Baudrillard Reading

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." -Baudrillard

Much of this reading was confusing as hell, to be honest. 

I do think I understand bits and pieces of it, but I may be wrong. 

When he is talking about dissimulation, he meant faking or copying something you have... with simulate, he meant faking or copying something you wish you had, something you want. Simulation "threatens the difference between "true" and "false" and "real" and "imaginary". 

Baudrillard also looked at the simulators can do... in the military and then on to the idea that a God or other divinity loses authority because its image is produced over and over again to the masses. Is the image/visible "God" as effective as the one you cannot see, but still believe in?

I really liked the section on "Murders of the real" and the "murderous capacity of images". Images can become replacements of the real thing which exists in reality, not on the internet. "To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All of Wester Faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation : that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange..."

Baudrillard also touches on the successful phases of the image:

1. it is a reflection of basic reality

2. it masks and perverts a basic reality

3. it masks the absence of basic reality

4. it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is pure simulacrum

Agree.... some images, like photos for example, are reflections of reality...

Others mask and pervert it. 

Some altered images, such as those manipulated with Photoshop (maybe) show the absence of reality because they have been changed.

And finally, some are totally created in order to be different than the reality we live in...

 

THE DISNEYLAND EXAMPLE

Baudrillard talks about Disneyland because it is a different kind of reality... you enter willingly, have a great time while inside (spending money, mostly) and then are essentially dumped at the door when the park closes to wander back to your car and get back on the freeway. Disneyland is not an imaginary place, it exists, and adults, for example, go there to live out their childishness (or the illusions of their childishness).
Los Angeles is nothing more than a "town of fabulous proportions, but without space and dimensions." It is expansive, although its limits can be seen on road signs. The ideas about Los Angeles and Disneyland, for example, far surpass the amount of space the actual places hold.