ABSTRACT
The Beaubourg Effect is Baudrillard’s critique of the highmodernist Pompidou Centre in Paris. Written after Symbolic Exchange, it none the less employs all its new theoretical means in an essay of devastating power. The essay has been influential: it has been used by Fredric Jameson as a resource to elaborate a general characterization of the present mode of western culture as postmodern, a form of culture generated by late capitalism. But at the time of writing this essay the term postmodernism had not become current, and in any case it is unlikely that Baudrillard would have used it, for Baudrillard’s basic orientations are in another direction (and the essay has to be understood and read in the context of the theory emerging in the mid-1970s to which this essay belongs). The essay, though only brief, was published as a book in 1977 (it also appears in 1981a:93-111, and in English translation, 1982). In this chapter the main lines of its arguments are presented and then its poetic structure examined in detail.
