Simulacra and Simulation (The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

Fantastic book. A different level of learning, you have to be really into it to get the most out of this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and agree with the message.

Very intriguing and easy to digest book, and in some ways I wonder if people will take this book up more as we explore deeper connections to technology. Given the book examines themes such as shared existence and "reality" it would be interesting to apply it to our current challenges where people are often building their beliefs and sharing them through social media. Overall though a good book and, my rambling aside, I have enjoyed it so far. Definitely don't regret my purchase!

In using this for my dissertation in English Literature, it is a extremely dense book, which is surprising as it is shorter than expected. Nonetheless, once one can wrap their head around the concepts that Baudrillard is laying out, it yields for an extremely fulfilling and enticing read.

A dense work, sometimes impenetrable and fails to define its terms such that anyone without a background in Baudrillard's work would struggle to keep apace. These criticisms aside, this is a perspective-altering work of far reaching insight, I find myself taken aback by how prescient it is despite its age and how much it appears to presage a lot of current events. There is something of value on every single page, although some pages may require a little more work and interpretation than others. Don't be afraid to re-read sections, you won't regret it.

I've been toying with buying this book for a while now: if only because it was featured in The Matrix. But I've recently got a job teaching media at a university and thought this might be some theory that would come in handy. Initial skimming suggests it's a challenging read. I'll let you know how I get on ;-)

Good to keep the brain cells from falling out ya nose.

Had to write review for sheer volume of insights.

Interesting

I will admit it took me a few weeks to gather my thoughts on this book, particularly because I couldn't understand if it's 4 or 5 stars for me (which is quite meaningless anyways, so let's move on). I think the purpose of theory and philosophy is to come up with ways of looking at life, that make the most sense, or that make life more "understandable". Beaudrillard does exactly that in Simulacra and Simulation, and the relevance of this book to our current timeline could not be understated in a thousand years. I will not lie - this book is hard to grasp. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either a genius or a liar. Some of the articles in this are very coherent and clear, and some are very abstract and confusing. On numerous occasions I found myself treating certain pages as just plain text because I could not understand what the hell is going on. The good news is that I don't think it requires any particular background, except for maybe a very basic grasp of semiology/semiotics. But for the vast majority of the book, there is a point, a very strong point, and as much as I didn't understand some of it (particularly the latter half), I still managed to extract very valuable insights, practically every 2 pages. This is one of the book's greatest strengths - Beaudrillard manages to keep it fresh by approaching the same concept from different angles and there really is beef around the bone - I often found myself thinking about the book while not reading it, which to me is the greatest evidence that a book is truly interesting to me, on some level. Beaudrillard's extremely cynical and pessimistic view is all encompassing - to the point where it seems he fails to see the world in way different than that of the prism of simulacrum and simulation. As much as these raw ratings really don't mean much, I decided to eventually give a 5-star rating simply because of how profoundly profound some of the insights were and how mind-numbingly relevant this book is to world we live in. Beaudrillard wrote this in the 80's - he looked into the future and saw nothing but a grim world deprived of any true meaning. When I say this book is best read critically I mean that you don't have to agree with every single sentence and every single point he makes, to still be able to appreciate the theoretical structure he leans on, and how he meticulous dissects everything in the modern life and exposes the mold and that hides itself from plain sight.

very good..

Very difficult to understand unless you have sone background in related topic.

This is essential reading for anyone interested in postmodern philosophy. Discussion of his proposal that our world has lost all referentials, and predominantly exists in the form of simulacra, or copies without a true original. Examples from Apocalypse Now, Crash, Disneyland, a French modern arm museum, the Holocaust, and the idea of nuclear deterrence, all in the service of the idea that the world has become...well, the Cracker Barrel, hyperreal versions of signs that have lost meaning. I'm sure I have butchered some terms here, which leads me to... ...the text alternates between the poetic and the utterly incomprehensible, in which there were pages where I won't even pretend to understand what Baudrillard was on about. But it sure seems important.

Some favourite quotations: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operating double." (p.2) (on god) "This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, who millennial quarrel is still with us today . This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from conscience of man , and the destructive annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, that only simulacrum ever existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum - from this came their urge to destroy the images." (p.4) "We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never know the word of Christ. Thus at the beginning of colonization , there was a moment of stupor and bewilderment before the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel. There were two possible responses: either admit that this Law was not universal, or exterminate the Indians to efface the evidence. In general, one contented oneself with converting them , or even simply discovering them, which would suffice to slowly exterminate them." (p.10) "Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based," (p.21) "History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth," (p.43) "Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal." (p.45) "Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation. And paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia - but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreampt of as one would dream of a lost object." (p.123)