July 29: End Note 3

Suppose you create a map of your city, then increasingly add detail to it, until it fully resembles the real world. But for city people, this is what you carry around as reality - you move from one point on your created map to another and do the appropriate tasks at each place and return to where you started. There is no longer any need to relate to the actual ground, you are ungrounded, hyperreal. You exist in our own matrix.

Consider this article about Baudrillard:

"Contradictions of Hyperreality: Baudrillard, Žižek, and Virtual Dialectics" by Ted Stolze, Cerritos College, Norwalk, CA, International Journal of Žižek Studies ISSN 1751-8229, Vol. 10, Number 1 https://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/viewFile/92/373

Which says:

Baudrillard's most fully elaborated account of hyperreality may be found in his essay "The Precession of Simulacra" (in Baudrillard 1994: 1-42). "In sum, Baudrillard is doubtless correct to point out that [computer] screens and their images give rise to certain disappearance-effects. But there is a more plausible response to the pointed question expressed in the title of one of his last books: "Why has the world not disappeared?" Answer: Because the world has always already existed prior to, and forever remains independent of, the very posing of the question." Baudrillard, J. (1994) "Simulacra and Simulation," trans. by S. Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Another critic of Baudrillard suggests that he is too concerned with production, almost in a Marxist manner. But a country that produces nothing actually produces nothing. So how can it trade that value to pay for imports?

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation


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