PoMo Lesson 4Beaudrillard

Simulacra of Reality

Baudrillard

Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard appeared on the scene in the early 1980s.

Loss of the real!

• Baudrillard is associated with the postmodern “loss of the real.”

He says there is a problem of representation that comes from the mass media’s relentless play with signs and images.

Simulacra and Simulation

• In “Simulacra and Simulation” 1994, Baudrillard says

“the distinction between what is real and what is imagined is continually blurred and meaning is systematically eroded.”

Hyperreality.

• Baudrillard’s most important contribution to postmodernism is the theory of hyperreality.

Hyperreality.

• According to Baudrillard, the world once consisted of signs that could be associated with their actual referents in reality.

• This has been replaced by the postmodern simulacrum, a system in which signs have lost their association with an underlying reality.

Simulations of reality

• The postmodern world consists of simulations of reality, or hyperrealities, wherein signs refer not to an external reality but to other signs.

• The result is a culture in which surface and depth become indistinguishable and superficial appearance is all that can be achieved.

No longer real !

• Under the bombardment of images from the dominant media of popular culture – TV, film and advertising – the real becomes subordinate to representation.

• Whereas the media once mirrored, reflected or represented reality, the postmodern culture faces the problem of media constructing a hyperreality (see Douglas Kellner, 1989: 68).

Beaudrillard

• Baudrillard proposes that simulations of reality end up becoming “more real than the real”.

• The Gulf War Never Happened!

Beaudrillard

• Beaudrillard wrote a book “The Gulf War Never Happened”. In this book he claimed that the BBC did not report the truth but propaganda provided by the American and British Governments.

Baudrillard

• We were told there were ‘smart missiles’ that would only target military targets. This was a lie. Civilian casualties were not reported on television.

Beaudrillard

• The reason Governments do not want a free press reporting the war goes back 50 years. In the 1960s the news channels reported what was really happening in Vietnam. The public were shocked and distressed at the bombing of civilians. Opinion turned against the war.

Baudrillard

• In the Gulf War, the Governments wanted to prevent this happening again. Journalists were ‘embedded with the armed forces’ and told what to report. Any journalist who went ‘off message’ was denied information to report.

Beaudrillard

• The same thing happened in the Iraq war. The public were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie. The public were told there was a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorism. That was a lie.

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