The humor is both fully buried and right on the surface. A trading card that depicts Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who argued for decades that signs that only refer to other signs have supplanted reality in modern society, is a sign that only refers to another sign. You don’t get Baudrillard from the card. It provides you with an image of Baudrillard, which provides you with a concept of Baudrillard that is already far removed from anything that could be termed the man or his work. That’s not a problem by his own standards. That’s the whole idea.
The main contention of Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation is one of those concepts that, at first glance, seems exaggerated. He asserted that we no longer live in a world where representations and images allude to a past reality. Rather, representations have taken the place of reality, or rather, they have so completely supplanted it that the original is no longer relevant or even recoverable. This was dubbed hyperreality by him. He famously claimed that Disneyland’s purpose is to convince us that the rest of America is real rather than to amuse us. A sense of an original that was never fully there is created by the simulation.
The stage of pure simulation, which Baudrillard referred to as the fourth stage of the image, is where the theoretical trade card is located. According to his theory, a sign starts off as a faithful representation of something actual, changes into a distorted duplicate, hides the fact that there isn’t a real original underneath, and eventually loses all connection to reality.
The philosopher is not accurately portrayed on a Baudrillard trading card. It symbolizes the notion of portraying the philosopher. Baudrillard is not the subject of the card. It’s about what it means to turn a philosopher into a collectible, the kind of cyclical loop that Baudrillard would have found either depressingly predictable or humorous.
The meta-joke is this: Baudrillard’s life work was a persistent indictment of how contemporary consumer culture commodifies everything, including ideas, relationships, political movements, and cultural resistance. This is important stating even though doing so somewhat deflates it.
You’ve done exactly what he warned of the instant you place his visage on a tradeable piece of cardboard and give his “special abilities” a point value. You’ve made the commodification critic a commodity. The cardholder is not interacting with Baudrillard’s ideas. They are interacting with a product that embodies the concept of interacting with Baudrillard’s worldview. That is a small version of hyperreality.
The Matrix included a copy of Simulacra and Simulation in the first scene for a reason: the filmmakers were aware of how well Baudrillard’s framework mapped onto the concept of that movie. However, Baudrillard himself dismissed the movie, claiming that by continuing to suggest a genuine world underlying the simulation, it misinterpreted his point of view. He felt that The Matrix was not sufficiently Baudrillardian. It held onto the reassuring notion that reality might be restored. The more awkward part of his argument was that there isn’t a red pill. There is no outside to the simulation.
In three bullet points, a trading card cannot adequately convey that concept on its back panel. That is an example of what the format does, not a failing of the format. It invites collecting, assigns value, simplifies, and categorizes. Baudrillard would have recognized the procedure right away. We only have the card, therefore it is impossible to determine whether he would have loved being the focus of it.
