“Jean baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and most controversial of contemporary social theorists. this major work, appearing in english for the first time, occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism. it leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death. most significantly, the book represents baudrillard’s fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of the simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation.”

“Fvinoly@webvisual.com, 02/16/97, rating=10: essential postmodern text baudrillard provides us with a clear explanation of the concept of simulations and simulacra–the copy without the original. from this postmodern landmark, he gives us specific examples of his theory that are a pleasure to read. chapters on ‘the china syndrome’, ‘holograms’, and ‘the animals’, among others, begin to define our roles in postmodern society and our relationships with our environment and ourselves. each chapter gives you a new, fascinating perspective, that culminates and reaches full circle with his final discussion of ‘nihilism’. table of contents the precession of simulacra history: a retro scenario holocaust the china syndrome apocalypse now the beaubourg effect: implosion and deterrence hypermarket and hypercommodity the implosion of meaning in the media absolute advertising, ground-zero advertising clone story holograms crash simulacra and science fiction the animals: territory and metamorphoses the remainder the spiraling cadaver value’s last tango on nihilism”

“The first full-length translation in english of an essential work of postmodernist thought”

“Scholars have recently paid increasing attention to china’s ‘mega events’ as a form of image management striving to influence future world order. in this article, the author examines china’s recent world fair, expo 2010 shanghai china, and argues that we need to move beyond the reading of mega events as simple representation and ideology and read it also as simulation and simulacra. reading the chinese world fair as a simulacrum of world order can provide different ways of relating ‘the west’ to its ‘other country’ china. the author examines this relation through asking what it means to be the fair: where is the world fair? when is the world fair? who is the world fair? reading the world/fair as simulacrum disrupts the fair’s notions of inside and outside, now and then, subject and object to the point where these terms are no longer workable.”

“This essay, based on the work of baudrillard and other critical theorists of culture and technology, describes how viagra and related products are creating not just new standards for men and women’s sexual performance, but new forms of hypersexual’ reality/hyperreal sexuality. considering television advertisements and framed around metaphors of landscape, internet spam’ advertisements for sexual performance enhancing products (both mechanical and chemical), and bodybuilding magazine representations of the body and sexuality, it is apparent that sexual expression in these genres is both constrained and yet exceeds its boundaries. sexuality is represented in these media as heterosexual, penetrative, and never to be imperfect in any way. the body itself, perhaps aging or flawed, is represented as incapable of achieving these ends reliably without pharmaceutical means. i argue that viagra and other sexual pharmaceuticals are best understood as hyperreal or hypernatural (reflecting baudrillard’s 1994 work, simulacra and simulation), as simulacra that bear no relation to reality’. sexual pharmaceutical advertisements refer to an unmedicated imaginary that assumes a unity where there is diversity, and conflates the means and ends of sexual technique.”

“Like today’s masses, the characters in j. g. ballard’s crash are fascinated by what jean baudrillard calls the accident, especially when it involves the death of a celebrity. ballard’s characters, however, reenact their accidents as sexual rituals of a marriage between technology and death that are beyond the realm of moral judgment, making crash sci-fi, hypothetical, unrealistic. calling crash ‘the first great novel of the universe of simulation,’ jean baudrillard has drawn heavy criticism for missing the alleged moral point, both in crash and in the still-real world. as a fiction writer, ballard is given a wide moral berth, but when baudrillard’s theory turns sci-fi, the question of ethical boundaries is broached, and leniency is less likely. in defense of baudrillard, i read him, like ballard, in the nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which i argue is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.; the characters of j. g. ballard’s ‘crash’ are fascinated by what jean baudrillard calls the accident. butterfield reads baudrillard like ballard in the nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which he argues is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.;”

“The extensive writing on the philosophical aspects of the matrix trilogy raises the problems inherent to the interrelation of philosophy/theory and film texts in an acute form. the films are often treated as an introduction to diverse and difficult concepts meaning that – at best – they function as examples to make the theories accessible. at worst, they are castigated for being insufficiently critical and presented as pseudo-philosophy. in contrast, this article will demonstrate that the scenarios offered by the matrix trilogy form an active dialogue with postmodern philosophy, changing the construction of key philosophical concepts. tracing such a dialogue involves the development of a new model for interrelating philosophical and filmic texts. the first part of the article sets out a new methodology, drawing on the work of french feminist philosopher michele le doeuff. the article focuses on the imagery that characterizes/defines baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal in simulacra and simulation. this is accompanied by an examination of the ways in which the matrix trilogy takes up key images, such as the mirror and aspects of greek mythology. the final part addresses the films’ presentation of value – a departure from its baudrillardian source – which sustains a radical reconceptualization of the hyperreal.”

“There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. our world, jean baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. the airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. we breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 that, according to baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 in hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. they stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. they are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 but postmodernism stutters. in the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. they become interchangeable. any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.4 faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. we can only gape in fascination.5 for the secret of the process is beyond our grasp. meaning has imploded. there is no longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. to the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6 meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not be cause it has receded into the distance. it is because the code has been miniaturized. objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. everything reduces to a molecular binarism. the generalized digitality of the computerized society.7 and so we gape. we cannot be said to be passive exactly, because all polarity, including the active/passive dichotomy, has disappeared. we have no earth to center us, but we ourselves function as a ground-in the electrical sense.8 we do not act, but neither do we merely receive. we absorb through our open eyes and mouths. we neutralize the play of energized images in the mass entropy of the silent majority. it makes for a fun read. but do we really have no other choice than being a naive realist or being a sponge? deleuze and guattari open a third way. although it is never developed at l…”

“Reality television is a euphemism. although audience members may believe they are seeing what happens when people stop being polite and start being real, nothing could be further from the truth. a vh1 expose, reality tv secrets revealed, divulges many of the techniques used by the producers of these shows to get the story they want including recreating actions that were not originally caught on tape, combining audio and video from separate times together, and acting out pre-planned storylines. reality tv viewers and critics, as well as television and media scholars, have debated the reality of these programs ever since the genre became a popular part of the american zeitgeist in the late 1990s. through editing techniques, the producers can exaggerate elements from an individual’s personality to construct a persona that audiences can rapidly identify. the discussion of these tactics leads me to a question: if reality television does not present reality, as it purports to do, then what is it actually showing? as jean baudrillard notes, ‘reality television [gives] the illusion of a real world, an exterior world, despite the fact that each world is the exact image of the other’ (2005:181). by using the words ‘illusion’ and ‘exact image,’ baudrillard points to reality tv programs as mere simulacra of the real world and which produce a hyperreality — not unlike his famous example of disneyland (baudrillard, 2002a:23, 96). as baudrillard argues, hyperreality is created through the process of simulation in which images of reality are turned into simulacra, copies which are so powerful that they erase the original. the constructed character personalities seen on reality tv reflect baudrillard’s discussion of simulacra. adapted from the source document.”

“DEFINICIÓ d’hiperrealitat: the generation by models of a real without origin or reality (pag?) o ‘a real without origin or reality’ p1”