Baudrillard’s Postmodern Media Theory
Back in 2005 I wrote an article on hyperreality and arrogance for a website set up by some Masters-level peers at Oxford, where I used an old colleague’s arrogance as the example to explain Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, something I taught during Magazine Theory classes at Middlesex Uni. I was reminded of it tonight while reading Anais Nin’s diaries from 1935, when she meets her brother Thorvald off the boat at New York harbour. She interprets his hard outer shell as a cover for his sensitivity at meeting for the first time in ten years, but then says ‘but i always interpret people’s shells in this way, and many times I have been proved wrong’. She has got it wrong, she later admits. And I guess I’ve been wrong about this, too (whenever I say ‘I guess’ I know that I’m making it easier for myself to admit something), so I need to apologise to that old friend. Luckily he’s on Facebook. It is often the easiest way to interpret those who come across as offhand or not in tune with your own outward facing identity. I got it wrong over the last couple of days with a close friend, who I felt wasn’t giving me enough support over an issue. Sometimes picking up media theory and using it to analyse interpersonal relationships can be a tricky business.
Anyway, it made me want to go back and take another look at Baudrillard, and there you go, the first ‘media theory’ Google alert of the evening was to the University of Maine’s blog on Baudrillard’s Postmodern Media Theory. Douglas Kellner covers the passage of Baudrillard’s theory from political economy through simulacra to hyperreality, and the role of the media in creating new meaning, values, world. He summarises:
Baudrillard’s earlier works focus on the construction of the consumer society and how it provides a new world of values, meaning, and activity, and thus inhabit the terrain of Marxism and political economy. From the mid-1970s on, however, reflections on political economy and the consumer society disappear almost completely from his texts, and henceforth simulations and simulacra, media and information, science and new technologies, and implosion and hyperreality become the constituents of a new postmodern world which — in his theorizing — obliterate all the boundaries, categories, and values of the previous forms of industrial society while establishing new forms of social organization, thought, and experience.
For any of you political economy students, Douglas Kellner is a well informed and well published critic of Baudrillard’s work, and this blog is a useful overview of the ideas in Baudrillard’s writing on the media. I’ve not yet found a useful enough account of interpreting the hard shell of people. Maybe I’ll write one.
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