Jean Baudrillard – Simulation, Hyperreality; Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been replaced by false images, to such an extent that one cannot distinguish between the real and the unreal.
Essay Structure:
Define Postmodernism, define simulation and hyperreality, Take out examples from the example, then a concluding sentence saying what you think Postmodernism has come to.
definitions: Hyperreality – Being unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Postmodernism –
- Deliberately playful, intertextual, reflexive
- Fragmentation, disorder, displacement
- A disconnection between cerebral and physical (ie mind and body Descartes – The Cartesian dilemma)
- A lack of coherent time and place creates a world built around uncertainties and half-truths = a virtual world
- A lack of knowledge and understanding
- Lack of Metanarrative – the new postmodern world is structured and built upon complex and sometimes contradictory layers of organisations, instructions, ideas and individuals.
- Individuals struggle to make sense and meaningful connections with this postmodern world.
- No rational explanation, for cause and effect.
- A loss of faith in scientific, empirical evidence.
- Emphasis on repetition = Simulation – a series of simulated events, sequences and characters
- Lack of overall Truth or coherent meaning
- Memento represents a world of nobody’s living in nowheresville!
- Individual and community alienation Individualistic / isolated narrative
- Results in individuals becoming isolated and vulnerable
- So individuals on focus on (understand, can cope with, are knowledgeable about) surface and style. As opposed to substance, content, cohesion, meaning, truth.
- Individual personal pleasure and gain is the only significant motivating factor
- Role of big organisations in dividing up society and individuals
- pastiche (re-makes of familiar genre, Film Noir, Thriller or Who dunnit?) re-make
- Fractured / split / multiple identity
- hypperreality – it seems real, but unreal? exaggerated reality? an un-reality?