simulacra-and-simulation (pdf)
The Precession of Simulacra
map and territory (allegory, precession of simulacra, hyperreal)
simulation (disruption of the real)
iconoclasm (phases of the image)
disney (no real, no place)
watergate (regenerative scandal)
map & territory
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. 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 winesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discenrable 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 simulaiton, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
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 wihtout 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 vistiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
[…] 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.
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 […].
The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an infinite number of times from these.
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 […]
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. [2]
Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself […]
A hyperreal henceforth sheltered form 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. [3]
the divine irreference of images
simulation
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’ (Littre)
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?
For if any smptom can be ‘produced’, and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered simulatable and simulated […]
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?
[…] all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lask of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth. [4]
iconoclasm
‘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?
This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millenial quarrel is still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipitence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the consience 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 God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum – from this came their urge ot 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 destory them. [4]
One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despais 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 exorcised at all costs.
[Baudrillard’s discourse which articulates an originary simulation itself coincides with the death of God as a real transcendent referent. Generalised simulaiton is what is apparent after the event – the Perfect Crime which we know coordinates so well with the Pure Crime in SM (also the death of God as a becoming immanent)]
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 can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith?
Then the whole system becomes weightless, is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, btu exchanged for itself, in an uniterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
[NB. this is how the mime operates (MS), which is why the there is a deep connection between the perfect and the pure crime. The mime stays in the game of referral, without ever touching the present (only creating the illusion of the present)]
Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to represntation. Represntation 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).
Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false represntation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of reprentation itself as a simulacrum.
Such would be 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
[NB. it as the ponit of the 4th phase that the image becomes autonomous. THE MIME INAUGURATES]
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 of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance – it is of 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 second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognise his own, no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection […].
disney
Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra.
It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms. […] This imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation. But what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt the social microcosm, the religious, miniaturised pleasure of real America, of its constraints and joys. [12]
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in itse entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). [12]
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the real is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.
It is no longer a quesiton of a false represntation fo reality (ideaology) but of concealing 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 rejuvinate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp.
This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere […] [13]
Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisley that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation – a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension. [13]
Dinsneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere,a nd even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imagination of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilisation.
watergate
The same scenario as in Disneyland (efect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the limits of the articicial perimeter): here the scandal effect hiding that there is no difference between facts and their denunciation […]. [14]
Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries – a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.
If one envisions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, all determination evaporates, every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions. [16]
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scene to discredit all extreme terrorosts and shore up its own failing power […]
All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. That is, we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason.
Simulation is characterised by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the mearest fact – the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event.
The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once. [16]
This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity, implosion of antagonistic poles), is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory – all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalised cycle. [17]
All […] is simultaneously true. It is the secret of a discourse that is no longer simply ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determined position of power, the impossibility of a determined discursive position. And this logic is neither that of one party nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
It would take too long to traverse the entire range of the operational negativity of all those scenarios of deterrence, which, like Watergae, try to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder – a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression, proving work through striking, proving system through crisis, and capital through revolution […] [19]
All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes.
To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity, and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsiibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and its already dead.
impossible illusion
The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, that is posed here. [19]
Transgression and violence are less dangerous because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitley more dangerous because it always leaves open to suppositiuon that, above and beyond its object, law and order might themselves be nothing but simulation.
How to put it to the test? Simulate a robbery ar a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no ‘objective’ difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery, the signs do not lean to one side or the other. To the established order they are always of the order of the real.
[…] the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will feint and die of a heart attack […]), i short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisley to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real – that is, to the established order itself […] [20]
It is necessary to see in this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation the weight of an order that cannot see and conceive of anything but the real, because it cannot function anywhere else.
This is certainly why order always opts for the real. When in doubt, it always prefers this hypothesis […]. But this becomes more and more difficult, because if it is practically impossible tyo isolate the process of simulation, through the force of inertia of the real that surrounds us, the opposite is also true (and this reversibility itself is part of the apparatus of simulation and the impotence of power): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real. [21]
This is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestreation rituals of the mnedia, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. In short, where they function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their ‘real’ end.
But this does not make them harmless.
On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer with a specific content or end, but indefinitely refracted by each other […], it is in this sense that they cannot be controlled by an order that can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on causes and ends, a referential order that can only reign over a determined world, but that cannot do anything against this indefinite recurrence of simulation, against this nebula whose weight no longer obeys the laws of gravitation of the real, power itself ends by being dismantled in this space and becoming a simulation of power (disconnected from its ends and its objectives, and dedicated to the effects of power and mass simulation). [21-22]
As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and simulation,disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes. For power, it is a quesiton fo life and death. But it is too late.
Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. [23]
TV
TV verite [reality tv]. A term admirable in its ambiguity, does it refer to the truth of this family or to the truth of TV? In fact, it is TV that is the truth of the Louds [1970s reality TV family], it is Tv that is true, it is TV that renders true.
End of the panoptic system. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. This still presupposes an objective space (that of the renaissance) and the omnipotence of the depotic gaze. It is still, if not a system of confinement, at least a system of mapping. More subtly, but always externally, playing on the opposition of seeing and being seen, even if the panoptic focal point may be blind. [29]
Something else in regard to the Louds. ‘You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live)’ […]
Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operaton, or with the medium, as in the Loud’s operation. Such is the last stage of the socila relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propoganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrnece: ‘YOU are informaiton, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.’ An about face through which it becomes impossible to locate on instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. No more subject, no more focal point, no more centre or periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion. […]
We are witnessing the end of perspectical or panoptic space.
[…] thus the very abolition of the spectacular.
Televisoion, for example in the case of the Louds , is no longer a spectacular medium. We are no longer in the society of the spectacle, of which the situationists spoke; nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new era.
There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it. [30]
It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the ‘active’, critical mode, the analytic mode – the distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the ends and the means […]
[NB Gravity’s Rainbow. Reversals of cause and effect: ‘Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out… a few feet of film run backwards… the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound – then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning… a ghost in the sky…
Pavlov was fascinated with ‘ideas of opposites’. Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from sumbission… But when, somehow – starve them, traumatize, shock castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past ‘equivalent’ and ‘paradoxical’ phases – you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master,yet now feels himself a slave… who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, ‘I think’, Pavlov writing to Janet, ‘it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients’ […]
… this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness (And is this really the rocket explosion that Slothrop’s keying on, or is it exactly this depolarizing, this neurotic ‘confusion’ that fills the wards tonight.?)] [GR, pp.49-50]
Now, one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in whcih the opposing poles of determination vanish, according to a nuclear contraction, retraction, of the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal difference between cause and effect, subject and object: precisely they distance of meaning, the gap, the difference, the smallest possible gap (PPEP!), irreducible under pain of reabsorption into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it, because it is itself a determined order. [31]
It is this gap that vanishes in the process of genetic coding, in which indeterminacy is not so much a question of molecular randomness as of the abolition, pure and simple, of the relaton. In the process of molecular control, which ‘goes from the DNA nucleus to the ‘substance’ that it ‘informs’, there is no longer the traversal of an effect, of an energy, of a determination, of a message. ‘Order, signal, impulse, message’: all of these attempt to render the thing intelligible to us, but by analogy, retranscribing in terms of inscription, of a vector, of a decoding, a dimension of which we know nothing
Infact, this whole process can only be understood in its negative form: nothing separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contraction of one over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion – an absorption of the radiating mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination, wiht its positive and negative charge – an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins. [31]
Everywhere, in no matter what domain – politcal, biological, psychological, mediatized – in which the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation, and thus into absolute manipulation – not into passivity, but into the indifferentiation of the active and the passive.