Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

    Another challenging book. I had originally planned to read this in French, but after failing miserably with Society and the Spectacle in French, I figured English was better for this. That was a good choice because I could barely read this in English. 

    Here is what I think I understand. Simulation is getting more and more important these days (1980 when the book was written). Simulation is different from dissimulation. Dissimulation hides something that is there, while simulation creates something that is not there. Simulation is different from representation. In representation, the sign/symbol is equal to the real thing. Simulation negates the sign as having any value. I don't really know what they means, but it creates four phases of "the image."

• The image is the reflection of a profound reality;
• The image masks and denatures a profound reality;
• The image masks the absence of a profound reality;
• The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

And once again, I am winging this and did not understand this, but I think that those four things, in order, are representation, dissimulation, simulation, and simulacrum. I found an example on the internet that may or may not be accurate:

My understanding is that Baudrillard is identifying a way that society is becoming more and more rootless and alienated from reality. The modern world is a fake world where we have fewer and fewer real, personal experiences, and more and more mediated experiences: mediated through technology. Right there in the name social media you can see it: our socialization is not personal, but is mediated by both the hardware of the phone/computer and the software of the app used for socialization. While in the 1800s the media was a letter, today it is facetime. We might be getting better ways to mediate social interaction, but the result has been an increase in mediated social interaction, and an increase in the tolerable distance for people to live apart from each other. I think it is sort of the opposite of what McLuhan said about an implosion when it comes to close relations. Technology has imploded the world into close interaction through social media, but exploded close relations into living further apart and interacting less than ever. I have no doubt that the average person today lives way further than the average person in 1425 from their friends, family, and loved ones than ever before, and yet it able to interact over social media with people on different continents. This is one part of what Trow was saying in Within the Context of No Context, about how the medium space has disappeared. That also interacts with the Bowling Alone and "third place" discourse.

    Something very interesting is that Baudrillard mentioned the Loud family from the show American Family, which I learned about in the Emily Nussbaum book, Cue the Sun. This unit on the media has been my first real success on these reading units. It feels like one cohesive course as each book references the others previously published. In the same vein, Baudrillard says that we are no longer the "society of the spectacle," thanks to reality TV--now there is a feedback loop. The result, as I understand it, of the advent of reality TV is that there is no more distinction between the real and the fake in the world of art. The participation of the audience is huge now--someone who watches Survivor becomes a contestant on Survivor, bringing their experiences as a viewer to their experience as a contestant performing the art. Then, that same person goes back to being a viewer of the show, but now viewing the art form with the experience of the contestant. Then, the same person starts a podcast, a new art form in a different media, where they criticize and comment on the next season of Survivor, as other viewers/listeners take in that new content, and perhaps become contestants themselves. At this point, can anyone really say that Survivor is just the show that airs on Wednesdays at 8pm Eastern on CBS? I would say that the fandom is now just as big a part of the show as the contestants themselves, because there is no way to separate the two. The same goes for the writing of TV shows and movie series. George RR Martin can sit on the internet and hear all the fan theories about the next Song of Ice and Fire book before he has finished it. He has been able to see the mass reaction to the end of the TV show that adapted his book, and change the ending of the book if he wants to. The artist-to-viewer/reader/listener feedback loop moves faster now than the actual publication of the art.

    

    One other concept I thought was interesting from the book is the discussion of surveillance. Baudrillard writes that surveillance cameras on the wall don't just surveil by videotaping, but surveil by signaling to the shopper at the supermarket that she is being videotaped, even if she is not. Some stores go even further (and I am doubtful this existed in 1980) by videotaping the entrance of the store and showing the captured footage in real time on a TV screen, so a shopper can see herself being taped. Moreover, Baudrillard writes that billboards and ads surveil their viewers, because even though they don't record anything, they inform the viewer that she is not the only viewer, and that she is in a public space, where this ad is meant to reach others. Today it goes even further. Ads have entered the personal sphere, making it a less private one, even more than in Baudrillard's day. Today, the majority of ads we see are on our phones, the most intimate personal objects we have, that we interact with every day. Advertisers are able to send us ads even there, reminding us that nowhere are we truly private or out of the reach of capitalist forces, which need advertising to convince people to buy things they never needed. But on the other hand, lots of the products being advertised are very useful!

    So that's the good part of the book. Then it gets very weird. Just like Society and the Spectacle, it gets all into Marxism that makes no sense whatsoever to me. There is also a CRAZY chapter about a book called Crash, which is apparently all about people who get off on car crashes. That chapter came out of nowhere. I was appalled. He just heavily quoted the book and it was the nastiest stuff I have ever read. Ever. It read like Baudrillard read that shit and now he was making us read it too. I guess it made some impact on him. I could not make heads or tails of it except that it was shocking and gross. A masterwork of nasty work.

    I'll end by saying this was an interesting book. It was short, but could have been shorter without all the weird stuff in the end. It made me think though, so in my mind, that's a good book.

Miscellaneous:

• This line cracked me up, this drama queen: "The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot--a veritable concentration camp--is total." That's somebody who has lost his car in the lot and spent hours looking for it lol.