Spencer Coates 1. Author: Jean Baudrillard(1929-2007) 1. Described as post-modernist theorist 2. Born in France 3.

Like Foucault, most of his English works are translated from French 4. I read Simulations; comprised of two essays; The Precession of Simulacra and The Orders of Simulacra 5. These essays were the inspiration for the Matrix movies (though they were simulacra of Baudrillard himself) 1. Perhaps a better example would be South Park's Imaginationland 6. Other notable works: The System of Objects, On Nihilism, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media 7. Baudrillard, essentially, argues that we have lost contact with the "real" in various ways, that we have nothing left but a continuing fascination with its disappearance. 1. In Objects the symbolic and iconic value of an object often supersedes its use 2. In Mirror of Production; in precapitalist societies, where sexual rituals of the pornographic sort do not exist, sexuality in istself does not exist (LB k?) 1. Baudrillard: It is always the same; once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are 3. In Consumer Society: Baudrillard writes: "Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea" 4. Simulacra is most famous work 8. Baudrillard's language: What do you get if you cross a post-modernist with a Mafioso? Someone wholl make you an offer you cant understand! 1. Confusng as hell; is it intentional? 1. Baudrillard: The form of my language is almost more important than what I have to say within it. Language has to be synchronous with the fragmentary nature of reality. With its viral, fractal quality, thats the essence of the thing! Its not a question of ideas there are already too many ideas! (WTF? Synchronous? Fractal?) 2. Many postmodernists, including Baudrillard, argue that language is disconnected from reality; an overabundance of symbols that creates a linguistic hyperreality in-and-ofitself. 1. Richard Hanley: Post-modernists tend to have a fundamentally different view of language and other representation, a view inherited from structuralism in linguistics. Representations, they say, only ever refer or apply to other representations, so that language (and thought) is literally cut off from the real world. No matter how hard you try to refer to the non-representational, you cant do it. 3. Philosophy, under Baudrillard, stretches beyond the confines of analytic knowledge and approaches something of an aesthetic quality; to rely on the limitations of the simulacrum of language is to miss the experience inhibited by the intellectual barriers of the language itself(i.e. The self-referentiality of linguistic determinism) 2. Simulations(Precession of Simulacra/Orders of Simulacra) 1. Published in French in 1985 (written in 1983), in English in 1996\ 2. Baudrillard started out analyzing the world in an economic fashion (Consumer Culture, System of Objects). He discussed much of the works of Marx and the semantics of production.

3. Simulations represent a shift in Baudrillard's focus from consumerism to social constructionism and communication 4. Who knows why Baudrillard does anything? 3. Summary 1. Basic thesis: We have reached a point where the simulated (our images, models, ideologies) has moved beyond simply representing parts of reality to actually determining a new reality, a hyperreality. We have lost all means of distinction between the real and the artificial (this does NOT necessarily mean that there is one!). 1. Religion, says Baudrillard, is not the power of the real over the subordinate; rather, the death of God has given birth to God in the hyperreal 2. Baudrillard defines the precession of the simulacra through the successive phases by which we have identified images: 1. The image is a reflection of a basic reality (reality begets image, image begets reality) 2. The image masks and distorts a reality (reality begets image, image screws over reality) 3. The image marks the absence of a reality(reality doesn't beget image, image informs reality) 4. The image is not related to reality(reality doesn't beget image, image is reality) 3. The image creates and informs reality, much like the Matrix. BUT, as Baudrillard says, we we cannot use any means, real or hyperreal, to distinguish the two 1. Baudrillard What we have here is essentially the same misunderstanding as with the simulation artists in New York in the 80s. These people take the hypothesis of the virtual as a fact and carry it over to visible realms. But the primary characteristic of this universe lies precisely in the inability to use categories of the real to speak about it. 4. The simulacrum is informed much as constructionist phenomona are; the absence or negation of something denotes its existence within the hyperreal (Mobius Strip) 1. The Watergate scandal informed the existence of a political morality by creating a scandal; the political hypothesis needed facts to embolden its model 1. Baudrillard: Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once 2. Baudrillard likens this to proving theatre by anti-theatre, pedagogy by antipedagogy 1. Think Foucault: power needs resistance to become power 3. Danger time: Is law and order nothing more than a simulation? 1. If we accept it on its scientific face, then probably 4. Reification is the weapon of the hyperreal; indicating the biconditional of the simulated and the reality 1. Take your desires as real! 5. Why the simulacrum is not the matrix: there is no overarching source of hyperreality (think South Park and the killing of Wal-Mart); rather, it is through the multiplicity of miniaturized codes (like computers, coded in semantics) that determine the validity of the hyperreal 1. Baudrillard: The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matices, memory banks and command models--and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite numbers 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 than operational. In

fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the produce of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in hyperspace without atmosphere. 6. Baudrillard: All media and the official news service only exist to maintain the illusion of actuality-of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts 7. Orders of Simulacra: 1. The counterfeit 1. Pre-modern period(Renaissance to industrial revolution); the image is recognized as an illusion 2. The production 1. Industrial revolution; use value of the simulation begins to equal that of the real, but knowledge remains of the distinction 3. Simulation 1. Today; the representation precedes and informs the real 8. Are we human, robots, or some amalgamation of the two? 1. A robot which captures our appearance, sound, smell, sound, taste; if in ran on capital, how would it be any different than we are? 1. Must have soul; and, as a means of distinction, some means of measuring the soul 9. Digitality: the 4th wall is always there, but it is not a one-way mirror. 1. When we watch movies, the camera questions us as much as we engage it 1. When you watch Schindler's List, you are asked (nay forced) to engage in a simulation; you must feel as if you are there, witnessing the horrors of the holocaust; to be able to tell the difference indicates that there is very little (I.e. If public opinion is said to inform media, then media does just as much --> mobius strip) 10. Democracies: 1. Power still restricted, no longer by the Prince, but by the ideology of the state 2. Free choice in a democracy is a distortion; there is no escaping the simulacrum which informs the validity of free choice; hence, like all wide distributions, we, as a free society, are a perfect model, feeding and leeching off of the simulacrum 3. Equilibrium, not unilateralism, ensures the survival of the state/simulacrum 1. Baudrillard: Any unitary system, if it wants to survive, must acquire a binary regulation. This changes nothing as far as monopoly is concerned. 11. The World Trade Center Towers? 1. The towering, dualistic nature of the towers is, in itself, a sign through the architectural medium; signify the victory of the binary model in competition with the unregulated, unchallenged underlings 4. References 1. (No explicit) Foucault; conctructionist view of the binary source of power much in line with Foucault 2. Karl Marx 1. According to Baudrillard, in the postmodern age, we have lost all sense of use-value: "It is all capital" 2. This is produced through, as Jean says, the production and reproduction of the material and the calculus of capital 3. Jorge Luis Borges 1. Fable of the map and the empire: map expanded with the empire, became focus of empire; empire crumbled, map remained

4. Ecclesiastes 1. The simulacrum is never what hides the truthit is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. 2. Thing is, Ecclesiastes never said that 3. SIMULATION ALERT---but how would you know upon reading it? 5. Thomas Sebeok 1. Coined biosemiotics 2. DNA is a model, one that extends beyond the boundaries of biiology into the realms of language, cognition, communication, etc. 5. Reflection 1. Personal note: I think that judging Baudrillard's arguments on their semantic validity would be missing the point and, in a way, falling into his trap. If I designate is as a truth, I am engaging in the same type of symbolic exchange that transforms, or perhaps contaminates, Baudrillard's work (like the Matrix). If I think it false, then I still have assigned a truth value to it; it is alive, now, brought within the debateable realm of truth, where the aesthetic quality of Baudrillard's work is all but lost 2. How to use in debate rounds: 1. Be...creative? Baudrillard seemed to succumb to the theme of post-modernism in that he does not follow a line of argument in which the solution presents itself; hence it is not a binary source of power, and seems impossible to reverse 1. Could prevent contamination of other, premodernist societies, I.e. Protect the third world from LB 1. Trying to liberate the sexuality of the oppressed is, in essence, transforming sex into an object. 2. Baudrillard argued that sexual and racial liberation, freedom of speech, the abolition of class differences - have been smoothly integrated into the "society of spectacle", where they have become the opposite of what they had originally represented. 1. The greatest example of this is pornography, which ought to represent unbridled sexual licence, but which, in reality, is "un-erotic, unexciting, nothing" - a symptom of the dreary and relentless commodification of time and experience that characterises our "hyperreal" media world. - Andrew Hussey 2. Baudrillard- porn is sexier than sex (just like obesity is more fat than fat) 3. Baudrillard argues that sexual liberation is the wrong avenue for women to pursue (perhaps men, too), because it brings about it the end of any vestige of sexuality, bringing all together in a knowable, productive system (Seduction). 1. Baudrillard calls it the scientiziation of sex, and specifically mentions a right to orgasm 2. Baudrillard argued that femininity, in and of itself, is a counter to masculinity, and the scientization/polarization that is inherent in sexual dichotomies; the femininity is that which escapes, is unknown 3. If sex becomes an kbject, it is the object itself that assumes femiinine qualities, leaving the person an empty shell; Baudrillard says a transvestite 4. Terminal impacts? As Baudrillard says, Hysteria, Anorexia 5. Baudrillard's alternative?

1. According to Ecstasy, the alternative to counter simulation is disguise and dissimulation, 2. Baudrillard: Seduction as an invention of stratagems, of the body, as a disguise for survival, as an infinite dispersion of lures, as an art of disappearance and absence, as a dissuasion which is stronger yet than that of the system. 3. Translation? Puzzle the system.......prefer seduction! 1. Baudrillard It causes the sexual poles to waver. It is not the pole opposed to masculinity, but what abolishes the differential opposition, and thus sexuality itself, as incarnated historically in the masculine phallocracy, as it might be incarnated in the future in a female phallocracy."