Evening,
So this is going to be a little different to the usual posts that I do... I'm not going to cut out the self-indulgence but this also isn't about my life. Much.
In one of my Sociology lectures on Thursday we discussed Jean Baudrillard, the French Philosopher and Sociologist. We read an obituary from the
Guardian on Baudrillard and then proceeded to attempt a civilised deliberation.
You might need a little bit of background knowledge about this Seminar I have. It is taken by a middle-aged, female, Communist who spends her life in black. Someone who I would
never want to get on the wrong side of!
Anyway, of the 15 or so people that turn up to this Seminar, I'd say that easily 1/3 are mature students. Mature students who have an extra couple of decades' worth of life experience to add to their knowledge and opinions compared to the green Undergraduates who have just come out of college for the standard University life.
We are all supposed to read the obituary, and answer two questions ready for discussion:
1.) Consider what has been the main contribution of Baudrillard to Social Theory.
2.) What are the advantages and disadvantages of Baudrillard's theory?
Well. Baudrillard, born in 1929, could easily be referred to as a Post-modernist, and even a Conspiracy theorist. He questioned reality, mistrusted the media and believed in a 'hyper-reality'. It was he who helped to coin the term 'virtual-reality' and decided that we are the "simulacrum of (ourselves)." The portrayal of Baudrillard through his obituary gives the impression that he was a very ironic, sarcastic, entertaining and somewhat cynical man. He is perceived as a very influential contemporary social theorist, but his entire arguments about how we don't exist in a real world, (yeah, the Gulf War never actually happened) sound as if he wanted to make an absurd theory just to see who would follow it.
For example, the 1999 film
The Matrix takes many of his ideas and uses them to create this fictitious world where we are all controlled by machines in a world that doesn't really exist. However, Baudrillard protested against the film saying that,
"The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce," and so doesnt want to get involved with it personally. Despite his reasoning and firm belief of 'virtual-reality' he doesn't ever give us a way to become
real; it's almost as if we are doomed to live in this 'hyper-reality'!
So the examples that my fellow students start to fling around the classroom include; Disney-isation (apparently that
is a word), airbrushing, films (CGI in particular), computer games, plastic surgery, internet dating, fashion, the list is endless. According to Baudrillard, Disney films and Disneyland/world corrupt our children into believing in a false world. We are socially conditioning them to believe in the 'happily ever after' ending, that animals can talk, that, in the case of Pocahontas, history wasn't at all bloody and painful but in fact a walk in the park.
Then of course general films were brought into the mix, how we apparently
believe that what happens in the films happened in real life. Seriously, the
Saw franchise would have a field day if they knew that everyone completely
believed in the horrendous torture that occurs throughout those films. The conversation then rambled on to airbrushing. On to how our 'virtual life' no longer knows what it is to be beautiful and how we all want to look younger and we have to look like the celebrities in the magazines who have flawless skin and are size zero.
Apparently there is this incessant need for us to want to achieve 'the American Dream' but in actual fact chasing that dream is giving in to the 'virtual reality' and embracing our simulacrum. The line between what is
real and what is
virtual is being blurred by our society and we are letting it. We just try to fulfil our wants, without really knowing what it is what we want, because we never have enough. We get seduced into wanting to possess objects and adopt styles that say more about who we are than we can ourselves.
Baudrillard has a point in that we are completely obsessed with the idea of celebrity and instant gratification and this idea of globalisation - that the entire (Western) world is obsessed with having one economy, one financial market that can be monopolised for capitalist gain. It was Marx who said that capitalism was the result of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which Baudrillard expanded on to say that it the class distinctions had
'been replaced, in the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation'.
Yet is it fair to say that we don't know what is real? Taking it to the extreme, we can't honestly, 100% know anything about anyone else's lives unless we experienced it firsthand. Everything that we hear from other people we judge based on our perception and the reliability of the source, but if we have been socially conditioned to believe; the 6 o'clock news, the Guardian, the internet etc. then why would we ever have any reason to doubt it?
In reference to the ideas that people can spend their entire lives blinkered by 'virtual reality', I don't doubt that it is possible. Some people may lack actual social skills and thus spend their lives hiding away on the computer, having virtual relationships, ordering their food online, doing work at home, talking to people on networking sites, watching films and tv, reading nothing other than what is fed to them through their frequented websites, playing games in virtual worlds, and their lives do lack any form of reality, think the Disney (!) Pixar (!!) film
Wall-E, set in the distant future.
However ironic Baudrillard tries and succeeds to be, he does bring up some interesting points about where we are headed. I find it difficult to understand wanting to explain the gory details of war to a child who wants nothing more than to see moving pictures and a simple storyline, or how we can honestly believe that men and women over the age of 40 can be wrinkle free without plastic surgery or airbrushing (which I accidentally said in out loud in the seminar... Didn't go down too well).
We live in a world where we care about our image and how we dress and we aspire to have a better life. How is that unreal? The Western world have it ingrained that we should be ambitious, aim high and want more than we have. How is that unreal? We want to believe what we are told because it is easier for us to believe than to question everything, we want to have easy and happy lives with no troubles or scandals. How is that unreal?
But then, in comparison to our capitalist, commodity fetishism there is the hard reality of poverty, discrimination, prejudice, environmental disasters and crime, which is impossible to escape and is the only life that some people know. They have no access to our 'hyper-reality'. Escapism escapes the very people who need it most and we are stuck in a world where we are more concerned about fashion and plastic surgery than saving lives and trying to live the most
real life that we can imagine. One without the desolate hardships or the ridiculous extravagance.
Ciao Bellas
Xx
In my Victorian literature module we are about to start studying Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-1861).
There is no way in hell that you can not feel the passion behind that poem. I just hope that it brightens up your day. I will write something new soon.
