Culture from simulation to simulacrum and back

Abstract

Reality show or Reality TV programme is a symptom of the new pairing of the metaphysic of the "two worlds" and the contemporary technology. To analyse it as a symptom - i.e. a set of related signs - we need to use semiology of the media, separating the key codes as sets of rules and protocols for signifying practices that produce such TV programmes. In the analysis, these codes, taken here in their minimal but most important numbers, are shown as also the codes which produce everyday circulation of our representations and discourses, and open up a series of new questions. For example, to what extent is the reality show an image of everyday life, is it a simulation (imitation, mimesis) of it, or is it a simulacrum, as a structure of signs, which is beyond the old opposition of a model and a copy? Or perhaps, what we witness is a turn in communication where everyday picture of the world becomes a simulation of this simulacrum, that is an imitation of a reality programme as a pairing of metaphysics and technology?