July 2-21-08

I will be given a brief from this week’s class from my own perspective. First, we ended the readings for exam one and moved on to Baudrillard. He stresses the terms dissimulate, which means to pretend not to have what one has and simulate, to feign to have what one doesn’t have. An example of dissimulate would be a police officer who is at the scene of a bank robbery trying to negotiating with a criminal, but stating “I do not have a weapon, but the gun is sticking out of the back of his pants. This is a more detailed example, but this action implies a presence, while simulate involves an absence. For example, a teacher stating “I have one hundred thousand dollars for the next person who gets a question correct,” but clearly he doesn’t have the money in his hands. Also, Baudrillard believes there are four successive phases of images: Reflection of reality (good), masking and denaturing of reality (evil), masking the absence of reality (sorcery), and no relation to reality (simulacara).
The next theorist of the week was Zizer, who briefly talked about the way humans convert movies into everyday activities and vice versa. One of his quotes that I thought was interesting was, “America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.” This quote is referring to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It means that America fantasizes or glorify over other countries depression and it was time for America to get a taste of their obsession. I don’t believe he meant it an offensive manner, but he was just stating reality.