Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation.pdf
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. The Precession of Simulacra
II. History: A Retro Scenario
III. Holocaust
IV. The China Syndrome
V. Apocalypse Now
VI. The Beaubourg Effect : Implosion and Deterrence
VII. Hypermarked and Hypercommodity
VIII. The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
IX. Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising
X. Clone Story
XI. Holograms
XII. Crash
XIII. Simulacra and Science Fiction
XIV. The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses
XV. The Remainder
XVI. The Spiraling Cadaver
XVII. Value's Last Tango
XVIII. On Nihilism
THE PRECESSION 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 Borges 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 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 discrete charm of second-order simulacra.*1
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the 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 - precession 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. The desert of the real itself.
In fact, even inverted, Borges's 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 coextensivity 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 coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the
dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and
memory banks, models 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 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 referentials - worse: with their
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, nor 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 vicissitudes. 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 hyperreal
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 IRREFERENCE OF IMAGES
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have
what one doesn't have. 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" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or
dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is
simply masked, whereas 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 ill.
Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness's 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 simulatable and simulated, and
medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "real" illnesses according to
their objective causes. Psychosomatics 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 that 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 the 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?*2
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 draws 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 favored 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 the 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 Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today.*3 This is precisely because they predicted this
omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the
conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow 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 this death of the divine referential must
be exorcised at all costs.
One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images,
were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only
saw 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 in the epiphany of his representations
(which, perhaps, they already knew no longer represented anything, that they were purely
a game, but that it was therein the great game lay - knowing also that it is dangerous to
unmask images, since they dissimulate 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
baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.
This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murderers of
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