One of the most challenging concepts
in Jean Baudrillard''s "Simulacra and Simulation" is that of
"the real". Intuitively we tend to distinguish what happens in the
real world from what is represented to us. We know (?) that what we see on
television isn't the real world but rather a representation of it. But
Baudrillard thinks differently. He uses the concept of "Simulation"
which he defines as the occurrence of something real which has no origin or
reality through the use of models: a hyperreality. A simulation is an event
which "stages" an actual event and recreates its conditions and even
experience. A simulation is like real life, only it's not.
Usually we think we can tell a
simulation from an actual occurrence, but Baudrillard's definition of the
concept argues the simulation is not something which follows the real, but
rather a "real" which does not stem from any other source or origin.
A simulation for Baudrillard is not something which disguises itself as the
real, but rather something which eliminates the actual "real", the
real which is distinguished from its representations.
When Baudrillard describes western
culture's move away from the real he argues that what we are losing is a
construction of the real. For Baudrillard, what we think is the real is always
in fact a simulacrum of the real.
To understand this assertion we have
to turn back to De Saussure's "The Nature of the
Linguistic Sign" in which he argues the lingual sign is made up
of an image or sound (signifier) and a meaning (signified). Saussure argues
that the lingual sign is arbitrary and that meaning is assigned by the function
and position the sign assumes within a system of structure. Baudrillars thinks
that the problem with this supposition is the idea the one sign is tradable
with the other, and that one sign can find its meaning through its relationship
with other signs. Like Roland Barthes, (in Rhetoric of the Image as
well as Myth Today), the sign always
carries additional meaning, a connotation according to Barthes, which does not
make it entirely tradable with other signs. A sign, in other words, always
signifies an additional something else.
Baudrillard holds that at some point
in history, objects have become signs and sings have turned into objects. Social
trade ceased being one of objects and became one of signs and what they signify
(this is very similar to Guy Debord's thought in the Society of the Spectacle ).
This trade of signs means to
Baudrillard that the referent is slowly diminishing. We grow ever more detached from real objects
in our lives and our relations with them are now determined by their signs and
process of signification. The sign is therefore not arbitrary, as Saussure
would have it, but rather an historical construct. Likw Debord's description of
a shift from "having into being and then to merely appearing", Baudrillard
replaces actual trade with "symbolic trade" as the only contemporary
form of social reality.
The "real" of the sign or
representation is established when signs "freed themselves" from
social binds, an emancipation which occurred according to Baudrillard with the
collapse of feudal society and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Only then did signs
become arbitrary and a shift in their value began in the market of symbolic
trade. In today's consumer society signs are presented as if they were still
connected to the world, still having a referent, but this is only a pretended
connection achieved by the distinguishing the sign from the world. A product
signifies something added to my reality (success, comfort etc.). it does not
represent the object itself but only all those meaning assigned to its sign,
which are to have an effect in the real world. The real is constructed through
the sign and through representation. Reality, for Baudrillard, can thus no
longer function on the basis of its opposition to representation.
This is how Baudrillard describes the
real as simulacra. The real only pretends to be authentic, a stable and
objective originless reality, when in fact it is nothing but the product of
symbolic trade of signs in culture. For Baudrillard, there is no longer any
real difference between the real and the imagined, between the world and its
representation.
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