Andre Ye

Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard (*)

Last updated on 26 Sep 2022.

Review and notes on Simulacra and Simulation.

The Precession of Simulacra

  • It is not that the map is drawn from the territory anymore, but rather that the territory is drawn from the map
    • Deconstructive initial step: the inversion of the de-facto hierarchy of opposites - the fake and the real, the representation and the meaning, the syntactic and the semantic
  • The ‘liquidation’ of the referential: the real in the referential exposed. The result is not a real nor a referential entity but a hyperreal.
  • Recurrent relations, reflection and refraction: the hyperreal is characterized by a unique, disorienting, ‘non-Euclidean’ space
  • The ‘irreference’ of an image \(\iff\) the ‘irreference’ of the reference?
  • Dissimulation leaves reality intact (does it, though?). Simulation produces the ‘true’ in ‘real’ ways.
  • “Objectively” one cannot treat a patient who simulates illness as being ill or not ill.
    • Is this really true? Assumes a behaviorist external-observation epistemological understanding of truth.
    • Is Baudrillard’s argument here self-circular?
  • The production of symptoms - Anti-Oedipus and the capitalist production of schizophrenic tendencies
    • Can we understand the hyperreality in relationship to the anti-Oedipal mechanisms?
    • To what extent is the hyperreality contained within anti-Oedpial schizoid production?
  • Resistance to the inherent deconstruction between the real and the simulated, resistance to the Deleuzian ‘virtual’?
  • What do we do about simulators? ‘Fake’ homosexuals, conscientious objectors, the madman.
  • All crazy people simulate: to convincingly simulate craziness is to be crazy.
  • The lack of distinction between the simulated and the real is ‘the worst kind of subversion’. Where does morality fit in here? Is Baudrillard lamenting the exposure of deconstruction? Is he a ‘real’ deconstructionist?

“the divinity that animates nature can never be represented”

“God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum”

“…the Jesuits, who founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God”

  • “murderers of the real” - in which ways is the real suicidal? How does it murder itself?
    • Zizek: how does transcendental reality give rise to ontic reality? How is the difference between the transcendental and the ontic transposed onto the transcendental itself?
  • Simulation as opposed to representation: simulation is not exchanged for the real, but for itself.
    • Marx and exchange. How does the real function as capital which reproduces itself? And how does this result in the valuation and exchange-value of the real?
    • The Real is capital; valued by its exchange, the transcendental for the ontic, the ontic for the transcendental, the ontic for the ontic. This forms the Mobius strip of the real. (?)
    • It may be too early to say this, but it seems like Baudrillard is a manifold of Zizek’s in Sex and the Failed Absolute.
  • Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and the real
    • “the radical negation of the sign as value”
  • Successive phases of the image:
    1. It is the reflection of a profound reality;
    2. It masks and denatures a profound reality;
    3. It masks the absence of a profound reality;
    4. It has no relation to any reality whatsoever - it becomes its ‘own’ pure simulacrum
  • Concepts of ownership, value, exchange.
  • Modern Mobius religions: in stage three, the absence of the reality is part of its reality. Is this a deconstructive/simulacrum type object?
  • Science never sacrifices itself, but it finds sacrifices to preserve th reality principle. It simulates its absence.
  • Disneyland - a play of illusions and phantasms which serves as explicitly false to hide that it is real.
  • The return to the double, to the copy which is and is not the original, which is lived without origin
  • If there is no origin, then is there a telos? (Donna Haraway’s titular philosophical question in Cyborg Manifesto)
  • Baudrillard plays into a cruel perversion of Kantian ontology: the real is moved beneath us, and now we observe the phenomenal standing upon thin air, and we retroactively constitute the existentially justificatory noumenal; the noumenal and the phenomenal both collapse under each others’ weight. We cannot isolate the process of the real, the production of the real.
  • Circulation becomes de-politicized. We are losing the violence; we are pacified.
  • Simulation can last indefinitely: it is not ‘true’ power in the sense of Foucault or Nietzsche, but rather a pure flux of social demand; pure circulation.
  • What does it mean to capture a representation as if the process of capturing hadn’t occurred? A paradoxical formula which only obeys the logic of simulation. We experience an excess of meaning, the pleasure from the surplus. What we always see is not the undisturbed real, the ‘pure’ noumenal real, but rather what it never was.
  • Control is not exercised transparently: this presupposes an objective space. It is no longer us which watches the television, but rather the television which watches us. It is impossible for us to locate where we are in the mess of models, statistical sociality, the real. There is no more violence, but only information.
  • Systems which expand, such as the nuclear explosion, are archaic. What we experience now are systems which implode. Spatial, nuclear models do not have a teleology; the truth is the model. Poles recycle and consume each other. The implosive behavior of the poles signifies the end of the dialectic.
  • Deterrence dominates: war becomes a simulacrum. A simulacrum which burns the flesh all the same, but which loses ideological seriousness and the reality of the stakes. But the sacrifices continue - and this makes it all the more sinister.

History: A Retro Scenario

  • What is history? It is not simply what happened before: that is merely a temporal relation, empty, a formalism of meaning. What gives history meaning is how we understand what happened, what we feel, what we infer and abduce.
  • Cinema is one of the most popular and formative understandings of history: captured, resurrected, transmogrified into a retro scenario.
  • “History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth” it is retroactively constituted: we congradulate ourselves on the awareness of the concept captured by the representation, in the spirit of ‘never forget’, ‘always understand’. But amidst the self-congradulation is an obsession with surfaces and the death of referentials.
  • The death of the referentials constitutes a retroactive irreversible constitutive trauma: the representation is not political. “History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema posthumously.”
  • It is not a matter of cinema being proofund or of high quality, of spectacular production proportion, but rather that we are left indifferent: it has happened, it is depoliticized in front of the cinematic screen.
  • Films build myths upon myths, in the process of never forgetting we have remembered a myth.
  • Cinema asymptotically is approaching the absolute real: “terrorism is always that of the real”.
  • Hyperreality: absolute correspondence with oneself.
  • To retroactive the original myth: to make a silent film more perfectly, more original, than the original; cinema aims to revive.
  • History is perhaps the last great myth: the possibility of an objective sequence of events, of high-resolution rendering. As cinema embarks upon this task it produces superresolutions of retroactively blurred images.

Holocaust

  • Forgetting extermination in the physical dimension is part of the broader campaign of extermination: the event becomes unlocatable and inaccessible to us. The forgetting is dangerous: it is supplemented by artificial memory: a restaging of extermination. The re-enactment of the extermination becomes more forgetful, cold, and exterminatory than the physicality of the extermination it documents.

One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor.

  • Forgetting is achieved in retro: in the weeping of never forget, extermination is not held captive in our memories but rather was always already reproducing itself - in the form of supposed exorcism.
  • Media is argued to be a site of collective consciousness raising. But rather it is a medium of deterrence: the Holocaust is primarily a televised object, one revives the cold body with ice - numbing, deterring. An eternal cold war, a new form of war.
  • Cinema vs TV: the cinema still retains the residue of the double; the TV is merely a terminal, a conductor; “you are the screen, and the TV watches you”: the TV passes directly through us like a tape, not an image. It is the always-already formation of myth.

The China Syndrome

  • The Holocaust became a televised event, a cold substitutive extermination
  • TV and general information are a formal and topologically catastrophic form: TV and the nuclear are the same in character - the heat boils into cold deterrence.
  • Nothing resembles the control HQ of a nuclear power station than the television studio.
  • The China Syndrome - confusion of cause and effect, of causality.
  • The chain reaction of the nuclear: the real is swallwoed, consumed: in continuous implosion.
  • Explosion is our hopeful promise - for destruction to be self-evident.
  • All are fascinated by the creation of spectacle by media. And indeed today all spectacle is created by the media.
  • The logic of the simulacra is the precession of the model.
  • Events no longer have meaning because they were preceded by the model.
  • The simulation of nuclear catastrophe prepares and embeds the subject with the ideological metaphysics of fission and absolute security, a game theoretic-equilibrium formed by universal deterrence.

“The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the atomic clash.”

  • The only way to mitigate the ssupension of deterrence is to make the catastrophe arrive, to reproduce the real. This is what terrorism is occupied with.

Apocalypse Now

  • One revisits war in cinema. The war in Vietnam is a baroque dream of napalm; it is power already filming itself.
  • There is no consciousness-raising: it is retroactive megalomania, how is the horror of the film possible?
  • The war itself and the film are “cut from the same cloth”, the film is part of war; the Americans won the cinematic battle.
  • Cinema is a phase of interminable war.
  • The disappearance of the separation between the subject and the camera is no longer a moral one, but one of the circularity and impermanence of destruction and production: the pharmakon in a Hegelian infinite.

The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence

  • Enigma of flux and signs, games of mass simulation: the black monolith in 2001. Immense convection and circulation.
  • An atmosphere of deterrence and implosive power radiates around the Pompidou Center.
  • Almost all social relations are structured in the sapce of deterrence.
  • The Beauborg is the figure of a culture crushed by its own weight, atomized, nuclear.
  • “an aleatory redistribution of destinies” - the universe of Borges
  • The masses salivate and mourn over the death of a repulsed culture. (Is Baudrillard an elitist?) They rush towards Baudrillard as they rush towards disaster scenes.
  • Perfect circulatory operator
  • Implosive mass. Implosion is cybernetic and combinatory.

Baudrillard’s response to the Beaubourg, as it is called, argues that this government sponsored building designed to house modern art and make it accessible to the general populace (the masses as they are sometimes called) functions in fact to neutralize and domesticate the creative and political power of modern art itself. It contains it, renders it transparent, and in effect prevents it from developing any further. The artwork was always, in Baudrillard’s argument, marked by the surprise of its event, its unaccountability, and the ways in which it is capable of provoking thought and even reorganizing the spaces designed for its exhibition. The Beaubourg functions to render these forces redundant. They “implode” (the folding in of edges, the sucking inwards of breath or air) on themselves in this space, which he compares metaphorically with a black hole. The Beaubourg is a site, then, not of revolutionary modern art but of “involution” (making more complicated and endlessly self-referential). Baudrillard puts it another way: the Beaubourg is not simply a gallery; rather it is a supermarket—or hypermarket—of culture. Baudrillard’s style is interesting too. He has absorbed the vocabulary of the Centre Pompidou’s propaganda and turned it against itself. Source

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