JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929-2007)

Simulacra and Simulations (1988)

The Precession of the Simulacra” (1981)

 

As the Bible once stated,

 The simulacrum is never that/Which conceals the truth—it is/The truth which conceals that/There is none./The Simulacrum is true.

                                                                               Ecclesiastes

Writing in the wake of May 1968 in Paris, the former Marxist Jean Baudrillard moved beyond Marxism and into a critique of Marxism and then, by the early eighties began a long engagement with the new economic system which appears in embryonic form in his early works. The System of Objects (1968) was essentially a book for its time–based on the philosophy of Ferdinand de Saussure and Structuralism. If consumer goods are signs that are symptoms of desire, then logically Baudrillard would take the next step which is to make the case that nothing is “real” and that we are functioning in the hyperreal non-world of simulacra. As Baudrillard explained in his opening to his 1981 essay,

Abstraction today 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 survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

However, Baudrillard refused to be categorized as a Postmodernist and even suggested that the Postmodern was itself a simulacra. Due to his long roots in Modernism, one could call Baudrillard a late Modernist or an ultra-Modernist, living as did many writers of his generation at the tail end of modernity without every taking the step into a territory he considered fictitious. In fact the writer rejected Postmodernism in 1986, because all old ideas were swept away in 1968, leaving behind only a state of total exhaustion without leaving anything new or a viable alternative in its wake. Centuries of critical thought were ended. Political and sexual revolutions were finished.  For the new generation there was nothing left, only “soft revivals” in the empty void of a postmodernism that functions by means of what Baudrillard termed a “lack of events,” or pseudo modernist “revolutions” or uprisings such as, “soft feminism,” “liberal Marxism,” “green politics,” and “enfeebled ideologies.” In many ways, like it or not, Baudrillard’s scorn for post 1968 efforts to change the world echoed the Postmodern refusal to accept “change,” something attached to Modernism. Of course, such refusals and scorn reinforce the dominant forces in play, the same forces that supported Modernism, a near entirely white and male phenomenon. Typical of Postmodernism which is essentially passive, it would seem that the only form of resistance that Baudrillard might allow would be no political action whatsoever.

Baudrillard’s main point is that the current system of hyper-spectacle supported by mass and all-powerful media which produces endless spectacles. For the writer, “mass media” was one entity,  defined in his time by film, movies, print press and so on, which diverts meaning and any hope of critique into specular forms–the spectacle that a diverts and misleads the enchanted spectators in to hyper-conformism. Trapped in this spectacle, we are shaped and constructed by its un-real premises.  Baudrillard attempted to explain this effect by using a metaphor for the unreal or an inversion of the basis of reality: the map preceds–comes before–the territory and engenders–creates–the territory. As Baudrillard argued,

The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

Baudrillard stresses the significance of the resulting Simulacra based on the word “simulate.” “To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has,” he said. Simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false and the real and the imaginary and there are no longer any references points, only emptied signs. The simulacra or simulations have always been feared in some quarters, particularly institutions that wish to control imagery or information. Even today, the Muslim faith prohibits some imagery such as that of Mohammad. The Jewish faith long had prohibitions on “graven images.” Early Christianity, being largely Jewish in origin, also reacted against attempts to create religious icons with a deliberate campaign of iconoclasm or breaking images–destroying icons. Baudrillard found this example of the dangers of simulacra or simulated images of holy figures an interesting example of the threat to the real and to the imagination. Early Christian leaders feared that the credulous congregation would become attached, not to a religious concept or faith, but to a base image.  To the early Christians, the image had a murderous capacity and the iconoclasts destroyed the images (of religious figures), lest the images take the place of the “original” or the “real.”  Baudrillard said,

It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possessed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game — knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

The simulacra then is opposed to representation which always assumes an equivalency between the sign and the thing (the real). The simulacra is the inverse of representation and is, in fact, the “death” of the sign. Baudrillard set up the stages the image progresses as “1. a reflection of basic reality, 2. a mask or perversion of basic reality, 3. masks and absence of reality, and finally 4. has no relation to any reality.” Baudrillard considered Disneyland to be the prefect model of all orders of simulation.  Disneyland is a deep frozen infantile world where ideology blankets and covers over the third order simulation–a simulation of a simulation that has no origin and conceals the fact that the real is no longer real or perhaps the real never existed and is only nostalgia. What Baudrillard called “the Disneyland Imaginary” is neither true nor false, but America in miniature existing in isolation as one of the many “imaginary stations” that exist in Los Angeles as islands of deterrence. An idea of a imagined America, created by Disney “imagineers” envelopes the visitor in a safe place where time loses all meaning and has been folded into past, present and future. Here in Disneyland, as Baudrillard posited, everything has metamorphoized into its inverse to be perpetuated in its purged form–the pirates of the Caribbean are not criminals but entertainment.

Speaking of criminals, Baudrillard moved on to Watergate, the scandal that ended the political career of the American president Richard Nixon. This event, pockmarked by many criminals and freighted by clusters of criminal activities was, from Baudrillard’s point of view, a simulacra. The system provided a “scandal” which allowed a shadow play of investigating aimed at purging the miscreants in order to protect the system itself, masking the (unseen) reality of the way in which citizens cannot see what actually happens and that the individual is now totally defeated and is subject to the object world. Watergate, like other political examples he brought forward, was about power. Baudrillard noted,

Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears.

Elsewhere in the book on Simulations,Baudrillard wrote in the essay, “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media” that, the end result is implosion, as the system of simulacra collapses in upon itself. He wrote,

..the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.* Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted.

Media makes events and then absorbs the events in a manner that is circulatory–a new postmodern system of false exchange in which nothing is exchanged but information is served up to an addicted and enchanted audience. The result is an implosion, an inward collapse. When meaning is neutralized and imploded, society too reaches its implosion point. This is who we are now. Today we live in a world that has vastly more media and more information than Baudrillard could have even imagined. Even in his own time, culture, after all, was dominated by the hyperreal in which there is no possibility of critique and all that is left is “intellectual dandyism.” or a display of information as style, also known as “talk radio” and cable television.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

[email protected]

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.
Thank you.

Get in Touch!

1 + 3 =