Description: www.egs.edu Jean Baudrillard, French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer talking about cultural identity, politics, changing and becoming. The work of Jean Baudrillard is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. Seminar for the students at the European Graduate School, EGS Media and Communication Program Studies Department, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, in 2002. Jean Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analysis of the modes of mediation and of technological communication. His writing, although consistently interested in the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects - from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to 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 such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interested in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school. 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. Jean Baudrillard thought, as many post-structuralists did, that meaning is brought about through <b>...</b> |
