Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real

Baudrillard's culture of simulation destroys our sense of paramount reality. It has created, as Chris Rojek puts it, a "huge refugee camp in which viewers, dissociated from place and community, are caught up in global indexing and dragging processes which no one controls." What is thus also, perversely, inscribed within the cultural landscape is a nostalgia for authenticity, for the dissimulated spaces and places which, though no longer there, stimulate their semiotic reconstructions and reproductions. And yet "[t]he possibility of lying is the prioprium of semiosis," as Umberto Eco has once remarked. Truth and falsity are inherent in the sign and in representation generally, subverting the tertium non datur principle. This book is an attempt to unmask representation, to see through the signs of the real, and through the real itself, at the realm of simulation. Those signs are not only signs of what they signify, but also signs of culture, of the cultural real which the articles included in the volume try to penetrate from various theoretical and philosophical perspectives.