Today’s “the most sexy thing”: virtual space or real life? ALEXANDRA DZIUBA - Odessa National Polytechnic University (ONPU) ABSTRACT The issues of Reality and Simulation of Reality are highlighted in this article. The nature of Desire is also discussed as a fundamental in contemporary culture and media environments. Special attention has been paid to advertising, as a form of creating desire and simulations of reality which stimulate growing frustrations in society. Online space is also been viewed as a new trend in the simulation of life and a faked advertising reality. In the article I attempt to compare both of these "worlds" – simulated by culture and virtualised by media. KEYWORDS Reality, simulation, media, advertising, sex, desire. Introduction A key issue in contemporary media and cultural studies is the question of what is Reality. Throughout history, humans were trying to comprehend their own existence and validity based on the reality of their own body and on the reality of everyday life. After a while, the human body started to lose its status as a bastion of reality. It happened with the help of growing interests in different kinds of “virtual” worlds, as well as the expansion of media influence. So, with rapid cultural transformations of the present the problem of definition of reality perhaps becomes the most difficult question. In this article I would like to discuss the general issues of Reality and simulations, which prevail in our society. Also, issues about the nature of desire and simulations of desires are considered as one of the main topics of this work. But what is more interesting for us is to revise advertising from a “desire”- point of view, because the most of our desires in society are stimulated by media and especially by advertising. I am interested in defining why this is so, and through what kinds of virtual spaces consumers satisfy desires which may be more preferable than real life. This work is based on the idea of “Reality” suggested by Jacques Lacan, where he defines Reality as a condition of mind before the trauma of birth, before the start of subject-object relationships, a state before any Desire. We can understand it as a state of being in the womb. Hence it is very important to grasp the difference between Real and Reality; here “Real” is understood as the validity of yourself in the social sphere (Lacan, 2004). This can be seen in contrast to Reality as the situation before subjectivity, before any external influence, and simulation, as an imitation of real objects, which aims to convince individuals in reality of something which is not actually existent. 20 This conceptual approach to Reality was developed in the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s through figures such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Richard Rorty, Nіkolas Luhman, and Michel Foucault and many others. The search for “what is real today” can also be understood through the construction of hyperreality (a term used by J. Baudrillard), as a sign of Reality and the Real. In this article I will use these terms as defined above as a way to look closer into the concepts. In addition, the basic term which needs to be specified is “Desire”. This concept firstly appeared in antiquity in works of Plato and Aristotle and during the years Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant and other philosophers were facing and working on “Desire” as a concept. But as we consider Desire through the frame of postmodern culture, it is important to base it on interpretations in Lacan and Zizek. “Desire's raison d'être is not to realise its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.” (Zizek, 39, 1997) and “(Desire) is produced in the margin which exists between the demand for the satisfaction of need and the demand for love” (Lacan, 4, 1958). In order to understand the problems of the existence of desires and why people follow it, we also need to define what exactly stimulates desires. Why do the media successfully create a simulated world and why do consumers willingly and actively perceive it as the real one? For this reason, we need to analyse how simulated reality is formed and what makes us strive for greater simulation. “Real” life The present is determined by postmodern culture which can be defined through some cultural changes. These changes are distinctive features of the present. In general a postmodern mentality bears the mark of disappointment in ideals and values of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment with its belief in progress and the triumph of the mind and human capabilities. The term "postmodernism" has no clear definition, because in essence it is an ambivalent and contradictory phenomenon. But it would be logical to specify some basic issues which characterise this cultural period. These characteristics of postmodernism (Hassan in Kovrizhenko, 12, 2004) could be understood as: 1. destruction of traditional forms; 2. intertextuality; 3. marginality manifestation relating to morality and ethics; 4. rejection of the canons; 5. blurring (uncertainty); 6. fragmentation; 7. ironic, grin, cynicism; 8. hybridization (changing genres, generating unclear forms) 9. carnivalization of life; 10. impersonality, superficial; 11. quotation; 12. understanding of the world as constantly changing, amorphous, multiversion in the development of reality. These “visualised” characteristics of postmodernism easily can be observed in our culture. Being a member of society we become a part of this culture and unconsciously feel the changes. But the question is “do we really feel this cultural influence? What do we really feel? And eventually, what is real?” Now we can trace a significant shift in the current position of “sense” and “reality”, as a space of human existence. The current postmodern belief is that a correct description of Reality is 21 impossible. That means it is impossible to be asked about Reality, impossible to comprehend it, because comprehension is an essence of distaining from Reality. Here we meet an interesting issue: if Reality is so impossible to reach where do we live and what surrounds us. Jean Baudrillard established and developed this through his concept of the simulacrum (from Lat. simulacrum - image, likeness). According to this concept the world is functioning as a world of "appearances", the world of delusion/simulations of consciousness is correlated with reality, but takes much more real than reality itself. This particular world is called hyperreality (Kovrizhenko, 15, 2004). In this case, is there anything that still could be trusted as real? Because simulation, as we mentioned before, is an assurance in self-sufficiency of “empty” form without sense, a loss of connection between sign and reality. So it can be said that cultural space is formed by simulacrums, which represent nonexistent things. In Symbolic exchange and death Baudrillard develops the concept of three levels of simulacra: counterfeit, production and simulation (50, 1993). He defines an exact or total simulation as a sort of slogan of modernity: "The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra" (Baudrillard, 2, 1993). One of the basic principles of cultures existence is “To dissimulate, is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (Baudrillard, 3, 1994). One simple example that simulates the concept of reality is a change in attitude to a scandal; before there was a tendency to hide a scandal and now there is a tendency to hide that it is not a scandal, - which is typical for the media industry and politics. Media total simulation in culture leads to a disappearance of sense by itself and not only, but also to disappearance of "demand" for the sense (because average individuals are satisfied by an empty form of "hyper good") (Baudrillard, 63, 2000). This looks more like a “corrosion” of culture, because it started from small reductions in truth and keeps on damaging the whole of society. By media, people unconsciously get less and less sense of what they observe and the overall meaning becomes rapidly displaced. So now we should "... produce not only goods, but also consumers, who will make demand on this goods" (Baudrillard, 85, 1993). The same applies to ‘sense’ - it is important not only to produce sense but also to make a demand for that sense, which has not been done yet. In this case the guarantee of reality relies on the individual’s memory - what is kept in memory is a fact of reality. News, broadcasted by television, stays in the mind and becomes a guarantee of reality, as the fact of news. Hence the sense of broadcasted content becomes actual information for the viewer. This forms a worldview but if there is not enough sense or sense is reduced individuals revert back to a reliance on the hyper good. But it is not only news and reduced sense which forms our life. The main feature of the facts of understanding is stereotypical actions which make up our daily life. Facts of news and events are remembered, but it is only enough to create a worldview. However, in order to excite individuals there is a need for special events, some sort of real events (Deleuze developed the concept of the Event (The Logic of Sense)). Social reality is given to us in the casual structure of cultural norms, routinely, as a chain of "stereotypical" events, those events which fit into our daily picture of the life. Therefore, these events are not “real events”. In contrast to equability of social (symbolic) reality, the experience of the Real through the Symbolic can occur only due to an Event.