the hypocrisy/never-ending cycle of ethnology and science – pursuing the truth of a subject but often by viewing it it will become disrupted – e.g. Tasaday people, Philippines
Lascaux caves – visitors allowed to see in via a peep-hole and then visit a life-size recreation – ‘the duplication suffices to render both artificial’ (?)
‘Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.’
e.g. restoring mummies: ‘We only know how to place our science in service of repairing the mummy, that is to say restoring a visible order, whereas embalming was a mystical effort that strove to immortalise a hidden dimension.’
‘We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end.’
the proof of something but contrasting it with its opposite
‘Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimpse of existence and legitimacy.’
If you were to stage a fake robbery, how would you then convince people after that it was fake as all the actions you would have taken would be identical to a ‘real’ robbery? Equally if you were to attempt a ‘fake’ hostage situation you would most likely end up entangled in a ‘real’ situation due to the response of others (i.e. police firing on sight, someone actually paying a ransom etc) – ‘It is necessary to see in this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation the weight of an order that cannot see and conceive of anything but the real, because it cannot function anywhere else. […] The established order can do nothing against [simulation], because the law is a simulacrum of the second order, whereas simulation is of the third order, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond rational distinctions upon which the whole of the social and power depend.’
TV experiment with the Loud family in America – their home was broadcasted live for seven months, raising many questions about the real/hyperreal – it is utopian to say ‘they lived as though we weren’t watching’
watching so intently that things which don’t usually have meaning begin to imbue themselves with meaning (in this case perhaps due to a particular camera angle etc)
also questions truth – now we can no longer say something is true until it has been thoroughly investigated (e.g. in science) – here this is replicated through the thorough eyes of the audience
we are not wowed by the Moon landing because a man is on the Moon, we are impressed by our own ability to achieve such a feat: to simulate and predict everything that will happen and need to happen in order to execute the perfect mission – nothing is left to chance, probability is mastered – ‘Just watching it produces vertigo. Vertigo of a world without flaws.’
‘cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object’ – cinema aims for the real, almost perfecting it too much, becoming the hyperreal – it becomes very self-aware and will ‘remakes [films] more perfectly than the original’ – ‘the cinema attempting to abolish itself in the cinematographic hyperreal’
‘History is a strong myth, perhaps, along with the unconscious, the last great myth. It is a myth that at once subtended the possibility of an ‘objective’ enchainment of events and causes and the possibility of a narrative enchainment of discourse. […] It is this fabulous character, the mythical energy of an event or of a narrative, that today seems so increasingly lost. […] Cinema contributed to the disappearance of history, and to the advent of the archive. Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, ‘objective’ form at the expense of the myths which once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.’
(because we aren’t in the past, we can’t know it and therefore history is written and just a fiction, therefore it is unknowable and undoable, we can say anything we want – we can only study historians not history – actually history has to be constructed from what we find, it is not fixed, it is fluid which is why history can be rewritten [a summary of what Baudrillard is saying contrasted with a contemporary critique – the book is from the late 20th century so quite postmodern in its ideas])
‘it is the intrusion of TV into the reactor that seems to give rise to the nuclear incident’
‘it is the masses themselves who put an end to mass culture’
‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.’ – how do these correlate to one another? Does information produce meaning, have no effect, or reduce meaning?
‘Information devours in its own content. It devours communication and the social. […] Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: “You are concerned, you are the event, etc.” More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication.’ – manifested in the relationship between media dn the masses – does the media influence us or do we influence the media?
‘Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivety and stupidity of the masses.’
‘Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possibility of metamorphosis, has power over all the others.’
‘The “thrill” of advertising has been displayed onto computers and onto the miniaturization of everyday life by computer science.’
‘Advertising is no longer (was it ever?) a means of communication or of information. Or else it is overtaken by the madness specific to overdeveloped systems, that of voting for itself at each moment, and thus parodying itself. If at a given moment, the commodity was its own publicity today publicity has become its own commodity.’
‘Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest. But the double is precisely not a prosthesis: it is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other.’
TV is the current closest simulation of a hologram we have – in itself it creates clones/duplicates/doubles – ‘The hologram […] gives us the feeling, the vertigo of passing to the other side of our own body, to the side of the double, luminous clone, or dead twin that is never born in our place, and watches over us by anticipation.’
‘The hologram, perfect image and end of the imaginary. Or rather, it is no longer an image at all – the real medium is the laser, concentrated light, quintessentialised, which is no longer a visible or reflexive light, but an abstract light of simulation.’
‘when an object is exactly like another, it is not exactly like it, it is a bit more exact. There is never similitude, any more than there is exactitude.’ – idea of the hyperreal
‘it is the real that has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object’
‘Until now we have always had a reserve of the imaginary – now the coefficient of reality is proportional to the reserve of the imaginary that gives its specific weight. This is also true of the geographical and spatial exploration: when there is no longer any virgin territory, and thus one available to the imaginary, when the map covers the whole territory, something like the principle of reality disappears.’ – similar to as mentioned in Mountains of the Mind, this idea that there always has to be somewhere left to discover, somewhere for the mind to roam freely without the intervention of fact – very applicable to art, wanting to probe and push the mind in a certain direction but not spell out an exact message/intention
Anna Harris 