Sanam Shahedali
Professor
Hossein Sabouri, PhD
English
Literature MA – Understanding Literature
25 January 2017
“If you know the
whole, you know nothing,
As the whole is
the signifier of the un-signified.”
-Attar
This review is
an attempt to provide a summary of Jean Baudrillard’s article “Simulacra and
Simulations” (French: “Simulacres et Simulation”). Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
is a French sociologist and philosopher whose works and theories are
predominantly associated with the postmodern condition. In his article “Simulacra
and Simulations”, Baudrillard examines the contemporary society in terms of its
relations to the concepts of reality, representation and simulation.
Baudrillard begins
by demonstrating the phases that the “image” could be said to have gone
through. The first phase in when one considers the image to be the
representation of a reality. The second phase is when the image obscures or
distorts a reality. The third phase is when the image dissimulates that there
is no reality, no original reference. The fourth phase, which constitutes the
core of his discussion, is when the image “bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulation.”
The dictionary
definition for the French word simulacre (English: simulacrum) is:
Ce que n’a que l’apparence de ce qui’il prétend être (English: That which does
not have the appearance of what it claims to be), or Se dit d’un apparence qui
pretend être la realite (English: Of an appearance that pretends to be the
reality). Baudrillard takes these definitions one step further in order to account
for the condition of the contemporary society. Simulacrum, he states, is “never
again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself.” In other words,
simulation is no longer about imitating or making something appear real which
is unreal, because it is not a simulation of an original reference. Simply put,
it is the simulacra that precede the reality, not the other way around. Simulation
“is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”
Baudrillard attributes the postmodern human’s hankering after myths of
origin and the real to this disappearance of the real and its being replaced by
the hyperreal. Moreover, in a world of hyperreality, in which anything that
happens is of the order of simulation in the sense stated above, the power
itself becomes a simulation of power. The situation proves to be an agitating
state even for societies, as power turns out to be a demand for them: feeling
the loss of the power, some grieving societies move towards powerful signs of
power, i.e., fascism.
Baudrillard gives an example in order to clarify how simulation is a
subversive force in relation to the power. If a person tries to simulate a
robbery, that person is obliged to imitate all the codes and signs that
constitute a robbery and, eventually, one has committed the crime while one was
merely simulating it. In fact, all the criminal acts are their own simulations
as their ‘real’ objectives have given way to the refractions of the “rituals of
the media.” Although these criminal acts are hyperreal now, they are still
offensive, though they are inaccessible by any system that dissimulates
referentiality. This is a dangerous situation for the order of the law since, at
the end of the day, the simulation and the real were inseparable and thus
eluded the realm of the repressive state apparatus. So the power will go to
extreme lengths in order to restore the principle of the real and the principle
of the preferentiality.
Interestingly, it was the power itself that deterred the real for a long
time by a profusion of commodity production and injecting the symbolic value upon
the commodity. Now that it feels the subversive force of the simulation, the
“power effect” has reversed the process in its desperation to find some firm
ground to stand on. Baudrillard gives two examples of the power’s attempts to
restore the reality and referentiality principle. Disneyland and Watergate.
Disneyland is not only a means through which the power tries to stamp the
American ideology upon the visitors, it is a third order simulation to conceal
the fact that it is the whole city, or rather the whole country, that is not
real, not just Disneyland.
Likewise, Watergate, which is considered to be a major political scandal
that occurred in the United States in the 1970s, is not a scandal according to
Baudrillard. An ideological analysis of the Watergate would be that this
shocking scandal was meant regenerate a sense of political morality, thus creating
a moral backdrop for the corrupt capital. However, “Watergate is not a
scandal,” Baudrillard asserts boldly. Watergate’s being called a scandal is a
cover in order to conceal the fact that capital cannot be addressed in terms of
any moral referentiality at all. Capital is not related by any contract to the
society that it dominates in anyway. Therefore, it is wrong to address it in
terms of justice or law, though this is precisely what the power tries to
achieve by creating scandals like the Watergate.
In this age of simulation, any ideological analysis, even if it is appears
to be a revolutionary one, is favored by the power since it hint at the
dissimulation of a reality, thus saving the whole order of social relations,
power included, from the threat of hyperreality.
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