Mind and Civilization as Simulacra
Making the most of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal
Stone Age people were closer to nature in that they had no permanent shelters from the wilderness. But their lives weren’t thereby closer to reality because they must have lived largely in their heads, as it were, or in their imaginations as they coped with the unknown by personifying natural processes with animistic presumptions.
Yet we late-modernists who live in large, globalized cities and technologically developed societies, seemingly far from the sway of nature’s indifference, and who thrive on elaborate, scientific objectifications of nature also live apart from reality because our lifestyles are full of First World myths, hubristic conceits, and pseudoproblems.
This isn’t so surprising since being at one with reality at large would entail the death of any living thing. Life is inherently at odds with everything else. Stone Age hunter-gatherers and First World consumers merely have different stylings of that existential discontinuity.
We can explore the late-modernity variety by reflecting on the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulations in hyperreality.
