Simulacra and Simulation

“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.’”

Baudrillard draws a line of distinction between pretending and hyperreality. When people are pretending, they are still anchored to original meaning. They know that what they are doing is grounded by a reality outside of it. In hyperreality, however, people do not know that what they are experiencing is simulated; the hyperreal becomes more real than reality itself. Baudrillard explains that this is how Hyperreality and the Death of the Real manifest in the postmodern world.

“When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

Baudrillard explains nostalgia as a desire for original meaning in a world that is devoid of it. He says that the reason nostalgia has become such a powerful emotion in the modern age is that people feel the loss of meaning in their hyperrealities and long for connection to meaning.

“Today, the history that is ‘given back’ to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a ‘historical real’ than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real.”

Baudrillard sets up his ideas about film and television by connecting his ideas about hyperreality to history. He says that since people easily forget the past, so it is necessary to create a mythology about history to ensure that the past does not repeat itself. Baudrillard argues that the hyperreal mythology of history, which is designed to manipulate and shape society, replaces the reality of events. When he says that history is “given back,” he means that historical events and narratives are presented through various media after being “taken” or removed from their original contexts. In art, “neofiguration” means abstract art styles that are not rooted in realism; Baudrillard says media representations of history are as unlike real history as abstract art is from realistic art.

“Cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths.”

Baudrillard views cinema as another type of hyperreality that replaces reality. He argues that the prevalence of cinematic franchises that use formulaic storytelling and reprise narratives is indicative of how even art and film are subject to repetitive copying. The Implosion of Consumer Culture is characterized by a loss of meaning in art; instead, films repeat themes and stories, replacing originality and creativity.

“This forgetting is still too dangerous; it must be effaced by an artificial memory.”

Film is a powerful tool for shaping the human psyche around historical events. Baudrillard shows how cinema is used to manipulate audiences and to develop cultural assumptions about historical events. Artificial memories produced through film, however, contribute to hyperreality, leaving people disconnected from the truth.

“The real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum, including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is essential from the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself, in the image of the film, to produce a simulation of catastrophe.”

Baudrillard shows how the hyperreality of film begins to mirror the hyperreality of the external world, and vice versa. The two become part of a larger hyperreality, where the lines of the real and the not real are blurred even further. Baudrillard says that simulacra can both copy original signs and precede them. While films distort historical events into mythology, life imitates film; he uses the example of The China Syndrome to discuss this.

“The war abolishes itself in its technological test, and for Americans it was primarily that: a test site, a gigantic territory in which to test their arms, their methods, their power.”

In this quote, Baudrillard discusses the film Apocalypse Now as a reflection of the Vietnam War and the gross use of military technology by the United States. He uses the film to explore larger arguments about the nature of war in a hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that the use of technology in war, like the use of technology in film, further disconnects people from the reality of events and desensitizes them to violence.

“But instead of breaking and compressing all culture here in this carcass that in any case has the appearance of a compression, instead of that, one exhibits Caesar there.”

Baudrillard criticizes The Centre Pompidou in Paris, which is a cultural center with a library, museum, and shopping center. The construction of the center was meant to provide a centralized public space for art. However, Baudrillard claims that it is a hypermarket where true meaning dies; he emphasizes this idea by using the metaphor of a “carcass,” saying that the building is itself dead and houses only dead things.

“Our time will never again be that of duration, that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling, that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids.”

Baudrillard continues to discuss The Centre Pompidou, viewing it as a symbol of hyperreality and the loss of lasting meaning and significance. He believes that the exposed circuitry of the building symbolizes The Implosion of Consumer Culture in which hypermarkets destroy beauty and meaning. The terms “accelerated cycle” and “transit of fluids” emphasize the speed and changes of the hyperreal world. “Recycling” refers to the way that ideas are reused and repackaged endlessly, without space for creativity or originality.

“This violence is unintelligible to us because our whole imaginary has as its axis the logic of expanding systems. It is indecipherable because undetermined.”

Baudrillard describes hypermarkets as a type of violence that humans are willing to accept because they cannot understand it for what it is. He argues that, like nuclear weapons, hyperconsumerism relies on compression. It makes its way through every nook and cranny of human existence until it replaces everything with the hyperreal. The process happens so seamlessly that humans are unaware that what they are experiencing is devoid of meaning.

“The objects are no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meaning and message one could decipher and appropriate for oneself, they are tests, they are the ones that interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them.”

In a hypermarket, commodities are no longer attached to profound reality. This is part of The Implosion of Consumer Culture. Baudrillard explains that hyperreality has an accelerating effect. As people move through a world that is devoid of meaning, they are nostalgic for meaning and seek it through consumption of hypercommodities, further fueling their emptiness. Baudrillard explains that people are under the spell of the hypermarket’s manipulative power, which produces desire rather than responding to human want.

“The hypermarket cannot be separated from the highways that surround and feed it, from the parking lots blanketed in automobiles, from the computer terminal—further still, in concentric circles—from the whole town as a total functional screen of activities.”

Baudrillard explains that the hypermarket is another example of the pervasiveness of hyperreality. Like Disneyland, hypermarkets give the illusion that there is a distinction between the internal and the external, but Baudrillard argues that all human culture has been absorbed into a hypermarket. This means that everything is monetized and made for consumption, without any meaning or originality.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

Baudrillard criticizes the oversaturation of information made available by the media. He argues that the prevalence of mass media has destroyed knowledge rather than expanded it. Like everything else in hyperreality, media is subject to Simulacra and the Loss of Meaning.

“We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us.”

Baudrillard points out that people’s belief in communication and meaning—their “passionate idealism”—is misplaced. He says that the more that people move away from meaning, the more they seek it, turning to mass media and advertising to find answers. However, he reveals that this desire for socialization and communication contributes to the acceleration of hyperrealities. The constant search for meaning is futile as the search itself destroys meaning; this will lead to “the catastrophe of meaning,” where communication will be abundant but genuine meaning is lost.

“This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possibility of metamorphosis, has power over all the others.”

Throughout Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard shows how The Implosion of Consumer Culture in a hyperreality consumes and destroys meaning. Here, he examines advertising as an art form and the way it devolves all art into a self-referential loop. Baudrillard sees the pervasiveness of advertising as another example of the omnipresence of hyperculture.

“Cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same.”

Baudrillard uses cloning as an example of Simulacra and the Loss of Meaning. A clone of a person is an exact copy , but it loses something of the original in its reproduction. Baudrillard argues that this is always the case with simulation, and it is the reason that meaning is inevitably lost.

“It is the fantasy of seizing reality that continues—ever since Narcissus bent over his spring.”

Baudrillard is discussing the human obsession with creating reality and reproducing their own images. He refers to Narcissus, the character from Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection, mistaking it for reality. Just like Narcissus, humans chase after the “fantasy of seizing reality,” but this only contributes to hyperreality.

“It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life.”

Baudrillard is describing the universe of J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash, where violence—“the Accident, the insane”—is the animating force or “the sex of life.” Hyperrealities leave people so disconnected from meaning and reality that they begin to seek it in extreme and violent ways. Through his analysis of Crash, Baudrillard shows how hyperrealities desensitize people and convince them that violence can be substituted for meaning.

“We can no longer imagine any other universe: the grace of transcendence was taken away from us in that respect too.”

Baudrillard breaks down three types of simulacra. He proposes that the second type offers people a narrative of science fiction, which is a way of examining reality in a dramatized and hyperbolic way. However, hyperreality replaces all reality with simulacra, leaving no room even for the narrative of science fiction. Baudrillard sees this as another type of theft committed by hyperrealities: They remove the possibility of examination and analysis.

“Everything that has happened to them has happened to us. Our destiny has never been separated from theirs.”

Baudrillard argues that humans should pay close attention to the experiences of animals in Hyperreality and the Death of the Real. He says that the subjugation and destruction of animal life—which is what he refers to in the line “Everything that has happened to them”—offers an indication of how hyperreality will eventually affect “us” humans, too.

“In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.”

Baudrillard encourages individuals to pay close attention to the nonverbal communication of animals as a sign of their intelligence rather than an indication of their lower status than humans. Animals still have territory; they live real lives in a real world. Humans, however, are subject to Simulacra and the Loss of Meaning. They have no territory or purpose.

“We also have to fight against the profound fascination exerted on us by the death throes of capital, against the staging by capital of its own death, when we are really the ones in our final hours.”

Baudrillard argues that people have a responsibility to fight back against The Implosion of Consumer Culture. He says that capitalism creates a narrative that it is in decline or in its “death throes.” However, this is only an illusion that is staged by the system of capitalism itself—it does so to distract from the fact that it proliferates and puts the very existence of humanity at risk. Baudrillard insists that capitalism and consequently hyperconsumerism are destructive forces that kill meaning in existence, and Baudrillard warns against buying into a narrative that suggests otherwise.

“The universe of simulation is transreal and transfinite: no test of reality will come to put an end to it—except the total collapse and slippage of the terrain, which remains our most foolish hope.”

In his closing chapters, Baudrillard explores the inevitability of hyperrealities. He proposes that simulacra will continue until no meaning is left and all value is lost. He uses the example of academia to illustrate this point. As more students obtain degrees without working, Baudrillard believes that education will continue to depreciate. A loss of knowledge and serious academic work serves to propel hyperreality forward.