Rethinking Baudrillardian Postmodernism: The Loss of the Realin Twenty-first Century Culture

Abstract

Along with the rapid development and pervasive distribution of simulatory technologies and media such as television and the Internet has come the era of images, simulacra, and virtual reality, which the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929- ) explores with keen insights to it. The initiative for this paper originates from my speculative concerns over such Baudrillardian postmodern culture. Possible negative impacts of simulatory culture on human perception and conception of the real are explored in detail from a theoretical perspective. Baudrillardian culture is often summarized in the well-known dictum, “the loss of the real.” It is thus a highly postmodernized culture in which the virtual becomes more real than the real, and so the conventionally held boundary between the real and the virtual is terminally blurred. The paper starts out by explaining major characteristics of Baudrillardian postmodernism. Then, the principal concepts and theoretical positions are introduced to better understand the questions posed above. Toward the conclusion, it explores some possible impacts that cultural manifestations of Baudrillardian postmodern society may have on today’s society, centering on the way in which traditional perspectives of the real have been altered in Baudrillardian postmodern culture.