Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson

Jean Baudrillard born on 27 July 1929 and died 6 March 2007. He was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Jean Baudrillard has 3 main theories hyper-reality, sign value and simulacrum. His theory of hyper reality is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, hyper reality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Sign value denotes and describes the value accorded to an object because of the prestige that it imparts upon the possessor, rather than the material value and utility derived from the function and the primary use of the object. Jean Baudrillard proposed the Theory of Sign Value as a philosophic and economic counterpart to the dichotomy of exchange-value vs. use-value, which Karl Marx recognized as a characteristic of capitalism as an economic system. Simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal.

 

Fredric Jameson born 14 April 1934, is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends. He once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between "spheres" or fields of, and between distinct classes and roles within each field, had been overcome by the crisis of foundationalism. Jameson argued, against this, and could have been understood successfully within a modernist framework; the postmodern failure to achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought. In his view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere, which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era. Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work. Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism are that postmodernity is characterized by pastiche and a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued that parody was replaced by pastiche. Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempted to view it as historically grounded; he therefore rejected any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon. His failure to dismiss postmodernism from the onset, however, was perceived by many as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views