Jean Baudrillard, The Procession of Simulacra and The Map

Jean Baudrillard, The Procession of Simulacra and the Map

On Exactitude in Science

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

--Jorge Luis Borges

May 1968

• the " movement" began at the University of Nanterre in 1967 when students resisted educational reforms installed there
• as a result, students at Nanterre became politically activated; their tactics eventually escalated into a full-scale, nation-wide general strike

"Dissimulation" vs " "Simulation"

Simulacrum:

• denotes representation, but also counterfeit, sham, fake
• have referents but are merely pretend representations that mark the absence, not the existence, of the objects they purport to represent
• Baudrillard blames contemporary consumer culture and imperialistic Western science and philosophy

• To dissimulate is to "feign not to have what one has"

• presence

• the reality principle remains intact

(Norton 1558)

• To simulate is to "feign to have what one hasn't"

• absence

• threatens the difference between “true” and “false”, between “real” and “imaginary”

(Norton 1558)

“…the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs. . .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. . .” (Norton 1557)

Derrida:

“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present being,

that the center had no natural site, that it was not a. . . fixed locus but a function, a sort of non locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse. . .” (1207)

Nietzsche:

"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions: they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered a metal and no longer as coins."

--"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

Disneyland

Concepts:

Hyperreality:

• the generation by models of a real without origin or reality

Influences

Theodor W. Adorno

"The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. . .the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached" (Jay 121).

"Real life is becoming indisinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience. . the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality" (Jay 126).

"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is not longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. . .it is a “deterrence machine” set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real." (Norton 1564)

What, then, is the "real"?

What is our role in this? Do we have any agency?

Phases of the Image:

De Saussure:

Guy Debord & The Situationalists

1)the reflection of a basic reality

• the image is a good appearance—the representation is of the order of sacrament
• signs that dissimulate something
• implies a theology of truth and secrecy (the notion of ideology)

2)masks and perverts a basic reality

• the image is an evil appearance—of the order of malefice

3)masks the absence of a basic reality

• the image plays at being an appearance—of the order of sorcery

4)bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum

• signs that dissimulate that there is nothing
• age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognise his own, not any last judgement to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection

"the key to his thought is the reversal of the commonsense understanding of the relation of culture to nature, of sign to thing signified"

What do you think of this? How do you envision the disconnection between sign and signified?

Debord's concept of the "spectacle":

"Debord's analysis is based on the everyday experience of the impoverishment of life, its fragmentation into more and more widely separated spheres, and the disappearance of any unitary aspect from society. The spectacle consists in the reunification of separate aspects as the level of the image. . .the message [of the spectacle] is One: an incessant justification of the existing society, which is to say the spectacle itself, or the mode of production that has given rise to it."(Jappe 6-7)

“The real is produced from miniturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”(Norton 1557)