DEMOS

Jean Baudrillard died on Tuesday, in Paris, aged 77.

It is desperately sad news indeed whenever such a creative thinker passes.  I don’t have a deep expertise in his work, and the understanding I have isn’t formiddable by any stretch, but what I have taken the time to explore felt compelling to the extreme, and still very timely.  It is easy to write-off philosophers and thinkers who revel in obtuse language and seemingly obscure theory.  But we lose out on their curiosity, their style and humour, and their unique insight, which can offer invaluable routes towards helping us understand the world around us.  It’s a terrible shame that his death didn’t generate more attention and reverance from the media circus whose affects, value and implications he diagnosed so forcefully.

Baudrillard asked some deeply important questions about politics and society.  He gave us provocative stabs at our sense of reality, and in doing so he stretched his thought to a wonderfully playful extreme.

As we see around us fragmenting identities refracting endlessly through the implications of what we buy, who we talk to, what we wear, what we watch, what we listen to - and what others think about us as a result - we can gain a lot from looking to a thinker whose work is rooted in the problems of finding collective footholds in a world that offers little certainty and no (easy) answers.

He drew predictable criticism from those who felt he embodied a kind of empty postmodernism, or that he dismisses too readily our contact with reality.  It's true that he certainly didn’t give us the key to Utopia.  But I never have much time for criticism that can’t be bothered to get past a slightly tired assumption about ‘postmodern’ thought.  Reading criticism of his work, I usually just feel - get over it, and grow a sense of humour.   It is just too easy to complain that he leaves us adrift; nowhere, with nothing constructive to say or do.   Too easy, too boring, and too lazy.  We’d do well to stop obsessing over whether a person’s words donate to us a perfect tracing of how things are.  I care more about what thoughts his work can provoke - about where Baudrillard can take us; what we can do with his work.  Which is a long way, and a lot respectively - if only we stop worrying about pointing out that the Gulf War really happened. 

Baudrillard's thought is a joy - a joy that admittedly lies amongst what can be frustratingly difficult writing - precisely because it stretches itself towards absurdity.  His world of the hyper-real is a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.  In doing so, he dives into the media-saturated public realm and ultimately, through the potentially desperate and thrilling spectacle we are left with, asks how, in a complex world, we are supposed to get out towards political progress.  I guess he has left the answer to us.

There's an obituary from the Guardian here (which begins with the same line as the title of this post).