Baudrillard, the simulacra and hyperreality

1
Baudrillard, the simulacra and hyperreality

• Postmodern culture is a world of signs that have
  made a fundamental break from referring to
  reality
• An image changes to a simulacrum as follows
• It is the reflection of a reality
• It masks and denatures a reality
• It masks the absence of a reality
• It has no relation to a reality
• We are left with a desert of the real an
  incessant production of images with no attempt to
  ground them in reality

2
The matrixthe red pill or the blue pill

• Baudrillards hyperreality in all its routinized
  splendor
• The real as cold, lacking aesthetic gloss and
  oppositional

3
As the real fades

• The cult of the immediate experience is the
  effect of simulated reality
• Things that are superficial leave one wanting
• We are still missing the real (cyberdating, the
  Bachelor, nostalgia)
• a panic-stricken production of the real and
  referential
• Exhibited in the cult of categorization of music
• Pure simulations might be getting beyond referral
• avowed antagonists locked together in systematic
  complicity (Arafat and Sharon)
• He dismisses state, class, and power and empty
  mystifications