Slavoj Žižek on "They Live" (The Pervert's Guide to Ideology)

Jean Baudrillard would argue we are in an even worse fate: The VR/AR/Mobile/Disneyland world is a presented reality in a way we can dismiss it, while still accepting the world around us as real [0]. The danger is the simple call ("turn it off" or "remove it from your eyes") misses that the reality without the glasses is just as much a fiction. Slavoj Žižek makes the argument as forcefully against Ideology as a concept as well [1]. > Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland: digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. > Certainly. > But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of realit