kleenexwoman | (no subject)

So we're doing Baudrillard's Simulations in po-mo class, and it's all about the stages of simulacra and reality not being real and all that. And the class is going "OMG! CRAZY!" and I'm thinking, "This stuff is oddly familiar." Because everyone in class has seen The Matrix and knows the "desert of the real" saying, but then there's Smiths flying about (who are Level 2 industrial simulacra, by the way), and the movie doesn't quite bother to go into the allegorial details the way Philip K. Dick has lots of paragraphs to.

My teacher says he's read some Philip K. Dick, and he can't see the thematic connection between Dick's work and Baudrillard's work. WTF? This is not like it's terribly arcane, either. I mean, Dick's entire oeuvre is made of cosmic Scooby-Doo stories, except that at the end the twist isn't "The pirate ghost was really Old Man Feeny!", it's "And the guy was a robot all along!" or "And the alien was really God all along!" or "And REALITY WAS AN ILLUSION ALL ALONG!!!"
I think he may have thought that I was implying that Baudrillard stole Dick's ideas, since Dick died in '82, one year before the book was printed, and I pointed that out when someone else said, "Well, maybe Dick read a lot of Baudrillard..."

More later because I have a Creative Writing class to go to.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Baudrillard's pretty cool. Try Becker for decent psychoanaylsis (of the existential variety) and Lacan for psychoanalysis plus deconstructionism

I think Lacan's on the syllabus, even.

yeah, I'm a dork. I think Literary Theory is exciting. ;0

It's fantastically exciting! And I always feel like a jerk because it's a seminar and I usually have nothing to contribute besides, "Um, I think this is really cool." I don't know if it's because I do understand it, or because I don't understand it.