Essay #3- Dreams

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Dream or Reality

The simulacrum is the word needed to describe and comprehend many modern processes - from postmodern art to virtual reality. It is no accident that even in The Matrix the hero Keanu Reeves uses the book of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, as a cache. Indeed, in essence, a matrix is a simulacrum, that is, a copy of something that does not exist in reality. A computer program reproduces the long-gone world of the late twentieth century. *Baudrillard contemplates the objectivity of our society from any fact which is portrayed in media and culture in the form of a dream.

Undoubtedly, the simulacrum is one of the main categories of postmodern philosophy. The concept of simulacrum is connected, first of all, with the name of the most prominent French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), according to which, the era of postmodernism is nothing but the age of total simulation. All simulation processes take place in the so-called simulation space, which the philosopher gives a figurative description in the book "Temptation" (1979), written several years after the work "Symbolic Exchange and Death" (1976).

In the simulated space of hyperreality, the effect of reality is imitated and exaggerated, giving the impression that all objects, air, lighting exist in fact. "This mysterious light has no source; in the oblique incidence of its rays, there is already nothing real; it is like a water surface without depth ... Things here have long lost their shadow (their materiality) Temptation. The complete characteristics of the space of hyperreality, as well as the era of simulation itself, are revealed by the philosopher in the book "Simulacra and Simulation", published in 1981. The knowledge of simulacra was also seized by visual art, first of all, pop art. The artist pretends to reproduce nature but does not need life itself: the shell denoting the object becomes more important than the object itself. "Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra" ( Baudrillard 10)

The dream is opposite to reality, and this is what Baudrillard explains in his text. Simulation is also an imitation of an imaginary object whose original object we have not seen, or no one has seen. What would prevent such a simulation from being even better than any previous actual occurrence of that phenomenon? A decent way to contemplate about these is like the diverse dream stages in the movie "Inception" (Hegarty 8). Movie portrayal all the four steps including; faithful recreation, reality perversion, absence of reality and finally pure simulacrum. (Kellner13).

One of the main properties of a simulacrum, according to Baudrillard, is the ability to mask the absence of actual reality. "The real is produced from miniaturized cells, ………………… several times from these" ( Baudrillard 3). In comparison with something artificial, the familiar environment seems more "real"; this is the trap. As an example, the philosopher cites the famous amusement park: "Disneyland exists to hide that Disneyland is a "real" country - the whole "real" America (much like prisons serve to protect that the entire society, in all its fullness, in all its banal ubiquity, is a place of detention). Disneyland is imagined making us believe that everything else is real." ( Baudrillard 10)

Ultimately, simulacra become more real than reality itself. And from this arises hyperreality, that is, a medium closed to itself, which already does not correlate with objective reality. A world where a plausibly depicted fantasy becomes identical with reality. So in a sense, we all already live in the Matrix. In this state, the simulation begins to focus on the image as perceived by sensory reason. And only then does the simulation become truly radical and futuristic. The simulation starts to reveal the unknown, instead of merely imitating the known. (Butler16)

It concluded that ethics is inevitably involved in the information process and connected with sources and media, which is one of the conditions for its sociocultural functioning. "The media are of especially great importance, for they have the most significant effect on the structure of moral consciousness and the nature of the application of moral norms and principles." ( Baldwin19) Based on a fundamentally different type of information with respect to traditional ethics, postmodern morality is based on information related to primarily with media. This interconnectedness affects the perception of the subject of the flow of correct knowledge. From the analysis of this sphere of production of moral simulacra, the most indicative is the media one.

Works cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan press, 1994.

Baldwin, Jon. "‘Self-Immolation by Technology’: Jean Baudrillard and the Posthuman in Film

and Television." The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015. 19-27.

Butler, Rex. Jean Baudrillard: The defence of the real. Sage, 1999.

Hegarty, Paul. Jean Baudrillard: live theory. A&C Black, 2004.

Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to postmodernism and beyond. Vol. 179.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.