Critical Studies Lecture Five.

Jean Baudrillard and hyper reality.

• Santa is a product of representations. Coke adverts illustrated him and through time he became well known through the world, depicted in a certain at. We take it for granted. Branding becomes more popular or more important then the product itself.
• Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007 French philosopher, critic, social and cultural theorist and photographer.Semiotics, political economy, postmodernism, popular culture and media theory.
• Post structuralism- Gilles Deleuze, Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Baudrillard. The play of language, signs, and structures.
• Structuralism- Althusser, Kristeva, Lacan, Levi Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Barthes. Language, signs important in how they represented the world. Structures, how they make the world work, everything has a structure and needs to work.
• Guy Debord- ‘Society of the Spectacle’ 1967. Marxist theorist revised Marx’s main concepts to analyse commodity, relations in the age of consumer culture. Society has become an immense accumulation of spectacles.
• Karl Marx- Pioneer philosopher and political and economic theorist developed the ‘critique of political economy’ maintained capitalist society in an industrial age functions on bias ‘labour theory of value’ and exchange of commodities argued that capitalism constitutes one kind of ‘mode of production’. Would eventually be replaced by another one. In capitalist society all that is solid melts into air. Money is an abstraction of value, its more about things that are floating around new technologies as supposed to material goods, money etc.
• Saussure- Pioneer of semiotics; understand signs then we can understand, underlying, structures of language etc. Language functions also on basis of theory of value ‘linguistic value’ and basis of exchange of signs. You say the word tree, take the letters in your mind and create a concept, syntax which creates meaning, we know that tree means tree even if its not there.
• Marcel Mauss- Anthropologist and ethnographer renowned for his analysis of the ‘economy of the gift’ in different societies idea that gifts are only given.
• Georges Batalille- Philosopher, novelist, poet. Writings on death, transgression, general economy, based on ‘expenditure without return’. You pay for something but get nothing in return is it a gift.
• Simulacrum- Are copies either of the timing, they are intended to represent or stand in for or in recent history are merely copies of copies. The copies take away from the underlining reality of the real thing. Baudrillard- is there an underlining reality? Key term is postmodern. The matrix uses simulacra book, something that appears, as it is not, postmodern theory. The whole idea of the matrix is similar to Baudrillard theory of what the world is.
• Jorges Luis Borges- ‘Collected fictions’ Andrew Hurley. Difficult to tell the difference between what you are mapping and the territory. If they are exactly the same how can you differentiate between the two.
•  Baurillard even says ‘desert of the real itself’ a quote they use in the matrix film. Masks and denatures a profound reality. No relation to any reality whatsoever it is its own pure simulacrum.