Understand Postmodernism: A Teach Yourself Guide. Glenn Ward BA in fine art (painting), University of Plymouth, 1990; MA in Visual Culture, Bath Spa University, 1992; PhD in film studies, University of Sussex, 2011. p. 91.
On Planet Baudrillard, the distinction between simulation and reality has collapsed. In The Evil Demon of Images, he calls this a telescoping or implosion of image into reality. We hinted at some of the ways in which this has happened when we noted how images intersect with (and, we might add, enable) certain experiences of the world. It will not surprise you to learn that Baudrillard goes a lot further than this simple observation. In fact, he turns conventional thinking about the ‘logical order of the real and its reproduction’ inside out, so that images do not just intersect with the real; they precede it, anticipate it, absorb it and produce it. Even with the examples given above, Baudrillard would claim that reality was an ‘effect’ of representation. He makes this point rather dramatically in a passage from his travelogue America (1988, first published in France 1986):
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media [my emboldening]. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.
Plsease see my emboldening, which sounds so overblown as to be unbelievable?
