See class-generated materials on Baudrilallard's essay.

Like Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway’s essays, Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” is a philosophical essay.  Like Benjamin and Haraway, also, he reflects an interest in new media and how it drives and defines culture.   This essay dates to the early 1980s, when Baudrillard became interested in Marshall McLuhan and how mass communication shapes society.

Some of you have read this essay in the Word and Image class in CC and it is possible that you may read it or something else by Baudrillard in the Literary Theory class (English 408).  If you have read this essay before, you know that Baudrillard is a French philosopher who was influenced by both Marxism and post-structural linguistics (the school that considered how language can never entirely say what we mean).  And, of course, if you are a fan of the Matrix or flip back to Henry Jenkins’s discussion of the film, you will see plenty of reference, directly, to Baudrillard.

The term of Baudrillard’s that you may be familiar with, even if you have never read his work directly, is the hyperreal: the idea that our images of things, our representations of them in today’s culture, no longer have any correlation with the thing, reality (the res, as Plato would call it).  Behind our abstractions, our representations, our images of things, is nothing--and our representations serve to hide that there is nothing behind them.

Chances are that you will find this essay engaging and will find things of concrete interest to you—as well as of promise for wiki work—in the examples of the Borges story “On Exactitude in Science,” Disneyland, blasphemy and iconoclasm.  The essay’s relevance to our unit is something we can definitely plumb in relation to Blowup, possibly The Artist of the Beautiful, and later, to Feed.