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Passwords

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Baudrillard's main thesis here is that words, rather than just generating ideas, actually metamorphize and become these ideas, which in turn do the same. We end up, then, in a sprialing evolution. Baudrillard closes the book by offering that there cannot be an end as the final word will only metamorphize into yet another concept, or will become the object. While this thesis is great fun to play around with, the book's true merits come in the presentation of a collection of Baudrillard's most important topics that he has been working with over the decades. This book is far from an anthology, but reading this book along with other difficult titles will open new routes of interpretation, thus helping readers to better understand some of Baudrillard's extremely difficult concepts.

This book is a very short read, but perhaps that is part of its charm. It is a window into contemporary thought, concerned with ways of viewing a super-extended human existence. As you may have noticed, humans and their gadgets, gizmos, plumbing, and bridges have conquered the world. But the imposition of the human will upon the structures of nature has its limits. When the everyday objects we take for granted in their use are seen as forms that have been forced into function, we cannot but notice, notes Baudrillard, that the object may someday take its revenge. The oceans, for example, may flood the earth. The author lets the reader become aware of the meaning that humans write into existence, mapping their desires onto an outside world that is otherwise non-human. Thus he encourages a world of the mind, of pass-words, that is, a way of adventuring with the spiraling language that humans otherwise use for politics. Although at times Mr. Baudrillard writes expecting that his meaning is self-explanatory, causing an unsure conjecture on the part of the reader, his book is a fine example of an urge to lead philosophy, the arts, the sciences, and ethics towards an interpenetrating coded language of thought, one that would encourage our minds to observe the world more brightly and, depending on where you stand, to regard it with ir/reverential I/eyes.

In his impressive body of work, Baudrillard seems to take an infinite amount of paths leading to a small set of concepts, or vectors upon which he observes society. One of those essential concepts dominating Baudrillard's work is that we can no longer make representations of the world we live in, because by now representation precedes reality, and as such is no longer a representation, but a model. Hence the end of the principle of reality, and the birth of the hyperreal, reality as nothing more than the simulation of a model.
With this book, Baudrillard allows those concepts to come forward, very much like nerve cells, connecting and connected to his previous works, clarifying many of his obscure observations.
Each word/theme works as a model throught which the world is, for lack of better word, simulated.
In many ways, those are the models upon which Baudrillard's work is generated, but I doubt it will be of much use to those who are not familiar with his work.

This very slender volume is advertised as a book of "open sesames" to the paradoxical thought of Jean Baudrillard, the King of Philosophical Hocus Pocus.

Each of the book's 16 short chapters is devoted to a key term or phrase in Baudrillard's work over the years: Seduction, The Perfect Crime, Impossible Exchange, etc. These topics are then defined in the way that Baudrillard has used them to build his philosophical vision.

The idea is that these simplified key-points will help clarify what is generally considered to be an exceptionally ambiguous, slippery, if not downright solipsistic, line of philosophical thought. Baudrillard is a kind of black magician of logic (some would say "charlatan")--he often seems to negate the very concepts he begins by proposing. This is not unintentional. He believes thought should be a kind of provisional play--it is the nature of things to be ever changeable, always in the process of becoming their opposite. It's very difficult to nail down such a chimerical use of language long enough to be sure you understand. What you think you understand keeps changing form and eludes comprehension even as you think it.

And so, as a curative to confusion, Baudrillard somewhat coyly offers this a-b-c version of his life's work. By its very nature, the treatment is rather superficial, but for the most part I think it gets the job done. For the complete Baudrillard neophyte, there's a good chance that "Passwords" will be just a confusing muddle; after all, it's difficult to clarify what you haven't even enough knowledge to misunderstand. But having already some familiarity with Baudrillard's texts as well as some commentaries on his work, I found this "outline" to be helpful in locating and reading the major signposts on what is generally a simulated road to a virtual nowhere.

In the end--which, by the way, according to Baudrillard, doesn't exist--I think the major question is whether or not the book is worth the cover price: $20. Probably not. You can get yourself a large latte and a cinnamon scone and read the whole book in a Barnes & Noble café during a rainy afternoon. Then you can buy one of Baudrillard's "real" books to take home with you.

One way or another, though, if you enjoy Baudrillard's take on things I'd recommend reading *Passages.* It's like a magazine article or a 60-minute television show about his philosophy--tasty and easily digestible.