Abstract
This paper examines the theoretical background and perspective behind certain of Baudrillard’s works. It’s argued that it is not nihilism when he asserts the impossibility of leisure and free-time in contemporary society. In early works such as “The system of objects,” “The consumer society: myths and structures,” and “Symbolic exchange and death,” he suggests a self-reliance system without externality, affluence of superficial communications, and extinction of ego owing to excess of structural or relational factor in Consumption Society. He refers to many theories such as capitalism, semiotics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis to comprehend the Consumption Society as a system. This modern system leads to many contradictions in terms of leisure: firstly obsessional quantification of time according to exchange values, secondly affluence of “solicitude” in systematic communication, and thirdly superabundance and the suppression of our existential egos. If leisure is to have positive significance in the contemporary world, people must try for an exodus from such a monolithic and self-reliant system. He describes realistically that capital and scientific movements quantify all things dissolving the symbolic orders formed by humanistic processes. This perspective is linked to his latter insights with respect to mimetic world and to the concept of “simulation” in the 1980’s postmodern context in which there are no differences between sacred and profane.
