Reading Simulacra

Reading Simulacra Synopsis

Traces the ways in which our culture has increasingly become a culture of simulations, and offers strategies for discerning meaning in a world where the difference between what is real and what is simulated has collapsed.

Reading Simulacra analyzes the ways in which our culture has become fatally immersed in simulation. Television, the Internet, virtual reality, and other advancements in technology and information processing have brought about an order in which simulations and digital images permeate our experiences of the world so deeply that their distinctions from reality appear seamless.

Through a careful study of some of the most important postmodern theorists, particularly Jean Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari, this book puts forth two different communication strategies-"seduction" and "rupture"-for a world where the difference between what is real and what is simulated has disappeared.

In an attempt to discern meaning from this contemporary situation, M. W. Smith examines a range of contemporary texts that have, in the past, resisted traditional analysis. These include the O. J. Simpson trial, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Reese Williams's A Pair of Eyes, Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Don Quixote, Clarence Major's My Amputations, and Baudrillard's America-all of which represent the obscenity of hypersignified existence.