Plato's cave brief summary.
Plato uses a simile of the projections within the cave to describe the reality that the public see. this is however not actually a reality, it is a simulacrum.
The movement through the writing describes how as each simulation is toppled by the discovery of what creates it, a new reality is born in the mind, because of a new, higher understanding of what reality is.
Plato believed there was a higher reality even than the one in which he was living, beyond what he called the world of appearances.
Visual Culture a brief summary.
This text discusses the flattening of meaning. It discusses the line between reality and simulacrum being crossed completely within art and media.
The point is made that this simulacrum has been produced through the forcing of meaning, within the media, to a point at which the reality portrayed is not actually a reality.
The viewers own sense of reality is changed to a hyper-reality produced by images being repeated without meaning, disconnecting from relevance to the audience, in a cycle that simply pushes itself further from any form of reality.
Jean Baudrillard : Simulacra and Simulation. Brief summary of text.
"To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have." Baudrillard discusses in the first section of the text, the divine irreference of images, how simulation is much more complicated than this initial discription. He uses the example of the simulation of illness. On one hand you have the person who fakes an illness by simply telling people they are ill, this leaving the "principal of reality intact." The dissimulator knows the difference themself, they are simply masking the truth. However where reality is put to trial, is with the simulator. If someone simulates an illness, they have produced the symptoms of the illness in themselves. Baudrillard states it is in this scenario that the "difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary" is threatened. Here the question of wether the simulator is ill or not is difficult to answer because in reality they produce the same symptoms as if they were actually afflicted with said illness. This scenario is translated to the loss of meaning through reference to medicine. If any symptom can be produced, then any illness could simply be simulated and medicine, which treats the "physical cause" for said illness, becomes meaningless because the line between what is really causing the illness, psychosomatic or physical, is blurred and you cannot treat a cause that is not there.
Baudrillard moves on to discuss the idea of simulacra in religion. Having looked at the iconoclasts destruction of worshiping idols, as they dissimulate god through representing what is supposedly represented in the conscience and cannot be seen. He questions whether god himself can be indeed just simulated, through being reduced to the signs that constitute faith. A good example for this is the apparition of God. Because the idea is given to those who hold faith in god, that he may appear to a person, or have a divine affect on said person, this supposedly being suggested as a sign of the reality of that faith, through the possibly dissimulated messages preached, from which origin of that religion stems, by the same idea of the simulacrum, any apparition or divine happening could have been simulated by the subconscious of the believer, that is to say that the subconscious may be simulating the sign from outside the physical control of the person, and this then questions whether God can be real or just a mass combination of dissimulation and the following simulation that has resulted in the simulacrum that is the belief in God.
In regards to the media, Baudrillard's hypothesis, within the implosion of meaning in the media, says that because of the way in which information is so heavily subscribed to in modernity, through so many different channels, there is a distinct loss of meaning because of the hyper acceleration of when, where and how it is received.
"Whoever is under-exposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning" however instead the channels by which people receive this information are simply over saturated leaving no room for specific meaning, just a blanketed environment of mass information devouring its own content.
In Advertising ground zero, the idea of advertising having moved out of simple publicity, of a consumable product, is suggested. A comparison is drawn to the social. Where in advertising is said to have lost any form to a point where it does not have its own substance, through its consumer, but simply through the simulation of the modern social mechanism. Advertising is simulacra, much as the public domain is, meanings that have been dissimulated and simulated time and time over to the point where they drive themselves to more production of signs and meanings and the difference between what is real (information) and what is social simulation has been lost.
