PHYSICS 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Simulacrum, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Claire Colebrook
Document Summary
Mimesis, or resemblance: a sign reflects an already-existing meaning or identity. A portrait that looks like its subject. A garden designed to look like a forest clothes that resemble the feathers of a bright bird. Ancient egyptian hieroglyphs are the best-known of written texts based on resemblance: they use many pictographic elements, along with abstract signs, to tell complex stories, relate dense histories. Simulacrum: a perfect stand-in for the original, virtually indistinguishable from the source. Plato discussed that: our efforts to produce representations will only be partial and equivocal; and will be based on our prior understandings of what is important, of what something means, and of the right way of showing it. Slavoij zizek argues that: ideology is a generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable . We can only see, or make sense of what we see, on the basis of how we understand the world to be.
