The Precession of Simulacra

Diego Thompson

The precession of simulacra

Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard’s why question: Why would Baudillard claim that real life is not based only on the performance like the only way to accept the reality?

Answer: He points out: “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.” (p.343)

Baudrillard’s motivational mechanism: The mechanism is the death or to fail the reality and the resurrection of the simulated generation of difference. “Never again will the real have to be reproduced- 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 even of death” (p.344)

Key concepts:

·  Hyperrealism: It is the essence of the real world. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. 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.” (p343)

·  Simulation: It is part of the “real world” and it is part of the “non-real”. Simulation threatens the difference between “true” and false, between “real” and imaginary and that produces “true symptoms”. In addition it is used by many structures or apparatus of the society to create and reinforce the real world. Ex: the army and the medicine are “favored terrains of simulation” (p.345). Simulation stars form the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the signs as value. (p.346)

·  Images: Are used as identification or mechanism for the differentiation between something part of the “imaginary” or not. Death and “saving the original” are the mechanisms used with the images (347-349)

·  Political Incantation: The political apparatus use means to regenerate moral and political principles towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress. (p. 353)

·  Sprirality and Negativity: “Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony” (p. 357) That process of that death is to renew the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power, like under a shape of “spirality”.

·  Strategy of the Real: There is no “objective” difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the other. Example: “law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation”. (p. 358)

·  Implosion: Is the consequence of the collapse of two orders or the end of “panopticon”. It is the absorption of the reality model of causality, of the differential mode of differentiation, with both the positive and negative poles. As a consequence: non-distinction of active and passive. (p. 366)

·  Orbital and nuclear: The inverse, irreversible, “implosive process”: a generalized deterrence finality, of every contradiction, rupture, or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm and doomed to the transparency of detail radiated by data collecting mechanisms. That process takes an orbital and global form of homogenization of everybody else on the earth. (p. 369)

Orbital and implosive process

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