Simulacra and Simulations by Jean Baudrillard

In a first for this course, the extract for reading is not available. Baudrillrad has been removed from Mirzoeff's The Visual Culture Reader in the third edition.

Consequently, the following notes are taken from pp 132-4 of Visual Culture by Howells and Negreiros.

Baudrillard rejects the classic signifier-signified relationship of semiotics in contemporary (1980s) society. The S/s relationship has given way to sequences of simulation models that bear no relation to reality and which combine in a whirl of 'orbital recurrence'. Instead of referentiality, objectivity and truth, Baudrillard claims there are simulacra, simulation, and hyperreality.

The best known allegory is Borges ' map. Borges describes a map which is so detailed that it covers the exact territory of an empire. The map decays and becomes useless except as a shelter. The signifier and the signified are confounded. 

Baudrillard inverts Borges' analysis. In our world, he claims, the territory does not precede the map, but the map engenders the territory: the signifier engulfs the signified, creating the desert of the real itself.

It is easy to see  how Baudrillard can be taken as prescient in today's digital society. One has to think only of digital pets like Tamagotchi  or digital sex toys. These   are contemporary examples of how what is real and what is not is becoming blurred within popular visual culture.

Baudrillard used a simpler example: Disneyland. To some, Disneyland may be seen as an ideological construction of American society, but Baudrillard claims it is more than that: it preserves the reality principle, convincing us that the world outside is 'real'. Disneyland simulates the reality, concealing the fact that the objects it characterises are no longer real.

Things take a more fantastic turn when Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not happen: rather it  was a hyperreal simulation created by the sophisticated technologies of the US forces and media apparatuses. One wonders then what exactly those who were killed in action during the Gulf War actually died for.

Baudriallard continues that real is dead and referentiality is an anachronism. It is a thesis in line with the postmodern notion that production of desire has become more important than production of things; exactly what we looked at in the previous project