Welcome to the Jungle of the Real: Simulation, Commoditization, and Survivor

Commodities are ubiquitous in contemporary society. As many have written-Karl Marx most prominently among early thinkers on the subject-these objects of material and/or symbolic value are often socially constructed and central to everyday life, be they perceived as needs or wants. Attaching additional meaning to commodities through history (an heirloom), nostalgia (vintage clothing), image (Michael Jordan-endorsed sneakers), branding (A shirt with the word "GAP" stitched in the collar), or other means can inflate their value, often artificially (Peterson). Indeed today, even television shows are not immune to being commoditized. This article will examine how the reality television program Survivor has undergone commoditization since its debut in May 2000 and is now approaching what Jean Baudrillard called simulacra-a copy without an original, endlessly reproducible images that reference nothing. The article will first describe Survivor and the "reality TV" genre, then demonstrate why the show is not "real," but rather a contrived construction. It will then describe how Survivor is used intertextually in parody, fan fiction, and among various seasons of the series, as well as detail the program's development as a commodity through both official and unofficial, viewer-driven means. Finally, the article will question where Survivor stands among Baudrillard's four stages leading to simulacra. Theoretical Context This article will rely on several theoretical concepts from cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and critical theory; this section provides a brief overview of some of them. First, there is the idea of commodities and commoditization. Arjun Appadurai defines the former provisionally as simply "objects of economic value" determined through an "exchange of sacrifices" (3), be it trading money for a toothbrush, bartering a barrel of oranges for a bushel of peppers, or sending your star shortshop to a rival baseball team in exchange for that team's catcher and a player to be named later. Indeed, these days even people can be commodities. As such, commodities take on countless forms, and one of these is the commodity sign. Here "sign" refers to semiotics, or the science of signs, a field deriving from the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure. A sign consists of a signifier and the signified it conjures. In a famous example, the signifier "t-r-e-e" evokes the signified, an image of what we call a tree (Chandler). The signifier and signified "form an indissociable unity, like two sides of the same piece of paper" (McNeill). This is the sign (the word "tree"). Among others, C. S. Peirce further developed Saussure's concepts. Some signs, such as "tree," are arbitrary or symbolic, according to Peirce-but there are two other types as well. First, indexical signs refer to a relationship of contiguity, or "pointing," such as causal or part-to-whole. They also can be based on point of view (Peterson). One use of indexical signs is in intertextuality, or how one text cites and refers to another (Goldman and Papson, "Sign Wars" 68). second, iconic signs are the most primordial and refer by resemblance, such as a painting featuring a red stop sign. The red does not arbitrarily represent the red of a real stop sign; rather, it is the same red as the actual sign (Peterson). The aforementioned commodity signs most visibly take the form of corporate logos, such as the Nike swoosh. "Our consumer-based society has reached the point where a blank shoe is meaningless. That's right, meaningless-the white shoe is a blank if it is not marked by a sign .... In fact, the market value of these products is produced by Nike's design and marketing specialists" (Goldman and Papson, "Nike" 12). In other words, the commodity sign's value is mainly symbolic, rather than derived from actual use value. Commodity signs can be iconic-for instance, the sign above a Hallmark card store resembles the sign above every other one, even though each has a different name (Leslie's Hallmark, Amy's Hallmark, etc. …