The Simulacrum of Consumerism.

On March 6, Jean Baudrillard died in Paris at the age of 77. Associated with the
postmodern and poststructuralist theory. Baudrillard is difficult to situate in relation to
traditional and contemporary theories and academic discipline. His work combines
philosophy, social theory, and idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflect on key
events and phenomena of the epoch. He is an extremely prolific author who published
over fifty books and commented on some of the most salient cultural and sociological
phenomena of the contemporary era that included gendered, race and class that structured
modern society in a new postmodern consumer media and high tech world. The mutating
roles of art and aesthetics, fundamental changes in politics, culture and human beings,
and the impact of the new media, information and cybernetic technologies in the creation
of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and
social life.

For some years a cult figure of postmodern theory, Baudrillard moved beyond the
discourse of the postmodern from the early 1980 to the present, and developed a higher
highly mode of philosophical and cultural analysis that is described as a post structuralist
mode of thought. From all postmodern and post structuralist thinkers, he has emerge as
one of the most radical, he undermines key categories of western philosophy and
contemporary theory.

The Simulacrum is never what hides the truth, it is truth.

That hides the fact that there is none The simulacrum is truth.

The simulacrum according to Argentinean writer Jose Luis Borges as he says in one of
his fables: The cartographers of the empire draw up a map so detailed that ends up
covering the territory exactly (the decline of the empire), witnessing the fraying of the
map, little by little, and it falls into ruin, through some shreds are still discernable in the
desert. The metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to
the empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the
double ends by beings confused with the real through aging, as the most beautiful
allegory of simulation. This fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing
but the discrete charm of a second order simulacrum.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the
generation by models of the real without origin or reality. Hiperreal. The territory no
longer precedes the map. It is not the real and not the map nor does it survive it. It is the
precession of simulacra that engenders the territory, and if one most return to the fable,
today as a territory, it is the territory whose shreds rot slowly not across the map. It is the
real and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the desert that are no longer
the empire, but ours, The desert of the real itself(1-Baudrillard).

Going back to Baudrillard and his notable examples on the world of simulacra and
simulation. In the political arena this two words are constantly construe and used for

regenerative purposes, one of the examples is Watergate as a way of political gain.

Watergate is not a scandal it mask the strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one
approaches the primitive (mise en scene) of capital the cruelty, the ferocity, its
fundamental immorality. This is what makes it scandalous, unacceptable to the system of
moral and economic equivalence. This is an axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of
the Enlightment up to Communism(B.15). We are in need of consumption of principles
in this case was in a form of political gain. The American public needs this type of
simulation in order to restructure our thoughts and create a capitalistic carnival.
Watergate was nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch his adversaries. A
simulation of scandal. Another good example of the gullability of the American system,
a sort of waking up call. According to Baudrillard is: Always a question of proving the
true through the imaginary, proving true through scandal, proving work through striking,
proving the law through transgression, proving the system through crisis, and capital
though revolution, also proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object. (B.19).

Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated

form. As Argentinean writer Jose Luis Borges Labyrinth if we are able to do that
through contradiction we are moving forward in a case of extremes. The consumption of
American values. To make the real unreal, to simulate events and things that will help us
attained extremes thought political emancipation. The simulacrum of political
consumption. We are consumers of that ideology that is so greatly recreated in the
media and through the use of radio, television, newspapers, etc.

Hipereality and Simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective; they
turn against power the deterrent that is used so well for such a long time. Because in the
end, through its history it was capital that first fed on the destruction of every referential,
of every human objective, that shattered every ideal between true and false, good and
evil, in order to establish a radical order of equivalence and exchange. The iron law of
power. Well today the same type of logic continues and it is set against capital. And as
soon as it wishes to combat the disastrous spiral by secreting a last glimpse of reality on
which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does nothing but multiply the signs and
accelerate the play of simulation(B.22).

Within the political sphere the president comes to resemble that Puppet of Power who
is the head of primitive societies (Clastres).
All previous presidents pay and continue to pay for Kennedys murder, because know it
can only be simulated president Johnson and Ford were both the objects of failed
assassination attempts which if they were not stage were at least perpetrated by
simulation. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something, the political
substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film.
Curiously Johnson, Nixon, Ford all have the simian mug, the monkey of power. (B. 24).
The iconization of power play is vital to our society we still are face with mythical
figures that persist in our everyday life some of this mythical figures are still affecting
our way of thinking and probably ruling the way we view our society. Death is never and
absolute criterion but in this case it is still significant. The era of James Dean, Marilyn
Monroe, and the Kennedys are long gone, this people died because they had a mythical

dimension that implied dead, not for a romantic vision but because of the fundamental
principle of reversal and exchange. This era no longer exist now we move into a more
hiperreal situation, murder by simulation, this generalized aesthetic of simulation. In
order to follow the Tradition we know have reverse to the resurrection of death by
allegorical simulation. Power float like money, like language, like theory. Criticism and
negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. If they become weak for
one reason or another, power has no other recourse but to artificially revive and
hallucinate them (B.24). This are the consumism that we need in order for our nation to
continue his phantasmagorical effect. This is our way of envision a reality that help us
transgress our images as consumers of political manufacturing. We are living in an
abstract hiperreality. Again controlled by signs and objects. In this effect we are the
objects. We already have pass the pastiche of Jameson creation, that is no longer the case
we are unreality trying to find some reality, something to grasp as a country and as
citizens of America. We are in the edge of non reality controlled by a whisper of makebelieve real effects that help us stay put. Architecture as a social entity help us clarify
some issues as we begin to try to find Us in some sort of place to again believe that we
have dimension and legacy and not and hiperreal movement of simulacra and simulation
as the words implied.