Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality

b. 1929, Reims, France

simulation:
-the process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented . . . the representations become more important than the "real thing"
-4 orders of simulation:
    1. signs thought of as reflecting reality: re-presenting "objective" truth;
    2. signs mask reality: reinforces notion of reality;
    3. signs mask the absence of reality;
            -Disneyworld
            -Watergate
            -LA life: jogging, psychotherapy, organic food
    4. signs become simulacra - they have no relation to reality; they simulate a simulation
            -Spinal Tap
            -Cheers bars
            -new urbanism
            -Starbucks
            -the Gulf War was a video game

hyperreality:
-a condition in which "reality" has been replaced by simulacra
-Borges
-Baudrillard argues that today we only experience prepared realities-- edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the Jerry Springer Show
The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal. . . which is entirely in simulation.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
  
Division between "real" and simulation has collapsed
    -stage a fake hold up

-circular referentiality:
Möbius strip

M.C. Escher:

T.V. verité: microscopic simulation that allows the "real" to pass into the "hyperreal"
-t.v. replaces real interaction by simulating it

End of the panoptican television

Advertising
    -publicity has become its own commodity
    -image is everything

Universities
The exchange of signs (of knowledge, of culture) in the university, between "teachers" and "taught" has for some time been nothing but a doubled collusion of bitterness and indifference (the indifference of signs that brings with it the disaffectation of social and human relations), a doubled simulacrum of a psychodrama (that of a demand hot with shame, presence, oedipal exchange, with pedagogical incest that strives to substitute itself for the lost exchange of work and knowledge).  In this sense the university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value, and those who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work, the true desperation of nonwork, of nonknowledge.  Because current generations still dream of reading, of learning, of competing, but their heart isn't in it--as a whole the ascetic cultural mentality has run body and possessions together.