FloRida, Baudrillard and Zizek

“How do things stand with the real event, then if reality is everywhere infiltrated by images, virtuality and fictions?” (Baudrillard). A question that I can kind of wrap my mind around and a question that relates to many concepts being studied in this class. Baurillard makes a reference to The Desert of the Real. From what I comprehend, this notion relates the idea that when people see something and it is real, when in reality it is not real at all. Pictures are a great example because we associate pictures with some forms of reality, when most likely they are not. Bourillard states that, “Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’” Simulation deals with the idea of Utopia and how there are no signs within the ideal. The problem is that in our reality signs make us who we are and what we believe. Signs are what create reality in today’s world. A great example that Baudrillard brings up is Disneyland, a modern day form of Utopia. It provides illusions and fantasies that create an alternative world for people to believe in. Disneyland is a “digest of the American way of life, panegyric if American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality” (Baudrillard). One profound statement that really summarizes this concept of Disneyland is that it is presented as something imaginary in order to make us think that it must be real. Slavoj Zizek article makes a direct connection to Baudrillard’s ideas through ideas of what is reality and what is not. Zizek focuses on Virtual Reality by bringing in a lot of explanations through television shows and movies. To explain this concept he states that, “Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real- just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so.” I truly understood and related to their approaches on these topics through modern experiences and ideas. The interconnectedness between these two articles made an impact on the knowledge and understanding of what was being said.