The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
-Ecclesiastes
The history of philosophy already had an idea of a kind of originality. For example, a vivid example of Plato and the Allegory of the Cave. For Plato, it remained important to get to the truth and be consecrated in the presence of a copy. Arthur Schopenhauer “The World as a Will and a Representation” is not a real-world in which we live, therefore we cannot know it, but we can, through our own will, make up a circle of ideas about the world. And since we once formed such an understanding of the world, it means that we are in this fabricated space.
Today Baudrillard distinguishes a simulacrum from a fake of the past. This term and concept were used as pretence and fake, but to distinguish these two things, you can use the analogy with machines. The analogy between an automaton and a person and between a person and a robot. As a result, we are comparing all the elements with a person. But in fact, it gets that, for example, the robot does not pretend to resemble a human being. The most technologically advanced robot looks like a high-tech device. Thus, the technology in the consumption system is independent of the individual.
A simulacrum it is an image or sign of an absent reality.
Photography destroyed the previous subject-object relations. The creator of photography is not a photographer, but the world itself by means of a technical device. The world itself wants to introduce itself, and only then comes a human photographer. Photography cannot be considered on par with other forms of art.
Light acts as a medium, it helps to reveal things, so Baudrillard concludes that gloss is becoming a symbol of the modern world. Photography reveals reality with light and hides the rest in the shadow part, and the gloss receives the physical embodiment of this culture. Television is a new media, returning primitive thinking to people according to the principles of the relationship of objects. The words in the film acquire the meaning of the thing, as it forms the image.
The reality, Baudrillard says, does not exist, it has mutated into an image. The appearance of the masses is the silent majority; it is the power of modernity. So new media form the images of these silent masses. For example, even if the masses opposite the television disappear, it will still form a spectacle that produces and supports itself according to its own rules. Here he gets that the simulacrum, as it were, precedes the reality - "the precession of simulacra."
Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard, p.6)
Media produces superreality. Live broadcasts turn reality into hyperreality by means of spying. While watching live we feel like participants in this process.
Paying attention to criticism of Baudrillard’s work, one should note Alan Sokal’s remark regarding the use of scientific terms that are not always correctly related to the context. On this basis, Sokal, using Baudrillard's terminology, proposes to exclude the “verbal gloss” from his work and see what remains. No less interesting is the observation by Katherine Hayles that simulacra are not evenly distributed in modern culture, and sometimes it is completely absent.
To summarize, we can say that Baudrillard outlined the differences between old and new media and how new media affect a person. If before a person understood himself as different from others, now a person is in the entertainment system. Baudrillard showed how media form reality, simulate hyperreality, and he described the specifics of visual media and showed that visualization is not part of our consciousness, but that which provokes it.
Bibliography and references
1. Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacra and Simulation Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan
2. Deleuze Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press
3. Schopenhauer (1997) KEY TEXTS by Patrick Gardiner, Classic Studies in the History of Ideas THOEMMES PRESS
4. Introduction to modern philosophy: Jean Baudrillard (Alexander Smulyansky) Введение в современную философию: Жан Бодрийяр (Александр Смулянский) 2018 [online] At: https://youtu.be/E0Q_WuimoYs (Accessed 31.03.2020)
5. Baudrillard, J. 2015 Simulacra and Simulations, Moscow: POSTUM Publishing House [in Russian] Бодрийяр, Ж. 2015 Симулякры и симуляции, Москва: Издательский дом «ПОСТУМ»
6. Wikipedia Симулякры и симуляция [online] At: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Симулякры_и_симуляция (Accessed 31.03.2020)
7. Russian State University for the Humanities, Media Theory. Lecture 4. 2015 Jean Baudrillard. Alexander Viktorovich Markov. [in Russian] Российский Государственный Гуманитарный Университет, Теория медиа. Лекция 4. 2015 Жан Бодрийяр. Александр Викторович Марков. [online] At: https://youtu.be/1BmbW9ZbHw8 (Accessed 31.03.2020)
8. Alan Sokal speaking in Stockholm. The nature of scientific inquiry and its importance for public life. A speech recorded by Henrik Thomé in Stockholm May 2009. [Online] Available from: https://youtu.be/kuKmMyhnG94
9. N. Katherine Hayles, The Borders of Madness, Science Fiction Studies Vol. 18, No. 3, Science Fiction and Postmodernism (Nov., 1991), pp. 321-323 (3 pages) [online] At: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4240084?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (Accessed 31.03.2020)
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