Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation Explained: Part 1

[00:00:03]simulacra and simulation by jean Bolger led the procession of simulacra the simulacrum is never what hides the truth it is truth that hides the fact that there is none the simulacrum is true Ecclesiastes if once we were able to view the Voyageurs fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map little by little and its fall into ruins though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting it like a carcass returning to the substance of the soil a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging as the most beautiful allegory of simulation this fable has now come full circle for us and possesses nothing but the discreet charm of second-order simulacra today abstraction is no longer that of the map that double the mirror or the concept simulation is no longer that of a territory a referential being or a substance it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality a hyperreal the territory no longer precedes the map nor does it survive it it is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory procession of simulacra that engenders the territory and if one must return to the fable today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map it is the real and not the map whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire but ours of the desert of the real itself in fact even inverter Borgias fable is unusable only the allegory of the Empire perhaps remains because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real all of the real coincide with their models of simulation but it is no longer a question of either Maps or territories something has disappeared the sovereign difference between one and the other that constituted the charm of abstraction because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory the magic of the concept and the charm of the real this imaginary of representation which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensive ET of map and territory disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic no longer at all specular or discursive it is all of metaphysics that is lost no more mirror of being and appearances of the real and its concept no more imaginary coax density it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation the real is produced from miniaturized cells matrices and memory banks modes of control and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these it no longer needs to be rational because it no longer measures its measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance it is no longer anything but operational in fact it is no longer really the real because no imaginary envelops it anymore it is a hyperreal produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere by crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real nor that of truth the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referential x' worse with the artificial resurrection in the systems of signs a material more malleable than meaning in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences to all binary oppositions to all combinatory algebra it is no longer a question of imitation nor duplication or even parody it is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double a programmatic metastable perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short circuits all its visit UD's never again will the real have the chance to produce itself such is the vital function of the model in a system of death or rather of anticipated resurrection that no longer even gives the event of death a chance a hyper-real henceforth sheltered from the imaginary and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences the divine reference of images to dis simulate is to pretend not to have what one has to simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't one implies a presence the other an absence but it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms therefore pretending or dis simulating leaves the principle of reality intact the difference is always clear it is simply masked whereas the simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false the real and the imaginary is the simulator sick or not given that he produces true symptoms objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not it psychology and medicine stop at this point for stalled by the illnesses henceforth undiscoverable truth for if any symptom can be produced and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature then every illness can be considered as simulate able and simulated and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat real illnesses according to their objective causes psychosomatic s-- evolves in a dubious manner at the borders of the principle of illness as to psychoanalysis it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order the latter is new and taken for real more real than the other but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious why couldn't the work of the unconscious be produced in the same way as any old symptom of classical medicine dreams already are certainly the psychiatrist purports that for every form of mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms of which the simulator is ignorant and in the absence of which the psychiatrist would not be deceived this which dates from 1865 in order to safeguard the principle of a truth at all costs and to escape the interrogation posed by simulation the knowledge the truth reference objective cause have ceased to exist now what can medicine do with what floats on either side of illness on either side of health with a duplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer either true or false what can psychoanalysis do with the duplication of the discourse of the unconscious in the discourse of simulation that can never again be unmasked since it is not false either what can the army do about simulators traditionally it unmasks them and punishes them according to a clear principle of identification today it can discharge a very good simulator as exactly equivalent to a real homosexual a heart patient or a madman even military psychology rose back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false between the produced and the authentic symptom if he is this good at acting crazy it's because he is nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard in this sense all crazy people simulate and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion it is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories but it is what today again outflanks them submerging the principle of truth beyond medicine and the army favoured terrains of simulation the question returns to religion and the simulacrum of divinity i forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented indeed it can be but what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons when it is multiplied in simulacra does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology or does it volatilize itself in a simulacra that alone deploy their power and pomp of fascination the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible idea of God this is precisely what was feared by Arcana clasts whose millennial quarrel is still with us today this is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra the Faculty simulacra have of a facing God from the conscience of man and from the destructive and the and the destructive annihilating truth that they allowed to appear that deep down God never existed that only the simulacrum ever existed even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum from this came their urge to destroy the images if they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic idea of God there would have been no reason to destroy them one can live with the idea of distorted truth but their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all and that these images were in essence not images such as an original model would have made them but perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination thus the death of the divine referential must be exercised at all costs one can see that the iconoclasts whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images where those who accorded them their true value in contrast to the icon the icon or laterz who only sought reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God on the other hand one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern Minds the most adventurous because in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images they were already enacting his death and his disappearance and the Epiphany of his representations which perhaps they already knew no longer represented anything that they were purely a game but that this that was there in that the great game lay knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images since they'd assimilate the fact that there is nothing behind them this was the approach of the Jesuits who founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences the Evanescence of God in the Epiphany of power the end of transcendence which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs behind the Baroque ness of images hides the eminence grise of politics this way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images murderers of the real murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity to this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power the visible and intelligible may be d--ation of the real all Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange god of course but what if God Himself can be simulated that is to say it can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith then the whole system becomes weightless it is no longer any it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum not unreal but a simulacrum that is to say never exchanged for the real but exchanged for itself in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference such is simulation insofar as it is opposed to representation representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real even if this equivalence is utopian it is a fundamental axiom simulation on the contrary stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence from the radical negation of the sign as value from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum such would be the success in the successive phases of the image it is the reflection of a profound reality it masks and denatures a profound reality it masks the absence of a profound reality it has no relation to any reality whatsoever it is its own pure simulacrum in the first case the image is a good appearance representation is of the sacramental order in the second it is an evil appearance it is the order of maleficents in the third it plays at being an appearance it is the order of sorcery in the fourth it is no longer of the order of appearances but of simulation the transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point the first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy to which the notion of ideology still belongs the second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the truth the real from its artificial resurrection as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance when the real is no longer what it was nostalgia assumes its full meaning there is a plethora of myths of origin and signs of reality a plethora of truth of secondary objectivity and authenticity escalation of the true of lived experience resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential parallel to and greater than the panic of material production this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us a strategy of the real of the neo real and the hyper real that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence Ramsey's or the rosy colored resurrection ethnology brushed up against it's paradoxical death in 1971 the day when the Philippine government decided to return the few dozen Tasaday who had just been discovered in the depths of the jungle where they had lived for eight centuries without any contact with the rest of the species to their primitive state out of reach of colonizers tourists and ethnologists this at the suggestion of the anthropologists themselves who were seeing the indigenous people disintegrate immediately upon contact like mummies in the open air in order for ethnology to live its object must die by dying the object takes its revenge for being discovered and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it doesn't all science on this paradoxic doesn't all science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the Evanescence of the object in its very apprehension and by the pitiless reversal that the dead object exerts on it like Orpheus it always turns around too soon and like Eurydice its object falls back into Hades it is against this hell of the paradox that the ethnologist wished to protect themselves by cordoning off the tasida with virgin forests no one can touch them anymore as in a mine the vein is closed down science loses precious capital there but the object will be safe lost to science but intact in its virginity it is not a question of sacrifice science never sacrifices itself it is always murderous but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle the tassa de frozen in their natural element will provide a perfect alibi an eternal guarantee here begins an anti ethnology that will never end and to which Jolin Castaneda cluster ease of various witnesses in any case the logical evolution of the science is to distance itself increasingly from its object until it dispenses with it entirely its autonomy is only rendered even more fantastic it attains its pure form the Indian thus returned to the getter in the glass coffin of the virgin forests again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology this model thus grants itself the luxury to incarnate itself beyond itself in the brute reality that these Indians it has itself entirely reinvented savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being savages what a turn of events what a triumph for this science that seemed dedicated to their destruction of course these savages of post hummus frozen cryogen eyes sterilized protected to death they have become referential simulacra and science itself has become pure simulation the same holds true at Crusoe at the level of the open museum where one museum are fired in situ has historical witnesses of their period entire working-class neighborhoods living metallurgical zones an entire culture men women and children included gestures languages customs fossilized alive as in a snapshot the museum instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site is everywhere now like a dimension of life thus ethnology rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science will today liberated from its object be applied to all living things and make itself invisible like an omnipresent 4th dimension that of the simulacrum we are all tassa days Indians who have again become what they were simulacra Indians so at last proclaim the universal truth of ethnology we have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology or of anti ethnology which is nothing but the pure form of triumphal ethnology under the sign of dead differences and of the resurrection of differences it is thus very naive to look for ethnology in the savages or in some third world it is here everywhere in the metropolis 'as in the white community in a world completely catalogued and analyzed then artificially resurrected under the auspices of the real in a world of simulation of the the hallucination of truth of the blackmail of the real of the murder of every symbolic form and of its hysterical historical retrospection a murder of which the savages noblesse oblige were the first victims but that for a long time has extended to all Western societies but in the same breath ethnology grants it's only and final lesson the secret that kills it and which the savages knew better than it did the Vengeance of the Dead the confinement of the scientific object is equal to the confinement of the mad and the dead and just as all of society is irremediably contaminated by this mirror of madness that is held up to itself science can't help but die contaminated by the death of this object that is its inverse mirror it is science that masters the objects but is but it is the objects that invest it with depth according to an unconscious reversion which only gives a dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation nothing changes when society breaks the mirror of madness polishes the asylums gives speech back to the insane etc nor when science seems to break the mirror of its own objectivity facing itself before its object as in Castaneda etc and to bend down before the differences the form produced by confinement is followed by an innumerable diffracted slowed down mechanism as ethnology collapses in its classical institution it survives an anti ethnology whose task it is to re-inject the difference fiction the savage fiction everywhere to conceal that in this world ours which has again become savage in its way that is to say which is devastated by difference and by death in the same way but with the pretext of saving the original one forbade visitors to enter the Lascaux caves but an exact replica was constructed 500 meters from it so that everyone could see them one glances through a peephole at the authentic cave and then one visits the Ricans the reconstituted whole it is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations but from now on there is no longer any difference the duplication suffices to render both artificial in the same way science and technology were recently mobilised to save the mummy of Ramses that second after it was left to rot for several thousand years in the depths of a museum the West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for 40 centuries but out of sight and far from the light of day Ramses does not signify anything for us only the mummy is of an inestimable worth because what it because it is what guarantees that accumulation has a meaning our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view to this end the pharaohs must be brought out of their tomb and the mummies out of their silence to this end they must be exhumed and given military honors they are prey to both science and worms only absolute secrecy assured them of this millennial power the mastery of a putrefaction that signified the mastery of the complete cycle of exchanges with death we only know how to place our science in service of repairing the mummy that is to say restoring a visible order whereas embalming was a mythical effort that strove to immortalize a hidden dimension we require a visible past a visible continuum a visible myth of origin which reassures us about our end because finally we have never believed in them whence this historic scene of the reception of the mummy yet the ollie Airport why because Ramses was a great despotic and military figure certainly but mostly because our culture dreams behind this defunct power that it tries to annex of an order that would have had nothing to do with it and it dreams of it because it exterminated it by exhuming it as its own past we are fascinated by Rameses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians those human beings who had never known the word of Christ thus at the beginning of colonization there was a moment of stupor and but wildermann before the very possibility of escaping the universal door of the gospel there were two possible responses either admit that this law was not universal or exterminate the Indians to efface the evidence in general one contented oneself with converting them or even simply discovering them which would suffice to slowly exterminate them thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramsey's to ensure his extermination by museum of occasion because mummies don't rot from worms they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic master of a putrefaction and death to an order of history science and museums our order which no longer masters anything which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science irreparable violence toward all secrets the violence of a civilization without secrets hatred of a whole civilization for its own foundation and just as with ethnology which plays that extra cating itself from its object to better secure itself in its pure form D Museum of D Museum affection is nothing but another spiral in artificiality witness the cloister of st. michael d kook sir which one will repair tree 8 at great cost from the cloisters in new york to reinstall it in its original site and is everyone supposed to applaud this restitution as they did the experimental campaign to take back the sidewalk on the Champ Elysee well if the exploitation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act if the cloisters of New York are an artificial mosaic of all cultures following a logic of the capitalist centralization of value there re-importation to the original site is even more artificial it is a total simulacrum that links up to with reality through a complete circle through a complete circle Oh Lucien the cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment which at least fooled no one repaid repatriating it is nothing but a supplementary subterfuge acting as if nothing had happened an indulging in retrospective volusia nation in the same way americans flatter themselves for having brought the population of indians back to pre conquest levels one faces everything and starts over they even flatter themselves for doing better for exceeding the original number this is presented as proof of the superiority of the civilization it will produce more Indians than they themselves were able to do with sinister derision this overproduction is again a means of destroying them for Indian culture like all tribal culture rests on the limitation of the group and the refusal of any unlimited increase as can be seen in Ishii's case in this way their demographic promotion is just another step towards symbolic extermination everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original things are doubled by their own scenario but this doubling does not signify as it did traditionally the imminence of their death they are already purged of their death and better than when they were alive more cheerful more authentic in the light of their model like the faces in funeral homes of the hyper real and the imaginary Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra it is the first of it is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms the Pirates the frontier the future world etc this imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation but what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt of the social microcosm the religious miniaturized pleasure of real America of its constraints and joys one parks outside and stands in inside one is altogether abandoned at the exit the only phantasmagoria in this imaginary world lies in the tenderness and warmth of the crowd and in the sufficient an excessive number of gadgets necessary to create the multitudinous effect the contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot a veritable concentration camp is total or rather inside a whole panoply of gadgets magnetizes the crowd in directed flows outside solitude is directed at a single gadget the automobile by an extraordinary coincidence but this derives without a doubt from the enchantment inherent to this universe this frozen childlike world is found to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogen iced walt disney who awaits his resurrection through an increase of 180 degrees centigrade thus everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd is drawn all its values are exalted by the miniature than the comic strip embalmed and pacified whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland el marrón did a very well in Utah Peaks digest of the American Way of life panegyric of American values idealized transposition of a contradictory reality certainly but this masks something else and this ideological blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third-order Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real country of all real America that is Disneyland a bit like prisons a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety in its banal omnipresence that is car cereal that is casserole Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it our No they're real but belong to the hyper real order and to the order of simulation it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality ideology but of concerning the fact that the real is no longer real and thus of saving the reality principle the imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp whence the debility of the imaginary its infantile degeneration the world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are everywhere in the real world and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere that it is that of the adults themselves who came here to act the child in order in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness Disneyland is not the only one however enchanted village Magic Mountain marine world Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality their energy of the real - a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant unreal circulation a city of incredible proportions but without space without dimension as much as electrical and atomic power stations as much as cinema studios this city which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms the Disneyland a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste treatment plants are everywhere and even here everywhere today one must recycle waste and the dreams the phantasms the historical fairy like legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product the first great toxic excrement of a hyper real civilization on a mental level Disneyland is the prototype of this new function but all the sexual psychics somatic recycling institutes which proliferate in California belong to the same order people no longer look at each other but there are institutes for that they no longer touch each other but there is contact oh therapy they no longer walk but they go jogging etc everywhere one recycles lost faculties or lost bodies or lost sociality or the lost taste for food one in one reinvents penury as Curtis ISM vanished savage naturalness natural food health food yoga Marshall Sahlins idea that it is the economy of the market and not of nature at all that secretes pannier E is verified but a secondary level here in the sophisticated confines of a triumphal market economy is reinvented a penury sign penury simulacrum a simulated behavior of the underdeveloped including the adoption of marxist tenets that in the guise of ecology of energy crises and the critique of capital adds a final esoteric oreal oriole to the triumph of an esoteric culture nevertheless maybe a mental catastrophe no mental implosion and involution without president lies in wait for a system of this kind whose visible signs would be those of this strange obesity or the incredible coexistence of the most bizarre theories and practices which corresponds to the improbable coalition of luxury heaven and money to the improbable luxurious materialization of life and to undiscoverable contradictions political incantation Watergate the same scenario as in Disneyland effects effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists than at effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the limits of the artificial perimeter here the scandal effect hiding that there is no diff forints between the facts and their denunciation identical methods on the part of the CIA and of the Washington Post journalists same operation tending to regenerate through scandal moral and political principle through the imaginary a sinking reality principle the denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law and Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal in this sense there was a prodigious operation of intoxication a large dose of political morality reinjected on a world scale one could say along with border the essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dis simulates itself as such understood as follows capital amoral and without scruples can only function behind a moral superstructure and whoever revives this public morality through indignation denunciation etc works spontaneously for the order of capital this is what the journalists of The Washington Post did but this would be nothing but the formula of ideology and when Bordeaux states that he takes the relation of force for the truth of capitalist domination and he himself denounces this relation of force as scandal he is thus in the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are he does the same work of purging and reviving moral order an order of truth in which the veritable symbolic violence of the social order is engendered well beyond all the relations of force which are only its shifting and indifferent configuration in the moral and political conscience 'as of men all the capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to come or to combat it in the name of rationality to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality because these are the same which can be thought of in another way formally one works to dissimulate scandal today one works to conceal that there is none Watergate is not a scandal this is what must be said at all costs because it is what everybody is busy concealing this dissimilation marketing a strengthening of morality of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive scene of capital it's it's it's instantaneous cruelty its incomprehensible ferocity it's fundamental immorality that is what is scandalous unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought from the theories of the Enlightenment up to communism one imputes this thinking to the contract of capital but it doesn't give a damn it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise nothing more it is enlightened thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it and all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game power is unjust its justice is a class justice capital exploits us etc as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules it is the left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society by the same token no need for revolution it suffice as the capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange capital in fact was never linked by contract to the society that it dominates it is a society of social relations it is a challenge to society and it must be responded to as such it is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law