Baudrillard Quotes

“We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body to do.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“In New York, madmen are free. Put out on the streets, they’re not all that different from the punks, junk, junkies, alcoholics, beggars who fill it. It is unclear why a city, just as mad, would suddenly keep its madmen locked up, why should he deprive the movement of these samples of madness, if it, in one form or another, has already captured the entire city”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“The United States is utopia embodied. You should not judge their crisis in the same way as we judge ours – the crisis of the old European countries. We have a crisis of historical ideals caused by the impossibility of realizing them. They have a crisis of a realized utopia as a consequence of its duration and continuity.

The idyllic conviction of Americans that they are the center of the world, a higher power and an absolute role model is not such a delusion.

It is based not so much on technological resources and military forces as on a miraculous belief in the existence of an embodied utopia – a society that, with what it may seem unbearable innocence, is based on the idea that it has achieved everything that others only dreamed of: justice, abundance, rights, wealth, freedom; America knows it, it believes it, and in the end, others also believe it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“the postmodern trajectory itself is a rather humorous joke on the human race which laboured for millennia to reduce working hours in order to produce leisure so we could enjoy this very leisure that then turns in a kind of vengeful act against us absorbing our leisure time, which was to be our living time, into time now spent in the service of what can only be called this inhuman spectacle”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“The traces of the dinosaurs howl in our memories. Had they been alive we would have exterminated them, but we respect their traces. It is the same with the human race: the more we imperil it, the more meticulously we preserve its remains.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Baudrillard argues that there used to be a time when the role of objects was primarily to signify rather than to function. Thus, the symbolic structure of the traditional domestic ambience reflected the rituals and traditions of the socio-political order, arranged according to prescriptive and unchanging rules based on, and extracted from, ‘tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together […] Hence, the fixed and immovable meanings with which these objects were endowed: if mirrors and family portraits symbolized a particular sense of introspection and enclosure, the clock crowning the marble mantelpiece symbolized both the hierarchical structure of the family and the permanence of time. Linked to one meaning and one meaning only, every object of the traditional domestic interior can thus be understood as theatrical and ceremonial, thus occupying a specific place within the domestic interior exactly as family members occupy a specific position in their corresponding family tree.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“…architecture is addressed [by Baudrillard] as a double- edged site of enquiry that acts as both a repository of contemporary theoretical practices as well as empirical applications from where a novel understanding of the discipline might extend.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Abstracted into signs, objects can be understood as a self-referential
system with no relationship to either the natural materials or colours, or
traditional societal structures. A substratum of meanings, objects become a
lowest common denominator to which the connotative meanings imposed by
advertising are attached.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Symbolically meaningful (and symbolically insignificant), glass intensifies all the contradictions at play in contemporary furniture: the inability of people to determine their own condition and destiny (Baudrillard, 2005: 42). By promising proximity, intimacy and transition (while at the same time promoting distance, detachment and immobility), glass reproduces in the microcosm of the domestic ambience the inequalities at work within the macrocosm of contemporary society. The happy ending embedded in its discourse is thus retracted by its ‘see- but- don’t- touch’ aesthetic quality.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“By addressing the building as an empty signifier (just as the Bauhaus lamp reveals the electrical wiring inside, so the Pompidou exposes its content and function according to a relationship that Baudrillard deems totally arbitrary), the Pompidou Centre is downgraded from architectural icon to hyper- functionalist failure.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Discussing the system of objects, Baudrillard focuses on the relationship between connotation (external) and denotation (internal) to the system; yet in addressing the Pompidou Centre, both are collapsed into an oversized commodity whose signifier/ signified (aka form/ function) relationship is unstable.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations. (Baudrillard, 1998: 27)”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“More real than reality itself’ is, therefore, Baudrillard’s favourite definition of hyperreality.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“A second way of interpreting Baudrillard’s hyperreality can therefore be found in his critique of the sign where consumer society, in its unstoppable process of deterritorialization, reduces objects to signs and the latter to empty signifiers. Hyperreality can eventually be understood as the pathway leading from a condition where the sign bears some semblance to reality to one where the sign becomes self-referential.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“A model whose referential is lost’ is therefore Baudrillard’s definition of an operation primarily meant to deterritorialize culture and knowledge via architecture (Baudrillard, 1994: 54).”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“L'art ne meurt pas parce qu'il n'y en a plus ; il meurt parce qu'il y en a trop.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“It is like truth according to Nietzsche: we no longer believe that the truth is true when all its veils have been removed. Similarly, we do not believe that war is war when all uncertainty is supposedly removed and it appears as a naked operation. The nudity of war is no less virtual than that of the erotic body in the apparatus of striptease.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“Brecht again: "As for the place not desired, there is something there and that's disorder. As for the desired place, there is nothing there and that's order." The New World Order is made up of all these compensations and the fact that there is nothing rather than something, on the ground, on the screens, in our heads: consensus by deterrence. At the desired place (the GuIf, nothing took place, non-war. At the desired place (TV, information), nothing took place, no images, nothing but filler. Not much took place in all our heads either, and that too is in order. The fact that there was nothing at this or that desired place was harmoniously compensated for by the fact that there was nothing elsewhere either. In this manner, the global order unifies all the partial orders.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order. In this sense, the Iran-Iraq war was a successful first phase: Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of the anti-Western challenge, even though it never defeated it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“There is no reason to assume that the unceasing forward march of techne will not eventually achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“Michael Jackson is a solitary mutant, a precursor of a hybridization that is perfect because it is universal—the race to end all races. Today’s young people have no problem with a miscegenated society: they already inhabit such a universe, and Michael Jackson foreshadows what they see as an ideal future. Add to this the fact that Michael has had his face lifted, his hair straightened, his skin lightened—in short, he has been reconstructed with the greatest attention to detail...This is what makes him such an innocent and pure child—the artificial hermaphrodite of the fable, better able even than Christ to reign over the world and reconcile its contradictions; better than a child-god because he is child-prosthesis, an embryo of all those dreamt-of mutations that will deliver us from race and sex.” -Jean Baudrillard”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena