Lecture on Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard
1929-2007

French philosopher/sociologist/cultural analyst
Originally a Marxist, he was interested in analyzing consumer society after WWII.

He distinguished between three different values of objects in modern consumer society:

1) From Marx – “use value” – all objects have a use value (i.e. a pen is used for writing down stuff, a sweater is used to keep us warm in winter, a car is used to get us places)

2) Also from Marx – “exchange value” – under modern capitalism, objects have become more associated with their exchange value, or what they’re worth. So, a Prada purse has more exchange value than a Gap purse, but not necessarily more use value. A Lexus has more exchange value than a Toyota, but not necessarily more use value.

3) Baudrillard adds a third category – “symbolic value” – all consumer goods have a symbolic value because they symbolize social rank, taste, and identity

What does it say about your identity, social rank and taste if you drive a beat-up 1990 Honda Accord with 160,000 miles on it and buy all your clothes at the Goodwill? What image do you project to the world? What about if you wear lots of gold jewelry, carry a Coach bag, and drive a BMW? Many things we buy have “symbolic value.”

SO, along with Marxism, Baudrillard became interested in Marshall McLuhan in the 80’s and 90’s, particularly how the media affects our perception or reality and the world. He began to see that in the postmodern era (from the mid-50’s to the present), we have experienced the “death of the real” – the internet, TV shows, the news, video games, advertising, theme parks, which all make up a huge part of our lives – these are the things we connect to on a daily basis, but these are simulations of reality. Our reality has become dominated by simulation, by image. Therefore, reality IS image, reality IS simulation.

In his book The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), he says we are so seduced by images in the mass media that these images dictate our private desires and secrets. Since TV and computer images invade our private spaces, we identify personally with mass-produced images. Example: note how so many people become obsessed with a celebrity, or how we fetishize certain images that we might claim as our tags. Or, what do people claim to find sexually attractive?

The essay you read for today, “The Precession of Simulacra,” is perhaps his most famous, although he has made some really infamous claims elsewhere. For instance, he has said that the Gulf War in 1991 was a total simulation of a war. Lots of people really died, but for a simulated cause. That war was started with a clear picture of what the outcome was going to be; there was never any doubt how it would turn out, and all the images on TV of that war only made it seem like a “battle.” He thinks that war was completely staged, by all participating powers. Similarly, he has said about 9/11, “it was they who did it, but we who wished it.” Terrorist acts are destined to be absorbed by our system’s own narrative of history and neutralized by the mass media.

Anyway, Baudrillard says the postmodern human condition is a combination of “fascination,” “melancholy” and “indifference.” Here’s how we got to this place; he outlines a four-part history of the image:

Four Orders of Simulation

1) Ancient to feudal times
Signs, images, art are fixed representations of a profound reality that isn’t questioned. Fixed symbolic order.
The system is rigid and ranked - God, King, nobility, peasants. No one moves in social rank.

2) Early Modern Period to Industrial Revolution
This is the “First Order of Simulacra”
Images begin to mask reality. How images represent reality begins to be ambiguous. Images start to pervert the representation of reality.
Example: paintings begin to idealize Jesus and Madonna in an unrealistic fashion. Counterfeit paintings appear.

3) Industrial Revolution to 1950’s
“Second Order of Simulacra”
This is the age of mass production
Copies and replicas dominate the scene
Reproduced things are just as real as the original. Examples: cars, planes, clothes, books, PHOTOGRAPHY – copies are indistinguishable from the original.
The whole idea of a profound, underlying reality is thrown into question.
Modern thinkers:
Freud – behind all appearances, there lies the profound reality of the unconscious
Marx – behind the glittery exchange value of commodities, there is a fundamental use value
Saussure – behind all signifiers, there is an ultimate signified (origin of meaning)

These thinkers of the modern period critiqued appearances in order to point to a profound reality, a hidden meaning beyond imagery.

4) Present Day
“Third Order of Simulacra”
We live in a world of images that have no original or prototype
Images don’t refer to a reality, they are reality
Computers, cloning, Fox news, opinion polls – it’s the information age
Information replaces the machine as the basic mode of production

What is a simulacrum, anyway?
This word goes back to Plato. He used it to refer to a “false copy” of an Ideal Form (i.e., a beautiful woman you see on the street is a simulacrum of the Ideal Form “Beauty” that exists in the invisible realm beyond our bodily reality).

But for Baudrillard, the simulacrum undercuts the idea of a true or false copy because ALL WE HAVE NOW ARE simulations, copies, images. There is NO REAL. This doesn’t mean we don’t have real bodies and live among real objects. It means that we don’t have real meaning, only image/copy. When we see someone get mugged on the street, we might think “this reminds me of that movie when…” Reality starts to mimic imagery. Imagery is primal for us. Movies and the internet make more sense to us and are more familiar than what we see in the actual world.

What of maps? He opens the essay with a description of a Borges story, in which imperial map-makers make a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire. It’s a perfect replica of the empire. When the map starts to wear out and fray, the citizens of the empire mourn its loss, because they had come to mistake the map, or simulacrum, for the territory. Under the map, the real territory had turned into the “desert of the real” and the frayed map is all that’s left for the people.

So, in our culture, Baudrillard says we take “maps” of reality like TV, film, games, as more real than our lives. People become enamored with celebrities and TV characters, and they seem more real to them than their friends. Think about what we might do in a day:
- communicate by email, Myspace, Facebook, texting
- relate to video game characters, TV show characters
- shop in malls that offer endless amounts of identical, reproduced products
- listen to Ipods
- vote for ex-Hollywood actors for political offices

So you see, the hyperreal “map” that covers our land is more real than the land itself for many of us. So we need to take a walk in nature “to get away from it all” – nature (real) is the exception to what’s normal (the hyperreal). The map, the simulacrum, is primary – hence the title of the essay, “the precession of simulacra.”

Disneyland

Why do we need Disneyland?
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland…” Read from the middle of p. 352 to top of 353.
What is he saying?
We need things like Disneyland because if we make a make-believe place, then by comparison, the real world will seem more real. People are unsettled by the fact that we live on images, so we build lots of imaginary places like Disneyland and Las Vegas so that we can return to the “real world” and “face reality.” But he’s implying that the real world is also a simulacrum. America is one big Magic Kingdom, chock full of enchanting slogans and imagery. He’s also implying here that we need childish fantasies like Disneyland so that the world won’t seem as childish in comparison, but the truth is that our world is infantile. Why do you think he says the “real” world is infantile?

He uses Watergate to illuminate the same principle. In politics, true moral and political principles don’t exist. We have a mass proliferation of images of morality in politics (think of images of Pres. Bush with wounded children in Iraq). But the reality is that politics is driven by capital, and capital is “immoral and unscrupulous.” However, capitalism can only survive under the GUISE, the image, of moral scrupulousness: “All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality…” So, he says politics needs scandal to “regenerate” a moral principle in politics. If everyone is scandalized at Nixon’s hiring of thugs to get secret info, then that automatically regenerates a moral/good image of how politics SHOULD be, and normally “is.” Thus, anti-politics proves the need for politics.

And what of reality TV?

Why is it so popular, according to Baudrillard’s theory? Especially, why do we adamantly insist that the results of reality competitions are fixed, manipulated by the networks??

Discuss!!

OK, I can't seem to embed this Youtube video.
But I wanted to post the opening six minutes of Natural Born Killers. Very Baudrillardian film. You can always go to Youtube and watch it.