In Progress

The four stages of simulacra that Baudrillard lays out in “The Precession of Simulacra” are very convincing but ultimately missing a crucial element in their makeup.

In the first order, a simulacrum “is the reflection of a profound reality,” which corresponds to representation.

In the second, “it masks and denatures a profound reality,” which I think we understand intuitively—for me, a convincing example of this is political cartoons, where caricature can highlight a particular feature of a politician’s character through blowing up his nose to an unflattering degree or something along those lines.

In the third, “it masks the absence of a profound reality,” which I can understand in terms of history books. In Soviet era history books in satellite states, there was a profound rewriting of history that omitted whole periods of their histories.

Finally, in the fourth phase, “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulation.” While I can intellectually grasp this idea, I think it is hollow and oriented in the wrong direction. First of all, simulacra are the product of human endeavor, and all human endeavors are rooted in reality—we have no choice but to apply our imaginations to the stuff of our own sensory experience, which, however distorted by our personal character or mentality, is still reflective of an essential truth. To explore the orientation of this phase, I offer the example of computer modeling.

In extreme cases, computer modeling can create something that seems wholly new to us—a house, for example, that doesn’t exist in reality, that is made of substances that we’ve never conceived of, that solves airflow problems we didn’t even know existed. I would argue that this could be thought of as a simulacra that has as limited a relation to reality as we can create at this point in time. Baudrillard argues that the image leads to the “death of the divine referential,” that reality is done in by iconography. But in the case of computer modeling, we are extending reality, creating new realities out of applying our imagination to the image. This is an opposite (and much more positive) orientation to what Baudrillard argues.

Posted on December 7th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: School, Uncategorized