Introducing Baudrillard

Introducing Graphic Guides

by Chris Horrocks, Zoran Jevtić (Illustrator)

This book cuts beneath the controversy of this misunderstood intellectual to present his radical claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images and events.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Graphic Novels, Cultural, Sociology, Comics

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Kio Heartworm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps this book would work better as a refresher for someone already familiar with his writing? Approaching it without too much relevant background, I found most of the information in here hard to make sense out of. So as an introduction it didn't really work. I found the section in this book, Teach Yourself Postmodernism, called "Welcome to Planet Baudrillard" much more useful for getting a basic understanding of his ideas.

[Syd Amir · Rating 4 out of 5]

ازون جایی ک قبلا دو سه کتابی از بودریار خونده بودم فکر میکنم یه اشنایی خوبی با اندیشه هاش داشتم به همین خاطر هم به این کتاب امتیاز بالایی میدم علتش این هست که هر چند خیلی گزیده و موجز هر ایده و مفهوم کلیدی رو مطرح کرده اما حقیقتا لب مطلب ر گفته و ب نظر میرسه نویسنده تسلط خیلی خوبی روی بودریار داشته

کتاب به صورت کمیک ها و تصویرسازی هایی سعی داره اندیشه های بوردیار را توضیح دهد. به همین خاطر خواندنش هم لذت بخش است :)

[Iona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philosophers and sociologists. In cartoon form. Cute.

If I hadn't already previously confronted Barthes, Saussure, Foucault, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx etc during my studies I'd have been completely lost with this text. Thankfully, Jean Baudrillard is rarely a starting point for any French undergrad, so it acted as quite an interesting hour-long refresher course on the theories of each of the above. In fact, it was quite interesting to see how they all interlink to form modern thought.

The content is good. All the essential ideas are there, so it has been a great starting point for my research. Recommended for anyone in my boat: starting secondary reading for an essay 2 weeks before the due date.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's no fault of the author that I hated this book, it's just that the subject matter is so awful. Baudrillard seems to have built his career on changing the meanings of words, making nonsensical statements, and saying that all things are exactly what they're not. In contrast to Michael Foucault, who tried to understand how society got to be such a mess of misinterpretation, Baudrillard just added to the problem. This book has told me that Baudrillard was not a valuable person to write a book about! It'd be better to let his obscurantist crap rot in the library vault with that of Mme Blavatsky and Erich von Daniken!

[David Gross · Rating 2 out of 5]

Takes a muddled and incomprehensible philosopher and makes him more muddled and incomprehensible. I had to just let it wash over me and try to absorb something impressionistically, since the text was so full of expressions that seemed designed not to mean anything in particular. I give it two stars instead of one because I half-suspect that what I'm criticizing about the book may actually be a faithfulness in spirit to its subject.

[Udit Miglani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plato or Routledge would be better introductory texts for Baudrillard- especially considering how convoluted his work is. Entire essays have been reduced to two lines' worth of explanation- leaving the reader to whip up Google.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jean Baudrillard was a French Postmodernist philosopher who passed away in 2007. To those who aren’t navel-gazers of the philosophical variety, he is best known – if he is known at all – for having influenced the conception of the game-changing sci-fi movie, “The Matrix.” While I haven’t yet read “Simulacra and Simulation” – the book said to have inspired the Wachowskis, it seems that the influence of Baudrillard on the film’s world is that he provided abstract ideas that the film takes in a more literal sense. If this book represents his ideas well, Baudrillard didn’t claim that we are in a computer simulation run by an AI [or by anyone / anything else, e.g. an alien overlord] (that would be more in line with ideas presented by Swedish Philosopher, Nick Bostrom.) Baudrillard’s claim is that we are increasingly building and gathering around us a world of things that are -- at their most fundamental level – signs and symbols. However, it’s also true that there are some quotes and concepts that make there way into “The Matrix,” probably most famously, “the desert of the real.”

A film [and its source novel] that might be said to more directly reflect Baudrillard’s ideas is “Fight Club.” Which isn’t to say that Baudrillard deals with issues of lost masculinity [he is, to many in academia, infuriatingly contrarian on gender related issues -- proposing seduction as the source of feminine power to balance the masculine.] Instead, the ideas that play into “Fight Club” are that human beings have become – first and foremost – consumers, and second that people are striving for hyperreality -- an existence that is more real than real. These core ideas: 1.) human as consumer, more so than producer; 2.) the world as a simulation; and 3.) the pursuit of hyperreality are book’s bedrock.

Built on that bedrock is a flow of topics. There are considerations of what Baudrillard’s ideas mean for art and entertainment. What is art? Is high art and low art a meaningful distinction? Baudrillard’s ideas are contrasted with various schools of thought that were active at the same time such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Of course, as a postmodernist, Baudrillard takes aim at the arrogance and absurdities of modernity, e.g. criticizing the prevailing notions about “primitivism.”

As the subtitle suggests, this book uses graphics. In the case of this book, they are mostly cartoon drawings, along with a few diagrams. Some of the cartoons repeat key text and definitions [like a text-box, but including whimsical cartoon images] and other depict debates between Baudrillard and his contemporaries.

I found this book was an informative outline of Baudrillard’s thinking. Baudrillard’s ideas are complicated, and thus conveying them clearly is a challenge, still I think that there were points at which the author could have favored clarity over scholarly precision in his discussions. If this were a philosophy text, that wouldn’t be valid criticism, but as this book is meant to be a basic introduction, I think it’s fair to say.

[Kevin K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm ambivalent about Baudrillard. Some of his writings I find totally opaque and incomprehensible. Others (like The Illusion of the End) I find to be very clever and prophetic; in fact, The Illusion of the End is one of my favorite books. Like McLuhan (who I also admire), Baudrillard is obsessed with media (and related phenomenon like fashion and hype), and that hits on something central and characteristic of the world we live in. JB may not always be a model of clarity, but he's often barking up the right tree, and I find his ideas very stimulating. This book is a great way to encounter some of those ideas in an enjoyable, bite-size form

[surfurbian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult and often impossible to follow. Perhaps a more comprehensive understanding of the ideas that lead up to and influenced his thiking would be helpful. Say a Introduction to the Introduction?

This aside there were moments when I could actually understand what was being written. Some of the ideas seemed reasonable and but much of his ideas seem so whacked out as to be completely laughable. His interpretation of various phenomena are uninformed and lead to conclusions that are simply wrong.

But again, perhaps I just need an intro to the intro.

[David Schwan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Baudrillard is one of two French Philosophers that seem to be better BS artists then thinkers (Derrida being the other). Baudrillard through semantic tricks tries to gin up what looks like a convincing philosophy, unfortunately it is built of mostly smoke and mirrors and seems like a typical rant against the system (although this time unlike Derrida it is dripping with extreme Nihilism). The authors have done an adequate job of discussing his ideas however shallow they are in reality.

[Frankie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This comic-style book helped me a little with Baudrillard. I don't think it's the best way to teach – drawing silly clip art and slapping clowny characterizations of philosophers' and celebrities' faces on them. It seriously was like reading Mad Magazine, complete with toilet-humor-esque vulgarity. I learned nothing that I won't have to re-learn in a proper format later.

[L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

the title is deceiving! it's not an introduction at all. this book might help if you already know dear jean and want to check your understanding of his concepts. otherwise you'll just want to kill yourself.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Baudrillard is muddled enough without this introduction. What should have been a light intro took months to trudge through - whilst the subject's thought is undoubtedly hard to put into layman terms, better guides can be found easily on in youtube essays and blog pages.

[Hussein Ebeid · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب مصور عن جان بودريار …و ملخص لكل افكاره و حيث اني قرات له عدة كتب ف هذا الكتاب به ثمرة فلسفته و نظرته الاجتماعية..
يعيب الكتاب الطباعه السيئة جداً جداً جداً جداً

[Papilina Jefferson · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOWWWW

[Lance Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic set out to explain the range and complexity of Baudrillard's works mixed with specs of biography through a mixture of exposition, quotations, and largely, reproduced or augmented images. The book (or graphic novel or mix-media, depending on one’s definition) is ambitious in its attempt to explain Baudrillard solely within his words and direct sentiments or that of other critics while simultaneously playfully mixing in images of and depictions of his discussion and Baudrillard, himself.

The book begins with several pages raising the question of who is Baudrillard and why is he important before switching into a short one-page biography that glosses over largely the first 37 years of his life, from his birth in Algiers to studying at the Lycee and his intellectual forefathers (Satre and Lefebvre). From there, the book hops about and often sprints through a series of topics that it both tries to explain and articulate Baudrillard’s contribution to in a way that can feel scattershot. A few pages in a row may make coherent sense but then it’s onto a new topic without any substantial continuity or clarity of intention. Rare is the opportunity when an example is made or laymen’s terms used to breakdown Baudrillard’s complex ideas. Occasionally, some section later on might reference an earlier section but that feels almost as an afterthought.

Perhaps this is the authors’ attempt to communicate the frenzied directions that Baudrillard’s works seemed to take or depict the senselessness of ordered meaning. That is, the format itself is a critique of grammar and syntax of the genre of introductory works as a simulation of what introductions signal. This assumption might also extend to the dozens of reproduced images of Baudrillard himself (or who I’m assuming is Baudrillard) throughout the book. Though it’s almost never the full body of the Baudrillard but usually only his head. Even when his full body is present, it’s usually distorted from normal proportions to look something like a bobble-head. These are particularly interesting forms to emulate. Presenting the Baudrillard's full body as a bobble-head seems to take Baudrillard and to put him (and his ideas) onto the body of an object that is typically mass-produced and representational of other bodies in often irreverent and caricatured ways. This Baudrillardian bobblehead is embedded on a 2-dimensional page and offered as a “real” in the sense that the authors’ indicate (through word balloons) words coming from his mouth. When we read, we are imagining this representation (Baudrillard on the page) of a representation (Baudrillard as a bobblehead trinket) is connected to the “real Baudrillard”--a living breathing person, who has been dead for nearly a decade. But the fun doesn’t stop there because the authors constantly crop his head onto other bodies and spaces throughout the text including a baby (p. 6), half a photo (p. 28), a pound note (p. 62), cubist art (p. 66), a stone statue, (p. 82), a baby in a birth canal (p. 93), a soldier (p. 119), and much more. Thus, Baudrillard’s head becomes a visual synecdoche of the man, his mind, and simulation itself.

While I would hope the preceding paragraph would be entirely intentional, I have my reservations given that I have read half-dozen of these Introducing guides and they are largely all the same in their mix-media approaches. This is not to say it couldn’t be the intention, but there is a formulaic (mass produced) element to the how the book is constructed. The one lingering critique of the book is that it moves too fast and assumes the clarity of its own ideas, leaving readers (particularly this one) often not really understanding the points being made.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Work, leisure, nature and culture were once separate and produced anxiety and complexity in our real life. Now they’re mixed, massaged, climate controlled and domesticated in the simple activity of perpetual shopping.”

Baudrillard and his work are often controversial and filled with many thought provoking and polarising ideas. This handy little guide does an admirable job of covering most of his better known ideas and theories, touching on mass consumption, structuralism, semiology and symbolic exchange, as well as other topics. We see how the work of the likes of the Bauhaus, the Frankfurt School and the Situationists ties in with his at various points along the way too.

Our subject could be quite prickly and combative during his career, speaking out against Foucault and rejecting the existentialism of Sartre, but elsewhere we see that he was also in agreement with many of his other fellow countrymen, the likes of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Marcel Mauss and Roland Barthes. Borrowing Freudian concepts and updating Marxist ones, Baudrillard incorporated these and many others to produce a shifting yet bold blend of philosophy that attracted plenty of attention for good and bad reasons alike.

“Consumer freedom means freedom to regress and be irrational.”

We see that he is critical of both so called high and mass culture, as they are all really ephemeral signs, they exist only as an ideal or metaphysical reference point. Both are organised by the code of consumption. He has many opinions on many aspects of the media and communication that vary between woolly to the point of meaningless drivel, to enlightening to the point of being profoundly insightful, and it’s this range and depth of opinions that make this so interesting.

So this introduction does what good, strong guides should do, it strips away most of the potentially intimidating terminology and beats a clear and engaging path to a genuine understanding of many of the basic principles of Baudrillard’s work, and makes for really absorbing reading.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short Introductions to ..." which started in 1995.

Inbetween came instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing ..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to the 1970s. These dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s.

The point of the 'Introducing/For Beginners' series was that they purported to introduce difficult ideas by explaining them in pictorial terms. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Introducing Baudrillard sadly does not.

This particular introduction was an attempt to pack twenty years of dense French intellectualism into 170 or so pages with perhaps a 100 or less words on a page with the pictures adding very little. 15,000-20,000 words is an article of 30 or 40 pages at most, an hour's read.

Half the book is taken up with Baudrillard's struggle to add something meaningful to the rapid decline of Marxist thought. Half the book is thus turgidly incomprehensible. This leaves only half available for when Baudrillard becomes potentially interesting.

Baudrillard likes simile and metaphors from cosmology and physics so the best and kindest way to describe what is happening to his thought is that he is being dragged into a philosophical black hole as Marxism implodes and then decides that it is the black hole itself that is interesting.

The result is a form of object-oriented nihilism that seems at times little more than a form of patrician intellectual despair at the masses who Marxism was supposed to liberate, a bit like Hitler's railing against the German people as the Russian shells burst overhead in his Berlin bunker.

Think of it like this. For decades, intellectuals sat on a pile of dung claiming that it was not dung but the world. It gives way and they are forced to accept that it is dung because they are now suffocating in it as they sink downwards.

As the world collapses around them and all the structures of meaning that they have created to explain that world prove meaningless, they drift, if not into cynical public intellectual careerism to enrich themselves, into assuming that the dung is the world and the world is dung.

Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the pile of dung continues to do what it always has done without benefit of clerics and intellectuals - live, struggle, survive, die, create personal and social meaning and generally exist regardless of theory.

From this perspective, one wonders why anyone would think the post-Marxist intellectual to be in the least interesting but Baudrillard, in his dead-end nihilistic way, still captures something worth considering - the elusive and increasingly absurd nature of social reality.

I would tend to ignore his negativity about the mass of the population (and its undoubted impotence at changing what matters to Baudrillard) and think instead of his analysis as often being correct but from which he draws the wrong conclusions.

The world he describes when he casts doubt on its reality is not the world of most of us most of the time, it is the evanescent and unstable world of elites (of which he is an unstable part). This is crumbling before our eyes while we duck and dive to deal with the consequences of the collapse.

There is a good example at the moment where the real world continues to trade along inflationary lines despite all the efforts of the central bank technocrats to control the process according to 'theory' while governments contribute to the chaos through wasteful potlach expenditures.

We have a war in the East whose actual operations work to one side's timetable (the attritional war economy-based long game of the Russians) while the public in the West sees a simulacrum made up of aspiration, agit-prop, hope and moral fervour much as Baudrillard might have pointed out.

Nothing Western elites hoped to achieve from February 2022 in terms of economic war has turned out the way that theory predicted. The Russian and Chinese counterparts do not have a theory in the same way - they just have a set of actions based on values and struggle.

Baudrillard's critique of society is actually a critique of Western society and of the utter failure of liberal democracy to be anything more than dysfunctional over the long term. We can merge Chomsky's Propaganda Model with Baudrillard's simulacrum here.

What we see is a massively complex and unruly system of social and political control that is, indeed, plunging into its own black hole. The 'masses' withdrawal into their own world is a rational response to the absurdity of a distant world that they see humming with self-importance far from them.

There is still a real world out there. It is still based on economics and competition for resources as well as on brute power and technology. The Marxism of simple faith rather than scholastic interpretation stands up, at least in part, surprising well.

Layered over this real world of markets and techno-innovation, of personal struggles and movements, of brute military force that can mostly not be deployed, of weather and crops, lies a magical world of intellectuals, managers, activists, politicians and technocrats that sucks this real world dry.

As the latter loses control over reality, the formally impotent masses enjoy themselves by treating their world as an elaborate game or as theatre with the fall-back position of taking to the streets as they are doing in France or may yet do on Trump's arrest.

The frustration of those intellectuals, managers and technocrats who still understand the link of everything to reality is compounded as careerism and the structures of power and media communications intensify the air of fantasy that allowed Baudrillard to speak of wars as illusions.

So, Baudrillard ends up both wrong and right. Wrong in that he did not have a correct description of all social reality. Right in that he had a correct description of the collapse of elites into their own black hole of illusion and ineptitude, out of control and taking the illusion for reality.

To answer a question posed by the book, Baudrillard is a symptom of what he writes about. Although this particular book is not useful in that respect, he should be read in order to diagnose the symptoms of the disease of Western civilisation from within.

If he is right (in this interpretation), the process of implosion will continue remorselessly. This will please political accelerationists but whether the implosion will even be noticed by most of suffering humanity is entirely another matter. They are living in another world entirely.

[Castles · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first part of the book I did not understand at all, while the second part starting with the theory of simulacrum is better. Not very well written and I’ve found the illustrations pretty vulgar.

While Baudrillard is a very difficult thinker to follow or explain, I hope there are better introductions out there.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read some of Baudrillard's work years ago, and I read this book, which is a sort of overview of his work, immediately after watching David Harvey's first video-lecture on Marx's Capital. Having the context of Marx fresh in my mind definitely helped me to make sense of this book.

Although the author (Chris Horrocks) poses some generic questions as to how seriously we should take Baudrillard, his exegesis does not include specific interrogations at the points where Baudrillard's own conceptual framework leaves considerable grey area. Consequently the book is surprisingly opaque for an illustrated introduction.

Nonetheless, by bringing into a small frame several of Baudrillard's thoughts across his career, this book did help me to see Baudrillard's view of things more clearly, and it would prepare me to engage better with Baudrillard's own idiosyncratic writings. An extremely pessimistic worldview comes through in Baudrillard's bold statements regarding contemporary life under capitalism. There is something to be said for going along with his extreme theories, if only to discover that we cannot believe in them entirely. Has capitalism extinguished every moment of individuality, every possibility of beauty, every instance of genuine gift-giving? Is it really a recent development of the capitalist system that there is no longer any remainder? Baudrillard is probably right to attack every outlet of social and political life that now exists. And yet...

[Icon Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illustrated guide to the controversial sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who died in 2007. Did the Gulf War take place? Is it possible to fake a bank robbery? Was sexual liberation a disaster? Jean Baudrillard has been hailed as one of France's most subtle and powerful theorists. But his provocative style and assaults on sociology, feminism and Marxism have exposed him to accusations of promoting a dangerous new orthodoxy - of being the 'pimp' of postmodernism. Introducing Baudrillard cuts beneath the controversy of this misunderstood intellectual to present his radical claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images and events ranging from TV news to Disneyland. It provides a clear account of Baudrillard's work on obesity, pornography and terrorism and traces his development from critic of mass consumption to prophet of the apocalypse. Chris Horrocks' text and Zoran Jevtic?s artwork invite us to decide whether Baudrillard was a cure for the vertigo of contemporary culture - or one of its symptoms

Christopher Horrocks is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design at Kingston University. Zoran Jetvic is one of the UK's leading graphic artists.

[Paracelsus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrible book. Needs citations and quotes to let the reader know when we're reading Baudrillard's words or the author's.

[Johan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kinda like the illustrations and art in this book, it sort of takes you back to the good old days of early computer graphics. But as for contents, I guess it covers all the basics you'll need about Baudrillard, but for me it was hard to follow. Maybe the short comic book style format isn't the best way to explain this postmodern maverick thinker.

[Insert name here · Rating 1 out of 5]

The details about Baudrillard's life are informative and help place his works in context, but the rest of the text--those sections dealing with his theories--are more difficult to follow than the most incomprehensible parts of Baudrillard's work itself. This book is an okay introduction to the man, but a lousy introduction to his work.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose this is a decent enough starting point but this is some dense conceptual material. I came away scratching my head, which is probably more due to the subject matter than the presentation of it.

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read Baudrillard before and this was a good review of his main ideas. The illustrations were hilarious and appropriate.

[Luke]

I refuse to rate/review this until I can comprehend half of what Baudrillard was attempting to explain even with this guide.

[Barak · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Sociologist who never existed

This was hyper!
meaning?
less.

I would ask Baudrillard!
tomorrow?
yes.

No sign!
of him?
guess.

[funkgoddess]

as impenetrable now as it was when i tried to understand it at university. pretty pictures though. i'd rate it, but i don't understand it.

[alicja :) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some facts were quite interesting, but the art is damn terrible.