Baudrillard - Representation Theory

Baudrillard’s theory on Hyper-reality can be applied to:

Ambiguity / Duality / Self-reference / Inter-textuality

“The era of simulation is thus everywhere…all the great humanist criteria of value… moral, aesthetic and practical judgement vanish in our system of images and signs” Baudrillard Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)

Hyper reality

Concept: in a postmodern world it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the real world from the media construct of reality. The real and the media world are blurred.

What is real?

The Matrix, Wachowski Bros, 1999 – deals with a number of postmodern concepts in particular the idea of perception of what is real. The film leans heavily on Baudrillard’s ideas, they even directly reference his book Simulacra and Simulation.

Simulacra

Concept: in the postmodern world we are surrounded by copies of copies (simulacra) , nothing is original and all original meaning has been lost.

Baudrillard believed that in a Postmodern world things are constantly getting copied and regurgitated and that gradually the signs and symbols that we use lose their original meaning and start to be interpreted differently. For example – Disneyland.

A place, constructed around cartoon and film characters and fairytale locations.

The place is a simulation full of simulacra – people dressed up as cartoon characters (copies of things that don’t exist). Yet families spend their entire year looking forward to a holiday there. The unreal has become more important than the real.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995

“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void…. That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”
― Jean Baudrillard