Literary Criticism

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Literary Criticism

• Class 12

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• Postmodernism is an age of simulation and
  simulacra.

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• Jean Baudrillard
• Simulacra and Simulations.
• Literary Theory. 2nd ed.
• Eds. J. Rivkin and M. Ryan.
• Oxford Blackwell, 2004. 365-377.

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Food for Thought

• In what sense does the map precede the
  territory? Or imitation the original?

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simulation

• Simulation is the generation by models of a
  real without origin or reality a hyperreal.
  (365)

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Simulation

• The process by which something real replaces
  the thing being represented. Language does this
  in being able to transform something specific and
  concrete into something abstract and universal. .
  . . For Baudrillard, the transformed "map" may be
  more real than the original territory. I might
  enjoy a film on sky-diving more than actually
  doing it.
• http//www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/d
  reamwork.html

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Simulacra

• In Plato a false copy. But in modern thought
  where the distinction between appearance and
  reality are challenged the simulacrum has more
  value as a critical idea and becomes a copy
  without an original. The idea here being
  reproduction without . . . reference.
• http//www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/dr
  eamwork.html

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Hyperreality

• A condition whereby models replace "the real"
  exemplified in such phenomena as the ideal home
  in women's or life-style magazines, ideal sex as
  portrayed in sex manuals or "relationship" books
  (or porno movies), ideal fashion as exemplified
  in ads or fashion shows, ideal computer skills as
  set forth in computer manuals, and so on. In
  these cases, the model or hyperreal becomes an
  ideal and a determinant of "the real" and the
  boundary between hyperreality and everyday life
  is erased. http//www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/k
  ell2.htm

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• fashion -- more beautiful than
  beautifulpornography -- more sex than
  sexseduction -- more false than the
  falseobscenity -- more visible than the
  visibleterrorism -- more violent than the
  violentobesity -- more fat than the
  fatcatastrophe -- more eventful than the
  eventhttp//www.csun.edu/hfspc002/baud/index.ht
  ml

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Food for Thought

• Do national flags bear any relation to
  reality or do they assume the function of
  simulacra? (Wolfreys 231)

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The Media

• Baudrillard argues that we live in a 'virtual
  reality'. The mass media, given its ubiquity in
  society, is the most prominent source and
  purveyor of this 'virtual reality'. In this sense
  Baudrillard famously claimed that the Gulf War
  was a hyper-reality a media simulation! 
• http//www.sociologyonline.co.uk/post_essays/P
  opBaud.htm

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Cinama

• It has copied itself profusely, evolving on
  and on to a stage where not only is it simulating
  the original mood/technique, but it is improving
  on it. And it is the media, referred to as a
  genetic code, which mutates the real into the
  hyperreal .
• http//www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theory/baudrilla
  rd/conterio.html

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Disneyland

• The ideal representation of the hyperreal in
  connection with the imaginary is Disneyland. The
  world of Disney creates an imaginary world of
  leisure and enjoyment. Disneyland is neither true
  or false it is a deterrence machine set up in
  order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the
  real. http//www.adamranson.freeserve.co.uk/Baudri
  llard.html

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Implosion

• Using McLuhan's cybernetic concept of
  implosion, Baudrillard claims that in the
  postmodern world the boundary between image or
  simulation and reality implodes, and with this
  the very experience and ground of "the real"
  disappears.
• http//www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell2.htm
  

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Entropy

• This process of social entropy leads to the
  collapse of all boundaries between meaning, the
  media, and the social- no distinction between
  classes, political parties, cultural forms, the
  media, and the real. Simulation and simulacra
  become the real so there are no stable structures
  on which to ground theory or politics. Culture
  and society become a flux of undifferentiated
  images and signs.
• http//www.uta.edu/english/hawk/semiotics/baud
  .htm

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Entropy

• One of the ideas involved in the concept of
  entropy is that nature tends from order to
  disorder in isolated systems.

http//hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/therm/e
ntrop.html
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Entropy

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Dissimulation

• The masking of reality and by implication
  presupposes/affirms that reality.
• http//www.sociologyonline.co.uk/post_essays/Po
  pBaud.htm

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Dissimulation

• Dissimulation dissemble or distort with images
  or ideologies ideology critique thus involved
  demystification which unmasked the distortions
  and perhaps hermeneutically recaptured "the
  real." http//www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell2
  .htm

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No Real

• No, for Baudrillard the 'real' is now part of
  a process in which it can no longer be seen as
  'singular'. The process generated by the media
  and its signs and involving 'mechanical
  reproduction' means that the real can be
  endlessly copied and extended. The dominance of
  this 'sign-form' as Baudrillard calls it, in
  which signs refer to each other, means that the
  'real' can itself become the copy of the copy!
  http//www.sociologyonline.co.uk/post_essays/PopBa
  ud.htm

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Mobius Band
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Mobius Band
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Mobius Band

• The twisted Mobius strip represents the
  twisting of meaning in our society. Meaning is
  distorted by excess information and by the
  blurring of the distinction between reality and
  simulation. http//www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theo
  ry/Mobius/why.mob.html

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Mobius Band

• In the Mobius strip as well as in a simulated
  social order, all dichotomies disappear. Our
  choices used to be binary yes or no, war or
  peace, power or impotence. But these oppositions
  have melted into each other in a silent
  implosion. What was once external has become
  internal, and vice versa. http//www.cyberartsweb.
  org/cpace/theory/Mobius/why.mob.html

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Food for Thought

• In Baudrillards analysis of electronic
  media, does the fact that modern media may help
  to form as well as mirror realities necessarily
  mean that sign or image is everything? Does
  Baudrillard underestimate the extent to which TV
  audiences have a knowledgeability of how to
  decode TV, allowing them to resist being quite as
  passively drugged and stupefied by TVs
  fragmented narratives? (Woods 29)

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Problems

• The potential for resistance is itself
  negated through a world of hyperreality, leaving
  the one-dimensional models to replace polyvalent
  "reality."
• http//www.uta.edu/english/hawk/semiotics/baud.
  htm

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• For example- putting gangsta-rap music on
  the screen completely takes it out of its
  historical and social context. In this context,
  the art was created as an expression of
  resistance to the feeling of domination in urban
  life. When white suburban kids see the videos,
  they have no understanding of the actual
  situational context- the videos are just images
  on the screen like all the others images on the
  screen that they see everyday. This takes away
  the "reality" of the historical context, and
  replaces it with hyperreality. By removing the
  context, MTV removes all resistant meaning. Pop
  music becomes a place of one-dimensionality. In
  the world of hyperreality, the lines between
  dominance and resistance, between high and low
  are collapsing. There is finally no distinction.
  There is a unification of opposition. Pop music
  becomes reified. http//www.uta.edu/english/hawk/s
  emiotics/baud.htm

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References

• Wolfreys, Julian. Critical Keywords in Literary
  and Cultural Theory. London Palgrave/MacMillan,
  2004.
• Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester
  Manchester UP, 1999.
• http//www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/baudweb.html