Abstract:

I am interested in examining Jean Baudrillard's theoretical construction of public space as pure simulation, an arena in which the audience is rendered not merely marginal, but invisible. If we accept Baudrillard's version of an illusory public, this presents an interesting set of questions to be asked about audience and discourses of power. If, as Baudrillard's narrative of the simulacra suggests, public space is rendered empty of meaning, wiped clean of normative references and relaced by historical "fictions," how do we go about constructing a genuinely democratic public space in which the audience reasserts itself to claim authority over its own historical process? In other words, how do we go about constructing something resembling an historical horizon against which an emerging public can engage in a meaningful dialogue about its own institutions and practices? This is particularly trenchent for teaching composition in a classroom which still presupposes underlying structures of meaning. This paper, therefore, attempts to think through a hermeneutics of public space, simulacra,composition, and play.