Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"

The Desert of the Real

"All of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus saving the reality principle" (Baudrillard 355).

Agenda

1. Daniela: Desert of the real

2. Amanda: Hyperreal

3. Jacquie: Reality TV as Religion

4. Rebecca: Plastic Surgery as

a simulated illness

5. Cara: A produced Reality

Conclusion

What are your views on reality TV? Do you buy into it? How do you feel when you watch it?

The Desert of the Real

What do you think about people who become their acting roles to seriously? (i.e. Heidi with plastic surgery, Heath Ledger playing the role of the Joker)

"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. ... 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. The desert of the real itself" (Baudrillard 350).

"The Precession of Simulacra"

A Produced "Reality"

The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite amount of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more then operational. (Baudrillard 351)

Jean Baudrillard

Reality TV

• Television Programs in which real people are continuously filmed, designed to be entertaining rather than informative

"There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; a second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and the substance have disappeared." (Baudrillard 354)

Daniela, Amanda, Rebecca, Jacquie,

and Cara

Hyperreality

Reality TV as Religion

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of subsituting sings of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descritpive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes."

Plastic Surgery as a Simulated Illness

i·con·o·clast   [ahy-kon-uh-klast]

noun

a breaker or destroyer of images, especially those set up for religious veneration.

I forbad any simulacrum in the temples

because the divinity that breathes life

into nature cannot be represented

"

ultimately there has never been a God,

that only the simulacrum exists,

indeed the God himself has only ever been

his own simulacrum.

i·con·o·clasm   [ahy-kon-uh-klaz-uhm]

noun

the action or spirit of iconoclasts

”

"

i·co·nol·a·tor   [ahy-kuh-nol-uh-tree]

noun

a worshiper or adorner of icons.

”

“To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t… But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: ‘Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms’”

“…simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Since the simulator produces ‘true’ symptoms, is he ill or not? He cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness” (Baudrillard, 114).

Jacquie

Plastic Surgery as a Simulated Illness