God forbade...must reading!

Simulacra






    Simulacra and simulation are known for their discussion of images, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity.





    Jean Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomena:

   

     1. Contemporary media including television, film, print and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between goods that are needed and goods for which a need is created by commercial images.

    
     2. Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money rather than usefulness.

    
     3. Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the materials and processes used to create them, plants, minerals.

    
     4. Urbanization, which separates humans from the natural world.

  
     5. Language and ideology, used to obscure, rather than reveal reality when used by dominant, politically powerful groups.





    A specific analogy Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.



    Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.







   His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning  — or a "total" understanding of the world  — that remains consistently elusive.







   He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, hyperreality. This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, "dies out."




   We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event.









He wrote that there are four ways of an object to get value.



            1. Functional value, its instrumental purpose. A pen writes, a refrigerator cools. Similar to Karl Marx “use-value”.

            2. Exchange value, its economic value. One pen could be worth three pencils and one refrigerator is worth three months work.

            3. Symbolic value, a value assigned to an object in relation to another subject. A pen could mean a graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift or a diamond ring may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.

            4. Sign value, value within a system of objects. A pen could have no other functional benefit but to signify prestige relative to another pen.





    Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference - through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.





    Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."







Wikipedia