Baudrillard's assessment of Disneyland (p. 12) as the explicit fantasy against which our simulated 'reality' is defined as 'real' resonates in vary tangible ways. I have been working to apply this 'real indicated by opposition' framework into other avenues of the spectacle society. Baud explains that this physical 'fantasty' city is situated in a way that oppositionally defines all that is not within its gates as 'real' - in spite of the fact that "all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hypperreal order and to the order of the simulation" (p.12). He extends this to other 'city-like' spaces - Magic Mountain, Marine World (what is that? anyone?), etc. But I would argue that there are other equally fantastical spaces that work to fix our the 'real' of simulated 'reality'.
For example, I'm not much of a gamer (shocking, isn't it?) but it seems that the world of video game functions similarly to this Disneyland phenomenon: enter into an interactive venue where it becomes understood that 'real' laws of science (physics, gravity) and humanity (mortality, ethos) do not apply. By engaging the participant in activities that one would not 'realistically' pursue (extreme violence, for example) the fantastical realm of video games delineates a space that is 'not real' - and in the same way, everything around outside of it is, thus, 'real.'
It is, Baud argues, when we can no longer distinguish between these explicitly 'fantastical' spaces and 'reality' that we enter into dangerous ground. Film and television, it seems is the ultimate articulation of this: starting as a fantasy-land of ideal social relations, the progress of the film/tv-production is to bring us ever closer to the space where we are able to forget that we are in the fantasy, mistaking it for 'real'.
Reality television is the manifestation thereof. By claiming it as 'real,' the producers claim no hand in the construction of the stories that we witness on the Bachelor, Fear Factor, America's Next Top Model...or dare I mention, 'Real World'. We neglect to recall that these are not organic interactions. Documentary film-making does this to an even stronger degree: claiming to 'capture' the state of happenings, a documentary account offers us a 'real' experience with its subject matter. And yet in both instances, these fictions - or somehow fictionalized - media events are crafted entirely by the human hand - and thus everything that is outside the unnamed fantasy becomes blurred without the explicity oppositional quality in place. 'Reality TV' gives us no definition of what the real is not.
Is the dangerous ground really when we can't distinguish between 'fictional' and 'real' spaces or rather when we administer fictional spaces to ourselves, as 'hormonal treatments through negativity and crisis' (Baudrillard, 19), in an attempt to reinvigorate equally simulacral systems as 'really real'? I think Baudrillard is going to want the simulation of video games to expose how simulacral our own physics, morals, and ethics 'really' are, rather than simply prove our real through their imaginary, prove these categories of ours through their 'antimorals,' 'antiethics,' and 'antiphysics.' I mean, wouldn't the Baudrillardean line read, 'But video games mask something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a //simulation of the third order//: video games exist in order to hide that they are the "real" country, all of "real" America that is the video game'?
--Guattari Hero
Yes, I see your point. I intended to head in this direction, but didn't quite get it all the way there.
It seems that Baudrillard's section on the Loud family is a premonition of just what you describe, but with more of a focus on being "true to life": it sounds like the games and contrived, bizarre situations of early 2000's reality TV are gone. And Baudrillard reads it much like you would expect, Guattari hero: the Louds, chosen as an example of the most average, stereotypical, family, reveal in the ways that they fragment and fall into disarray the fluid and tenuous nature of the simulacrum of the 'family'. The symbolic identification of them as "a typical ideal American family" (28) interferes with their own conceptions of identity, causing them as a community held together by this idea to fracture.
I read his statements about the TV watching you to be partly a cultural control mechanism of late capitalism thing, and also partly a way for the viewer, through seeing "his/her self", to feel implicated, to feel connected to the currents of cultural exchange (a little like Benjamin's take on television, actually). It's interesting to me that this is the "end of the panoptic system" (29), when in fact there seems to be a very centralized power structure (that of cultural exchange in capitalism) asserting itself in this case. But what I'm really left wondering is how to make sense of the "laser that touches and pierces" (29). I can sort of map this to the crisis of the louds, but would appreciate others' thoughts on this phrase.