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Quote by Jean Baudrillard

“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.”

Quote by Jean Baudrillard

Book:Fragments
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Fragments

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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher known for his critical studies on consumerism, media, and semiotics. His theories have had a profound impact on postmodernism and cultural studies. more

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“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.”

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Book:Baudrillard for Architects
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“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.”

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Book:Baudrillard for Architects
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“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.”

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Book:Baudrillard for Architects
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