Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. Baudrillard calls this the “order of sorcery”, a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.Ĥ) The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.ģ) The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. “Simulacra and Simulation” breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:ġ) The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality” (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called “the sacramental order”.Ģ) The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance-it is of the order of maleficence”. This is a historical process.Īccording to Baudriallard, the world is constructed on the representation of representations. Ultimately the simulacra is indistinguishable from the real. They are orders of simulation that progress until the difference between the true and false has collapsed. In effect the orders of simulacra functions as a process whereby total simulacra is achieved. The orders of simulacra increase as it becomes less and less possible to trace the origins of the simulations. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all.Jean Baudrillard. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacra - from this came their urge to destroy the images. "But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulationġ0. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle." Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace ): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. "Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L.
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