Simulation and Reality

Overview

Jean Baudrillard is a French academic who has become something of a pop culture figure, at least among those who study the workings of the modern media landscape.   He is most famous for his views of how mass communications media, especially television, have created an unreal image of the larger world which millions of westernised people live in, thinking it real. This has given currency to the common science-fiction theme of people living, unaware, in artificial realities to overcome some terrible reality of their circumstances. These simulations often are "Hyper-real", or "spectacular", being more than the real version.

Baudrillard can be seen as simular to Marshal McLuhan, in that many of his ideas are incomprehensible to most people, and some of these ideas have been misunderstood or simplified and then used as inspiration/justification for artworks/ideas. For example, the movie the Matrix, where the central character Nero is reading a copy of one of Baudrillard's book (Simulacra and Simulation) just before he begins his journey of discovery. Is this intended as a joke by the film's creators, or is it intended to give the movie more "intellectual" credibility?

The notions about copies of originals replacing original taken by popular understanding from "Simulacra and Simulation" (if not actually intended by Baudrillard himself), seem to have extra significance in the digital 1990s, and then into the current century, where bio and nano-tech threaten to make the copying of reality itself possible.

The major value of a superficial understanding of Baudrillard's work is that modernised humans already experience much of their lives through media channels, and as such are removed from the physical realities that would otherwise have occurred in order to have that knowledge or experience. Since these channels are subject to control by technological, economic and political forces, it can be said that we may already be in a kind of "virtual"   "alternative" reality.

Primary Reading

Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Baudrillard: On Postmodernity." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue University.

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/postmodernism/modules/baudlldpostmodmainframe.html

"The Matrix Decoded:   Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard1" (Translated by: Dr. Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx.) Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004)

available on-line at http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/genosko.htm

"The Impact of Interactive Violence on Children" by Eugene F. Provenzo.

http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/0321pro.pdf

More

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism) by Jean O Baudrillard, Sheila Faria Glaser (Translator). 1995. University of Michigan Press.

"Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?" By Douglas Kellner

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell26.htm