Cultural identity can be expressed through certain styles of clothing or other aesthetic markers

Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics.

Child with flag

Description[link]

Various modern cultural studies and social theories have investigated cultural identity. In recent decades, a new form of identification has emerged which breaks down the understanding of the individual as a coherent whole subject into a collection of various cultural identifiers. These cultural identifiers may be the result of various conditions including: location, gender, race, history, nationality, language, sexuality, religious beliefs, ethnicity and aesthetics. The divisions between cultures can be very fine in some parts of the world, especially places such as Canada or the United States, where the population is ethnically diverse and social unity is based primarily on common social values and beliefs.

As a "historical reservoir", culture is an important factor in shaping identity.^[1] Some critics of cultural identity argue that the preservation of cultural identity, being based upon difference, is a divisive force in society, and that cosmopolitanism gives individuals a greater sense of shared citizenship.^[2] When considering practical association in international society, states may share an inherent part of their 'make up' that gives common ground, and alternate means of identifying with each other.^[3]

Also of interest is the interplay between cultural identity and new media.^[4]

In the current era, cultural identity does not necessarily mean an individual's interaction within a certain group but a social network of people imitating and following the social norms presented by the media.Instead of learning behaviour and knowledge from cultural/religious groups, individuals from the present era are learning these social norms from the media to build on their cultural identity.^[5]

See also[link]

General

• Self-concept
• Self-determination
• Globalization
• Cosmopolitanism
• New media

Identity

• Social identity
• Collective identity
• Identity (social science)
• Multiple identity
• Gender identity

Culture

• Cultural diversity
• Intercultural competence
• Cultural conservatism
• Transculturation

Politics

• Identity politics
• Diaspora politics
• Nationalism
• Pan-nationalism
• Survival of the fittest

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Robyns, Clem (1995). "Defending the national identity". In Andreas Poltermann (Ed.), Literaturkanon, Medienereignis, Kultureller Text. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag ISBN 3-503-03727-6.
• Robyns, Clem (1994). "Translation and discursive identity". In Poetics Today 15 (3), 405–428. http://kuleuven.academia.edu/ClemRobyns/Papers/692295/Translation_and_discursive_identity
• Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
• Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Bourdieu, Pierre (1980). "L'identité et la représentation". Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35: 63–70. DOI:10.3406/arss.1980.2100. 
• Gordon, David C. (1978). The French Language and National Identity (1930-1975). The Hague: Mouton.
• de Certeau, Michel; Julia, Dominique; & Revel, Jacques (1975). Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois. Paris: Gallimard.
• Balibar, Renée & Laporte, Dominique (1974). Le français national: Politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la Révolution. Paris: Hachette.
• Fishman, Joshua A. (1973). Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
• (full-text IDENTITIES: how Governed, Who Pays?)
• Woolf, Stuart. "Europe and the Nation-State". EUI Working Papers in History 91/11. Florence: European University Institute.
• Stewart, Edward C.; Bennet, Milton J. (1991). American Cultural Patterns. Intercultural Press, Boston, MA.
• Evangelista, M. (2003). "Culture, Identity, and Conflict: The Influence of Gender," in Conflict and Reconstruction in Multiethnic Societies, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press [2]
• Güney, Ü. (2010). "We see our people suffering: the war, the mass media and the reproduction of Muslim identity among youth". Media, War & Conflict 3 (2): 1–14. 

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard in 2006 at European Graduate School
Born	(1929-07-27)27 July 1929 Reims, France
Died	6 March 2007(2007-03-06) (aged 77) Paris, France
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Post-Structuralism · Marxism · Post-Marxism
Main interests	Postmodernity · Mass Media
Notable ideas	Hyperreality · Simulacra · Sign value
Influenced by Marx · Nietzsche · Freud · Wiener · Mauss · Lévi-Strauss · Lefebvre · Barthes · Bataille · Debord · Dick · Borges · McLuhan · Castoriadis[1]
Influenced Braschi · Pelevin · Vizenor · Žižek · Wachowski brothers · Benoist · Zerzan

Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ])^[2] was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.

Life[link]

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.^[3] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University.^[4] There he studied German language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.^[3] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.^[5]

During his time as a teacher of German language and literature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^[6] During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".^[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the USA (Aspen), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Japan (Kyoto). He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a photographer.^[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee^[10] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. In 1999-2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.^[11] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts," at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.^[12]

Core ideas[link]

Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and technological communication. His writing, though mostly concerned with the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects  — including consumerism, gender relations, the social understanding of history, journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

His published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school.^[13] In common with many poststructuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference - through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning  — or a "total" understanding of the world  — that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.^[14] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."^[15]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa^[16] or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and its military establishment (see below).

In 2004, the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies was launched.

The object value system[link]

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, it was consumption, rather than production, which was the main drive in capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value." Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply—despite the fact that Marx did not use the term 'genuine' in relation to needs or use-values. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs"^[17] precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are as follows:^[18]

1. The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and a refrigerator cools.
2. The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
3. The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
4. The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

Simulacra and Simulation[link]

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes' formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood (and thus formless) version of structural semiology. The concept of Simulacra ^[19][20] also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. Baudrillard argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Some examples Baudrillard brings up of the simulacrum of the model are: 1) the development of nuclear weapons as deterrents—useful only in the hyperreal sense, a reference with no real referent, since they are always meant to be reproducible but are never intended to be used—2) the (former) Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which replaced a New York of constantly competing, distinct heights with a singular model of the ultimate New York building: already doubled, already reproduced, itself a reproduction, a singular model for all conceivable development, and 3) a menage-a-trois with identical twins where the fantasy comprises having perfection reproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behind this reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehend otherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very act of perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is in the tactile sense, since we already assume the reproducibility of everything, since it is not the reality of these simulations that we imagine (in fact, we no longer "imagine" in the same sense as before; both the imagined and the real are equally hyperreal, equally both reproducible and already reproductions themselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do not imagine them reproduced for us, since the original image is itself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model, the simulation.

The end of history and meaning[link]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology's victory over the other, but the disappearance of the utopian visions that both the political Right and Left shared. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book The Illusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.^[21]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."^[22]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."^[23]

Political commentary[link]

On the Gulf War[link]

Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his 1991 book, titled for its provocative main thesis, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". His argument described the first Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not "the continuation of politics by other means", but "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means". Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the US coalition and the Iraqi government were actually fighting, but, such was not the case. Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His politico-military power was not weakened, since he suppressed internal uprisings after the war. Overall, little had changed politically in Iraq, Saddam remained undefeated, and the "victors" were not victorious. Therefore, there was no war; the Gulf War did not occur.

Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of the book  — originally a series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération in three parts: During the American military and rhetorical buildup as "The Gulf War Will not take Place"; during military action as "The Gulf War is not Taking Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"  — was based on his critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it: People died, the political map was altered, and Saddam Hussein's regime was harmed. Some critics accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (part of his denial of reality, in general). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrin has asserted that Baudrillard did not deny that something happened, but merely questioned that that something was a war; rather it was "an atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin's book viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was more nuanced. In Baudrillard's own words (p. 71-72):

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him ... Even ... the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax ...

On the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001[link]

In contrast to the "non-event" of the Gulf War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism^[24] he characterised the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event." Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction^{[clarification needed]} to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously based or civilization-based warfare, he termed the absolute event and its consequences as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.

Baudrillard thus placed the attacks  — as accords with his theory of society  — in context as a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange. This stance was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin failed to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding to the notion that the Towers were "brought down by their own weight". In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

Reception[link]

Critics have found fault with some of Baudrillard's writing, ideas or positions.

For example Denis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad Writing Contest" — which listed examples of the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequently criticised — had the following to say:

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.^[25]

However only one of the two major confrontational books on Baudrillard's thought — Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (ISBN 0-87023-817-5)  — seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand. The other — Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5)  — seeks rather to analyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a concept with which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy and rarely explicit, relationship) and to present a Marxist counter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (as discussed above) has published more than one denunciation of Norris's position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive (in Nicholas Zurbrugg's Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact).

Willam Merrin's work has presented a more sympathetic account, which attempts to "place Baudrillard in opposition to himself." Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard's position on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself his own position on symbolic exchange. Merrin thus alludes to the common criticism of Structuralist and Post-structuralist work (a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard, Foucault or Deleuze) that emphasising interrelation as the basis for subjectivity denies the human agency from which social structures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and Michel de Certeau have made this point generally, and Barry Sandywell has argued as much in Baudrillard's specific case).

Finally, Mark Poster, Baudrillard's editor and one of a number of present day academics who argue for his contemporary relevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster's 2nd ed. of Selected Writings):

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media ...

Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Norris who see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism (ibid p. 7):

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfill my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

In popular culture[link]

• Native American (Anishinaabe) writer Gerald Vizenor, who has made extensive use of Baudrillard's concepts of simulation in his critical work,^[26] features Baudrillard as a character in a "debwe heart dance" in his 1996 novel Hotline Healers.^[27]
• The Matrix, a (1999) film by the Wachowski brothers, names Baudrillard's thought, especially Simulacra and Simulation, as an influence. While one critic went so far as to claim that if "Baudrillard... has not yet embraced the film it may be because he is thinking of suing for a screen credit,"^[28] Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection between his work and The Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.^[29][30][31] Carl Colpaert's film Delusion was inspired by his book America.
• Newcastle based band Maxïmo Park wrote a song about Baudrillard which featured as a b-side to "Karaoke Plays" from their 2007 album Our Earthly Pleasures.
• Apollo 440 paid tribute to Baudrillard via direct quotes in lyrics and song titles
• Baudrillard's Blender Symbolic Exchange and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

Bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• The System of Objects (1968)
• The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970)
• For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972)
• The Mirror of Production (1973)
• Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
• Forget Foucault (1977)
• Seduction (1979)
• Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
• In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1982)
• Fatal Strategies (1983)
• Simulations (1983)
• America (1986)
• Cool Memories (1987)
• The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
• The Transparency of Evil (1990)
• The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
• The Illusion of the End (1992)
• Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (Edited by Mike Gane) (1993)
• The Perfect Crime (1995)
• Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit (1998)
• Impossible Exchange (book)|Impossible Exchange (1999)
• Passwords (book)|Passwords (2000)
• The Singular Objects of Architecture (2000)
• The Vital Illusion (2000)
• Au royaume des aveugles (2002)
• The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002)
• Fragments (interviews with François L'Yvonnet) (2003)
• The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (2005)
• The Conspiracy of Art (2005)
• Les exilés du dialogue, Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles (2005)
• Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978) (2006)
• Pataphysics (2007)
• Radical Alterity (2008)
• Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (2009)
• Carnival and Cannibal, or the Play of Global Antagonisms (2010)
• The Agony of Power (2010)

Articles[link]

• “The Spirit of Terrorism”. Telos No. 121 (Fall 2001). New York: Telos Press.
• "Divine Europe". Telos No. 131 (Summer 2005). New York: Telos Press.

Audio-CDs[link]

• Die Illusion des Endes  — Das Ende der Illusion (Jean Baudrillard & Boris Groys), 58 minutes + booklet. Cologne: supposé 1997. ISBN 3-932513-01-0
• Die Macht der Verführung, 55 minutes. Cologne: supposé 2006. ISBN 978-3-932513-67-1

See Also[link]

• Psychoanalytic sociology

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Baudrillard

• Jean Baudrillard Faculty page at European Graduate School (Biography, bibliography, photos and videos)
• Jean Baudrillard entry by Douglas Kellner in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• International Journal of Baudrillard Studies
• The Baudrillard Dictionary [2]
• Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories [3]
• Baudrillard; Cultura, Simulacro y régimen de mortandad en el Sistema de los Objetos | EIKASIA PDF (in Spanish) Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

Sarah Silverman
Silverman at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Take This Waltz
Birth name	Sarah Kate Silverman
Born	(1970-12-01) December 1, 1970 (age 41) Bedford, New Hampshire,[citation needed] United States
Medium	Stand up, Television, Film, Radio
Years active	1992–present
Genres	Blue comedy Black comedy Political satire
Influences	Steve Martin
Domestic partner(s)	Jimmy Kimmel (2002-2009) Alec Sulkin (2010)
Notable works and roles	Saturday Night Live Sarah Silverman on The Sarah Silverman Program
Emmy Awards
Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics 2008 Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Sarah Kate Silverman (born December 1, 1970) is an American comedienne, writer, actress, singer and musician. Her satirical comedy addresses social taboos and controversial topics such as racism, sexism, and religion.

Silverman first gained notice as a writer and occasional performer on Saturday Night Live. She starred in and produced The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran from 2007 to 2010, on Comedy Central.^[1] She often performs her act mocking bigotry and stereotypes of ethnic groups and religious denominations by having her comic character endorse them in an ironic fashion.^[2][3]

Early life[link]

Sarah Silverman, the youngest of four daughters, was born in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her mother, Beth Ann Halpin, was George McGovern's personal campaign photographer and founded the theater company New Thalian Players.^[4] Her father, Donald Silverman, was a social worker by training who ran the discount clothing store Crazy Sophie's Outlet. She was raised without religion, though she is ethnically Jewish.^[5]

She appeared in community theater at age 12, most notably with Community Players of Concord, New Hampshire in Annie and also appeared on a local television show in the Boston area called Community Auditions at age 15. At seventeen, she performed stand-up comedy in a restaurant, singing a song she called "Mammaries."

After graduating from The Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire, she attended New York University and continued her stand-up in Greenwich Village.^[6][7][8][9]

Career[link]

[edit] 1993-2007: Career beginnings and Jesus is Magic

Silverman first received national attention in the 1993–94 season of Saturday Night Live (SNL) as a writer and featured player. She was fired after one season because only one of the sketches she wrote survived to dress rehearsal, and none aired. Bob Odenkirk, a former SNL writer explained, "I could see how it wouldn't work at SNL because she's got her own voice, she's very much Sarah Silverman all the time. She can play a character but she doesn't disappear into the character — she makes the character her."^[6] Silverman states she was upset when SNL fired her via fax. She parodied the situation when she appeared on The Larry Sanders Show episode "The New Writer" (1996), playing Sanders' new staff writer, whose jokes are not used because of the chauvinism and bias of the male chief comedy writer, who favors the jokes of his male co-writers. She appeared in three episodes of Larry Sanders during its last two seasons.

Silverman was a featured performer on the HBO sketch comedy show Mr. Show (1995–97). She made TV program guest appearances on Seinfeld, in the episode "The Money"; (1997) on Star Trek: Voyager, in the two-part time travel episode "Future's End" (1996); on V.I.P. in the episode "48¹⁄₂ Hours" (2002); on Greg the Bunny as a series regular (2002); and on the puppet television comedy Crank Yankers, as the voice of Hadassah Guberman (2003, 2007). She had small parts in the films There's Something About Mary, Say It Isn't So, School of Rock, The Way of the Gun, Overnight Delivery, Screwed, Heartbreakers, Evolution, School for Scoundrels, and Rent, playing a mixture of comic and serious roles.

Silverman's concert film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, based on her one-woman show of the same name, was released in 2005. Liam Lynch directed the movie, distributed by Roadside Attractions. Rotten Tomatoes gave Jesus Is Magic a "fresh" rating of 64% with 54 positive reviews and 30 negative ones, with the "cream of the crop" giving it a rating of 67%.^[10] It made US$124,475 on its opening weekend, showing on seven screens. The box office performance led to an expanded release in as many as 57 theaters, resulting in a box office take of more than US$1.3 million.^[11] The DVD was released in June 2006. The soundtrack featured songs and standup from the movie, and previously unreleased songs.^[12] As part of the film's publicity campaign, she appeared online in Slate, as the cover subject of Heeb magazine, and in roasts on Comedy Central of Pamela Anderson and Hugh Hefner.

Silverman played a therapist in a skit for a bonus DVD of the album Lullabies to Paralyze by the band Queens of the Stone Age. Silverman also appears at the end of the video for American glam metal band Steel Panther's "Death To All But Metal". On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Silverman parodied sketches from Chappelle's Show, replaying Dave Chappelle's characterizations of Rick James and "Tyrone", as well as a Donnell Rawlings character based on the miniseries Roots. The parody addressed a popular rumor that Silverman was the planned replacement for Chappelle after he left his popular television show. In 2006, Silverman placed #50 on Maxim Hot 100 List.^[13] In 2007, she placed #29 and appeared on the cover.^[14] She made the cover of The Observer in the United Kingdom, with an article naming her "the world's hottest, most controversial comedian".^[15]

[edit] 2007-2010: The Sarah Silverman Program

Silverman at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2007

Silverman's television sitcom, The Sarah Silverman Program, debuted on Comedy Central in February 2007. The show proved to be a ratings success, scoring the highest premiere ratings of any Comedy Central show in three years, with 1.81 million viewers and the highest 18–49 rating of the night on cable.^[1][16] It portrays the day-to-day adventures of fictionalized versions of Silverman, her sister Laura and their friends. A number of comedic actors from Mr. Show have reappeared on The Sarah Silverman Program. Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award^[17] for her acting on the show. At the awards ceremony, she wore a fake mustache. Comedy Central canceled The Sarah Silverman Program after three seasons.^[18]

In June 2007 she hosted the MTV Movie Awards. During her opening act, she commented on the upcoming jail sentence of Paris Hilton, who was in the audience, "In a couple of days, Paris Hilton is going to jail... As a matter of fact, I heard that to make her feel more comfortable in prison, the guards are going to paint the bars to look like penises. I think it is wrong, too. I just worry she is going to break her teeth on those things."^[19] In September 2007 she appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards. Following the comeback performance of Britney Spears, Silverman mocked her on stage, saying: "Wow, she is amazing. I mean, she is 25 years old, and she has already accomplished everything she's going to accomplish in her life."^[20]

In January 2008 she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to show Jimmy Kimmel, her boyfriend at the time, a special video. The video turned out to be a song called "I'm Fucking Matt Damon", in which she and Matt Damon sang a duet about having an affair behind Kimmel's back. The video created an "instant YouTube sensation".^[21] Kimmel responded with his own video a month later with Damon's friend Ben Affleck, which enlisted a panoply of stars, to record Kimmel's song "I'm Fucking Ben Affleck".^[22] On September 13, 2008, Silverman won a Creative Arts Emmy for writing the song "I'm Fucking Matt Damon".^[23] Silverman guest starred in a second season episode of the USA cable program Monk as Marci Maven. She returned in the sixth season premiere, and for the 100th episode of Monk. According to the audio commentary on the Clerks II DVD, director Kevin Smith offered her the role that eventually went to Rosario Dawson, but she turned it down out of fear of being typecast in "girlfriend roles". However, she told Smith the script was "really funny" and mentioned that if the role of Randal Graves was being offered to her she "would do it in a heartbeat."

In October 2008, Silverman visited the United Kingdom to promote the release of The Sarah Silverman Program on Paramount Comedy, but her media and stage performances failed to impress audiences. Her debut stand-up performance at the Hammersmith Apollo was widely panned by the critics and audiences alike. The performance bombed when Silverman's warm-up act failed to appear and Silverman rushed through a short 35–40 minute set. The heckling audience, who had been charged £40–50 a seat, refused to leave the theatre and Silverman, sporting a pair of after-show slippers, was forced to return to the stage for an impromptu question and answer session. Steve Bennett from comedy website Chortle declared that "minute for minute, there are sex phonelines that are cheaper than Sarah Silverman."^[24][25] In an interview on the How Was Your Week podcast, Silverman made one of her only public comments on the matter, claiming that the show had been one of the best of her life and that the audience reaction had been misreported by bloggers and the press.^[26]

Silverman at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival

She also appears in Strange Powers, the 2009 documentary by Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara about cult songwriter Stephin Merritt and his band, the Magnetic Fields. Silverman wrote a comic memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which was published in 2010, and became a New York Times Best Seller. She received a $2.5 million advance for the book.

[edit] 2011-present: Take this Waltz and other projects

Silverman played a dramatic role alongside Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen in the film Take This Waltz, written and directed by Sarah Polley. The film was well received when it premiered in Toronto in 2011^[27] and was picked up by Magnolia for U.S. distribution in Summer 2012.^[28] Much was made of the fact that the movie features a full-frontal nude scene from Silverman,^[29] which the actress has spoken about on several occasions. At the Toronto International Film Festival, she told the press she'd deliberately gained weight for the part, emphasizing that Polley wanted "real bodies and real women" rather than impossibly skinny ones.^[30] In interviews she warned fans not to expect too much.^[31] However, she later told podcaster and author Julie Klausner that she had not really gained weight for the role, and that the statements were meant as self-deprecating humor.^[26]

A single camera comedy pilot by Silverman was given the go ahead by television network NBC in 2011 after a bidding war between multiple networks.^[32] Arrested Development producer, Ron Howard was reported to have been personally involved in the development process of the series.^[33] It was to be loosely based on Silverman's life as a woman who had just ended a decade long live-in relationship.^[32] The series was tentatively titled Susan 313 and received a put pilot commitment, which would require the network to pay a large fine if the pilot was not aired.^[34] However, NBC did not pick up the series for the fall 2012 season.^[35]

Controversy[link]

Racial slur[link]

In a July 2001 interview on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien Silverman used the ethnic slur "chink" explaining that a friend advised her to avoid jury duty by writing a racial slur on the selection form, "something inappropriate, like 'I hate chinks.'" Silverman said she decided that she did not want to be thought of as a racist, so "I wrote 'I love chinks' – and who doesn't?" Silverman said that the joke satirizes the racist thought process. Guy Aoki, of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), objected to her use of the slur.^[36][37] NBC and O'Brien apologized, but Silverman did not, later appearing on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in July and August 2001. Silverman questioned Aoki's sincerity, accusing him of exploiting the opportunity for publicity. On an episode of the show, Aoki appeared with Silverman, and stated that he did not accept Silverman's explanation, saying that it was not successful satire and that comedians should consult with groups such as his before performing such material. Silverman stated in an NPR's Fresh Air interview that she was asked to repeat the joke on Politically Incorrect, among other places, but she eventually dropped the joke from her act because she felt it was becoming stale.^[12] Silverman has since turned the complaint into grist for her stand-up act, saying that the experience helped teach her the important lesson that racism is bad: "And I mean bad, like in that black way."^[38]

[edit] The Aristocrats

A minor controversy arose over Silverman's performance in the documentary film The Aristocrats (2005). The film shows Silverman giving an apparently autobiographical account of her life as a child sex performer and mentions how Joe Franklin, a New York radio and TV personality whose nostalgic programs have aired since the early 1950s, would ask her to perform privately for him in his apartment. Silverman looks at the camera and, in a deadpan voice, accused Franklin of raping her. The film was edited in such a way that it appears as if Franklin knows what Silverman said about him. Later, after her clip, Franklin is shown stating "Sarah Silverman is a young lady to watch". After the film came out, Franklin took offense to Silverman's using his name and considered suing her. A month later the New York Times noted he remained undecided, but said, "the best thing I could do is get Sarah better writers so she'd have funnier material."^[39]

Personal life[link]

Silverman's humor frequently references religion; in this photo, she is holding the Jesus Dress Up magnet set

Silverman has said that she does not consume alcohol, because it nauseates her. She is open about her lifelong battle with clinical depression which at one point led to her developing an addiction to Xanax. She credited her subsequent emotional health to taking prescription drug Zoloft.^[8][40][41] She struggled with bedwetting from the time she was young until well into her teens and has stated that the last time she wet her bed was when she was fired from Saturday Night Live.^[12][41] Her autobiography, published in April 2010, entitled The Bedwetter, explores the subject, among others.

Silverman talked about having dated Dave Attell on one of her appearances on The Howard Stern Show. Silverman and Colin Quinn joked about having been romantically linked during her Saturday Night Live career. In her first appearance on the Stern show in June 2001 she said she was dating someone named Tom who wrote for SNL. Silverman was in a relationship that began in 2002 with comedian Jimmy Kimmel.^[42] She referred to the relationship in some of her comedy, "I'm Jewish, but I wear this Saint Christopher medal sometimes; my boyfriend is Catholic — but you know... it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn't burn a hole through my skin, it will protect me."^[6] In July 2008, Vanity Fair reported that the couple had split, ending their relationship of five years. However, in October 2008 it was revealed by Fox News and People magazine that they were on "the road back to being together."^[43] The couple attended the wedding of Howard Stern and Beth Ostrosky together,^[44] but split again in March 2009.^[45]

Silverman has stated she does not want to get married until same-sex couples are able to.^[46] She has also stated she doesn't want to have biological children to avoid the risk that they might inherit her depression.^[47] Silverman's biological sister Laura plays her sister on The Sarah Silverman Program. Another sister, Susan, is a rabbi who lives in Jerusalem, Israel with her husband and five children.^[48][49] Silverman is a fan of Jenny Lewis and appeared in Lewis' music video for the song "Rise Up With Fists!!" She is also a fan of comedian Steve Martin, who was one of her major inspirations as a younger comedian.^[15] Silverman enjoys playing Scrabble on the Internet. One of her regular opponents is Alyssa Milano, who lives in the same building that she does.^[40][50] She credited comedian Tig Notaro as one of her best friends in an interview in The Advocate.^[46]

She considers herself ethnically Jewish, which she has frequently mined for material, but says she is agnostic^[51] and does not follow the religion, claiming, "I have no religion. But culturally I can't escape it; I'm very Jewish."^[52][53] Her humor has also touched on other religions. In 2009, she suggested the Pope sell the Vatican and use some of the money for luxurious housing and the remainder to stop world hunger, saying he would "get crazy pussy."^[54] In January 2010, Silverman was dating Family Guy producer/writer Alec Sulkin,^[55] but as of October 2010, they had broken up.^[56]

Solar energy[link]

At the 2011 Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, in an interview with Yigal Ravid, Silverman spoke about her support for solar power as a project on which Israelis and Palestinians could work together. Silverman endorsed solar energy not only as good for the environment but as a peace-building industry as well. She said:

When I think about peace… and I think about the Jews and the Palestinians…. I think the only real solution is the classic buddy-movie formula… You take two enemies and they are forced to work together on some common goal and in the end they realize they aren’t that different. Right? So they’ve got to come together either for some common goal — how about solar power? [to applause] How about solar power!? How about powering the world with this beautiful sun they share?^[57]

Filmography[link]

Television[link]

Silverman protesting during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike

• Community Auditions (1985)
• Saturday Night Live (writer & cast member, 1993–1994)
• Mr. Show (featured performer, 1995)
• The Larry Sanders Show (1994–1996)
• Star Trek Voyager ("Future's End", two episodes, 1996)
• Brotherly Love - (Rosa "Pizza Girl" episode 1997)
• Seinfeld ("The Money", 1997)
• JAG (Blind Side "Lt. Schiparelli", 1997)
• Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist (voice as herself, "Alderman", 1998)
• Smog (unsold pilot, 1999)
• Late Last Night (1999)
• Futurama ("The Cryonic Woman", 2000; "Futurama: Bender's Big Score, 2007)
• Super Nerds (unsold pilot, 2000)
• Rocky Times (unsold pilot, 2000)
• Greg the Bunny (2002–2004)
• Crank Yankers (voice, 2002–2007)
• Frasier (Jane, "Maris Returns", 2003)
• Pilot Season (miniseries, 2004)
• Entourage (herself, 2004)
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force ("Robositter", 2004, credited as Big S)
• Drawn Together ("The Other Cousin", episode 1.5, 2004, Cousin Bleh)
• Monk (Marci Maven, "Mr. Monk and the TV Star", 2004)
• American Dad! ("Stan Knows Best", 2005, voice)
• Tom Goes to the Mayor ("Pipe Camp", episode 11, 2005)
• Celebrity Poker Showdown (twice, 2003–2004)
• Comic Relief (stand-up segment 2006)
• Monk (Marci Maven,Mr. Monk and His Biggest Fan, 2007)
• The Andy Milonakis Show (herself, 2007)
• The Sarah Silverman Program (2007–2010)
• Monk (Marci Maven, Mr. Monk's 100th Case, 2008)
• 8 out of 10 cats ("Herself", 2008)
• Friday Night with Jonathan Ross ("Herself", 2008)
• The Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget (2008) (pre-recorded video message)
• The Simpsons ("Stealing First Base", 2010, voice)
• Vitamin Water Commercial (Voice, 2010)
• Warren The Ape ("Black Lotus", 2010 as Herself)
• Bob's Burgers (two episodes, 2011 as Ollie)
• The Good Wife ("Getting Off", 2011 as Stephanie Engler)
• The League ("Thanksgiving", 2011 as Andre's sister, Heather)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sarah Silverman

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Sarah Silverman

• Sarah Silverman at the Internet Movie Database
• Sarah Silverman on Twitter
• Sarah Silverman on National Public Radio in 2010
• TheJC.com: Interview with Sarah Silverman
• Guardian interview
• AV Club article
• Nerve article