Vitanza, Victor.
"Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways." Olson 164-176.
Tag: spectacle
Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation (1981/1994)
Baudrillard begins by suggesting the impossibility of Borges’s exhaustive
map, a precise cartography of the empire. According to Baudrillard, such a
map is no longer possible; the farcical project is rendered impossible because
of "the precession of simulacra," which we might take as an onslaught of
images without immediate reference or "copies without originals." If images
are referential, simulacra shroud the reference, resulting in what Baudrillard
calls the hyperreal as well as conditions giving rise to "the era of
simulation [which] is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials" (2).
Hereafter, maps precede territory (1); this applies to the medicalization of the
body and anticipations of war-action as the trainings for each are staged
through elaborate and artificial simulations. Also, Baudrillard works this
theory on Disneyland, Watergate and God.
Debord – Society of the Spectacle (1967/1983)
Spectacle, for Debord, refers broadly to the convergence of representation,
media, the proliferation of image-objects, and visually gripping mass
circulations given to
commodity: "a monopoly of appearances" (12).
Debord
spearheaded the Situationist
International movement which was resolutely
actionist, performative, politically motivated, and theoretically sophisticated
(expansive of avant-garde, from Dada to surrealism). In
Society of the Spectacle, Debord issues a series of relatively short
vignettes–manifesto-like blurbs each attending to the effects of the spectacle,
from the separations of workers and their products to widespread isolationism. Debord was concerned with the implications of the massification of the image,
consumerist patterns, and the spread of disillusionment pushed by the complacent
and consenting bourgeois profiteers. Among the multiple definitional
turns, Debord writes, "spectacle is the opposite of dialogue" (18).