For our first meeting, we read selections from Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation, which was not first published in English until 1994. It is a work of high theory that tackles the relationship between media, culture, and political-economy. Summarizing—simplifying, perhaps—in my own words, the book’s main premise is that representational items, like images or words, no longer (need to) reference anything real in the present or the past. The images make up their own continuously changing and mixing reality. This is, in fact, the “reality” that modernity has produced, and the one we live inside of. It’s not about actually having something to trade, but about having the version of money that is numbers on a computer screen. It’s not about being a politician, but about performing the character of a politician on TV.
Aljazeera columnist Hamid Dabashi wrote an op-ed about the Gulf War “Paris attacks,” saying that “what we are witnessing today is a Baudrillardian global simulacrum of events that actually have never happened.”
It seemed especially relevant for the inception date of our reading group—April 7, 2020—at which time most people around the world were quarantined at home or living under some version of a government-issued shelter-in-place order due to the Covid-19 virus pandemic. One major response among institutions and corporations has been to shift work that requires interpersonal communication (almost all jobs) to virtual online video conferencing. This set the stage for discussing Simulacra, in that we were all becoming virtual versions of ourselves.
Along with the introduction, which focuses on hyper reality, we read about hypermarkets and hypercommodities, and “the implosion of meaning in the media.” Under hyper reality, we lose the original referent, but then realize that there may not ever have been an original in the first place. PHOTOGRAPHY is very much a part of this conversation, not least because it has always blurred real moments in time with the images that come to stand in for them.