![]() Confinement to tight spaces raises anxiety. “Democratic” access to food, so all animals will grow, screws up animal instinct for a pecking order. Immediately, he dived into the mental health of animals in industrial feeding enclosures. Is this a race to symbolic nowhere, an inane mashup of personal and corporate brands, never escaping Solomon’s conclusion in Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity?Īnticipating relief from this depressing thought, I started Baudrillard’s chapter on animals – nature – something other than Mobius strip loops of symbolic logic in media. You can see this in pop up ads and promos, all trying to out-gimmick the others. The impression left, and perhaps the one he intended, is that post-modern, post-structuralism humans live mostly in our own simulations, subject to chaotic flips in meaning as discordant images flash by. I could not follow many of Baudrillard reversals of logic. For Baudrillard, coupling sex and death in one emotional smash up invokes the full circle of life – but this combination didn’t particularly grip me. The plot hinges on people being sexually aroused by fatal car crashes, either as victims or as witnesses. Incidentally, Baudrillard did not mention The Matrix, but cited the 1996 British-Canadian movie, Crash, as one that approached seeing reality through the superficiality. He claims that hyperreality is the medium by which humans communicate, so it’s not new, but with modern media, we swim in an ocean of hyperreal nothingness. It’s like seeing a video of a resort only to find that the real resort, if such really exists, is much less elegant than the video. Its opening attributes to Ecclesiastes the observation that, “the simulacrum (a representation) never hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” (I could not find this in Ecclesiastes, but suspect that Baudrillard refers to its refrain that of much study there is no end all is vanity.)īaudrillard harps on “hyperreality,” symbolism as in videos, whereby images seem more real than whatever they represent. Simulacra and Simulation is an eye glazer. Consequently he is an expert turning logic in loops, citing referential contradictions, and doubling logic back on itself. None of it may represent reality, if there is such a thing. ![]() Baudrillard posited that we create meaning only by symbols referencing other symbols in a pattern that makes sense to us. So if Simulacra and Simulation inspired The Matrix, what did the horse’s mouth say? Practically nothing that’s the point. The plot of The Matrix hinges on people being unaware that they are interacting with an alien, faux world, not reality, somewhat like Orwell’s 1984 earlier. This bores anyone not deep into philosophy, so why dig into it? Because Simulacra and Simulation is mentioned in the movie, The Matrix, which is becoming a classic among people questioning all authenticity in an on-line world, and this book partly inspired it. Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, a contributor to post-structuralism, along with the better-known Jacques Derrida. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. ![]() We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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