Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It is always the goal of the ideological analysis to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum. Baudrillard (1994 : 27) Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and Dimetrodon are spectacular points of reference in the vast template of our collective, prehistoric past, an elaborate simulacrum that has become visually familiar and a natural expression of our global identity. Through books, museums of natural history and, even more compellingly, on TV and on the giant screen, we have come to see and experience and touch and feel the prehistoric creatures that occupied our space once upon a time. Particularly for first-world children, the deadly have become dear and the carnivores have become cuddly. Indeed, the branding, packaging and marketing mechanisms in the dinosaur industry have been so refined that the manipulations of demand and supply seem inconsequential, if not entirely invisible. But the naming of these at-once strange and all-too-familiar creatures embeds a covert reference to the much more recent past when the Anglo-American civilization derived its strength, if not its identity, from a Greco-Roman foundation. In 1841, as is well known, Sir Richard Owen invented the term ‘dinosaur’ - and that ‘invention’ led to the re-creation and a sort of de-fossilization of the creatures that died millions of years ... log in or subscribe to read full text