Aim - To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillards theory of hyperreality.
To foreground Bauldrillards position, by shwoing how it develops out of a marxist critique of capitalism.
To examine how Bauldrillards analysis of advertising led him to argue that consumers engagements with commodities had begun function like a language;
To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis into a fully blown theory of post modernism.
'The system of objects'
'The mirror of production ' Integrated rise of mass media, developed argument about our engagement with reality
Hyperreal world - what we call reality is rounded in simulacra - 'Matrix' an example
Simucrlum - Similar to
e.g - Fight club 'Copy, of a copy, of a copy'
Matrix 'What is real' youtube clip
"How do you define real?"
Simulcra - Pure construction, no reality outside themselves
Labour - Concept how we shape environment through industry, what we make and do, we are conditioned by our environemnt. Marx investigating how we become removed.
Commodities - exchange value. We weight them up against each other - relationship is qualitative.
Once we start exchanging things, our contact with physical world becomes transformed, objects are forced to conceptualise to other objects. Indirect contact with world.
Workers labour becomes a commodity, directly engaging with the world around you, which suits your own needs is destroyed under capitalism as labour you do has to be exchanged for money. We have to sell ourselves to survive. Externalisation of worker, his work becomes an object,
Product means nothing to us, we have sold our labour to purchase it,
Labour embodied in product is looked at in its ability to exchange
Peoples labour a commodity, to be bought and sold for a wage, which can then be exchanged for other commodities.
Transformation of production and consumption - capitalist production 'the principles of scientific management' advocated each labour process
Assembly line. first attempt Mass production
Post war period, boom in mass production.
Assembly line became a way of producing all consumer items.
Berger ways fo seeing chapter 7 "Publicity is not merely competing messages, its a language in itself used to create the same general proposal, publicity as a system only makes a single proposal, it proses that we transform ourselves and our lives by buying something more."
Williamson - Advertisements seek to address consumer desires, not how the product may be useful to us.
e.g - Car has human characteristics, we apply characteristics to car, then applies to our status when we own it.
Advertising codes products through symbols, which differentiates them from other products.
'Focus group on mad men' - Youtube
Products usefulness is superseeded by icons and symbols used by advertisements
Advertisement are forcing needed to coherce with products
Layout of department stores
Products arranged to be distinguished
display window, brands etc play essential role in creating a coherent vision - Baudrillard
products arranged - linguistic sign
Concept (signified) - Sound - image (signifier)
Conventional relationship between word, pronunciation and object - Semitoics
Berger - advertisement as a system and language - creates a form of interaction with products
Adverts converge with eachother, all different, no reason for arrangement, continual consumer exposure, constitutes a system of signification of consumer desire
Post modernism - link between images and reality - simulacrum
Experience saturated by media imagery
representation,(following reality) begins to shape the way we see reality itself
Cultural condition becomes that of hyper reality - images take on lives of there own, become templates for new realities
simulacrum overtaking reality - takes a code from concrete social relations and reemploys them within the media
Disneyland shapes by idea of american history, not reality.
a Hyper real landscape, perfect model of simulation, play of illusions, overtly fantastical environmental, distract attention from reality outside of it. Distraction from corruption and crisis of world.
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