Jean Baudrilliard

Question 1

The four phases of simulacra?

Answer 1

1. The image is the reflection of a profound reality (Good copy)
2. The image masks a profound reality (Bad copy)
   
   • This phase can be paralleled with ideology
     
     • The image representing the state sanctioned lies that cover over the profound truth of economic inequalities
3. The image masks the absence of a profound reality
   
   • It marks the transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing
   • Like Disneyland. A fantasy world created to is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest is real
   • Disneyland sets up false oppositions between imaginary/real, child/adult thereby regenerating the concept of the real in order to cover over its ultimate absence
   • The third phase is linked to the fourth
4. The absence of the real is recognised
   
   • Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real country all of real America that is Disneyland
   • This recognition shows the interpretation of the real by the image
   • The real is is judged to resemble a cartoon reversing the normal order of the relation between reality and its image/copy set out in phases one and two
   • The precession of simulacra, such as in films and advertising turns the real into a copy of the image simultaneously abolishing the concept of an objective reality
   • Thus in the fourth phase, the image has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum
   • The primacy of the image obliterates the real, creating the always already fictionalised image-laden hyperreal

Question 2

What is the hyper-real?

Answer 2

• A representation so realistic that it cannot be distinguished as a representation
• The inability to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality
• This is present all around us in advertising etc.

Question 3

Who is this theorist?

Answer 3

• Jean-Baudrilliard
• French Philosopher
• Simulacra and Simulations (1981)
• What role do images play in contemporary society and how is reality mediated by these images?
• Simulacrum are images and symbols (representations)
• Simulation is the reality we live in, as representations have replaced reality in our human experience

Question 4

What are the possible relationships between film and philosophy?

Answer 4

• Film can offer a bridge to philosophy
• Can film philosophise itself?
• Does film make spectators philosophise?

Question 5

Catherine Constable on the typical relationship between film and philosophy

Answer 5

• The Matrix is either celebrated as accurate albeit derivative or castigated for misrepresenting original sources like Baudrilliard
• Bridge or Illustration model?
• The criterion of fidelity is the unacknowledged assumption dominating the interlinking of philosophy and film
• By setting up the film as a bad copy, Baudrilliard is automatically placed as a genuine original
• The true meaning depends on each person’s reading of it
• The conception of a single true meaning is a key tenet in analytical approaches to reading philosophy
• Philosophy and film stand equally as texts in the both are subject to a plurality of essentially provisional interpretations

Question 6

Baudrilliard’s critique of the Matrix (In Catherine Constable’s writing)

Answer 6

-The film offers a vision of reality that exists beyond the hyperreal
-The film is an entirely exemplary product of the capitalist processes that it claims to subvert
-Just as Disneyland disneyfies America, the film spreads capitalism
“The matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce”
-For Baudrilliard the Matrix as a film is in the third phase
-The films are criticised, because they present a false reality that contributes to the virtualisation of the real
-While the matrix in the film covers up the real, the Matrix as a film is a simulacrum that helps to cover over its absence
-In the second film Baudrilliard changes his critique to his overall position
-Due to this shift in critique, a new relationship between film and philosophy should be thought of

Question 7

Catherine constable on how film can philosophise

Answer 7

• Wartenberg and Falzon set out ways in which films can philosophise
• How can film embody the form of critical reflection associated with written texts?
• The film challenges the audience to critically reflect upon their own position
• But does this not mean that only the audience philosophises?
• The Matrix deliberately alludes to previous philosophical texts and themes thereby demanding to be read as philosophically significant
• Falzon sees references to philosophical texts as expositions of that text that are associated with criticism of it
• The link between philosophical and filmic texts is not argument but figuration, the presentation of dramas, metaphors and images
• By tracing the ways in which the symbolic is linked to the conceptual, ensuring that film can be seen to philosophise in the sense of producing particular theoretical positions and arguments
• What needs to follow is a close analysis of figurative elements that are applied to Baudrilliard’s theory!!!
• This will how how the film textual details construct alternative lines of arguments
• The Matrix has the power of altering our conception of the original

Question 8

Baudrilliard on Nihilism

Answer 8

• The Universe and all of us have entered live into simulation
• We are in a new position in relation to prior forms of nihilism
• Terrorism is nihilism in a political, historical and metaphysical form
• Today there is no real apocalypse, only the precession of neutral and indifference
• Baudrilliard Accepts the immense process of the destruction of appearances in the service of meaning
• Things becomes insoluble
• Nothing has meaning
• This is good, because meaning is mortal