Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Postmodernism wk 8 Lecture notes

Travels in Hyper reality

Deadline for essay = week 12, December 12.30 - 2.30

  • Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard
  • Modern society replaces all reality and meaning with symbols and signs
  • world we live in replaced by a 'copy world'
  • individual in post modern world becomes entity influenced by media, technology, experience and the hyper real
  • our generation now sharing experiences
  • hyper reality - more real than real
  • The Matrix - concept: world first introduced that seems real is a computer simulation
  • The Truman Show - existense appears to be concrete, real turns out to be a constructed TV stage
  • Disneyland Florida - more real than real, more vivid, more satisfying
  • Perfect model of all entangled orders of simulacra - illusions and phantasms
  • Umberto ECO - writes about Disneyland as a 'shiny bauble' , public meant to admire the fake, can give us more reality than the world can
  • pleasure of immitation innates the human spirit as it has reached it's apex
  • the Seagaia Ocean Dome, Japan - perfect waves proper realiable experience of reality
  • Las Vegas, Nevada - the great fake world, playground for the rich and famous, imagination provoked
  • Disney's Celebration Town, Florida - 'utopian project'


  • David Boyle picks up with hyper reality of fantasy compares Celebration Town to suburb imprisonment in the Truman Show
  • houses influence fairy tales, the fantasy of perfect America, the time of innocense
  • Nostagic - did it ever exist
  • The Stepford Wives - sassy photographer moves to an iconic town - all women replaced by robots - all is not as it seems
  • idea of zombies and happy what companies want us to be like to 'manufacture into'
  • Poundbury, contemporary 'utopian project' - enshrine 'englishness' - how it use to be
  • Boyle talks if you deconstruct this - they are highly conservative - but better for whom?
  • they are metanarratives - not quite the real
  • "We live, not inside reality, but instead a representation of it"
  • our society has become relliant on maps, models and images that are lost all contact with the real world
  • reality has began to immitate the model
  • we have lost ability to make sense of distinction between nature and artiface
  • he (Baudrillard) argues three orders of Simulacra
  1. the sign of illusion
  2. idea gets mass produced and grows in influence - grows in power gets harder to distinquish
  3. the representation preceeds the real, no longer a distinction
  • IFF.com - flavours for foods created - intense proper - 'the true taste' for every consumer preference
  • Britney Murphy - air brushed version more commercial, sells beauty but skin is hyper real because impossible to become

  • Barbie clearly a contifet but people become manufactured according to that image
  • Men also buy into a manufactured world to become 'perfect' trying to become a reflection of the unreal
  • 'Christmas' major hyperreal created we see it by victorians, causes stress and panick to create a fiction
  • Diana's death - public - worldwide gathering but someone who we don't truely know but given to us by an image / a symbol
  • Twin Towers - Filmic can't believe it's quite real =- the news created a 'hyper real' event
  • story of Jade Goody - character of news paper, lived and died infront of us
  • Valerie Belin took photos of Michael Jackson look - likes had surgery to become like the icon, immitating a person already in hyper real so they are even further away
  • Avatar - current example, 'Post Avatar Depression' disappointment of the real world compared to the fake map in the film

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