Hyperreal civilization must recycle its own lost faculties and imaginary.
Evidence
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. But all the sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 52
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the Disneyland-as-recycling-plant frame that defines the new function of the imaginary in hyperreality.
- ADDENDUM: The ‘recycling lost faculties’ list — institutes for touching, looking, walking — speaks to the Grafting & Growth essay’s theme of re-naturalizing simulated experience.
- SEED: Angle: an essay on therapy/wellness culture as ‘recycling institutes’ for faculties hyperreality has already destroyed.
- XREF: connects to: Hyperreal cities need imaginary parks to feed the energy of the real — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 51; Overproduction aims to restore a real that escapes society — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 85; Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 106 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish
#expands(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 106 - Hyperreality is the totalizing implosion of commodity and culture into circulation
#expands(0.85) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 226 - Culture becomes administrable precisely by being severed from practical action
#complicates(0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 161 - Civilizational decay is reversible through intentional renewal
#qualifies(0.75) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 836