Bella Post Class 2/19

Reality? Masking reality? Masking no reality? No reality? What IS reality? Whose reality are we talking about anyway? “To dissimilate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other, an absence” (Baudrillard 54). It reminds me of the term ‘verisimilitude’- art is real because it attempts to imitate reality. If an image or a sign is representative of reality, how can we tell what is real and what is not real? What is simulated, what is not? In class, Dr. Rog asked us to connect this reading with one that we have read previously. I think the quote I can best connect Baudrillard to would be Lyotard. In his piece on Habermas, Lyotard said, “It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (Lyotard 46). This reminds me of Baudrillard because he directly talks about the issue of reality: what is reality, how do we define it, can we define it? Lyotard says that reality is not definable, rather, we create allusions to reality so that we don’t have to worry about making them real. Wow. That feels like a mouthful, and I’m not even sure if it makes sense. Lyotard said, “We have the idea of the world, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it” (Lyotard 43). Baudrillard says something similar about America’s obsession with Disneyland, “Disneyland exists in order to hide the fact that it is the ‘real country’…Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest of the world is real” (Baudrillard 461). We have an idea of our world, but we create fantasies, images, signs, allusions, productions, etc. to explain and imitate it because we do not have the capacity to show an example of something “real”…in order to do so, something ELSE must be presented as fake (like Disneyland).