Hyperreality of Jean Bauldrillard
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-
-it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image Salvador Dali
Jean Baudrillard was a social theorist best known for his analyses of modes of mediation and technological communication, although the scope of his writing spreads across more diverse subjects — from consumerism, to gender relations, to the social understanding of history through to more journalistic commentaries on AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the (first) Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center. He had affinities with post-structuralism in that his arguments consistently drew on the notion that systems of signification and meaning are only understandable in terms of their interrelation. In contrast to Foucault however, of whom he was sharply critical, Baudrillard developed theories based, not on power and knowledge, but around the notions of seduction, simulation, and, the term with which he is most associated, hyperreality. Baudrillard uses this principle to argue that in our present 'global' society, wherein technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning, meaning's self-referentiality has prompted, not a McLuhan-style 'global village', but a world where meaning has been effaced and society has been reduced to an opaque mass, where the 'real' has been reduced to the self-referential signs of its existence. Wikipedia
eBook: Age of the Hyperreal
The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.
Jean Baudrillard [1929 - 2007]
