PREVIOUSLY ON

Jean Baudrillard (1929-

2007)

• French sociologist, cultural theorist, author, political commentator

• His best known theories involve hyperreality and simulation

Simulacra and Simulation

Jean Baudrillard

Ben Jillard, Jon Doering, Sam TrieuContemporary Critical Theory

Professor V. LamontFebruary 2011

Influences

• Structuralism, Marxism, Sociology

• Transitions through different schools of thought

• Labelled: Post-structuralist, Post-Marxist, Post-Modernist

• Offers one view of postmodern condition among several others (Lyotard, Jameson)

Simulacres et Simulation

• Published 1981 (Editions Galilée) / English translation1994 (University of Michigan Press)

• Series of short essays written at different times, applies &extends theory from the first essay, “The Precession of Simulacra”

How to read S&S• It provides both a theory about how we construct and

“simulate” reality, and a social/cultural critique

• Theoretical DimensionDraws together sociology, media studies, semiotics, history, and philosophy. Though about reality, S&S is not strictly a work of metaphysics

• Critique DimensionApplication of theory to criticize aspects of American culture, consumer culture, TV, capital, science, and politics

How to (mis)read Baudrillard

Baudrillard is known for his:

Aphoristic writingHyperbolic statements

Politically charged examples

S&S in a nutshell

• Today, reality has been replaced by sign systems that recodify and supplant the real. Simulation precedes and determines the real.

• Mass media shapes these symbols as agents of representation, not communication. Mass media creates a new culture of signs, images and codes without referential value, and are exchangeable.

• Contemporary society consumes these empty signs of status and identity having lost the ability to make sense of the distinction between the natural and the simulation.

“People come to live in pure simulations,

replications of reality that resemble it in all

respects save they are representatives through and through” (Rivkin &

Ryan 365)

“The era of simulation is thus everywhere...All the great humanist criteria of value, all the values of a civilization of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgement, vanish in our system of

images and signs. -’Symbolic Exchange and Death’ (1976)

What is Simulation?

• Simulation is the active process of replacement of the real.

• Whereas dissimulation (pretending) “leaves the principle of reality intact…Simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’”(3).

“Simulation is no longer a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreality”

(Baudrillard 1)

What is a Simulacrum?

• A representational image or presence that deceives; the product of simulation usurping reality

• A “copy without an original”

• Classical example: a false icon for God

• Modern example: Disneyland

Simulation vs Simulacrum

Simulation refers to a process in motion, whereas simulacrum (plural simulacra) refers to a more static image

Simulation is a 4 step process of destabilizing and replacing reality

1. Faithful - The image reflects a profound reality Portrait

2. Perversion - The image masks and denatures a profound reality Icon

3. Pretense - The image masks the absence of a profound reality

Disneyland

4. Pure - The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever,

it is its own pure simulacrum. “The ultimate Matrix”

Causes of Simulacra(um)

• Media culture

• Economics: Exchange-value, multi-national capitalism, urbanization

• Language and Ideology

Simulacra and Ethnology

Video: http://www.uncontactedtribes.org/brazilfootage

“We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology...[I]t is thus very naive to look for ethnology in the Savages or in some Third World - it is here, everywhere...in a world completely cataloged and analyzed, then artificially resurrected under the auspices of the real...” (8)

• Hyperreal: A world of simulacra where nothing is unmediated (i.e.-without previous meaning, without intermediary mass media)

• Media and medium mediate our experience without our noticing.

• We know that we are living in a mediated world, but as a result of the ubiquity of the simulation life is now "spectralised...the event filtered by the medium--the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV" (55).

What is Hyperreal?

Hyperreal Example

• The American Dream as a simulacrum of?

• Culture and media create and perpetuate the hyperreal.

• Whatever experiences in our lives that are mediated are all simulations. Whatever is mediated is what is simulated.

Freedom from Want. Norman Rockwell, 1943

Reality television or cinema verite as

hyperreal

“reality tv as “exhumation of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity (27)”

The Consumer Society and the Linear Nature of

History

• Kraus and Auer: “Because we feel lost in this artificial world of simulacra, of copies without originals...we nostalgically cling to outworn concepts such as reality, truth and reason. This self deluded craving generates a ‘panic stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production’. ” Simulacrum America (2000)

• History is understood as linear. Society builds off events and assigns truth through signifiers. The result is the state we live in now...the hyperreal

Why can’t we ever go back?

Cold War

The hyperreal

HolocaustKennedy Assassination

All previous presidents pay for and continue to pay for Kennedy's murder as if they were the ones who had suppressed it - which is true phantasmatically, if not in fact…”(25)

What is Myth?•Myth to Baudrillard

is a lost referential.

•Today, technology and mass media have made consumption of objects a new tribal myth and shared morality

≠Coffee

= a lifestyle, a morality, a myth.

What is Mobian Compulsion?

• Mobian compulsion: Under post-modern culture, all referentials combine their discourse in a circular reconciliation and assimilation.

• Two things diametrically opposed are not really that different in reality.

• Given time a good and an evil will reconcile and be seen as one in the same, intertwined and essential for each other. -Sex and work-piercings/tattoos and counterculture

Reflecting On Baudrillard• Baudrillard is a critical observer. He does not offer solutions.

• His observations point out the current human condition is based on simulations of the idea of reality.

• Reality is in the past and is corrupted beyond the point of recognition.

• Looking back on S & S, what was it? What is the best term for it: “theory”, “critique”, “aesthetic”, or “postmodern prophesy”?

Questions

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