![]() With our senses becoming increasingly attuned to digital media, we are now living in a world of representations, where we come to experience and understand things through their digital representations first rather than through physical observation.Ĭultural Theorist Jean Baudrillard by Lillian BirnbaumĪs a case study of the simulacra, Instagram is a perfect example. As a concept, the simulacrum is highly relevant in our digital era of artifice and imitation. In its current definition theorized by Jean Baudrillard “simulacrum” refers to that which retains merely only the form of the thing it seeks to represent. Enter, the theory of the simulacrum.Īs a post-modern philosophical theory, the “Simulacrum” has gained credibility as an influential understanding of reality in the contemporary age. In the age of social media, where one spends countless hours engrossed in the digital realm, we have come to experience the world through digital rather than physical means, and thus the digital realm has become our reality. Such has traditionally been the fodder for the musings of philosophers and quantum physicists, but the implications of these theories increasingly have valid real-world relevance. Some muse that we are living in a simulated reality – like Sims – in a perpetual computer-generated reality, others believe through our hyper-mediated world that we now perceive the digital realm as our baseline reality. What is reality exactly and is there an objective reality by which we can anchor all of our experiences? With digital artifice inundating us constantly, it is easy to begin questioning whether there really is a truly objective reality, or if everything we experience is rather just a simulation. Reality is an increasingly difficult subject to broach in the contemporary age. ![]() Andy Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup prints).Cody Rooney Jean Baudrillard & The Simulacra His example of this is Pop Art, which in his view pushed the copy so far it became a simulacrum, an image without resemblance (e.g. The simulacrum is not just a degraded copy, Deleuze argues, it has its own positive power, which interrupts the relation between original and copy. because of his sin-he no longer resembles Him). His argument is that the copy or simulation is an image with resemblance (by definition, the copy resembles the thing copied), whereas the simulacrum is an image without resemblance (man is made in the image of God, according to catechism, but since the fall-i.e. The simulacrum is not a concept Deleuze wrote much about, indeed he only addresses it directly in two essays (on Plato and Lucretius) attached as appendices to Logique du Sens (1969), translated as Logic of Sense (1990), but his contribution has been decisive. In contrast, Deleuze uses the concept of the simulacrum against that of the simulation, to create an immanent theory of representation. Another way of putting this would be to say that a simulacrum is only ever an effect and never a cause. ![]() ![]() On this view of things, anything deemed to be an original idea or object is in fact a mirage, an optical illusion of the same order as back-projection in cinema. At its limit, as in certain accounts of postmodernism, the simulacrum is used to deny the possibility of anything being the singular source or origin of either an idea or a thing. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is essentially the copy of a copy, that is to say, the copy of something that is not itself an original, and is hence an utterly degraded form. The two most important names that have come to be associated with this concept are Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze.īaudrillard tends to use the words simulation and simulacrum interchangeably, and offers not so much a new theory of the simulacrum as a new history of the present viewed through the conceptual lens of the simulacrum. Although the term has been around since Plato's time, it is really only in the 20th century that it has acquired the significance it has today. ![]()
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