Modernism:  "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part"

And what am I in it?"

scientific method, absolute truth, absolute reality Plumb the depths in order to understand how things work.:

“in order to understand what is going on in the world, we have to understand how the inner workings operate.”

Modernism = calculation aesthetic

Postmodernism: "Which world is this? What is to be done in it?"

Which of my selves is to do it?"

surface over depth, simulation over the real ”Simulation offers us the greatest hope of understanding.  When our

world is far too complex for the human mind to build it as a mental construct from first principles, then it defies human intellect to define its truth.”

Postmodernism = Simulation aesthetic

Of Exactitude in Science by Jorge Borges

...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda

Baudrillard interprets Borges

Baudrillard discusses a fable written by Jorge Borges where cartographers draw a map in such detail that it ends up exactly covering the real territory of the empire. The map frays as the empire declines. The reality and the abstraction (map) decline together.

By contrast, today that pairing has disappeared. Abstractions are no longer "the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept." No longer is there simulation of a "territory, a referential being, or a substance." Instead, Baudrillard sees a "real without origin or reality" being generated "by models." This is the hyperreal. In the hyperreal, (referring again to the Borges fable), the map "precedes the territory." And this map becomes a simulacra, which "engenders the territory," such as it is.

Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and Simulations

Excerpted from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

Hyperreal and imaginary

 Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an 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 cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the

America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

 

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

 

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.

…

Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation. 

As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of

signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late.

What is Baudrillard saying? Simulacra: a copy without an original. In The Matrix, there is a computer program called "the matrix"

which is a simulation of the world at the end of the 20th century. That world no longer exists. The real world is a nuclear wasteland; cities are charred and empty, life on earth is only possible beneath the surface. But an exact copy exists in the form of a computer program. People are living life in a simulacra, a copy which is its own reality.

Simulation: a model of the real or the creation of the real through conceptual or "mythological" models which have no connection or origin in reality. The model becomes the determinant of our perception of reality, we end up confusing the model for reality.

In a world of hyperreality, the distinctions between real and unreal are blurred. Ronald Reagan becomes a simulation of politics; Britney Spears is a simulation of pop sex idol; Kurt Cobain a simulation of marginality. The point Baudrillard is trying to make is that simulations have devoured reality, and that models have taken "precedence over things." Too much reality has resulted in saturation and explosion. Now, we are looking at an implosion -- reality and meaning are melting into a nebulous mass of self-reproducing simulation. So there is an odd chain reaction, whereby simulations have taken over for reality, but now generate nothing but more simulations.

This "fall" into simulations is exacerbated by the masses and media. The public prefer spectacles to reality. We would rather go to Disneyworld than to work. When we watch the news, we would rather be entertained than informed. The consequence of this preference is that reality loses its status, and that the effectiveness of simulation is greater than the potency of reality.

How real is reality TV? Survivor, The Fifth Wheel, The Real World? How are these simulations of reality?

Baudrillard points out very clearly how our modern culture is contrived of images and other stimulus from media sources and simulations rather than what is considered real and how it becomes what is real to us by perception. For instance, we are all familiar with various commercials and other forms of advertising that are creations, sometimes of non-real visuals and events, to promote products. We see people and places on TV that we have never been to yet we know them visually as if we had. The simulation is real to us not the real place.

Another and maybe even better example would be how we relate to ancient cultures. Archeologists dig them up and create simulations of their cultures in museums that we see. We have never seen the real societies and thus the simulacra of these cultures is what becomes real to us about these cultures. Baudrillard clearly defines how various things like Disney, multi-media advertising and many other sources have replaced the stimulus of the real for us and how our media culture has become our reality.

Modernism VS. PostmodernismThe features in the table below are only tendencies, not absolutes. In fact, the tendency to see things in seemingly obvious, binary, contrasting categories is usually associated with modernism. The tendency to dissolve binary categories and expose their arbitrary cultural co-dependency is associated with postmodernism.

MODERNISM Using rational, scientific, logical means to know the

world. Optimism that we can understand and control an objective world

POSTMODERNISM A reaction against rationalism, scientism, or

objectivity of modernism.

There is an absolute, universal truth that we can understand through rationalism and logic.

There is no universal truth. Rationality by itself does not help us truly understand the world.

Humans are material machines. We live in a purely physical world. Nothing exists beyond what our senses perceive.

Suspicious of such dogmatic claims to knowledge.

Humankind is progressing by using science and reason. "Progress" is a way to justify the domination by European culture of other cultures.

Time, history, progress Culture on Fast Forward: Time and history replaced by speed, futureness, accelerated obsolescence.

history as a "narrative of what happened" with a point of view and cultural/ideological interests.

Postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of history and cultural identities: history as "what 'really' happened" is from one group's point of view

Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, how things work) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, how we use things).

Attention to play of surfaces, images, things mean what we make them mean, no concern for "depth" but with how things look and respond

"disenchantment with material truth and search for abstract truth."

"There is no universal truth, abstract or otherwise."

Faith in the "real" beyond media and representations; authenticity of "originals"

Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original". "As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.

TIME LINE Renaissance and Enlightenment through World War II

  Post WWII, especially after 1968

GENERAL Attempt to acheive a unified, coherent world-view from

the fragmentation that defines existence

  Attempt to overturn the distinction between

"high" and "low" culture

High Modernism 1920s & 1930s, following WWI -- outmoded political orders and old ways of portraying the world no longer seemed appropriate or applicable; reaction against existing order

Eclecticism, a tendency toward parody and self-reference, and a relativism that knows no ultimate truth; no distinctions between "good" and "bad"

Classification of the world; order; hierarchy The way we understand the world is relative; it depends on our culture, position, class, gender, age, time period, beliefs, etc.

Mastery and progress Historical development; past affects present and future. Universalizing Linear (like a novel) Works of art, science are windows to the truth.

"Localizing", pluralizing Non-linear (like the Web) Works of art, science are only texts, can only be understood in themselves.

CULTURE High culture vs. low culture -- strictly divided; Only high

culture deserves to be studied, analyzed

  Everything's "popular" culture -- it all deserves

to be studied; pluralizing Commodification of culture -- everything can be bought or sold

Humans are self-governing and free to choose their own direction

People are the product of their culture and only imagine they are self-governing.

reality can be discovered through science and can be expressed abstractly (equations)

"the transformation of reality into images" (Britney Spears is not a person but an image; Nike is not about shoes but about an image, etc.)

Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing. Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities.

SYMBOLISM Symbols & meaning: hammer and sickle = world

communism

  Symbols drained of meaning: hammer and sickle

in advertising (e.g., beer commercials)

ARCHITECTURE "Form follows function"; Le Corbusier, "machine

aesthetic"; Mies van der Rohe; International style (eg, airports): straight, clean lines

  Multiple, historical refs.; "playful" mix of styles,

past and present. Las Vegas, Pompidou Center; Venturi, Robert Stirling

BODY Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human

and machine cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic,

human and machine and electronic

POLITICS Big ideas/big, centralized political parties rule Fragmented ideas, decentralized power; "micro-

politics": interest groups rule (minority factions, NRA, business groups); Foucault, "everyone has a little power" TV politics -- clash of images: "how will it play on the six o'clock news?"

Door-to-door politics; big rallies "Late capitalism" rules

Capitalism vs. communism: clash of ideologies "The Making of the President" Parody: Dr. Strangelove; Orwell's Animal Farm

"The Selling of the President" Pastiche: Wag The Dog

IDENTITY Sense of unified, centered self; "individualism," unified

identity.

  Sense of fragmentation and decentered self;

multiple, conflicting identities.

ARTS Artist is creator rather than preserver of culture

Impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism, suprematism (Malevich's "Black Square") "Photograph never lies" -- photos and video are windows/mirrors of reality

  Artist plays with different styles; aesthetics;

pastiche all-important Pop Art, Dada, montage

Art fights capitalism Photoshop: photos and video can be altered completely; montage (where's the reality?) Art is consumed by capitalism

Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.

Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality. Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.

Art as one unique object created by a master artist.

Analog media: quality deteriorates the farther removed a copy is from the original

Art as copies (Andy Warhol's Factory)

Digital media: there is no distinction between an original and a copy

Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.

Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness.

Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature).

Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche.

FICTION/LITERATURE Novel is the dominant form; movies Author determines

meaning; the "canon"; of great works: Shakespeare, Kafka, Joyce, Some can tell "good" from "bad" -- art critics important

  TV, WWW; Meaning is indeterminate. Thomas

Pynchon, Cathy Acker, William Gibson. Rise in importance of "popular" culture; we can't tell good from bad; it's all relative

Interpretation of a text; there is an ultimate meaning hidden inside master literature

Non-interpretation of a text; there is no ultimate meaning, instead meaning emerges from what the audience brings to the text

the book as sufficient bearer of the word; the library as system for printed knowledge

hypermedia as transcendence of physical limits of print media; the Web or Net as information system

MEDIA Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality.

The encyclopedia.

  Navigation, information management, just-in-

time knowledge.

The Web.

Broadcast media, centralized one- to-many communications.

Interactive, client-server, distributed, many- to-many media (the Net and Web).

Centering/centeredness, centralized knowledge.

Dispersal, dissemination, networked, distributed knowledge