Simulacra

Plato Simile of the Cave

In the Simile of the Cave Plato uses an allegory to illustrate human nature in its education and desire of education. It can be explained as some sort of a journey from ignorance to enlightenment.
 For prisoners from the cave the shadows on the wall are sort of reality, for Plato they are just illusion and belief. He then explains, that philosopher is like a prisoner who came out from the cave and started to realise that the shadows he's been seen all his life are not the form of the reality at all, because now, Fred from the cave with an opened mind the philosopher can perceive the true "real" form of reality rather then just faded shadows. Plato also called this process the ascent of the mind from illusion to pure philosophy.


Dick Hebdige Living in the wake of the withering signified

In this part of his work (Visual Culture) Hebdige compares the First, the Second (Post People) and the Third worlds.
People of the First World believe in underlying truth and real existing prior to signification accessible for analysis by men and women (fully centred human subjects) who can see essential truths and ideal forms behind appearances (p. 108).

The Post People (or people of the Second World) were challenging the authority of any distinction. They aimed to replace the dominant regime of meaning (First World People) by a radical anti-system which promotes articulation of difference as an end of itself - just a ceaseless procession of simulacra (p.109).

The Third World People stand for liberty and freedom to serve whatever gods they choose and to construct themselves in fiction and fantasy (p.109).


Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation

The Divine Irreference of Images
Baudrillard believes that there are no more originals, only copies or simulacra. He also gives a definition of simulation. "To simulate is to feign to have what the one doesn't have" p. 3. But simulation is not a pretending, it is much more complicated process because simulator produces some of the symptoms he simulates in himself.
Baudrillard explains the simulacrum of divinity. Based on his theory, an icon, for example, is not a symbolic representation of reality, it is a simulation.
Religious simulation reveals fears about what becomes of divinity when it reveals itself in icons in relation to whether the supreme authority is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology or whether it is volatilised into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination, the visible machinery of icons instead of the pure, intelligible notion of God p.4.
Buadrillard also outlines the successive phases of the image:
1. it is a reflection of a profoundreality;
2. it masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. it masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is it's own pure simulacrum p.6.


Hypermarket and Hypercommodity
Hypermarket centralises and redistributes a whole region and population, concentrates and rationalises time. People go there to find and select the objects which are "no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meaning and message,...  they are test that interrogate us and we are summoned to answer them" p. 75.
The hypermarket is the model of all future forms of controlled socialisation (work, leisure, food, culture etc).
Billboards now are like a big mirror, they observe and surveil people as the "policing" television p. 76.
The form hypermarket can thus help us understand what is meant by the end of modernity. Hypermarket functions as an implant for the city. And the city faces a disintegration of functions.

The Implosion of Meaning in the Media

In today's world there is more and more information and less and less meaning.
There is a catastrophe of meaning: where we thing that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.
"Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in t)3 act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning" p. 80. There is a massive process of simulation.

Absolute Advertising, Ground-zero Advertising

Today all original cultural forms and languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneously forgotten.
Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces.

The power of simplify all languages is stollen from advertising by type of language which is even more simplified - the language of computer science.

Advertising is no longer a means of communication or information.

"It is useless to analyse advertising as language, because something else is happening there: a doubling of language and images, to which neither linguistics nor semiology correspond" p. 92.