Plato's Allegory of the Cave: metaphor for how society operates. Prisoners kept in cave by slave masters. Prisoners born in cave, sit shackled in deepest darkest part. Stay in there until they die. Real world outside never seen. Can only see shadows cast on the wall of the cave by light which seeps in through cracks or of the slave masters from the fire. The only images they see. Prisoners take images cast on wall of cave to be reality. This allegory displays our society in advertising. Shadows on wall of cave = TV news, mass media. This is an image world from which we take construction and take as fact.
Baudrillard ...the gap between representation of things and the reality of things. How one masks the other.
How commodity culture (capitalism) create alternative realities which make reality impossible to express. Commercial images change the nature of our world and understanding of it.
To use this example: Hadddon Sundblom. Employed by Coca Cola 1930's. wanted image of father xmas, western, outfit tie in with brand image of Coca Cola ...red and white. Keep using this over and over again as xmas campaign. Emerges at a similar time every year. Coca Cola take one story of santa claus, this has become the reality of santa claus. Origins of our culture are lost and replaced by copies of copies of copies, so much so that you cannot find the origin.
Baudrillard... how to get to the real, to the origin. How corporate consumer culture creates images that mask our real. Also, how advertising images affect us as people. How these images that make a commodity look more special affect reality.
Reality is replaced by images of reality which then change reality.
www.popmatters.com/pm/post/133316-/
Coke //Pepsi Challenge ...it is the commercial branding actually affect the way we feel and think about things
Post-structuralism: Baudrillard, Foucaul, Derrida, Cixous.... part of group
Guy Debord// Society of the Spectacle: described situation where society has become unreal. A society that lives around exciting spectacles of life rather than the real.
'The speactacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation amoung people, mediated by images.'
People are increasingly investing in fake realities.
THE SYSTEM OF OBJECTS (1968)
Marx:
Commodity central to everything in society ...it has a 'use value' and and 'exchange value.' Ex value greater than the use value because workers are being exploited.
Baudrillard: gap between use value (a watch to tell the time) and exchange value (what it is worth) is the 'sign value'. This is the ascending factor in our lives. It is the various different things it connotes (Rolex doesn't just tell the time: shows wealth)
Society getting more and more dependent on images of things rather than the reality. Rolex worth £30,00 when real worth is only £1,000 (when melted down)
SIMULACRA: a copy of something that almost supersedes the original or makes it difficult to tell the original from the copy in one way or another. Coca Cola father xmas is a copy of the santa claus.
SIMULATION:
What happens when a copy becomes so good that you cannot tell the difference between the copy and the real. What happens to our reality?
Hyper real ...impossible to access the real.
The copy is not produced by the real any more, they are produced by a copy. They begin to affect reality. Reality is produced by simulacra rather than simulacra being produced by the reality. The real slowly fades and that remains.
Example:
Sleeping Beauties Castle, Disneyland Park, California.
Disney took inspiration from real caste in Prague (Bohemian architecture) Made drawings of this (simulacra) added more aesthetic. People then visit the castle in Prague as they knew it was inspiration for the Disney castle. The copy is informing their experience of the real world.
Christmas Market. Started to market Germany to get more people to come over here. So made a fun light-hearted version of the German christmas market. Made it a bit sillier (cliches of Germany for UK tastes. To make it seem more charming) Begun in Bham and Manchester, now so popular that every major city has one. Bham one is now 3 times bigger than the actual German market in Germany.
The link back to it's reality of Germany is lost, it becomes the tradition for all major UK cities.
Baudrillard all our lives are lived through images of things. It is impossible to access the origin of things. We invest in sign value as reality.
New York Skyline... think is a romantic view because seen it in many romantic films. It is a simulacra. You approach it through the copies of it.
Can you ever get an original feel for New York or are we always living through what we have seen.
Ribena//flavour =artificial flavour. Doesn't represent a blackcurrent. The copy has replaced the current.
Does society instruct you to feel a way based on what you have seen.
The sign value of the wall, we would rather stay in the image world than face the real world.
The origin of our reality is an imitation of our actions.
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