Reality, Virtuality, Hyper-reality: Lecture Notes

Jean Baudrillard - French Philospher + Social Theorist
- 'Structuralism' + 'Post-Structuralism'
- Key theorist of post-modernism

Key Precusors
Karl Marx
- Thought through capitalist implications on society
- Use-Value
- Exchange-Value - Products become commodities - We are expected to believe commodities are of high and low monetary value

Ferdinand Saussure - Swiss Linguist
- 'Theory of linguistic value'
- 'Theory of sign'

Guy Debord - French Marxist Theorist and film maker
- Image based culture - 'Society of the spectacle'

Marshall McCluhan - Canadian literary, scholar and educator

Georges Bataille - French writer - Art & Culture to challenge concept of spectacle
- Refuse to accept commodity culture as a given and challenged with counter arguments

Marchel Mauss - Sociologist and Anthropologist
- 'Theory of Gift'

Jean Baudrillard
Books
- The System of objects
- Simulacra and Simulation (Defining text)
- Symbolic exchange and Death
- The Illusion of the End

Simulacra and Simulation
- Context
- Vietnam War
- Situationism
- Rise of Consumerism and Mass Media
- Colonialism end
- The Cold War
- Watergate Scandal
- Rise of Terrorism

End of utopanism - Rise of post-modernism - Hyperreal

Jorges Luis Borges - 'On Exactitude in Science'

Plato - 'The world is an image of something, the timaeus' Plato
- Philosophical Reality - Plato's allegory of the cave - Bastardisation of reality

Pure Simulacrum - An appearance of simulation which has no profound reality.

Disneyification - Taking an a cartoon creation and placing it into 'reality' (example: snow whites castle and building a replica in Disney World)

Baudrillard - Forget foucault (book) - Foucaults panoptic model does not offer best solution.

Matrix - Post-Modernism (example of virtual reality)
- Virtual world with real world.

Bladerunner - Classic example of post-modernistic film making - Hyper reality

History becoming simulacrum - Written in books, simulated sketches, and remastered video