Baudrillard (2007)

Reading various news stories from around the web, I find that Jean Baudrillard passed away 2 weeks ago. I don’t consider Baudrillard a philosopher that represents my own personal views. Of the 30 or so books that he has written, I must say that I have only read 1(and various excerpts from others). I believe that I have read “Simulacra and Simulations” all the way through about 5 times and I am not sure that I fully understand all of what he is saying in the book. Some of the confusion stems from his own comments on his work. At times he seemed to believe that he was the only one who could understand it.

I am not writing this to lament his passing. I started this blog a couple of weeks ago and I was having some trouble getting everything I wanted to say into something easily digestible. As with my other incoherent ramblings, I am sure I have failed miserably.

Baudrillard writes of a world in which the hyper-real is what is real. The images that we bring forth into the world as representation is what is real and that everything else is an illusion, or that it does not matter whether it is real or not. If that just confused you, then you can see where I am coming from.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existent world of the pornography, and even though the pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of "sex" becomes something non-existent. Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges (which Borges also borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal.

There is, for each one of us, a representation of what we are that exists in the world. This is real. For the other people that you interact with, this representation is real. While this puts a slant on “fake people”, I think it is important to acknowledge that we all need to have this representation as an extension of ourselves. No person can deny the existence of this mask, but I would think that people find issue with having to wear it.

The crazy thing is that we know that the mask is also false. We know that the person interacting with us is projecting this representation out into the world.

I am not saying that the representation is always false, or more often false. Just that it exists.

The danger, of course is that in this sea of representation, the real is lost. When the image of a thing becomes a good enough representation of a thing, whether or not one is real is irrelevant.

When the representation of what is real, skewed by our own perceptions, becomes the world in which we base our own representations the real no longer exists. To Baudrillard, this is what has happened to the world. The real is lost to us.

I originally had some thoughts on this a couple of weeks ago when I was standing in line at the grocery store. Magazines full of representations. Images of what men and women look like. Representations of behavior. Representations of products. We truly live in a world where the real only exists in a very narrow spectrum. The news that we base our views of the world being given to us by people who are paid to sell products. The worth of the actual product is so warped by exaggerated claims. 

Maybe the real danger is not that representations are real and have primacy. It is the fact that we have found a way to make those representations based on other representations.

In such a world, there is a point of no return. Where what is, is no longer even a pale reflection of what was. Where reality is no longer based on the real, but nothing at all.