The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
What is Simulacrum?
“an image or representation of someone or something.” – Google
What is the quote saying?
Truth is something that is real and something we can prove. Everyone’s truth is different – we all have different understandings/perspectives. Maths is a truth that we can’t argue, if you cannot argue about it then it is truth. We accept that there is truth and we have a need for truth, but at the same time we know there is a dimension to it that is personal, that we cannot expect others to share and also that is depends on our point of view in time. We can only know what we know now, we may change our opinions over time.
Baudrillard is trying to find the reasons for truth and finding the truth.
Barthes was looking at an image with connotations and denotations, and then myth.
Baudrillard is picking up where Barthes left off but what he needed was to talk about history and at what point in time the sign was relevant.
The time this text was written was heading into the time of post-modernism trying to explain the perception of what is real and what is the truth.
Paragraph 1 & 2
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l
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.
What is it trying to explain? What is this text trying to say?
Relationship between the simulation and the reality – they used to be equal. The map was to describe reality.
Hyperreal is something that Baudrillard talks about a lot – it is the generation of models without origin or reality. The models need to come from somewhere even though he says the models have no origin, so surely it could have come from somewhere?
Baudrillard is talking about a time before the internet/radio/magazines etc. and ways of which we generate our content. Media is part of our time and he talks quite strongly about it. It can be said that Baudrillard is talking about how art has moved on and it’s not about traditional values and it’s all gone crazy, also how we live our lives and how we make sense of it, describe it, and view it.
Paragraph 3 & 4
In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction’s charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer’s mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. 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.
In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. 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 the simulated generation of difference.
What is he describing? How is he describing it? Is it difficult to describe what is real?
He is saying everything is the same, and there are no differences between things. Everything is changing so much it’s difficult to depict something that is real. Imagination is easier to depict so it is easy to fall back on it. There could be something disturbing about what is real.
Genetic Miniaturisation?
Another one of his articles Ecstasy of communications talks about miniaturisation as a way of technology. When we look at something really really small, we lose detail, and you can feel superior to it and you can’t see it properly. We lose the idea of scale so it isn’t so great anymore. Baudrillard wrote about it in the 70s but it’s more true in today’s age.
Once you have something that is real, then you can have a mirror. When you have a mirror you have a classic relationship or art – mirroring reality. When what is real cannot be any more reflected by a mirror, then it is very difficult to represent imagery, and it is also difficult to know what you’re trying to describe and in many ways (they can be copies of other copies and generating their own reasons) and we don’t have that opposition. When you have something very concrete you can talk in oppositions, example = politics.
Middle ground is what Baudrillard is talking about – why is it so hard to tell the difference between the right and the left when they are so similar.
The way he understands it is that power is the real, he talks about politics social and economics and production. He is coming from Marx’s tradition. Some of us have very little power and from point of view of power in order to maintain hold we need to obscure the real, which is people to get up and oppose the other person in power. The system is not for me and want to step out of that, then you may not ever own a house & kids etc. The system is repeating itself and preserving their structure. Change is inevitable, power defends itself to create simulacra and is there for us to not see any differences and tell wrong from right and act upon it.
Because simulacra is connected to technology its own problem is itself. There is no opposition but it tries to generate it without it being there in the first place. It’s trying to explain you can self-revive something.
The divine irreference of images (religion)
In the context of religion, he talks about the death of God. Is he dead? When the theory of evolution came to light – Charles Darwin – the idea of God being alive, started to fade because of people believing the theory of Darwin and evolution. God died with science, and in philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche.
Within Christian society, everyone goes to Church on Sunday. Nowadays maybe we believe or maybe we don’t. Everything has changed, UK isn’t as religious as US. It’s not whether he exists or not, but the question is if we as a society we can accept there is no God then how do we judge the other things we have around us. Images of Christ, Images of Saints. How do we explain the images? Images are very powerful because they are the beginning of simulacra. There are 4 stages:
1) It is the reflection of a basic reality.
A good appearance
2) It masks and perverts a basic reality.
An evil appearance
3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.
Plays at being an appearance
4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
No longer of appearance at all.
Hyperreal and imaginary
Disneyland is the one place that children associate with imagination and a fake land filled with imagination and stories and fables. Once you leave Disneyland and you go to the car park it is the opposite and you have a sense of isolation. and he talks about the sense of freezing your childhood in Disneyland.
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