Today's lesson: If Jean Baudrillard started a cult, I would join it.

"...Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.

Realism had already inaugurated this process. The rhetoric of the real signaled its gravely altered status (its golden age was characterized by an innocence of language in which it was not obliged to redouble what it said with a reality effect). Surrealism remained within the purview of the realism it contested - but also redoubled - through its rupture with the Imaginary. The hyperreal represents a much more advanced stage insofar as it manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself."

An excerpt from Symbolic Exchange and Death, originally published in Paris, in 1976.

Currently I am reading "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard, which is about the aforementioned hyperreal. Let me see if I can summarize it somewhat, although it is a concept that takes a whole book to develop. It's not kiddie stuff.

If I was to (somewhat) succinctly sum up Baudrillard's thesis, it would be this:

Our "postmodern" society is defined primarily by the destruction of the real through the formation of the "hyperreal." This hyperreal is the abstraction of society and its application as a circular, tautologistic model of reality. Modern pseudo-capitalist ideals have completely permeated our society, objectifying and commodifying every aspect of our lives, including the social, political, and intellectual. This total commodification has resulted in 'the means' and 'the end' becoming one and the same, with the means eventually totally replacing and destroying the end. Thus real meaning is lost, as the system becomes a self-propagating and simulated model of real society. What then proceeds in our society is a meaningless simulacrum, a copy without an original, that simulates the normal procession of society, hiding the fact that the real end, to which capitalism and our society were means, has been lost.

This, of course, is a thesis and not an explanation. It might make some sense at this point, or it might make no sense at all. You have to read the book to really learn anything! I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a very thought provoking and mind bending interpretation of modern society. Although it does have a tendency to be somewhat dry and overly academic at times, once you have become acclamated with the writing style, it is very enjoyable. It is probably one of the most thought-provoking and interesting books I've read. Here's the information on it:

Simulacra and Simulation
by Jean Baudrillard
Translated (from French) by Sheila Faria Glaser
ISBN: 0472065211