This is a bad article really. After reading it I'm none the wiser as to what 'hyperreality' and 'simulacra' actually mean in this context. I can make guesses, but the author doesn't explain his central concepts and fails to build a case around them. Am I wrong to expect much clear writing and a developed argument from a university professor? Or is the price of admission to this article a familiarity with Baudrillard's work?
It's post-modernism. The author doesn't know what it means, and if he's a fan of Wittgenstein he'd probably argue that there's no point in even looking for meaning in it.
"To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm."
Great idea, Baudrillard. Reality has become confusing, therefore, let's act like retards.
Media necessarily presents an abstraction of reality to the viewer. However, the pervasive and distributed nature of information gathering and dissemination in the Internet age opens that abstraction up to people in a way that simply wasn't possible when all media was "black boxes" (television, radio, newspaper, etc.) Media now encompasses people uploading footage to Youtube from their phones in the middle of a war zone.
The premise of Baudrillard's argument as I understand it - that the model of reality created by media is useless fiction and propaganda, which must, one assumes, be rejected out of hand as postmodernists seem to want to do - has possibly become more tenuous over time. Although some would (and do) assert that the fabrication of reality by corporate and government interests has only exploded exponentially and become even more pervasive, and that the appearance of fine-grained truth presented by social media is, itself, only a more elaborate set of lies.
This phenomenon, by which reality is described through abstractions and attempts at narrative, is everywhere - and it's arguably unavoidable, given that the very nature of human consciousness is a post-hoc hallucination generated by the unreliable narrator that is the brain. Should science dismiss all of its theories as incredulous nonsense because its models are falsifiable? Of course not, because even imperfect models can be useful. What exactly are we to be left with, if we must reject abstraction? We cannot reject it, we are it.
It is likely true, however, that for many people the rest of the world exists primarily in the form of a set of packaged narratives or curated experiences presented on an electronic screen or a device. There is also possibly a discussion worth having on the ever-shifting definitions of "war" and "terrorism" and just and unjust conflict in the modern age, because to an extent, the arbiters of these definitions exist as ghosts in the machine.
Unfortunately, I had to wade through the cesspool of comments in the linked article and the Wikipedia page on Jean Beaudrillard to even get a superficial idea of what it was even talking about. The degree of contempt this article appears to have for the lay reader only makes it likely most of the discussion around it is going to be complaints about how difficult it is to understand.
I believe there is a difference between hyperbole and outright falsities. No excellence of academia redeems a statement like "The Paris attacks did not take place." I'd argue that any kind of academic appreciation of these false statements, in postmodern reflections on hyper-reality, say more about the hyper-reality that academia seems to dwell in, particularly in the non-technical sciences like sociology and philosophy. For reasons of lack of rigor, it's easier for these specious "worldly" reflections to dwell in the non-technical sciences, than lets say Chemistry, Biology, Math or Physics. Need I say more about how I feel on the (dis)merits of this article...
A dumb but legitimate philosophical reflection. The only interesting and surprising thing about this article is Al Jazeera choosing an exceptionally disingenuous title.
