INSIDE THE SIMULACRUM: THEDECONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.sidebar##
##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.main##
Abstract
Baudrillard writes of a new category – a virtual reality, a reality which is a double for the real reality and which is generated using powerful media systems. By regarding the media of the information society as ‘machines’ for the manufacture of reality, Baudrillard points to the difference between media reality and the world which surrounds us, as well as the future place and role of humans in nature. He believes that reality, as it has traditionally been understood, is dead. True reality has become skewed by concepts and algorithms, distorted to the extent that it cannot be straightened out, brought back to its original position. All physical and all social concepts arise as a product of the functioning of the models refiguring the elements of reality. With the patterns which refigure time and space, matter,energy- man has modeled the world he lives in. The reality with man in its centre is hyper-produced reality, a simulacrum, reality obscured by signs and symbols. The simulacrum as a product of the model which precedes all reality, for man at least, is contained in representation. By endless representation, man draws contours, boundaries of reality, he creates reality.
##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.details##
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.
How to Cite
References
- He later published his work under the title The System of Objects (Le Systéme des objets)
- In each of his works Baudrillard covers a wide range of different topics, consistently following the course of the ‘multidisciplinary concept’ harboured by his ‘ancestor thinkers’ such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche Heidegger. Such a classification of his works is not generally accepted among analysts, it has been created for the purpose of this work, and thus should be treated as such.
- During this phase Baudrillard published the following works: The System of Objects (1968); The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970); For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972); Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976).
- The most significant representative of this phase is, without a doubt, his renowned work Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
- Just as the book Simulacra and Simulation marked the previous phase of Baudrillard’s work, so the Illusion of the End serves as the central work of his historical focus.
- In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History and the Last Man and ten years later also Our Posthuman Future where he examines the consequences of the technical revolution.
- Baudrillard’s late works include The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991); The Perfect Crime (1995); The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002); The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (2005).
- On September 11, 2001, the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City were destroyed.
- The Deconstruction of Structure was made famous by Jacques Derrida
- In 1991, Frederic Jameson publishes his book titled Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
- A representative postmodernist film is certainly Matrix, a film made by the Wachowski siblings influenced by Baudrillard’s books. A special homage to Baudrillard in the abovementioned film is paid in the scene where one of the characters says: ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’- Morpheus.
- Postmodernist interpreters construe the emphasis placed on design as a representative characteristic of produced goods in terms of an increase in the value of the symbolic system which underpins society.
- Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation (The Precession of Simulacra). Translated into English by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman), Columbia University, 1983, p 1. (Serbian translation in Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1991, p 5).
- Ibid, p 2 (Svetovi, p 6).
- Ibid, p 4 (Svetovi, p 9).
- Ibid, p 4 (Svetovi, p 10).
- Baudrillard, Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Decije Novine, Gornji Milanovac, 1991, p 61.