Fantasy and reality
Dubailand - the dream that will never happen. This was part of a project I did earlier in the year, but it continues now in an essay I'm doing about the 'real' in representation. Enjoy some Baudrillard, a very interesting French intellectual. The whole concept of the 'real' ties my mind up in knots, but I quite like that. I have so much work to do this coming week that I think I will collapse on 17th when the term is over .. can't wait.
“Disneyland is the perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to ensue the success of the operation. But what attracts the crowds the most is without doubt the social microcosm, the religious, miniaturized pleasure of real America, of its constraints and joys. One parks outside and stands in line inside, one is altogether abandoned at the exit.”
“Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. On a mental level, Disneyland is the prototype of this new function.
…
Nevertheless, maybe a mental catastrophe, a mental implosion and involution without precedent lies in wait for a system of this kind, whose visible signs would be those of this strange obesity, or the incredible coexistence of the most bizarre theories and practices, which correspond to the improbable coalition of luxury, heaven, and money, to the improbable luxurious materialisation of life and to undiscoverable contradictions.”
Jean Baudrillard - “Simulacra and Simulation” Essay - ‘The Precession of Simulacra”
First published 1981, English translation 1994.