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Title: Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism) by Jean Baudrillard, Sheila Faria Glaser ISBN: 0-472-06521-1 Publisher: University of Michigan Press Pub. Date: December, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.80 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.64 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Read my review its the ONLY one worth reading!!!!
Comment: ...I came to the conclusion that no one understood the purpose or meaning of this compilation of essays. Most of them rated it highly and read it because Neo (from the Matrix) happened to own a copy.
If you wish to understand this book, first please understand the fundamentals of the Post Modern Condition!! Then you can comprenhend the true meaning of this book.
The book explains the trend of cultural materalism in our current society that has created subcultures and materalistic trends (fashion, music, art, ect.), that are based on nothingness. They are purposeless and have engulfed in many different ways our society and everyone in it.
The seduction of materialism has led to APATHY for the real issues in the world, and has caged each one of us in our own hyper reality!!!
That is the message in this book. My sysnopsis is far too short, because it is very difficult to explain this book an its meaning in such a short paragraph. Once you have read it and understood it, you will see why the Matrix movie alludes to this book, and uses quotes from the book throughout the movie.
The seduction of materialism has led to APATHY for the real issues in the world, and reality itself has faded from sight!!! This is the true meaning of this book, and it explains how through simulation, simulacras become real, and lead to a culture built on nothingness, thus an inevitable self inflicted NIHILISM for our society!!!. Real information is distorted through every median it travels through, from biased opinions to exaggerations, and parasitic materialistic trends from either corporate marketing schemes or cultural insecurities, this distorion turns reality into a hyper reality that each one of us is living in.
This book and the study of the Post Modern Condition have led me to be a better, more moral person, by rejecting the socioeconomic garbage that our society tries to feed you in different forms, everyday of your life.
Rating: 5
Summary: Pointless? Sure. But enlightening still.
Comment: Everything you have heard about this book is true. It is dense, complicated, annoyingly analytical, and fairly pointless. Yet it's also genius. To preface...Continental philosophy, in the past hundred years or so, has not been known for it's practical applications. Existentialism and Postmodernism are mental games for the Ivory Tower intellectual, sure. But that doesn't mean that they do not provide a model for looking at and thinking about the world that the average intellect can relate to and use. And this book is no exception to that. It IS dificult to understand, yes, but no where near as bad as most people in these reviews seem to think. Anyone with a basic understanding of Objectivism v. Subjectism, Platonism, and the empirical philosphers can get plenty out of it. The vocabulary is no worse then most other philosophy, and a lot less complicated then some (this isn't Kant). Baisically, Baudrillard shows us that reality no longer exists, and has been replaced by simulacra via the process of simulation, creatin what he calls the "hyperreal". It is a very enlightening read, and will make you really rethink how you view the world. The major problem with the book, as at least one other person has pointed out, is Baudrillard's cultural references. They are quite dated by this point, and you'll find yourself completely lost as to his point, since you can't relate to his subject. In the end though, it is a book that anyone interested in contemporary philosophy should read.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Metafictional Mystery Novel
Comment: This is by no means an easy text to read. For those unfamiliar with postmodern tropes-and especially those who have never read Baudrillard before-this text may seem especially daunting. I recommend that these people start with the essay entitled 'Simulacra and Science Fiction'. In this essay, Baudrillard details the three orders of simulacra: the first, natural simulacra, are operatic, founded on images, and aim at the restoration of "the ideal institution of nature made in God's image"; the second order are both productive and operative, based on energy, and work toward "a continuous globalization and expansion [and] an indefinite liberation of energy"; the third order, the simulacra of simulation, are "founded on information [and] total operationality, hyperreality, [and the] aim of total control" (121). The differences between the various simulacra exist in the distance between the real and the imaginary exhibited by each order. This illuminating interstice provides the locus for projecting critical activity and idealism. The first order maximizes the projection, allowing the utopia to stand in direct opposition to the real. The second order reduces this projection. Baudrillard describes it as a hyper-productive universe in which "science fiction adds the multiplication of its own possibilities" (122). As all previous models implode, the third order of simulacra witnesses the complete disappearance of the projection between reality and the imaginary as it becomes reabsorbed in simulation. To Baudrillard, this is the world in which we live: no more real, no more imaginary, no more fiction, just an endless regression of lost meaning with no foundation, or rather an endless precession of simulacra.
The book could easily be read like an apocalyptic Mythologies or a nihilistic Logic of Late Capitalism. In the first essay alone, 'The Precession of Simulacra', Baudrillard draws on such diverse cultural examples as the Tasaday Indians, the mummy of Ramses II, Watergate, and Disneyland. Bordering on the prophetic, Baudrillard heralds the end of Foucault's panopticon by referring to what was then (in the early seventies) only an experiment in TV verité, or what we now effortlessly refer to as reality TV. This first chapter heralds Baudrillard's "Anti-Copernican revolution": a world in which the universe presents itself as its own simulation, reality dissolves in its relentless self-representation, and Ockham's Razor loses its edge (42). As the book continues, Baudrillard presents history as false nostalgia, numbing fetishism, and desensitizing mythology. War and film find themselves conjoined by technology in 'Apocalypse Now'. 'The China Syndrome' further reveals the "telefission of the real and of the real world" as Baudrillard juxtaposes the images of the movie of the same title alongside those of the nuclear catastrophe of Three Mile Island, the latter occurring shortly after the release of the former. Defying causal logic, these events blur the distinction between symptom and effect (53-54). Baudrillard samples modern architecture ('The Beauborg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence') and current fiction ('Crash'), criticizes the effects of simulacra on historical tragedy ('Holocaust'), and, in 'Clone Story', warns of the dangers in allowing the reproduction of aesthetic forms in political forms. Through observing the media and the marketplace, Baudrillard sees society drifting away from the primary language of fascination as it becomes reinterpreted into a prolixity of discourse in which information far outnumbers meaning and semiology offers no recourse.
Most critics condemn this book for its dense prose, of which there is plenty. To escape this, the text should instead be read as a metafictional mystery novel. The crime Baudrillard reports is the dissolution of the real at the hands of productive operationality. As the precession of simulacra unfurls throughout the course of the book, the reader is provided with Lacanian quilting points, clues which lead forever forward while constantly trying to refer to the past. With every subsequent presentation of ordered simulacra in the hierarchy of simulation, readers find themselves referencing the previous order, only to be propelled farther from reality. One becomes lost in cultural references and almost gives up completely on the notion that reality exists at all. Clues implode upon themselves, losing all referentiality. Perpetrators are lost, or rather dispersed across the universe. We confront ambiguous motives, polyvalent modus operandi, and amorphous crime scenes. The crime itself becomes erased, the victim disappears, and what we are left with is 'The Spiraling Cadaver', "the simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power" (149). Baudrillard, as the one who reported the original metacrime, offers up his own defense in 'On Nihilism': meaning is mortal while appearances are immortal, the latter remaining forever invulnerable to the nihilistic influences of the former. Referring once more to the beginning of the text, the reader finds renewed meaning in one of Baudrillard's first gestures toward the effects of simulacra. In 'The Precession of Simulacra', he shows that the police will react the same in a holdup regardless of whether it is real or simulated. As such, law and order remain nothing but simulation, therefore effectually nullifying any of our own detective abilities (19-22). Through investigating the crime, we lose all equivalence to the real, leaving the murder unsolvable. In order to fight the fascination we have with the mystery of reality's fate and the crime of its dissolution, we must marshal theoretical violence since truth no longer exists. Seduction, as opposed to fascination, begins through accepting the always already lost referential and the primacy of appearances.
Far from what the Wachowski brothers produce in The Matrix, Simulacra and Simulation is both unforgiving and relentless in its presentation of hyperreality. Unlike the movie, there is no transcendental savior, no neoplatonic allusions to ideals-only the stark unreality of our existence. Welcome to the real desert of the real.
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Title: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly ISBN: 0201483408 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans, Oscar Zarate, Richard Appignanesi ISBN: 1840460431 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix by Glenn Yeffeth, David Gerrold ISBN: 1932100024 Publisher: BenBella Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Popular Culture and Philosophy, V. 3) by William Irwin ISBN: 081269502X Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner ISBN: 0804725012 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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