The Simulacrum of Consumerism

8/18/2019 The Simulacrum of Consumerism

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The Simulacrum of Consumerism.

On March 6, Jean Baudrillard died in Paris at the age of 77. Associated with the

postmodern and poststructuralist theory. Baudrillard is difficult to situate in relation to

traditional and contemporary theories and academic discipline. His work combines

philosophy, social theory, and idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflect on key

events and phenomena of the epoch. He is an extremely prolific author who published

over fifty books and commented on some of the most salient cultural and sociological

phenomena of the contemporary era that included gendered, race and class that structured

modern society in a new postmodern consumer media and high tech world. The mutating

roles of art and aesthetics’, fundamental changes in politics, culture and human beings,

and the impact of the new media, information and cybernetic technologies in the creation

of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and

social life.

For some years a cult figure of postmodern theory, Baudrillard moved beyond the

discourse of the postmodern from the early 1980 to the present, and developed a higher

highly mode of philosophical and cultural analysis that is described as a post structuralist

mode of thought. From all postmodern and post structuralist thinkers, he has emerge as

one of the most radical, he undermines key categories of western philosophy and

contemporary theory.

“The Simulacrum is never what hides the truth, it is truth.


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That hides the fact that there is none” The simulacrum is truth.

The simulacrum according to Argentinean writer Jose Luis Borges as he says in one of

his fables: “The cartographers of the empire draw up a map so detailed that ends up

covering the territory exactly (the decline of the empire), witnessing the fraying of the

map, little by little, and it falls into ruin, through some shreds are still discernable in the

desert. The metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to

the empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the

double ends by beings confused with the real through aging, as the most beautiful

allegory of simulation. This fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing

but the discrete charm of a second order simulacrum.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.

Simulation is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the

generation by models of the real without origin or reality. “Hiperreal”. The territory no

longer precedes the map. It is not the real and not the map nor does it survive it. It is the

precession of simulacra that engenders the territory, and if one most return to the fable,

today as a territory, it is the territory whose shreds rot slowly not across the map. It is the

real and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the desert that are no longer

the empire, but ours, “The desert of the real itself”(1-Baudrillard).

Going back to Baudrillard and his notable examples on the world of simulacra and

simulation. In the political arena this two words are constantly construe and used for


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regenerative purposes, one of the examples is “Watergate” as a way of political gain.

“Watergate is not a scandal it mask the strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one

approaches the primitive (mise en scene) of capital the cruelty, the ferocity, its

fundamental immorality. This is what makes it scandalous, unacceptable to the system of

moral and economic equivalence. This is an axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of

the Enlightment up to Communism(B.15). We are in need of consumption of principles

in this case was in a form of political gain. The American public needs this type of

simulation in order to restructure our thoughts and create a capitalistic carnival.

Watergate was nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch his adversaries. A

simulation of scandal. Another good example of the gullability of the American system,

a sort of waking up call. According to Baudrillard is: “ Always a question of proving the

true through the imaginary, proving true through scandal, proving work through striking,

proving the law through transgression, proving the system through crisis, and capital

though revolution, also proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object. (B.19).

Everything is metamorphosed into it’s opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated

form. As Argentinean writer Jose Luis Borges “Labyrinth” if we are able to do that

through contradiction we are moving forward in a case of extremes. The consumption of

American values. To make the real unreal, to simulate events and things that will help us

attained extremes thought political emancipation. “The simulacrum of political

consumption”. We are consumers of that ideology that is so greatly recreated in the

media and through the use of radio, television, newspapers, etc.


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Hipereality and Simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective; they

turn against power the deterrent that is used so well for such a long time. Because in the

end, through its history it was capital that first fed on the destruction of every referential,

of every human objective, that shattered every ideal between true and false, good and

evil, in order to establish a radical order of equivalence and exchange. The iron law of

power. Well today the same type of logic continues and it is set against capital. And as

soon as it wishes to combat the disastrous spiral by secreting a last glimpse of reality on

which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does nothing but multiply the signs and

accelerate the play of simulation(B.22).

Within the political sphere the president comes to resemble that “Puppet of Power” who

is the head of primitive societies (Clastres).

All previous presidents pay and continue to pay for Kennedy’s murder, because know it

can only be simulated president Johnson and Ford were both the objects of failed

assassination attempts which if they were not stage were at least perpetrated by

simulation. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something, the political

substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film.

Curiously Johnson, Nixon, Ford all have the simian mug, the monkey of power. (B. 24).

The iconization of power play is vital to our society we still are face with mythical

figures that persist in our everyday life some of this mythical figures are still affecting

our way of thinking and probably ruling the way we view our society. Death is never and

absolute criterion but in this case it is still significant. The era of James Dean, Marilyn

Monroe, and the Kennedys are long gone, this people died because they had a mythical


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dimension that implied dead, not for a romantic vision but because of the fundamental

principle of reversal and exchange. This era no longer exist now we move into a more

hiperreal situation, murder by simulation, this generalized aesthetic of simulation. In

order to follow the “Tradition” we know have reverse to the resurrection of death by

allegorical simulation. Power float like money, like language, like theory. Criticism and

negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. If they become weak for

one reason or another, power has no other recourse but to artificially revive and

hallucinate them (B.24). This are the consumism that we need in order for our nation to

continue his phantasmagorical effect. This is our way of envision a reality that help us

transgress our images as consumers of political manufacturing. We are living in an

abstract hiperreality. Again controlled by signs and objects. In this effect we are the

objects. We already have pass the pastiche of Jameson creation, that is no longer the case

we are unreality trying to find some reality, something to grasp as a country and as

citizens of America. We are in the edge of non reality controlled by a whisper of make-

believe real effects that help us stay put. Architecture as a social entity help us clarify

some issues as we begin to try to find “Us” in some sort of place to again believe that we

have dimension and legacy and not and hiperreal movement of simulacra and simulation

as the words implied.

The Simulacrum of Consumerism

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