Simulacra and Simulations - Jean Baudrillard

An ENGL 470A presentation.

1. PREVIOUSLY ON

2. Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
•French sociologist, cultural
theorist, author, political
commentator
•His best known theories
involve hyperreality and
simulation

3. Simulacra and
Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
Ben Jillard, Jon Doering, Sam Trieu
Contemporary Critical Theory
Professor V. Lamont
February 2011

4. 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)

5. Simulacres et Simulation
•Published 1981 (Editions Galilée) / English translation
1994 (University of Michigan Press)
•Series of short essays written at different times, applies &
extends theory from the first essay, “The Precession of
Simulacra”

6. How to read S&S
•It provides both a theory about how we construct and
“simulate” reality, and a social/cultural critique
•Theoretical Dimension
Draws together sociology, media studies, semiotics, history,
and philosophy. Though about reality, S&S is not strictly a
work of metaphysics
•Critique Dimension
Application of theory to criticize aspects of American culture,
consumer culture, TV, capital, science, and politics

7. How to (mis)read
Baudrillard
Baudrillard is known for his:
Aphoristic writing
Hyperbolic statements
Politically charged examples

8. 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•Today, reality has been replaced by sign systems that recodify and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)

9. 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)

10. 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

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

12. 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”

13. Causes of Simulacra(um)
•Media culture
•Economics: Exchange-value, multi-national capitalism,
urbanization
•Language and Ideology

14. 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)

15. •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?

16. 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

17. Reality television or
cinema verite as
hyperreal
“reality tv as “exhumation of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity (27)”

18. 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?

19. Cold War
The hyperreal
Holocaust
Kennedy 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)

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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”?

23. Questions

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