Simulacra and Simulation

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Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period:

First order, associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality.
Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as "real" as its prototype.
Third order, associated with the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept

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Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomena.

Contemporary media including television, film, print, and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created by commercial images.

Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (literally denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange.

Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes (including the people and their cultural context) used to create them.

Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around productive throughput systems so large they cause alienation.

Language and ideology, in which language increasingly becomes caught up in the production of power relations between social groups, especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly in monetary terms.

>take the final redpill

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bumping an interesting thread

Can you say anything about how Baudrillard's concepts relate to photography?

All I ever heard about with this guy was this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYWRSNQGu2o

(video proper at 3:30)

>>2993714
He makes an interesting point in the book when he talks about images in general

>One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images, were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God. On the other hand, one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous, because, in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images, they were already enacting his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which, perhaps, they already knew no longer represented anything, that they were purely a game, but that it was therein the great game lay - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

I assume he'd get to say a lot about contemporary memetic culture on the internet if he lived a little longer. Internet memes are probably the most obvious example of pure simulacra as he imagined it.
>>2993740
I suggest reading his writings, they're very short and concise.

>>2993881
Cool beans.
I have Simulacra and Simulations in my bookshelf, I should give it a read, just been reading a lot of purely photographical texts recently.

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>>2993714
He himself took photographs. But really the hyperreal is the idea that photographs are just as real as the thing they are depicting, pornography is sex, etc.

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I prefer to watch her
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNz43C5MskM

>>2994020
Kent?

>>2994020

embarrassing

>>2993990
I know, I've seen a lot of his photos. Pretty good stuff.

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http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/91
I see.

>>2993990
>the hyperreal is the idea that photographs are just as real as the thing they are depicting, pornography is sex, etc.
No, they're even more real than reality itself

Here's Rick Roderick's lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c

>>2993503
Anything that reads this much stuff into history should be dismissed.

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>>2993513
>Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (literally denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange.
The early Baudrillard also introduced the concept of sign value, which he found missing in the classical Marxist texts.

You buy shit becaue of how people would react to it, like a status symbol.

Priority-wise this is placed above both the exchange value (because if you really cared about the exchange value you'd buy cheaper shit), and the use value.

More here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#1