Famously he described the simulated world of Disney’s Magic Kingdom and how it disguises and parallels the absence of the real in the equally simulated landscape of American culture:ĭisneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). In essence, Baudrillard suggests that the copies of reality have overtaken reality and replaced them. Simulations of reality, he argued, have become “more real than the real” to such consumers as they regard the significance of the sign (that which represents a real thing - a form of simulation) more crucial to life than the reality it formerly signified. There he defines the term hyperreal to describe how mass media consumers view reality. Simulacra and Simulations (1981) most clearly defines Baudrillard’s concerns. Books like America (1986) and The Illusion of the End (1992) offered fascinating observations on the pop culture iconography that has come to dominate late 20th century culture. But his later work, generally cultural critique focusing on mass media and pop culture, was what would make him notable - notorious, perhaps - within both academic and even mainstream culture. Yet something seems quite appropriate in the public’s absence of awareness of Baudrillard’s death in the wake of all the press surrounding Smith’s death Baudrillard’s own critique of media centered on absence and especially the absence generated by the white noise of mass media.īaudrillard began his scholarly life as a fairly traditional Marxist critic railing against the prevailing consumer culture in such works as The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970). A philosophy professor at my university had passed on a link to a New York Times obituary to a number of folks, mostly specialists in contemporary philosophy but also, like myself, a specialist in 20th century literature.Īs always, I was a little saddened - both by Baudrillard’s passing but also by the fact that his obituary came to my attention in this obscure, word-of-mouth fashion while the whole country had been fascinated by the death of Anna Nicole Smith just weeks before. The news of Baudrillard’s death reached me on the morning of 7 March as such news often does in academia - through the grapevines that emerge when prominent critics, scholars or literary artists die and the public at large takes little notice. While it is a seemingly bleak and dismal prospect to be the man who may be best known for declaring the “death of the real”, I suppose that some positive spin can be placed on the fact that Jean Baudrillard apparently was able to outlive “the real” by at least a few years. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |