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Simulacrum

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This article is about the term. For the album by John Zorn, see Simulacrum (album).
"Simulacra" redirects here. For the 2017 video game, see Simulacra (video game).

Image of a real apple (left), and plastic food model apple (right). The fake apple is a simulacrum.

A simulacrum (pl.: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin simulacrum, meaning "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing.[1] The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original.[2] Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing.[3] Other art forms that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil,[4] pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave.[3]

Original philosophy

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Mole & Thomas, Human Statue of Liberty (1919)—12,000 people in the flame of the torch, 6,000 in the rest of the shape. Plato was referring to an optical illusion such as this in his discussion of simulacra.

Simulacra have long been of interest to philosophers. In his Sophist, Plato speaks of two kinds of image-making. The first is a faithful reproduction, attempted to copy precisely the original. The second is intentionally distorted in order to make the copy appear correct to viewers. He gives the example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on the top than on the bottom so that viewers on the ground would see it correctly. If they could view it in scale, they would realize it was malformed. This example from the visual arts serves as a metaphor for the philosophical arts and the tendency of some philosophers to distort the truth so that it appears accurate unless viewed from the proper angle.[5] Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum (but does not use the term) in the Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.[6]

French semiotician and social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. According to Baudrillard, what the simulacrum copies either had no original or no longer has an original, since a simulacrum signifies something it is not, and therefore leaves the original unable to be located. Where Plato saw two types of representation—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".[7][8]

In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned".[9] Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance".[10]

Alain Badiou, in speaking with reference to Nazism about Evil, writes,[11] "fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the situation not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set ... (the 'Germans' or the 'Aryans')".

According to the philosopher Florent Schoumacher,[12] in societies of hypermodernity, in the West, the social contract states that we are obliged to use “simulacra”. We are carried there by hubris (hubris). However, the contemporary notion of simulacrum assumes that we all have a biased relationship with the reality of the world, not because reality is not accessible, but because we wish not to see things as they appear. The philosopher nevertheless emphasizes that our capacity for aphairesis, our capacity for representing the world, does indeed exist.

Recreation

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Recreational simulacra include reenactments of historical events or replicas of landmarks, such as Colonial Williamsburg and the Eiffel Tower, and constructions of fictional or cultural ideas, such as Fantasyland at The Walt Disney Company's Magic Kingdom. The various Disney parks have been regarded as the ultimate recreational simulacra by some philosophers, with Baudrillard noting that Walt Disney World Resort is a copy of a copy, or "a simulacrum to the second power".[13] In 1975, Italian author Umberto Eco argued that at Disney's parks, "we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it".[14] Examining the impact of Disney's simulacrum of national parks, Disney's Wilderness Lodge, environmentalist Jennifer Cypher and anthropologist Eric Higgs expressed worry that "the boundary between artificiality and reality will become so thin that the artificial will become the centre of moral value".[15] Eco also refers to commentary on watching sports as sports to the power of three, or sports cubed. First, there are the players who participate in the sport (the real), then the onlookers merely witnessing it, and finally the commentary on the act of witnessing the sport. Visual artist Paul McCarthy has created entire installations based on Pirates of the Caribbean and theme park simulacra, with videos playing inside the installation.

Caricature

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An interesting example of simulacrum is caricature. When an artist produces a line drawing that closely approximates the facial features of a real person, the subject of the sketch cannot be easily identified by a random observer; it can be taken for a likeness of any individual. However, a caricaturist exaggerates prominent facial features, and a viewer will pick up on these features and be able to identify the subject, even though the caricature bears far less actual resemblance to the subject.

Iconography

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Beer (1999: p. 11) employs the term "simulacrum" to denote the formation of a sign or iconographic image, whether iconic or aniconic, in the landscape or greater field of Thangka art and Tantric Buddhist iconography. For example, an iconographic representation of a cloud formation sheltering a deity in a thangka or covering the auspice of a sacred mountain in the natural environment may be discerned as a simulacrum of an "auspicious canopy" (Sanskrit: Chhatra) of the Ashtamangala.[16] Perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena approach a cultural universal and may be proffered as evidence of the natural creative spiritual engagement of the experienced environment endemic to the human psychology.

As artificial beings

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Simulacra often appear in speculative fiction. Examples of simulacra in the sense of artificial or supernaturally or scientifically created artificial life forms include:

Also, the illusions of absent loved ones created by an alien life form in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris can be considered simulacra.

Architecture

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Architecture is a special form of simulacrum.[according to whom?]

In his book Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard describes the Beaubourg effect in which the Pompidou Centre functions as a monument of a mass simulation that absorbs and devours all the cultural energy from its surrounding areas. According to Baudrillard, the Centre Pompidou is "a machine for making emptiness".[17]

An everyday use of the simulacrum are the false facades, used during renovations to hide and imitate the real architecture underneath it.

A Potemkin village is a simulation: a facade meant to fool the viewer into thinking that he or she is seeing the real thing. The concept is used in the Russian-speaking world as well as in English and in other languages. Potemkin village belongs to a genus of phenomena that proliferated in post-Soviet space. Those phenomena describe gaps between external appearances and underlying realities.[18]

Disneyland – Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. [...] Play of illusions and phantasms.[19]

Las Vegas – the absolute advertising city (of the 1950s, of the crazy years of advertising, which has retained the charm of that era).[20]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Word of the Day". dictionary.com. 1 May 2003. Archived from the original on 17 February 2007. Retrieved 2 May 2007.
  2. ^ "simulacrum" The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1993
  3. ^ a b Massumi, Brian. "Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari." Archived 23 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine retrieved 2 May 2007
  4. ^ Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. transl. Sheila Faria Glaser. "XI. Holograms." Archived 27 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine retrieved 5 May 2010
  5. ^ Plato. The Sophist. Translated by Jowett, Benjamin. Archived from the original on 30 December 2005. Retrieved 2 May 2007.
  6. ^ Nietzsche, Friedrich (1888). "Reason in Philosophy". Twilight of the Idols. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Archived from the original on 26 April 2007. Retrieved 2 May 2007.
  7. ^ "Baudrillard Simulacra". Archived from the original on 9 February 2004. Retrieved 2 May 2007.
  8. ^ Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Poster, Mark (ed.). Selected Writings. Stanford University Press. pp. 166–184. ISBN 978-0804714785.
  9. ^ Deleuze, Gilles (1968). Difference and Repetition. Translated by Patton, Paul. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 69.
  10. ^ Deleuze 1968, p. 299.
  11. ^ Badiou, Alain (2001). Ethics - An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Hallward, Peter. London: Verso. p. 74.
  12. ^ Schoumacher, Florent (2024). Eîdolon: Simulacre et hypermodernité [Eîdolon: Simulacrum and Hypermodernity]. Paris: Balland.
  13. ^ Baudrillard, Jean (4 March 1996). "Disneyworld Company". Libération. Translated by Debrix, Francois. Archived from the original on 27 May 2010. Retrieved 12 September 2024.
  14. ^ Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Reproduced in relevant portion at "The City of Robots" Archived 12 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine retrieved 2 May 2007
  15. ^ Cypher, Jennifer and Eric Higgs. "Colonizing the Imagination: Disney's Wilderness Lodge". Archived 4 July 2007 at the Wayback Machine retrieved 2 May 2007
  16. ^ Beer, Robert (1999). The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs. Shambhala Publications. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-57062-416-2.
  17. ^ Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Glaser, Sheila Faria. University of Michigan Press. p. 43. ISBN 978-0472065219.
  18. ^ Pisano, Jessica (2014), Beissinger, Mark; Kotkin, Stephen (eds.), "Pokazukhaand Cardiologist Khrenov: Soviet Legacies, Legacy Theater, and a Usable Past", Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 222–242, ISBN 978-1-107-05417-2, retrieved 5 May 2022
  19. ^ Baudrillard 1994, p. 10.
  20. ^ Baudrillard 1994, p. 63.
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