Simulation & the Postmodern Reality

Baudrillard tries to find meaning in a contemporary desert of meaninglessness (“La Disparition du Monde Réel/The Disappearance of the Real World”), which is an existential effort in postmodern rhetorical settings. To Baudrillard, mass media brought forth the violence of the images, the death of the subject and the object, and many other issues that haunt the present era. How do we get our resurrection when we realize that commodities and images are

overwhelming? How do we balance the banal with the fatal in the indefinable postmodernist world? These are vital to build new models of postmodern and rhetoric and communication.

Baudrillard stresses the present and the absent at the same time as an implication of his hyperreal, which is the real more than the real—the nonreal. Therefore, in classroom settings, we have to help students understand not only how culture and cultures are shaped and

communicated, but also how to critically separate meaning and its carrier language because information society renders visuals and digital inventions loaded with ideologies and cultural implications they might ignore due to the explosion of speed and images. For example, the Obamao image has both American and Chinese connotations with Chinese language

instance, the WeChat app, combine personal communication with payment options, linkedin and facebook registration, and many other transnational features. It can be used to teach students’ transnational media literacy.

Baudrillard’s early awareness of photographic technology and the television’s subversion of time and space lead us to his crystalized idea of simulation (1983). The first part of his

Simulations—“The Precession of Simulacra” reveals the fallacy of an existent reality. Drawing our attention to the fallacy of the appearances, he actually achieved his goal of pulling us back to the essence of capitalism and the consumer society. The book’s epigraph is:

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true. —Ecclesiastes

This parody of the Bible or his play of words to reach a black humor can be seen as an irony. He also gives the example of the Empire and its fall and then moves to argue the essence of

mapping, the precession of simulacra. He loves to use the image of desert, which can be regarded as a symbol of death when he says that the map and the desert both disappear with simulation.

Never again will the real have to be produced—this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyper-real henceforth sheltered from the imagery, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference. (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 4). His assertions (1983) are inspiring but depressing, for psychology and medicine have no remedy for this powerful simulation rather than a superficial and recognizable “feigning” (p.5).

The successive phases of the images goes through the following stages according to him: 1) the reflection of a basic reality;

2) masks and perverts a basic reality; 3) masks the absence of a basic reality;

4) bears no relation to any reality. (Baudrillard, 1983, p.11)

This process reminds us of the apple trademark, maps, as well as visual and architectural design in Las Vegas. The very act of mapping and imitating is vital to understand Baudrillard and help students distinguish reality from simulation, especially when texts and visuals are loaded with different ideological and cultural connotations. The idea of simulation becomes easy to understand when we take a look at the commoditized postmodern architectures. What they give us is a sense of reality, but they are actually not the reality, but rather simulations. The Window of the World at Shenzhen City, P. R. China (Bohorquez, S. 2016. “Window of the World, Shenzhen.”) is an example of simulation in architectural representation. Hengdian World Studio can be another example (Yan, C. 2011.“If You Build It, They Will Come: Chinese Town Gets Hollywood Makeover.”), and the list goes on and on. The postmodern copy of a copy of a copy phenomenon is just what Baudrillard argues in his Simulacra and Simulation. The idea of the “hyper-real” comes from “the precession of simulacra,” which is why he considers cultural and media constructed reality as simulations. Baudrillard (1983) gives the example of

Disneyland when he talks about the hyper-real and the imaginary (pp. 23-26). He also refers to the Watergate as the same scenario as Disneyland. He considers the simulative political

incantation as a “moebius-spiralling negativity” (p. 30). However, we have to search for the unsaid in his arguments. It seems that he leaves no place for the role of agency due to his negativity on the existence of the masses. Nevertheless, he is trying to put the object in the gaze

so that we as the subject can have a clearer view of the simulations of nihilism in mass media and technologies. Therefore, his theory is not an absolute denial of the reality, but a hyperbole of the simulations in order to present the real. Therefore, rendering space for the object to get closer to the subject with effort. This idea of simulation is thus significant in the invention of any new model in the digital era, including one that has a transnational rhetoric and communication mission because the simulation relates what the media presents with truths, realities, and cultural implications behind commodities, the postmodern and late capitalized world full of ideographs and fragmentations. To help students understand the simulation process in a technological world is significant in cultivating their awareness and literacy to the rhetorical context of the digital world. In addition to the digital technologies of simulation and the like, students will have to be aware of their identities in the fragmented and ideographic postmodern cultural context.