Dr Claude Mangion, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Malta pays tribute to social theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard who passed away recently

The passing away of Jean Baudrillard marks the close of an era that originated with the events of May 1968 in Paris. The failure of the French Communist Party to support the student movements had created a sense of betrayal and disappointment among those who had embraced leftist ideals of justice and equality. Baudrillard (together with other French intellectuals) moved away from a Marxist analysis of society in terms of production such as one finds in The System of Objects (1966), to semiological interpretations of consumer society in works like For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981).

It was, in fact, the transformation of contemporary society brought about by the various forms of communication technology that both interested Baudrillard and brought him a degree of notoriety. The analysis of the nature and processes of communication in a media-saturated world necessitated new explanatory concepts, such as those of simulation and hyper-reality. For Baudrillard, the world of communications was one marked by an increasing interaction between humans and technology as opposed to face-to-face interaction. In the criss-crossing network of technological gadgets, reality was constantly being produced. We live in a world of too much reality, of hyper-reality. And in this technological labyrinth, the metaphysical question of reality is lost. There is not one reality but a ceaseless proliferation of images that function as a substitute for reality, constantly circulating without a final resting place. This, in my view, might explain the popularity of TV reality shows since they feed on the audience's desire for the real. Paradoxically, the reality shows that are supposed to bring us into direct contact with reality are contrived in such a way as to produce the illusion of the real.

Baudrillard will also be remembered for stunning the public with the publication of The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). Despite the hyperbole of the title, Baudrillard's central argument in this paper concerns the way the war was reported through the media. Some of his critics pointed out that the (first) Gulf War did take place and that the thousands of people killed attest to it. Baudrillard was not denying any of this but rather making a different point. For a start, the Gulf War was not a war in the traditional sense between two opposing sides of more or less equal strength. Rather, it was a one-sided war in which no one doubted who the final victor would be. In addition, and more importantly, all the information viewers received about the Gulf War was not only edited by the various news agencies, but the information provided to the news agencies was strictly monitored by the U.S. military, who learnt their lesson from the Vietnam war when the media delivered the images of the dead American soldiers to the living rooms of American households. The intervention of the media in the Vietnam War was considered one of the reasons for the U.S. military defeat there, and the military made sure this would not happen again. Ironically, it should be added, Saddam Hussein was reported as watching CNN so as to learn about the state of the war.

Despite rejecting the label “postmodernist”, Baudrillard was regarded by many as the “high priest” of postmodernism. However, whether one accepts this label or not, Baudrillard became in his lifetime something of a cultural icon and this is, in a way, a fitting tribute to him. Having dedicated many years to studying the way society

constructs images, he himself has been transformed by society

into an image of itself. This reminds me of the words of Nietzsche who, in Aphorism 146 of Beyond Good and Evil, wrote: “He who fights monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”