II Simulacra

I have created a few small summaries of the texts, which I have looked at about Plato ‘The Republic’, Jessica Evans, Stuart Hall ‘Visual Culture and Jean Baudrillard ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. I looked at what they are trying to get across and my thoughts on the texts.

In Plato The Republic it talks about a cave, where people are forced to watch a screen, what ever is shown on the screen the people see as the truth. A prisoner from the cave escaped and saw the real world, he saw people, things you can touch etc, by him talking to people and seeing different things his thinking developed. The cave is referring to belief and illusion and how people’s thoughts of reality are not the same as what reality actually is. The writing suggests that it is not certainty that reality exist beyond you; Plato believed that reality exists beyond us but not here. I think that it could be a metaphor of what society is actually like now, where you are almost forced to believe anything with all the adverts. When I thought about this text the whole thing reminded me of ‘Sims’ where people are controlling the characters making them do what they want them to do.

In the section of Jessica Evans, Stuart Hall ‘ visual culture’ it explains the different between both first and second world thinkers and the knowledge and understandings from each. The first world thinkers want to get back the original concept and meanings of images. Looking at what they originally meant and how they were firstly portrayed. However the second world thinkers want to allow images to have many different meaning and gain new meanings to become established in different ways. When images are been used over an over again and keep being repeated the context is flattened and looses it’s meaning, so it loses its simulacrum.  

In the final section of Jean Baudrillard, simulacra and simulation, the text discusses and debates the differences between the truth and a simulation of the truth. Simulacrum is ‘something that replaces reality with its representation’; an images that doesn’t have the quality’s of the original. In the text he describes a full screen, with the display of different products, brands and advertisements, this is a link to Plato’s cave. It is basically saying that advertising has lost its purpose, to inform and to communicate, because of the amount of times everything has been repeated.