Jean Baudrillard April 18, 2007

Okay, so after being pretty sick with a stomach bug part of the weekend into yesterday, I am really glad to be moving again.  On the other hand, coming back to read theory wasn’t really the best way to recover.  But I’ll take this over puking any day.

 

I would like to state first and foremost that Jean Baudrillard needs a good smack upside the head for writing The Precession of Simulacra.  I read the first two pages and was like, what?! Empire, fable, inverted, imperialism, it all seemed to be a bunch of gibberish to me.  But, learning from past experiences with theorists in this class, I know that if I don’t get something, I should probably read it again.  I’m not going to lie, the first section still made no sense to me, so I moved on.

 

I felt like Saussure had come back to haunt us in this piece due to Baudrillard’s discussion on how nothing is really new, but we are making signs up for reality.  “Signs, signs, everywhere a sign.”  A little help from Five Man Electrical Band.  But I digress.  I feel that this renewal of the old, a repetitive sign of what has already been, could be seen in society today.  If you look on MTV or VH1, when they show videos at least, any female performer looks like she could be a clone of another person.  How many Lindsey Lohans, Hillary Duffs, and Jessica Simpsons do we need?  If I had my way, they’d all be gone because they all suck.

 

I think someone is a little bitter toward Walt Disney.  Wow, he just constantly slammed Disneyland, which, having never been there, I’m assuming is similar to Disneyworld.  “By extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenised: Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade,” (1740).  Wow.  This is harsh. And yet, when he says “infantile world” I can’t help but think of Michael Jackson.  I did find this line pretty amusing though compared to the rest of his rant on Disney.

 

The line here that worried me the most was, “The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot-a veritable concentration camp-is total,” (1740).  He compares the parking lot of Disneyworld to a concentration camp?   I think I understand what he is trying to say about how Disneyland is not even an escape from reality, it is a false reality which destroys what is actually real.  I don’t know if that makes any sense.

 

I felt that the Rameses discussion could play into this false reality.  He discusses how Rameses is to us as the Native Americans were to Renaissance Christians.  It is something completely new and fascinating, something that we don’t see every day.  Because we don’t see it every day, we are interested and can let ourselves be swept up in the history of mummies and Egypt.  Similarly, we can let ourselves be swept up in the fun of our altered reality in Disneyland.