Abstract
A society of signs is a term that has been used to denote one of the most significant characteristics of the contemporary social order (Edwards and Usher 1999). Such a society is one where social relations and the materiality of the world become so intensely mediated through semiotic exchanges, through the production, circulation and reception of signifying practices, that signs are no longer simply representational but acquire value and meaning in their own right.
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Text in the sense that ‘lifelong learning’ has to be ‘read’ and interpreted and texts in the sense that these meanings are articulated in written texts of various kinds.
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‘Myths’ in the semiotic sense of extended metaphors that enable sense to be made of experiences within a culture. They express and serve to organise shared ways of fashioning something within a culture. They naturalize the cultural.
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A copy of a copy which has been so dissipated in its relation to the original that it can no longer be said to be a copy. The simulacrum, therefore, stands on its own as a copy without a model.
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The 1999 cult movie The Matrix explores the relationship between people and simulacra. The Matrix of the title is a simulation created by sentient machines to control the human population. In this world all is simulation. The lead character in the movie, Neo, in a self-referential move uses a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation as a secret store – a simulacrum of Simulacra and Simulation!
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Everything articulable in language must be a simulation because language systematically creates the world and in doing so makes everything a simulation…that which is not a simulation is all that which cannot be articulated in the systematicity of language.
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Baudrillard has also argued that ultimately people desire and seek to consume the myth of consumption.
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It could be argued that fundamentalists of all religions are embarked on such a renewed search.
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Or as Deleuze and Guattari playfully put it: pas les points, mais les ponts.
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These fields of intensity are produced and experienced not only by humans but by different forms of ‘agency’ such as animals and computers, or even movement, thought and space.
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Usher, R. (2012). Lifelong Learning, Contemporary Capitalism and Postmodernity: A Selected Reading. In: Aspin, D., Chapman, J., Evans, K., Bagnall, R. (eds) Second International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2360-3_43
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