For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Description

In this book, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought,

Jean Baudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he

hopes may yet be solved: the ''murder'' of reality. To solve the crime would

be to unravel the social and technological processes by which reality has

quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of media ''real time.'' But

Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the

real, an occurrence he recently described as ''the most important event of

modern history,'' nor even to meditate upon the paradoxes of reality and

illusion, truth and its masks. The Perfect Crime is also the work of a

great moraliste: a penetrating examination of vital aspects of the social,

political and cultural life of the ''advanced democracies'' in the (very)

late twentieth century. However, whether stripping away the layers of

hypocrisy which surround our smug perceptions of the former Yugoslavia, or

deploring the New European Order characterized by ''white fundamentalism,

protectionism, discrimination and control'', the moraliste is also the deft

and disturbing social theorist. Where critics like McLuhan once exposed the

alienating consequences of ''the medium'', Baudrillard lays bare the

depredatory effects of an oppressive transparency on our social lives, of a

relentless positivity on our critical faculties, and of a withering ''high

definition'' on our very sense of reality.