Aesthetics II: Simulation Presented by: Nakiyah Hayling and Max Kramer

The Spectacle Debord, “The Society Of The Spectacle”, “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” (1-1) “The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.” (1-6) Debord refers to this spectacle, which is a byproduct of the system/culture industry to keep the masses in a state production. He also states “the spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.” (1-21) “The time spent consuming images (images which in turn serve to publicize all the other commodities) is both the particular terrain where the spectacle’s mechanisms are most fully implemented and the general goal that those mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all the particular consumptions.” (6-153) Debord stresses the idea that the spectacle is continually perpetuated through consumer consumption. The purpose of publicizing commodities was to capture the minds of the masses and cause the masses to submit to the continuance of the spectacle.

Hyperreality Umberto Eco, “Travels In Hyperreality”, “This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality in search of instances where American imagination demands the real thing and to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake…” (110) Eco defines hyppereality as a draw on one’s imagination to create a reality. It’s also the attribution of signs and signifiers to symbolize manifestations of reality. He says “…the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred…” (111) Leveling the past: The “leveling of the past” is the fusion of copy and original. We all contribute to the continuum of this concept because we’re here attending a university and receiving instruction on theories of the past. We reinforce this ideology with idea like retro-fashions/styles, sampling of preciously recorded music, remakes of movies etc. The Diorama: “the diorama aims to establish itself as a substitute for reality, as something even more real.” (111) He says that in order to truly achieve the real, or one’s personal hyppereality, there has to be a fusion of the original and the copy.

Simulation and Simulacra Seyda Ozturk, “Simulation Reloaded”, Simulacrum is “…a semiotic conception that includes a ‘process of transforming the lived symbolic into its semiotic image whose reality-effect eclipses the former.’ [Simulation is] a re-conceptualization that includes an establishment of a symbolic functioning as a critical foundation against the simulacrum.” (3) “Deleuze assigns simulacra an affirmative and productive status: by denying the primacy of an original over the copy, one can explore the dimensions of an unreasonable and limitless becoming”. (3) According to Ozturk the simulacra “ …is an image that does not resemble; the image is maintained whereas the resemblance is lost.” (2) In relation to the movie “The Matrix” Ozturk states “There is no more opposition of copy and model, but a copy that has developed an inner dynamic of its own.”

Family Matters - Urkel Bot

Power Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation”, “Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of the collective demand for signs of power…” (15) “Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialialization. And if it was the first to foster the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating value… the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation.” (15) Baudrillard argues that to maintain a sense of power amidst the culture of the siumulacra we must constantly simulate meaning through reproduction of the “real”, when it is this same reproduction that is subversive of power and gives way to the simulacra. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power – obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears.” (15) “The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning.” (15)

Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard

Hyperreality and the Referential J. Baudrillard, SS, “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.” (1)

J.B., SS, “Ramses [as a theoretical historical figure] does not signify anything for us, only the mummy is of an estimable worth because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning. Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.” (5)

The Iconoclast JB, SS,“To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence.” (2) What happens when “divinity reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra?” Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatize the simulacra.” Pg 3 Iconoclasts “predicted the omnipotence of the simulacra, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum.” It is the iconoclasts that “accord them [idols] their true value”, as simulacrum, and therefore they are the ones who embraced the truth of hyperreality.

Art of Simulation JB, SS, “Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open the supposition that… law and order might be nothing but simulation.” (13) “For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up.” (13) “It is necessary to see in this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation the weight of an order that cannot see and conceive of anything but the real … Thus, lacking the real, it is there that we must aim at order” (14)

The Strategy of the Real JB, SS, “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere… To this end it prefers the discourse of crisis.” (15)

Simulation Reloaded, Seyda Ozturk, Pg 3 “In his praiseworthy essay ‘Did You ever Eat Tasty Wheat: Baudrillard and The Matrix”. William Merrin states that The Matrix, while playing with simulacrum, “domesticates it again beneath a higher and true reality: not once does Neo consider whether this ‘real world’ he is shown might not be just another level of virtual reality – perhaps this ‘reality is one created for the machines by another intelligence to keep the machines themselves in happy slavery?” Preventing the overflow into madness that the resonance of the simulacrum generates, the narrative of the film depends ultimately upon a real that must exist.”

Yum, Tasty Wheat

The Modern Iconoclast

Why is it wrong to embrace the simulacrum?