The class discussion began with Professor Croxall providing some background about Jean Baudrillard. He died two and a half years ago (March 6, 2007). He was one of the first people in his family to go to a university in France, attending the Sorbonne in Paris. He studied German and became a high school teacher in the subject for several years. Professor Croxall brought up the influence that Baudrillard's theories had on The Matrix, and a book written by Baudrillard appears in an opening scene as an in joke.

Professor Croxall shifted the discussion to the terms in which people associate with Baudrillard: hyperreal and simulation (or simulacrum).

Terms

Simulation/ Simulacrum- Any image or representation of something.

Hyperreal- a particularly realistic recreation that is simultaneously fake.

Baudrillard is concerned about the way images affect society, which is very similar to McLuhan. The three phases of simulation are:

1.      There are copies made of the original.

2.      Once there is mechanical reproduction the image (simulacra) becomes easier to copy.

3.      The simulation precedes the real object (related to hyperreal).

In class interesting examples were brainstormed to correspond to Baudrillard's three phases of simulacrum. In the first phase simulacrum copies the original. Numerous knockoffs of real objects are common in our modern world. When referring to the second phase, Simulacrum becomes more predominant alongside mechanical production, an example being films, and the difficulty in calling any one copy the original. Photography and associated technologies continuously give us the ability to make even better copies of the original. The third phase is the Hyperreal, where the creation of hype is more important than the actual event itself, as in the case of the hype surrounding the Ipad, that didn't match the actual product.  When this phase has taken place, the Hyperreal has totally taken the place of the original.

The perfect examples in America are two of its most popular tourist destinations, Las Vegas and the Disney Theme Parks. In Las Vegas tourists can gamble in Casinos designed to represent Paris, New York City, or the Pyramids of Egypt. With its perfectly pruned African Safari ride and the Wild West feel of the runaway train attraction, Disney creates a world that's realistic enough to satisfy its patrons, but sanitized enough to not offend.

The hype always surpassing the real is the basic premise Baudrillard is working with when he stated that the Gulf War wasn't a war. According to Baudrillard the outcome was inevitable, and the actual event would never live up to the build up. War is unpredictable, but in this war the weapons had improved to an extent that the US military had an unprecedented control of the battlefield. Baudrillard claims that America as a nation uses deterrence as a military strategy.  Instead of building weapons to use them, we keep them as a sort of warning to potential enemies.  "Don't threaten us, we have weapons!" Hostages, Baudrillard states, have also become forms of deterrence, the "simulacral protagonist." These kinds of things, hostages and negotiations, decoys and the simulations that soldiers run through over and over to prepare for battle, are not war because they are far too calculated and planned.  Baudrillard also cited the survival of Saddam Hussein's regime as proof that the war did not in reality match what it had been hyped as.

The role of the media during the Gulf War and Baudrillard's specific thoughts about CNN were central in the text. "CNN produced its own editorial documentary, “CNN: War in the Gulf” which was shown on T.V. around the world..........In their publicity, they described this interactive multimedia disk as the "first draft of history." (Baudrillard p.3)

This is interesting, considering the questionable fidelity that CNN's coverage had to the facts on the ground. In a sense there were two wars, CNN's Gulf War, and the actual Desert Storm. CNN is not authoritative even though there is a perception that it is.

Summary

The hyperreal comes first, and the real product becomes second. This is what Baudrillard wants to expose. We care more about the images than the real object. As Anna pointed out Disney World is a great example of this. Rides at Disney World are designed to mirror the real thing. It creates a blanket atmosphere in which everything starts to become real.

Baudrillard gives several reasons why the Gulf War wasn’t a war.

• The outcome was predetermined.

• There was no declaration of war.

• Both sides are engaged in decoys.

• There was an absence of engagement.

• The outcome wasn’t right.

• The forces were unequal.

   

Passages

“See them become confused in explanations, outdo themselves in justifications and lose themselves in technical details (war drifts slowly into technological mannerism) or in the deontology of a pure electronic war without hitches: these are aesthetes speaking, postponing settlement dates into the interminable and decisions into the undecidable. Their war processors, their radars, their lasers, and their screens render the passage to war as futile and impossible as the use of a word-processor renders futile and impossible the passage to the act of writing, because it removes from it in advance any dramatic uncertainty.” (34)

This quote was discussed in relation to Baudrillard’s reasoning as to why the Gulf War wasn’t a war. It’s significant that he writes this book as the war occurs, labelling the three parts of it to correspond to Before, During and After, but each time denying the reality of the war.

“Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what an ultra-modern process of electrocution is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of an experimental enemy away from the field of battle with no possibility of reaction. But this is not a war, any more than 10,000 tonnes of bombs per day is sufficient to make it a war.” (61)

This quote in relates to the unequal forces and the inevitability of the American victory. Baudrillard is saying that it was not a fair fight. It’s was even called a “surgical war”, due to the precision of the US military's state of the art precision weapons.