Baudrillard: France's Bad Boy

Todd Chanko | March 08, 2007, 01:30 PM

"L'Amérique est la version originale de la modernité, nous en sommes la version doublée et sous-titrée"... "L'Amérique, c'est l'utopie réalisée".

America is the original version of modernity – the rest of us are living the dubbed and subtitled copy. America is utopia achieved.

With these words, and many more, the late Jean Baudrillard cut into the heart of our modern, media-drenched world. Reading his 1986 volume “Amerique,” I was struck by the image of a lone TV set, always on, in a dank, unoccupied motel room. It was a trenchant comment on the ubiquity of media in American life and, at the same time, the emptiness that can sometimes be its result. Baudrillard died this past Tuesday, March 6th, and had a forty-year career challenging the assumptions of the consumption-obsessed society. If you haven’t heard of him, check out his opus.