THEORY - BAUDRILLARD

Postmodernism – Baudrillard
Postmodernism is the idea that society has moved beyond modernism – either modernism in art and culture (early 20th century) or modernism in the sense of a belief in progress, which dates back much further.

Baudrillard argued that, as modern societies were organised around production of goods, postmodern society is organised around ‘simulation’ – the play of images and signs.

Previously important social distinctions suffer ‘implosion’ as differences of gender, class, politics and culture dissolve in a world of simulation in which individuals construct their identities.

The new world of ‘hyperreality’ – media simulations, for example, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasy lands – is more real than the ‘real’, and controls how we think and behave.


Below are two web pages that attempt to explain the ideas with some value:
https://midnightmediamusings.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/the-precession-of-simulacra-by-jean-baudrillard-a-summary/

http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2012/10/simulacra-and-simulation-by-jean.html


Next are a few extracts from the first chapter of SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS

This first paragraph is an attempt to analogies simulation

To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have whatone hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.

 

In this next section, Baudrillard attempts to order the precession of simulacrum into phases:

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.