Rupiah and Baudrillard

 

A man from Kalimantan, Indonesia found himself the victim of a Mr Bean comical con job where he sold off his used handphone to a buyer - who paid for it with fake money drawn on paper with red markers. The buyer arrived in a motorcycle, left the engine running, exchange done hurriedly, with the seller handing over the phone and accepted the "money"

 

Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages: 

1.  The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". 

 

2.  The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating 

 

3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.

Hermetic philosophy posits that opposites are identical in nature but differ in degree; it states that extremes meet and that all truths are but half-truths.

 4.  The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as over-sentimental.