Philip Holden, Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore
Baudrillard is perhaps one of the most infamous of postmodern theorists, known for his view that we live in a world surrounded by "models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal." In this hyperreality, signs not longer refer to referents: rather, they are simulacra, referring to other signs "in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference":
So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. The latter starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent . . . . Conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.
This would be the successive phases of the image:
- it is the reflection of a basic reality
- it masks and perverts a basic reality
- it masks the absence of a basic reality
- it bears no relation whatsoever to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum.
. . .
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.
Baudrillard's rather cryptic here, but his notion of the "hyperreal" clearly has resonance in the age of virtual reality, when w can assume any identity we want on IRC. When Keanu Reeves, as Neo, is asked out by a group of partygoers early in the film The Matrix he is holding Baudrillard's book Simulacra and Simulation in his hand. One way to illustrate the four phases of the image might be to think of blue jeans. Jeans were originally working mens' clothes, which explains the rivets, the patch pockets on the back, and so on. They thus reflected a basic reality. When rock and roll stars began wearing blue jeans in the 1950s this would represent the masking and perverting of a previous reality. As we move into the 1960s jeans become flared, or have flowers embroidered on them: jeans are even pre-washed or stonewashed, masking the fact that their real functionality no longer exists. Finally, in the 1990s and the new millennium, jeans for us signify casualness--we know we can wear denim on casual Saturdays, and patch pockets still look more casual than fully integrated ones. Jeans, however, are just signifiers of casualness, without any connection to "reality" itself.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation.Tr.Sheila Faria Grazier. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994
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