BAULDRILLARD AND

POP CULTURE
WYRLO BINAMIRA DELA CRUZ
USTL │ BUGS
Objective
 Understand the ideological frame of pop culture
 Present Jean Baudrillard assertions of hyper-reality and simulacra
 Articulate insights as an implication of simulacra and simulations
CONTEXT OF SOCIETY AND
CULTURE
Cosmo-centric
Theo-centric
Anthropocentric
Decentric/Pluralist/
Technocentric
Globalization (what does this context reveal to our
culture?)
Pop culture
POP CULTURE
To understand pop culture, is first to define, what is
culture?

All efforts, actions, endeavors, fields, creations, programs,

and thoughts of man define culture (Sario, 2009)

But what makes pop culture a pop culture?

POP CULTURE
Pop culture is heavily influenced by the mass media and
turned constantly by different cultures and lifestyles of
local, set of ideas, that permeate daily life of society
(shopping clothes, eating fastfood, watching TV,
playing games)

Commercial value
Pop culture is a culture of commercial impact of mass
production
Storey (2003)
POP CULTURE
Culture of Fashion
Culture of Communication
Music
Television
Sports
Film
POP CULTURE
Commercialized and economically driven culture

This affirms the critique of Marxian movement on

Hegelian romanticism of culture
Jean Bauldriallard
Used value
Exchange value
Sign value (define the value of things based on signs and symbols,
things are no longer measured by its utility)

: reality and meaning have been replaced by signs and symbols

SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS
The real and simulacra

“Simulacra are copies of reality that depict things that either had no

reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original. 
Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or
system over time” human experience of simulacra
…The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the
truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true
STAGES OF SIMULACRA
1. Reflection/copy(image of reality)
2. Mask (obscure reality)
3. Illusion (absence of profound reality)
4. Pure simulacra (Hyper-real)
perception of unreal as real and real is no longer real, but originated to real
Signs, according to Baudrillard, do not point at any reality, but only at
other signs and significations. This means that signs have lost the
representational character with the consequence that ideological analysis
is meaningless since there is no reality to be found behind any
signification.
The phenomena of mass media in forms of TVs, commercials or
advertisements, film, situate human to simulation and hyper reality to
the extent that society has become saturated
What is your insights on the implication of simulations
and hyper-reality on the phenomena of pop culture?