Leading Class Discussion
We have two Leading Class Discussions tonight:
- Anthony will do Umberto Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality”
- Here’s the origin of the name Anthony
- Christopher will do Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”
- Chris might not be available because of a power outage, so he’ll go next week if that’s the case.
- Here’s the origin of the name Christopher
We should again talk about the Rhetoric/al Project (due 5/04) before signing off tonight.
Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality”
Lots of discussion of American entertainment. Our obsession for the fake is quite apparent to Eco. Let’s have a general discussion on this piece.
- What is the point about telling us we like fake stuff?
- In terms of rhetoric, why does knowing people prefer the fake or assume the fake is “real” important? What do we learn about public discourse after reading Eco?
- Consider these places/ideas:
- Concord Mills
- Olive Garden
- Hooters
- Busch Gardens (“It’s like being back in the old country”–exact words of someone I used to know)
- Democracy
- Education
- What else?
We will discuss Las Vegas next week after reading Jameson…this topic isn’t over.
- simulacrum: the replication (upon replication) of a subject without being able to find the concrete beginning.
- hyperreality: More real than real!?! Or, as White Zombie would say, “More Human than Human.” The idea of “hyperreality” is often associated with a viewer (an audience in general) believing the media-generated simulation is real or more real than an actual event, personality, condition, or, ultimately, an experience.
Brent on his experience as a helicopter gunner while playing Battlefield Vietnam (Electronic Arts). (Toscano, p. 17, 2011)
Brent’s penchant for first-person shooters suggests that he enjoys embodying the avatar’s persona: As the helicopter “gunner” in Battlefield Vietnam (Electronic Arts), Brent is in an Army attack chopper firing on the Vietcong listening to Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—two popular songs from the Vietnam Era. Brent was never in Vietnam, but the music and his sense of attacking the VC from a software-engineered helicopter helps him better incorporate the soldier’s persona from representations he has seen in films such as Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), popular war movies he watches. The video game is a synecdoche of experience and a simulacrum at best. Unlike real war, Brent’s only risk is temporary eye strain and not serious injury or death—he is engaged in a fictional world. Juul (2005) points out that “games project fictional worlds through a variety of different means, but the fictional worlds are imagined by the player, and the player fills in any gaps in the fictional world” (p. 121). What makes the video game a figured world is that the world of the helicopter gunner is simulated via the video game’s programming and accepted by gamers who enter the “text” for this virtual experience. Like Brent’s situation above regarding what it feels like to be in Vietnam, a gamer’s interpretations come from other sources—culture. Video games (and gamers) are products of the culture(s) from which they come, and we can read the culture—its values, fears, and “history”—in video games.
Acting
In February 2013, Bradley Cooper was interviewd on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He discusses his role in the indie movie Silver Linings Playbook. Interestingly, and this isn’t odd to hear from an actor, he talks about how he and David O. Russell (the director) wanted him to “play as real and authentic as [h]e could.”
What does it mean for an actor to be real, authentic, raw, etc.? What’s behind the idea of believability in acting?
- Check out the transcript and scroll down to the line “Jacki Weaver, yeah.”
- How is he maintaining “authenticity” of his character when the film is edited?
Some Key passages for further discussion:
- p. 3: “Holography…achieves a full-color photographic representation that is more than three-dimensional.”
- p. 4: “America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a ‘real’ copy of the reality being represented.”
- Commenting on wax museums:
- p. 7: “The Lyndon B. Johnson Library is a true Fortress of Solitude….suggest[ing] that there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy.”
- p. 7: “The aim of the reconstructed Oval Office is to supply a ‘sign’ that will then be forgotten as such. The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement.”
- p. 7: “two typical slogans that pervade American advertising….’the real thing’…’more.'”
- p. 8: “leaving a surplus to throw away–that’s prosperity.”
- p. 8: “this journey into hyperreality…demands the real and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”
- pp. 9-10: “the ravenous consumption of the present and about the constant “past-izing” process carried out by American civilization in its alternate process of futuristic planning an nostalgic remorse.”
- p. 11: “As in some story by Heinlein or Asimov, you have the impression of entering and leaving time in a spatial-temporal haze where centuries are confused.”
- Even animals are fake if artificially selected…but that chicken is real, right?
- p. 12: “The whole of the United States is spangled with wax museums, advertised in every hotel.”
- These attractions “are loud and aggressive, they assail you with big billboards on the freeway miles in advance.”
- pp. 13-14: “Another characteristic of the wax museum is that the notion of historical reality is absolutely democratized: Marie Antoinette’s boudoir is recreated with fastidious attention to detail, but Alice’s encounter with the Mad Hatter is done just as carefully.”
- p. 15: “The idea that the philosophy of hyperrealism guides the reconstructions is again prompted by the importance attached to the ‘most realistic statue in the world.'”
- Is there a parallel here to a person who always claims he has “the best, most beauty, greatest–better than Obama–wonderful” policies?
- p. 19: “the visitor is convinced that the Palace [of Living Arts in LA] itself replaces and improves on the National Gallery or the Prado” (emphasis added).
- p. 23: On the artifacts in Hearst Castle, “The striking aspect of the whole is not…the artificial tissue seamlessly connect[ing] fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn’t suggest something.”
- p. 25: “The Madonna Inn is the poor man’s Hearst Castle….It says to visitors: ‘You can have the incredible, just like a millionaire.”
- Think South of the Border on I-95
- Yes, Las Vegas also does this.
- pp. 36-37: “It is the ideology f preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of the Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something…”
- p. 37: “once the fetishistic desire for the original is forgotten, these copies are perfect. And at this point isn’t the enemy of the rights of art the engraver who defaces the place to keep low the number of prints.”
Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981)
Jean Baudrillard was a major contemporary philosopher (although he died in 2007). His theories would fall under a postmodernist classification. Although he has capitalist critiques, his later work focused on media and culture more broadly. In “Simulacra and Simulations,” Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) ideas of mass communications is in the background. Baudrillard argues that forms of communication mediate social relations (on a broad societal plane). Here’s some key points to McLuhan’s famous The Medium is the Message.
Marshal McLuhan
- p. 7: “the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium–that is, of any extension of ourselves–result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
- p. 8: “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”
- Message of the electric light (p. 9): Look to the structure that brings electricity to a household/community. Electric lighting communicates the fact that the society has a system of electric power, a grid. It shows modernization, industrialization, and progress. More importantly, though, electric lights extend or change what we can do in the dark.
- p. 16-17: Our concept of literacy is socially constructed. We (members of a culture) have biases towards conventional ways of doing things. The norm in culture is seen as truth, and those not conforming are seen as lesser or weird. They don’t understand the “grammar” of the system; they don’t fit our patterns (e.g. a person without a cell phone is a pariah).
- Fixed charges regarding commodities (p. 21): Societies have commodities that are, for lack of a better term, givens. The community accepts (it doesn’t have to be conscious) these commodities as givens, which “create the unique cultural flavor of any society.”{i.e. NASCAR is a given in Charlottean culture…pasta is a given in Italian culture…oil, cable TV, mobile phones are givens in American culture}
- Jung quote image: Keith Herring’s Free South Africa drawing.
Here’s a good 2-page explanation of McLuhan’s theory.
Some Key passages for further discussion:
- p. 1: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”
- Note 1 is actually at the end of the 1st paragraph after “second-order simulacrum.” The note mentions the 1926 German Expressionist film The Student of Prague. “In The Student of Prague, the main protagonist sells his mirror image to the devil ‘for a pile of gold’”(Kul-Want, p. 114). However, the protagonist “witnesses the Devil peeling his ‘image from the mirror as though it were an etching”….His image is subsequently made flesh and proceeds to stalk Balduin, with ultimately fatal consequences” (Smith, p. 127).
- p. 2: “The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”
- p. 2: It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
- p. 2: “the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra.”
- p. 2: “substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.”
- *I think we can paraphrase this latter part of his introduction by considering that ideas no longer have origins; instead, what we consider real is just a sign of something in the referential world. All we do is reproduce substitutions and continually simulate signs. We only had representations to begin with, so we aren’t actually dealing with anything real but more real.
- p. 2: “To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t. One implies a presence [simulate], the other an absence [dissimulate].”
- p. 2: “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’”
- pp. 2-3: “As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former.”
- p. 3: “Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth.”
- pp. 3-4: “the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove.”
- p. 4: “it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”
- p. 4: “Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.”
- p. 5: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity.”
- p. 5: “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc.”
- p. 6: “the America surrounding [Disneyland] are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
- This is exactly how we critique Las Vegas, that oasis in the desert. Las Vegas makes you feel it’s real and everything else is a desert. Vegas is the adult version of hyperreal Disneyland and Disneyworld.
- p. 6: “Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.”
- p.7: “you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that’s exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.”
- p. 7: “Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based.”
- p. 7: “namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.”
- p. 7: “where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their “real” goal at all.”
- Crimes are “inscribed in advance” by repeated descriptions that the media (culture in general as well) reproduces.
- p. 8: Let’s also look at note 5 that discusses the paradox of adolescent emancipation: “Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty.”
- Baudrillard doesn’t go down this road, but it’s obvious to me that there’s a similar paradox to getting married: The ideal, media reproduced version of marriage (through the parody of romcoms) has no “real” referent in the world but is a legally binding union that shackles (in patriarchy) women to men. Once married, the illusions disappear and the real “devour[s] every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality.” Like the new adult who has bills, responsibilities, the “freedom” to chart their own way, etc., the new couple exists in a desert of matrimony with only the media reproductions of hyperreal marriage.
- p. 8: “As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs.”
- p. 8: “What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary ‘material’ production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction.”
- p. 9: “Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.”
- Consider all the scapegoats needed in society to maintain the “authority” of the demagogue, the “powerful referential.” That demagogue can’t stop the social pains, so they must continue to find problems to maintain the illusion they’re working on terminating mourning. To make a country great again, one needs to assume greatness is real.
- p. 9: “A simulation which can go on indefinitely…is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand….it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption.”
- p. 9: “It is as if everyone has “occupied” their work place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a “self-managed” job, in exactly the same terms as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.”
- Occupy Wall Street using the new media technologies brought to you by those multinational corporations that “liberate” you when you purchase them.
- p. 10: “Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.”
Hence, this is why we say we live in a tissue of lies.
Works Cited
*Kul-Want, Christopher. 2019. “On Contemporary Alienation or the End of the Pact with the Devil.” Pp. 113-116 in Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou: A Critical Reader, edited by Christopher Kul-Want. New York: Columbia University Press.
*Smith, Richard G. 2010. The Baudrillard Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press.
Next Week’s Readings
Next week we have several readings, but you only need to choose one to read. They’re all on Canvas. The following week (4/27) is the last reading–Knoblauch Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword” (pp. 130-200). Also, your Rhetorical Projects are due that day. You’ll present them in 4-5 min on our Final Exam Day, 5/4.
“The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
–Morpheus from The Matrix (1999)