See Media Theory for A Level by Mark Dixon chapter 5 on Baudrillard
Key concept: the real and the hyperreal
- 3 distinct phases of cultural evolution
- Baudrillard's key argument stems from his observation that society has experienced three distinct stages of cultural revolution that he labels 'the precession of simulcra'. In many ways, Baudrillard's precession relates the story of 20th-century secularisation and the replacement of religion as society's primary meaning maker by the mass media. The three phases of Baudrillard's precession can be described as follows:
- Phase 1- Early modernity This covers the period from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution. In this stage, cultural products (literature, music and arts) map closely to what Baudrillard calls 'a profound reality'. Culture, in this sense, creates an authentic experience when consumed. Mass culture, moreover, is dominated by the lone voice of religion and connects the masses to singular ideology – to one version of the world. Culture, too, Baudrillard tells us, is 'sacramental' in that it communicates profound spiritual experiences. As a result, early modernity produces authenticity and collectively agreed set of truths about the world in which we live.
- Phase 2 – Modernity. The second phase, modernity, covers the period from the industrial Revolution to the Second World War. In this stage, religion and religious certainties begin to fragments, eventually giving way to early mass media forms like cinema, radio and photography. During modernity, Baudrillard argues, the authenticity and collective truths of early modernity begin to 'dissimulate', breaking down into competing versions of reality.
- Phase 3 – Postmodernity. The final phase, the phase in which we now live, he labels post-modernity.In post-modernity, Baudrillard argues, mass media forms dominate culture, replacing the single voice of religion with the multi-channel, multi-media whirlwind of contemporary mass media.This, Baudrillard tells us, is the age of hyperreality in which cultural products no longer reference the deeper unified significations the religion once provided. In the post-modern era, culture is fragmented, its meanings and instructions are temporary, its messages commercialised and inauthentic.
Baudrillard uses the word simulacra to suggest that culture (mass media, religion, art, etc) produces versions of reality to explain our place and function in the universe. Christian religion, for instance, constructs a version of reality in which, crudely speaking, God is said to have created the universe in seven days. Of course, God did not create the world in seven days. This assertion is an early religious story that attempted to explain the complexities of the universe before science could give us a more accurate picture. Culture, of course, authors numerous other stories that attempts to explain the world we living. Importantly, Baudrillard argues,These cultural products, all versions of reality, are in fact 'simulations' quotation. The 'precession of the simulacra' refers to the way in which those 'simulations' have changed since the Renaissance.
The ecstasy of communication
Significantly for Baudrillard, the technologies of the mass media have helped to construct what he calls an 'ecstasy of communication'. He argues that the process of making meaning has exponentially expanded in the postmodern era, permeating modern life in ways that lie far beyond the cultural capacities of previous historical periods. Baudrillard identifies the following effects of post maternity:
- The media is everywhere. In today's hyperreal world, every bus holding street corner and shop window is an advertising opportunity–indeed public spaces are so saturated with media that it is almost impossible to avoid the tidal wave of cultural messages aimed at us.
- Our private spaces have been invaded. Baudrillard tells us too that today's hyperreal media even penetrates the once safe havens of our homes. There is no escape, Baudrillard says, the incessant chatter of hyperreality: 'One's private living space,' Baudrillard writes, 'is conceived of as a receiving and operating area, as a monitoring screening endowed with telematic power'.
- Authenticity is impossible to find or keep. Because the hyperreal world of modern media is so all-encompassing and so incessant, Baudrillard tells us, the deluge of messages offered have limited significance. Cultural products in post-modernity construct throwaway messages, forgotten almost as instantly as they are consumed.
- Repetition and duplication effects.The post-modern media, Baudrillard further argues, repeats and repurposes content in never-ending chain of replication. Commercially successful products are repurposed, remade, serialised or copied to attract and maintain audiences, while genre oriented storytelling replicates narrative formulas in endless echoes of products that are themselves copies of something was made along time ago. In this sense, Baudrillard tells us, we know the end of any news event before it has happened. We know how our box sets will resolve or how our gaming cut scenes will play out, because 'everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.'
Meaning Implosion
The proliferation of media comes as a further cost in that the variety of arguments and opinions presented via television, news and online media makes it difficult for audiences to reach an objective conclusion about the real world. News outlets, for instance, produce a version of the world that we implicitly understand to be biased towards one political viewpoint, and today's media landscape it does not take too long to locate an opposing source or contradictory analysis
Indeed, products internally neutralise content through the use of opposing opinion editorials or balanced reportage. The resulting effect is to present a world in which simultaneous truths exist - a presentation, moreover, that lacks both objectivity or certainty and that leaves media audiences to effect what Baudrillard calls hyperreal 'inertia', a kind of mesmerised inability to act.
The age of advertising
'Promotion,' Baudrillard writes, 'is the most thick-skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict...It allows us to turn the world in advance of the world into consumable substance.' Whereas the age of modernity was dominated by cinema and photography, advertising he tells us presides over the post-modern age.That ascendancy, Baudrillard explains, has important repercussions in that the narrative strategies laid down by TV and print-based advertising form a story blueprint that influences other media products, while also configuring audiences to respond to those narratives with hyperreal 'inertia'.
Advertising, Baudrillard suggests, holds us in a hypnotic state of superficial saturation and fascination, teaching us from an early age that the mesmerising ideals of commercial advertising are rarely realised in real life. The ensuing mistrust of commercial media imagery, Baudrillard further argues, is regularly applied to other media forms. We are compelled to watch, he says, but we do not quite believe what we see.
Baudrillard suggests too that the language and narrative structures of advertising have infected other media products. News bulletins, for example, are reduced to easily digestible packages, their stories built upon the same strategies of suspense and revelation that we find in short-form advertising. Politicians, too, Baudrillard argues, have sacrificed debate and argument for news-friendly soundbites designed to effect political branding voter seduction. Drama, too, pulses in shorter and shorter scenes, while YouTube vloggers have swallowed wholesale advertising's commercial mantra by commodifying themselves - branding themselves in the same way that a shampoo ad might affect audience appeal via choreographed representations of impossible ideals.
Fictionalised reality/ Realised fiction
The blending of media forms is a further symptom of our hyperreal age Baudrillard tells us that products borrow and steal at will in order to attract our attention in today's media saturated landscape. As a result, contemporary media forms have blurred fact and fiction to the extent that, he argues, audiences can no longer tell them apart.
Documentaries cast their participants as if they were actors, deliberately orchestrating moments of narrative crisis to produce entertainment Geordie Shore, TOWIE and Love Island might cast participants from the real world but no one is fooled. Contestants and knowingly engineer their on-screen selves to maximise the opportunities that such shows present, guided, of course by the careful hand of TV producers so that their cast might satisfy audience expectation. There is little that is real in today's reality TV.
Baudrillard suggests that the news similarly effects an ever present discourse of fictionalised crisis, generating daily doses of real-life entertainment that are populated by cameos of TV savvy politicians and business leaders who are media trained so they might deliver news friendly soundbites. News narratives, too, replicate the language and imagery of disaster movies.The news is a never-ending soap opera packaged into easily digestible parcels, into three act narratives that instantly forgotten once delivered. Any meanings and emotions produced our temporary, Baudrillard argues, replaced by the next news cycle 'in an accelerated circulation of meaning'.
The shallowness of contemporary media hyperreality, he argues, produces a deep yearning by media audiences for products that provide authenticity.The endless churn of contemporary culture, he tells us, produces a desire for stability and validity that the media tries just satisfy through nostalgic appeals and an attempt to embed reality in programming.
The real world has fast become a staple ingredient in post-modern fiction. Biopics and historical drama readily reinterpret history without due regard to historical accuracy - repackaging the world of yesterday using stock characters and audience-friendly narrative formulas. Horror films also call upon their audiences to believe that their narratives are genuine through the ubiquitous 'based on real events' tagline.The word 'based', of course, gives due license to magnify, distort or change any element of the writer's choosing. And, of course, soap opera, crime drama, family drama and work-based drama purport to offer us a view of the world using the tropes of realism to convince us of their actuality, yet do so in ways that reflect nothing of reality at all.
Particularly applies to news about
news (e.g. stories about viral stories), or
celebrities who are famous for being
famous, where there is no clear sense of
a ‘real’ lying behind the hyperreality.
This is a book of essays covering the years from 1973 - 1986 by Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist (The Name of the Rose), semiotician, and cultural critic. (Semiotician: one who studies signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication). Eco writes as if his audience knows a great deal about Western Civilization, which can make this difficult to relate to and understand. Eco requires you to have a huge frame of reference and you may be looking up both medieval figures and pop culture of the 1970s, so just do so and don't feel intimidated.
The opening essay has Eco traveling the United States, home of the Hyper Real attractions (he notes that he was in the New Orleans French Quarter the day after seeing the New Orleans Square at Disneyland).
The opening essay has Eco traveling the United States, home of the Hyper Real attractions (he notes that he was in the New Orleans French Quarter the day after seeing the New Orleans Square at Disneyland).
He traveled around the United States to examine how we construct different realities. Sometimes they are copies of European originals and sometimes, like Disneyland and Disney World, we construct fake worlds that are intended to be artificial but actually better than reality.
The title essay is about the beautiful and horrific American sense of inflated reality as it manifests in its tourist spectacles, citing as examples a number of places: San Simeon, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Disneyland and Disney World, and particularly the Madonna Inn, an over-the-top, theme-roomed Swiss chalet hotel in San Luis Obispo. Eco doesn't sign off on the life-as-circus as he sees it here, but he gets why we do it, how the inflated story culled from a million facts and misunderstandings is the story we tell ourselves, the myth that we believe. Eco's prose is so evocative, you will want to drop everything and visit the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library, or at least the one that appears in the text.
Here is San Simeon aka Hearst Castle aka Xanadu from Citizen Cane
The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn't suggest something, and hence the masterpiece of bricolage, haunted by horror vacui, that is here achieved.
and here he goes into metaphoric overdrive attempting to depict the Madonna Inn:
Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry, Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms.
Here is San Simeon aka Hearst Castle aka Xanadu from Citizen Cane
The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn't suggest something, and hence the masterpiece of bricolage, haunted by horror vacui, that is here achieved.
and here he goes into metaphoric overdrive attempting to depict the Madonna Inn:
Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry, Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms.
In further essays, he discusses the effect that wearing blue jeans has on one’s perception of the world (especially, apparently, the very tight kind of blue jeans), the return of the Middle Ages to modern society, his views on World Cup Soccer as a social phenomenon, and how movies become cult movies, using Casablanca as an example.
Eco suggests that fo the average American’s taste, he feels the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copies; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. He also feels that Americans always want more of extra, and that we are not satisfied with the average serving of life and must strive to fabricate the absolute fake - for instance the oval office in Texas. Everyone, except perhaps, New Orleans, is on his disapproval list.
In his travels across American observing various museums, mansions, amusement parks and historical sites, Eco examines every detail of the location, from its real items and imitations—such as furniture duplicated to look like a specific real piece, fabricated ceilings to look like ceilings in chapels found in Europe, to the Pompeii-mosaic-tiled floor in the Hearst Castle, Eco is offended at America’s obsessiveness about copying the original.
In his travels across American observing various museums, mansions, amusement parks and historical sites, Eco examines every detail of the location, from its real items and imitations—such as furniture duplicated to look like a specific real piece, fabricated ceilings to look like ceilings in chapels found in Europe, to the Pompeii-mosaic-tiled floor in the Hearst Castle, Eco is offended at America’s obsessiveness about copying the original.
The essays about the modern fascination with the Middle Ages suggest that the reason for the fascination is that much that is important in the modern world got its start in the Middle Ages.
Many of the assertions in this book about spectacle seem more true now than in the 1990s when social media has literalized many of the ideas of self as spectacle and gone are worries about authenticity.
Travels in Hyperreality centres around America's fixation with creating such authentic fakes as to raise them to almost mystical iconography. From Disneyland, to wax museums and classical Greek and European replications incorporated into the houses of the uber wealthy.
“This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness,” of horror vacui.”
Replicas take on lives of their own like the imitations of the original Manhattan purchase contract sold in one tourist gift shop---it looks and even smells real, and yet it is in English whereas the original was written in Dutch... a replica of a past that never was. "Museum" context further distorted by the use of fake reference photos or small scale miniature models in order to make the contrived exhibits more "authentic." Even the fictional wax diorama, like that created for Alice in Wonderland, is made to such precision as to seem real---a fiction of a fiction masquerading as real. This is the "hyperreal." And with comical perfection, Eco's metaphors match the absurdity of his subject matter:
“The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. … Let’s say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli.”
America fills its cultural/historical void with next-level deception worthy of praise---entertainment as existential balm. Eco reverses the polarity as he takes us to Marinelands, a kind of Sea World where the real (aquatic creatures) are made to feel fake (routine performances, interactions with trainers, etc.). Meanwhile, the human tourists are treated like animals as they are herded from location to location, told when to sit and stay. But all this is not merely Eco applying theory to pop culture and tourist destinations---it creates a fascinating perspective on the America of the '80s.
And just before we get lost in the funhouse, we move on to the middle ages, a whole section on how we're reliving the past, a past in which “...all the problems of the Western world emerged: Modern languages, merchant cities, capitalistic economy (along with banks, checks, and prime rate) are inventions of medieval society.” The Pax Americana struggles with its own demise akin to the Roman Empire's. The barbarians are at the gates but they can't be identified as simply as we like (despite a political climate that attempts to do so). All we know is that something definitive is slipping through the cracks (a "greatness;" a shared history... ). Eco doesn't describe it this way because he was writing these essays some 40 to 50 years ago, but they are remarkably prescient.
The music video is often described as ‘postmodern’, a slippery term which is sometimes used as a substitute for intertextuality. Broadly, if we see music promos as frequently drawing upon existing texts in order to spark recognition in the audience, we have a working definition of ‘intertextuality’. Not all audiences will necessarily spot the reference and this need not massively detract from their pleasure in the text itself, but it is often argued that greater pleasure will be derived by those who know the reference and are somehow flattered by this.
It is perhaps not surprising that so many music videos draw upon cinema as a starting point, since their directors are often film school graduates looking to move on eventually to the film industry itself. From Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ (Mary Lambert 1985, drawing on ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’) to 2Pac and Dr Dre’s ‘California Love’ (Hype Williams 1996, drawing on ‘Mad Max’) there are many examples of cinematic references which dominate music video. Television is often a point of reference too, as in The Beastie Boys’ spoof cop show titles sequence for Sabotage (Spike Jonze 1994) or REMs recent news show parody ‘Bad Day’ (Tim Hope 2003).
John Stewart sees visual reference in music video coming from a range of sources, though the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography. Fashion sometimes takes the form of specific catwalk references and sometimes even the use of supermodels, as by George Michael in both ‘Father Figure’(Morahan/Michael 1988) and ‘Freedom’ (Fincher 1990). Probably the most memorable example of reference to fashion photography is Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ (Donovan 1986), parodied many times for its use of mannequin style females in the band fronted by a besuited Palmer. Shania Twain copied it for her ‘Man I feel like a woman’ (Paul Boyd 1999) and Tamra Davis directed a $350 parody of it for Tone Loc’s ‘Wild Thing’ (1988).
For the near future, John Stewart suspects that the influence of video games will predominate for the younger audience with the more plasticised look of characters emerging (as seen for example in Robbie Williams’ ‘Let Love be your Energy’ dir. Olly Reed 2001 and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers ‘Californication’ dir.Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris 2000)
His description of the music video “incorporating, raiding and reconstructing” is essentially the essence of intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar to generate both potentially nostalgic associations and new meanings. It is perhaps more explicitly evident in the music video than in any other media form, with the possible exception of advertising.
“Each group manufactures its dissidents and its heresiarchs, the attacks that Franciscans and Dominicans made on each other are not very different from those of Trotskyites and Stalinists---nor is this the politically cynical index of an aimless disorder, but on the contrary, it is the index of a society where new forces are seeking new images of collective life and discover they cannot be imposed except through the struggle against established “systems,” exercising a conscious and severe intolerance in theory and practice.”
His essays dealing with the contemporary medieval, both how we consider the Middle Ages today and how we are, today, medieval still ring true, even at the distance of 20-odd years. We do still dream of the Middle Ages, as the success of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter films and books and others like The DaVinci Code will tell us. What we do not do in our popular culture is define what we actually mean by "medieval". Eco elucidates the "Ten Little Middle Ages" he believes we are all talking about when we call this movie, that book or this aesthetic "medieval". The important point about the whole exercise is that the Middle Ages, as historical time period, is not the point: by and large, pop culture references to the medieval, explicit or implicit, really only speak to a set of stereotypes gleaned from what we require the Middle Ages to have been for our present day purposes.
In the section on The Gods of the Underworld, he examines the recycling of millenarian cults (Manson, Jim Jones), fears of the End Days, spiritual revivals, and Afro-Brazilian rites mixing spiritualities in a heady concoction that attempts to replace erased slave histories.
But for all these cyclical commonalities, he outlines fascinating breaks with the past and changes still in development. In the section The Global Village, he looks at the role of communication, remarking upon the near impossibility of revolution with a globe that's under constant surveillance and capitalist production/trade exploits sometimes controlling entire countries. The multinational system itself actually relying on terrorism and small local wars to act like pressure release valves on the larger system and preclude large world wars. Mini-insurrections built into the system (keeping in mind that all this was written prior to 9/11 and the so called "War on Terror," which, while larger scale in terms of disruption and challenge to the status quo ultimately seem to have reinforced power dynamics thanks to remote warfare either by proxy or by technology... #dronestrikes).“Today a country belongs to the person who controls communication.”
“We can legitimately suspect that the communications media would be alienating even if they belonged to the community.”
Some of his essays feel prescient: with just these two quotations, we could easily move from Russia to North Korea to Berlusconi and Trump, and then on to social media, most especially Twitter. Controlling communications allows one to shape the story, to distract, to frame the discussion. In a sense, social media does belong to the community in that participants shape the content but its form seems to dictate the kind of tribalist return that television engendered. And if Eco thought sports media had become a kind of meta-industry no longer dependent on the actual performance of real sport, we can only imagine what he would think today (sports media/talk doesn't just replace political discussion and participation as a kind of tribalist substitute as he suggests, it now delves into "fantasy" participation.
In this post, I acknowledge the views of critics and readers from The Good Read.
Text that are relevant:
Disney films, Disney World, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter franchise
SlideShare on Postmodernism and another
- Intertextuality
POSTMODERNISM and MUSIC VIDEOS: Article here
MUSIC VIDEOS and POSTMODERNISM (Teaching Music Video Pete Fraser, BFI, 2004)
The music video is often described as ‘postmodern’, a slippery term which is sometimes used as a substitute for intertextuality. Broadly, if we see music promos as frequently drawing upon existing texts in order to spark recognition in the audience, we have a working definition of ‘intertextuality’. Not all audiences will necessarily spot the reference and this need not massively detract from their pleasure in the text itself, but it is often argued that greater pleasure will be derived by those who know the reference and are somehow flattered by this.
It is perhaps not surprising that so many music videos draw upon cinema as a starting point, since their directors are often film school graduates looking to move on eventually to the film industry itself. From Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ (Mary Lambert 1985, drawing on ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’) to 2Pac and Dr Dre’s ‘California Love’ (Hype Williams 1996, drawing on ‘Mad Max’) there are many examples of cinematic references which dominate music video. Television is often a point of reference too, as in The Beastie Boys’ spoof cop show titles sequence for Sabotage (Spike Jonze 1994) or REMs recent news show parody ‘Bad Day’ (Tim Hope 2003).
John Stewart sees visual reference in music video coming from a range of sources, though the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography. Fashion sometimes takes the form of specific catwalk references and sometimes even the use of supermodels, as by George Michael in both ‘Father Figure’(Morahan/Michael 1988) and ‘Freedom’ (Fincher 1990). Probably the most memorable example of reference to fashion photography is Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ (Donovan 1986), parodied many times for its use of mannequin style females in the band fronted by a besuited Palmer. Shania Twain copied it for her ‘Man I feel like a woman’ (Paul Boyd 1999) and Tamra Davis directed a $350 parody of it for Tone Loc’s ‘Wild Thing’ (1988).
For the near future, John Stewart suspects that the influence of video games will predominate for the younger audience with the more plasticised look of characters emerging (as seen for example in Robbie Williams’ ‘Let Love be your Energy’ dir. Olly Reed 2001 and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers ‘Californication’ dir.Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris 2000)
His description of the music video “incorporating, raiding and reconstructing” is essentially the essence of intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar to generate both potentially nostalgic associations and new meanings. It is perhaps more explicitly evident in the music video than in any other media form, with the possible exception of advertising.
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