Sunday, 12 December 2010

Lecture 5... Reality, Virtuality & Hyperreality

- Haddon Sundblom illustrations from the 1930s: Coca-Cola shaped Santa Claus, which has become the icon of Christmas.

- People only taste the branding of Coca-Cola – proven in blind taste test, between Pepsi and Coca Cola, no matter which drink was in the glass, if it had the Coca Cola label on, people preferred it.

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) French philosopher, cultural theorist; associated with post-structuralism.

- Post-structuralist thinkers: Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous

- Structuralist thinkers: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser

- Other precursors: Karl Marx (Marxism), Guy Debord, Marcel Mauss

- Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle (1987) - revised Marx’s main concepts to analyse commodity-relations in the age of consumer culture.

- Marx: Pioneering philosopher, ‘critique of political economy’

- Baudrillard : Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

- Simulacra: simulacra are copies either of the thing they are intended to represent or stand in for or - in recent history - are merely copies of other copies.

- The Holy Sacrament: ‘reflection of a profound reality’ - Gargoyle as an example of ‘maleficence’ - ‘masks and denatures a profound reality’

- Malficent, from Sleeping Beauty – ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum’

- Hence: Coke or Santa aren’t ‘real’ in the sense of ‘profound reality’, because they are ‘pure simulacra’ (copies of copies that do not refer to a pre-existing reality).

- Christkindl Market in Leeds: festive example of simulation.

- Charlie Brooker video – Reality TV Editing: TV isn’t real, it’s hyperreal.

- Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) -three orders of simulacra

1. Counterfeit - dominant scheme - ‘classical period’

2. Production - dominant schema - industrial era

3. Simulation - dominant schema - current code-governed phase

- September 11 – Before it happened – game on web where player defends the twin towers.

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