Two Paradigms of the New Image Theory : J. Baudrillard and J. Lacan

뉴이미지론의 위상과 두 패러다임 : J. Baudrillard와 J. Lacan을 중심으로

The postmodern culture since the later 20C breaks downa tradition a relation between the reality and languages or sign images expressing it. It develops in the way to review the meaning on the object's imitation or the representation to have been followed since Plato and represent the new state and concept of expressed things. Also, The visual art leads an change of paradigm by images giving up the visual resemblance or the function of representation and endowing them with the new sense. This essay has a purpose to study an important discussion about this change centered on Baudrillard and Lacan. A sociologist Baudrillard promotes the concept of 'simulation' through detecting the reality and the social and historical state of the image. Studying on the course of this change, he calls the step that the image escapes from the stage to reflect the reality and become the pure imitation by itself simulation. The image in the stage of simulation is called 'hyperreality' because it doesn't have any an indicator or a substitute and happens by models without the original or the reality. So he asserts that art is not to contain some absoluteness or transcendency as the past, but to be as the spectacle with characteristics of meaningless, emptiness, contingency. Lacan dismantles the concept of the absolute Cogito to have become the center of the western ideology, and creates the concept of 'Other'. He concludes also the reality exists but can't be captured, and it's impossible for the thinking subject can reach it. The concept of new image which can be thought as the Symbolic in Lacan is 'Signifier without Signified' since it isn't possible to be the transcendent Signifier fixing the meaning finally in it. His 'Gaze' theory is which to be emitted in other's area determines the subject. Equally Baudrillard and Lacan sets up the new state of the image through the end of representation system As for Baudrillard, art intends to the worthlessness and is nothing but imagination. But in Lacan a picture represents the subject being in process by the dialectic of desire.