Baudrillard, Jean

(born July 29, 1929, Reims, France—died March 6, 2007, Paris) French sociologist, philosopher, and social critic. He taught sociology at the University of Paris from 1966 to 1987. He is known for his theories of consumer culture and of the influence of contemporary electronic media, especially television. In a series of works in the 1970s, he applied ideas from semiotics to argue that consumer culture and especially advertising constitute a “code” of images and ideals in terms of which individuals construct their social identities. In works published during the 1980s and '90s, he argued that the exchange of words, images, and other symbols through increasingly pervasive electronic media created a new kind of reality, the “hyper-real,” in which symbols become partly constitutive of the reality they serve to represent. An example, according to Baudrillard, is the television news, which reports about important events in the world but at the same time makes events important by reporting about them. In The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), he contended that the mass-media portrayal of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf had made that event “unreal.” See also postmodernism.