Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation

Workshop II, OUCA501
Key points from readings.

Fowler on 3rd layer and virtual experience new media can add to campaigns (benefits)

Implications of B conclusions, art direction and copy writing, reaching target audiences?

The Simulacrum and Simulation


Jean Baudrillard states that the border between art and reality has disappeared and has fallen into universal simulacrum. By this he means that our society relies so much on signs and models that the 'real world' no longer matters as to us the 'real world' is just an imitation of the model, so signs and their meanings break down. This is an extreme postmodernism view upon our culture. Baudrillard believes that we have now reached a state of hyper reality where images breed incestuously with each other, therefore losing all reality and meaning. This happens in 4 stages; 1) The image is a reflection of a basic reality, 2) It then masks and perverts a basic reality, 3) It marks the absence of a basic reality, 4) It bears no relation to any reality- it is its own pure simulacrum.Media (film, internet, ads) are therefore not trying to relay information to us but reflect ourselves to us so we see our whorl through the images the media shows us. We no longer want commodities due to our needs but due to our desires that are defined by the media itself so we are not in touch with our on realities or the real world.


- The Define Irreference of Images

An imitation is a deception, intended to disguise the fact that it isn’t real. A simulation has aspects of the real. So, for example, someone who feigns illness is has no symptoms, whereas someone with psychosomatic illness actually experiences symptoms of the “real” illness.An icon isn’t just a symbolic representation of the real; it’s a simulation. The sacred image is a “visible theology,”instead of pointing beyond itself to the fullness of the real, itself became the focus of attention as the repository of holiness. The simulacra can become real and become a model for the real, blurring the lines between what is true and what is not. Baudrillard uses Disneyland as an example of a simulation, as disneyland becomes an escape from the real world, but it as a hyperreal illusion based upon the real world. 


- Hypermarket and Hypercommodity

Baudrillard sees all messages in media to be meaningless and have no depth, “Objects are no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meaning and message one could decipher…all the messages in the media function in a similar fashion:…referendum, perpetual test, circular response, verification of the code.”He sees the Hypermarket as a huge factory or "...the model of all future forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a homogeneous space-time of all the dispersed functions of the body and social life (work, leisure, food, hygiene, transportation, media, culture)…” Commodities have lost all meaning and function and are now apart of the hypermarket.

- Absolute Advertising, Ground Zero Advertising

All modes of expression are being absorbed into that of advertising, as advertising is superficial so "all original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantly forgotten.” It seems that Baudrillard believes advertising is not effective however he states "It is not that people no longer believe in it or that they have accepted it as a routine. It is that if its fascination once lay in its power to simplify all languages, today this power is stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more fictional: the language of computer science." Therefore the excitement advertising brought has been displaced onto computers.However he still believes advertisement has the capacity to influence despite its lack of meaning as it has imposed itself into our society and he refers to us as a "bewildered audience".

He also states that due to advertising has converged with propaganda (due to such events like the crash of 1929) which has established a relationship between the economical and the political and also the social. He argues that "...there is a demand of advertising in and of itself, and that thus the question "believing" in it or not is no longer even posed…" and that advertising "…historical necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple  demand for the social…the social has lost precisely  this power of illusion, it has fallen into the register of supply and demand…"

Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.