Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. The premise of Baudrillard’s philosophy is that the society has reached a point where it has become increasingly difficult if not impossible-and this written before the 2016 election!-to distinguish between what is genuine reality and what it is artificially constructed reality. What he is describing is an attempt at creating a simulacrum of reality: a fake crime scene in which everyone actually involved knows it to be faked. In answer to the question of what, exactly, is a simulacrum, the author presents this scenario. You won't be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack one will actually pay you the phony ransom). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible - in short, remain close to the 'truth,' in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. 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. 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.

Simulacra and simulation quotes