Reply #17: it's a bummer, isn't it!

[Lisa]

On the one hand, it's cool to know there's a term for this kind of thing (which was just on the tip of your mind, since you've evidently come across it before).

On the other hand, it's kind of depressing that it's there for all to see, yet not many people recognized it for what it was.

I've always wanted to use the words "George W. Bush" and "Foucault" in the same sentence (as in "Bush knows Foucault") -- may I? Just to Derrida him?

p.s. I wonder what Baudrillard would make of all this? I've read some of his writings on simulacra, but I'm not familiar with what other post-modern philosophers have said on the topic. Anyway, I bet he would find lots of examples of "spectacles" and "simulation" in Dubya's White House photo ops.

http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/baudrillardone.html

"In the fable, cartographers draw a map in such detail that it ends up exactly covering the real territory of the empire. The map frays as the empire declines. The reality and the abstraction (map) decline together. By contrast, today that pairing has disappeared. Abstractions are no longer "the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept." No longer is there simulation of a "territory, a referential being, or a substance." Instead, B. sees a "real without origin or reality" being generated "by models." "
*and the map ends up replacing the "real" landscape. (This already does happen, in terms of perception and decision-making -- a lot of planners and policymakers don't bother to check out whether the actual conditions on the ground are accurately represented ... and in an extreme situation, ground-truthing like that would be dismissed as "reality-based community" thinking.)