Jean Baudrillard
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929) has established himself as an influential and
highly original theorist of postmodernity. His writing is characterized by a‘fatal strategy’
of pushing his analyses to an extreme, so that his work becomes less a representation of
reality than a transcendence of it. Emerging out of a Marxist tradition, yet also registering
a psychoanalytic impulse, Baudrillard relies on a semiological model to understand the
world of the commodity. Against more traditional measures such as use-value,
Baudrillard emphasizes the sign value. Our present society, according to Baudrillard, is a
media society, a world saturated by images and communication, a world where Marshall
McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ comes true. Culture is now dominated by
simulation. Objects and discourses no longer have any firm referent or grounding. Instead
the real has been bypassed. The image has supplanted reality, inducing what Baudrillard
has termed a condition of hyperreality, a world of self-referential signs.
In ‘Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence’ Baudrillard offers a complex
reworking of thoughts which have their origin in his Symbolic Exchange and Death,
published just one year earlier. Beaubourg—the Centre Pompidou—is presented as a
confused cultural object, the embodiment of a paradox deeply embedded within the
contemporary cultural condition. The exterior represents the recyclable and transient—
the ethos of the oil refinery—of flux and flow. It speaks of simulation, a hyperreal
version of culture. The interior, by contrast, houses ‘culture’ in the form of temporary art
exhibitions. Yet it has the paradoxical air of the hyper-market—a hypermarket of art—
and has abandoned any sense of memory in favour of art as ‘stock’. Thus, for Baudrillard,
the true culture of Beaubourg is an anti-culture.
Just like the Bastille—the very site of popular uprising—which had been given over to
a new opera house, Beaubourg is an attempt by the elite to introduce culture to the
masses. Yet the masses have always been antithetical to such culture. A further paradox
emerges. Seduced by the attraction of the crowd, the masses may potentially destroy this
house of culture through their very weight—they threaten to ‘make Beaubourg buckle’.
This violent implosion, this panic in slow motion, is a model of saturation which
underwrites culture at large. Culture risks imploding in on itself in a metaphor which
evokes the Big Bang theory of science.
Baudrillard reveals himself as one of the most incisive commentators of the urban
realm in his various ‘city portraits’ which seem to owe their origin to Walter Benjamin
and the tradition of the theoretically informed European essay. A clear parallel develops
between Benjamin and Baudrillard, between a theorist of the modern ‘arcades’ and a
theorist of the postmodern shopping mall. Meanwhile, Baudrillard’s description of the
Bonaventure Hotel makes an interesting comparison with that of Fredric Jameson.
THE BEAUBOURG-EFFECT: IMPLOSION AND DETERRENCE
Beaubourg-Effect... Beaubourg-Machine... Beaubourg-Thing—how can we name it?
The puzzle of this carcass of signs and flux, of networks and circuits ...the ultimate
gesture toward translation of an unnameable structure: that of social relations consigned