SACRAMENT, MALEFICE, SORCERY

The Disappearance of Jean Baudrillard

“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.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

In an early scene in The Matrix (1999), the main character Thomas Anderson — hacker-name ‘Neo’ — is seen hiding cash and computer files inside a hollowed-out book in his apartment. At this point in the plot, we the audience are still inside the illusion, just as he is. But the book in question is a copy of Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, published in 1981. It is details like these that justify Morpheus, the most important guiding figure in the story, when he tells him that “There's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” He then proves that he and his resistance movement have been watching Anderson by quoting from the text as he gives Neo a glimpse of the world as it actually is: “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.”

Jean Baudrillard was a post-modern social theorist who became known as a prophet of artificial reality. Simulacra and Simulation, his most famous work, is about the human obsession with images, models, copies and representations of all kinds, and concerns the point at which representation loses connection with reality, trapping humanity in a closed circuit of artificiality where that word loses all meaning since it’s all there is. Such a world is neither real nor unreal, but ‘hyperreal’.

When I saw the film soon after its UK release in the year 2000, I failed to catch that detail, which would have interested me if I’d noticed it since I’d read Baudrillard’s treatise soon after its publication in English (1983). I’m not sure what I made of it, then; I think I read it in the same hallucinophiliac spirit as I read Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels. If I discerned the fundamentally escapist nature of Baudrillard’s cult of artificiality, I was okay with it. In the early eighties his theme still seemed futuristic, distant; by the beginning of this century, much less so. Perhaps I would have tracked down a copy and reread it if I’d noticed it in the film. As it was, I only came back to Baudrillard later, by way of Philip K Dick and Ridley Scott — and by way of events, of course, which have taken us ever deeper into Baudrillardian territory.

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A simulacrum is a likeness, image or effigy bearing a superficial similarity to its original and used as a placeholder or sign for the real thing, a representation rather than a replica. The instrumental suffix -crum signifies something which might be used in a simulation, like a baby doll in a nativity play, or a CPR dummy, or a scale model of the moon for rehearsing the Apollo landings: something, that is, that mimics the appearance or function of another thing: a specious imitation. Jean Baudrillard, however, galvanizes the word with post-modern magic, stratifying its meaning into four gradations.

“Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance — representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance — it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance — it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.”

The use of the word ‘phase’, as in the phases of matter or of the moon, suggests a cyclic or developmental evolution of the role of images from one phase to another through the maturation of a civilisation. He is writing, out of the Marxist habit which he would never out-grow, about impersonal historical forces or inevitable tendencies within a society or all societies; a trend in which we are all swept up and carried along to the only logical outcome. Once we have accepted the Death of God, the next phase must bring us, in turn, the Death of Reality.

And so the simulacrum becomes something more than a mere likeness; it is the image that ‘murders’ reality. The violence of the hyperbole is startling, inspired apparently by one of those anthropological snippets (gleaned from Chinua Achebe, I think) that tends to lodge in the bourgeois mind:

“Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.”

Sacramental forms of representation, such as works of art, ritual enactments, even maps and diagrams, defer to the ineffability of the real, not seeking to rival or replace it; it is the loss of this sacramental humility that releases the murderous capacity of the image, which consists in its negation of meaning. The chapter heading visible in the movie clip — and the film-makers appear to have re-ordered the book’s chapters to make this possible — is ‘On Nihilism’.

Baudrillard encapsulates his thesis by allusion to Jorge Luis Borges’ 1946 short story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, about an empire in which the art of map-making has reached such perfection that eventually the cartographers create a map so detailed that it is as big as the Empire itself. This hypersimilitude must be resolved; the map and the empire occupy the same space, so one or the other has to give way. In the story the people abandon the map in the Western deserts, in disgust at its uselessness. It rots away under the sun and rain, its shreds and tatters scavenged by animals for their nests and beggars for their clothes.

Baudrillard’s thought-experiment is to make the counter-intuitive suggestion that in the modern (or rather, post-modern) era what would actually happen is that the territory, not the map, would give way; that the map would replace the territory, and the Empire’s inhabitants would live inside the map, unaware that anything had changed, and with no reason to question the reality of their experience.

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A contemporary forerunner in articulating such themes was the novelist Philip K Dick, working through the genre of science fiction. His novel The Simulacra (1967) is set half-way through the 21st century, and projects ad absurdum the Straussian model of puppet politicians masking the actual sources of power (Dick’s vision of humanity is fundamentally absurdist – a note which rarely survives into film adaptations). In Dick’s story, US presidents are (literally) simulacra, while political authority is vested in a permanent First Lady, Nicole Thibodeaux, who died forty years ago but has been played ever since by a series of actresses. In Dick as in Baudrillard, the true centre of power is impossible to locate, as fewer and fewer individuals or even phenomena can be identified as anything other than simulations.

I was getting flashbacks to Dick’s novel during the 2016 US presidential campaign, when it became apparent that Hillary Clinton was ill, and that on a number of (non-speaking) occasions her role had been played by doubles. I imagined her getting into office and being replaced by an actress, or a series of actresses; perhaps, like Thibodeaux, she would live forever.

As for President Biden, in The Simulacra the succession of presidents (always male) are known as Die Alten — the Old Men. The incumbent Alte, Rudi Kalbfleisch, is an android like his predecessors, and at the beginning of the story his planned obsolescence by heart attack is already imminent. A major subplot concerns the corporate dogfight over the rights to manufacture his successor. In fact this is now how politics takes place; power struggle within the establishment exists only in this form, the contest to win the contract to produce the next presidential simulacrum.

The screenplay for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was in still development when Baudrillard published Simulacra and Simulation. The novel shows us a society completely in thrall to simulation, including the mass production of artificial humans, or ‘replicants,’ used as slaves. Police assassin Rick Deckard, assigned to track down and terminate a group of runaway replicants, sees himself as one of the remnants of a human reality defending itself against rogue simulacra, which he views merely as malfunctioning equipment. The moment when he realises that he too is a Nexus 6 series replicant, implanted with memories which are not his own, is essentially hyperreal, and embodies in dramatic form Baudrillard’s ‘precession of simulacra’, a profound change in the human condition.

Dick’s slow-burning influence, as opposed to Baudrillard’s, probably has more to do with the proliferation of this particular story type over the past forty or fifty years, in which the main character is awoken from a profound delusion or artificial reality: variations on the archetype of awakening and rebirth from Plato’s Cave onwards. Examples which come to mind include Total Recall, The Truman Show, The Game, The Others, The Island, Vanilla Sky, Adaptation, Shutter Island, Inception, as well as Blade Runner and of course The Matrix.

Baudrillard distanced himself from the Wachowski brothers’ splendid metaphor, saying that the film-makers had misread his work. The moral of this: agree with a philosopher and he will disagree right back. But perhaps Baudrillard has more in common with these producers of imaginative fiction than he knows. His work is more rhetorical than epistemological, and what he presents not so much an argument as a vision. Re-reading him, I find a poet masquerading as a philosopher – a description which might apply also to McLuhan in some respects. Like the Canadian, Baudrillard’s work should be taken as ‘probe, not package’; the writing is dense, hyperbolic and paradoxical, making a secure reading problematic. It’s as if he crafted his work to resist synopsis: perhaps paraphrase is to Baudrillard what photography is to certain tribespeople – he instinctively fears the simulacrum, as they do.

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Any reading of Baudrillard’s prose has to be constructivist to a degree; the reader must find pathways through his labyrinthine complications, and it’s unwise to take anything literally. The mixing of dramatic rhetoric and academic jargon gives Baudrillard’s style an interesting tension which readers may equally find attractive or repulsive: a kind of pedantic wildness or wild pedantry. But there is no doubt that his vision — of a society somehow disappearing into its own information systems, so blinded by its own representations of the real as to become divorced from reality itself — responds to a cultural malaise or dislocation in the contemporary psyche.

God has, of course, been thoroughly exorcised by the time Baudrillard arrives on the scene, but this is ultimately what fascinates him: once God is gone, religious iconography becomes a closed circuit of reference without referent, sustaining itself as “pure” or “perfect” simulacra without ground or origin, and providing the archetypal form of “a hyperreal sheltered from […] any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.” From there, Baudrillard’s hypothesis follows that the same “precession of simulacra” will be observed throughout the culture as the reality-image hierarchy finally capsizes.

Baudrillard’s theme crystallised the emergent zeitgeist. In 1981, when he published Simulacra and Simulation, the metaverse was already rising, but all you could see of it was a faint glow of artificial light peeping over the horizon. In 1981, Nintendo had not yet released its first Mario Brothers game. It was not until 2003 that Linden Labs released its virtual society, ‘Second Life’. Reality was still realer than any of its rivals; it still appeared, at least, to have a monopoly on itself.

But what Baudrillard wants us to understand is that all of us, not just these early-adopting virtual ‘residents’, are disappearing into a world of simulacra: that in terms of Western culture, the reality principle is in irreversible retreat, the territory rotting away to mere rags and shreds clinging here and there to the map.

He writes implicitly as if the precession of simulacra has already occurred, and one finds onself reviewing any and all foregoing events of significance and wondering to what year he would date the transition, if pressed. Obviously it’s a gradual, incremental process, but one would also expect certain watershed events to stand out as simulations. And logically, too, one would expect the process to accelerate over time, as a process embodying Moore’s Law, and that at a certain point it would become exponential.

Have we reached that point?

It wasn’t just the Wachowskis’ movie that announced the theme of the new millennium; the Oxford English Dictionary chose ‘post-truth’ as its ‘Word of the Year’ at the turn of the century. Now, in the 2020s, caught in an endless vertigo of simulation — simulated pandemics, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, deepfake video, humanoid robots, transgenderism, weather weapons, and even the potential activation of the fabled Operation Bluebeam, using hologrammatic technology to simulate aerial phenomena including huge extra-terrestrial space-craft — it feels like we’re in the midst of precession right now, tied up in “a logic not of facts but of simulation”, and rapidly losing touch with reality. If once we were obsessed with images, now we are governed by them. Our maps have become the territory. Our reality is generated by models. Our doppelgängers are living our lives.

The proliferation of images organises itself into an infinite regress, an image of an image of an image, as in twinned mirrors, or a Dali painting. The shadows on the wall in Plato’s Cave do not mimic reality but mask its absence; a wall of shadows screens the desert of the real. Your experience in the simulation simulates nothing, when the simulation is all there is. It is now both completely inauthentic and the only reality; that is, hyperreality. The original, now, has not only disappeared — it never existed at all.

It was thoughts like these that sent me back to reread Simulacra and Simulation and flesh out my scant knowledge of Baudrillard’s subsequent career. Then, realising for the first time that he had lived into the twenty-first century (he died in 2007), I turned to The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), wondering how he had responded to the world-changing pseudo-event that would utterly vindicate his vision.

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…An epoch-making Baudrillardian pseudo-event indeed, combining real slaughter and simulation, and where was the great philosopher of the simulacrum at the moment of precession? Watching TV, like everyone else; mesmerised by the ‘incandescent images’ on the screen, gripped by the drama and believing every word, as if he had never written his 1981 masterpiece.

But what else should he do, having announced that ‘the simulacrum is true’, and exhorting us respect the illusion? In the eighties and nineties he had decreed that we must give up the quest for truth, because illusion has sucked all vitality from the real and truth itself become an illusion. The precession of simulacra cannot be resisted; the desert of the real will not bloom again. Reality is dead, and it is a false desire to want to prove otherwise. Instead, we must enter into this strangely seductive, unblinking, double-thinking state of hyperreality.

The tragedy of Baudrillard was that his vision was too quickly realised on the world stage, and that he lived long enough to see it, and published his verdict without waiting for critical information to emerge. 9/11 is the gateway event which invokes exactly the precession of simulacra envisioned in 1981. Karl Rove, political adviser to the Bush dynasty, put it like this:

Q

Of course Baudrillard would say I am misreading his work by taking it literally. For myself, I merely want to apply twentieth-century Baudrillard’s sinister tetrad — sacrament, malefice, sorcery, hyperreality — to the events of a new millennium the old man somehow managed to sleep through from the beginning, and in the process to save Baudrillard from himself.

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Ten years after Simulacra and Simulation, as the USA assembled a coalition to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait and geared up for Operation DESERT STORM, he had published a series of three essays: ‘The Gulf War Will Not Take Place’ (January 1991); followed by ‘The Gulf War is Not Taking Place’ (February 1991); and ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ (March 1991). In these essays he argued that the stylised, selective representation of events in the media bore little relation to reality, and that in reality there had been no war, but ‘an atrocity masquerading as a war’.

In 1991, then, Baudrillard was still writing from a perspective of reality. The first Gulf War was the first fully televisual war, propagating a sanitised pyrotechnic imagery of tracers and ‘smart’ bombs. It was presented as a new kind of war, an efficient, scientific war of precise, clinical strikes without collateral damage. The feel of a video game was heightened by the use of point-of-view video relayed by cameras in the bombers and even the nose-cones of cruise missiles. After Vietnam, the Pentagon prioritised imagery-control in the theatre of operations. ‘Embedded’ reporters, supervised within military units, were prevented from witnessing the only significant ground assault, the bulldozer attack on a network of Iraqi trenches near the Saudi border, which used anti-mine ploughs mounted on tanks and combat earth-movers to bury the Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches. No infantry were used in this attack, with all US combatants encased in armoured vehicles.

Imagery-control broke down hours before the cease-fire, after an Iraqi convoy of 1,400 vehicles withdrawing from Kuwait was completely (and wantonly) destroyed by aerial bombing and strafing north of Al Jahra. Scenes of the most gruesome carnage and devastation were stumbled upon by journalists traveling (with military liaison) towards Kuwait in anticipation of the cessation of hostilities. The most famous image was of an Iraqi soldier incinerated in the act of trying to escape from his vehicle. The photograph, by Ken Jarecke, was censored in the US but published in the UK Observer newspaper, and caused controversy due to its graphic horror. In response, Jarecke published a copy on his blog with a handwritten caption: “If I don’t photograph this, people like my mother will think that war is what they see in movies.”

And that’s Baudrillard’s point: that the West’s suppression and fragmentation of the reality-principle in its citizens enables it to perpetrate its atrocities without public opposition. Once reality is dead for its own citizens, horrific surpluses of reality can be imposed on people of other regions. That in turn creates an opportunity for a terroristic counter-balancing of reality against its own people.

And yet reality in terrorist events – as we saw in Italy, Germany and Belgium – is precisely the issue. Baudrillard’s Gulf War essays are about mediation: they are predicated on the comparison of reference to referent. This aspect is completely missing from his reflections on 9/11. No ‘The September 11th Attacks Did Not Take Place’, nothing like that. Instead, he mythologizes the terrorists, aggrandises the ‘War on Terror’, and bows down before the ‘incandescent images’ of that day. The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), quite simply, is neocon propaganda. At the exact moment that his vision was vindicated, the Baudrillard I knew vanished and was replaced by an approximate replica. From that moment on, as his theory dictated, he was a shadow of himself, a simulacrum among simulacra.

In his heyday, he wrote about the murderous capacity of images. In his dotage, Baudrillard pays homage to the murderous audacity of terrorists. At times, he seems nostalgic for his theory of the eighties and nineties and strokes it a little just to hear it purr. But nowhere is there any awareness of mediation, any question, not any more, of what is real or what is simulated. At first it seems like an extraordinary abdication – and it is – but he had prepared an alibi.

In fact by 2001, twentieth-century Baudrillard had cunningly disappeared inside his theory, like a hermit crab inserting its tender ass into a carefully chosen shell. Two publications on the theme of Simulacra finalised his escape plan – The Perfect Crime (1996) about the ‘murder of reality’, and The Vital Illusion (2000), his lionisation of the murderer. In these publications he confirmed that reality had already been defeated, thus justifying his desertion before the battle – the battle of paradigms that has raged on through or two decades, and the struggle to dethrone the propaganda narratives that have mesmerised Western audiences, securing their consent for a state of permanent atrocity and ultimately the destruction of their own civilisation.

Thus Baudrillard nullifies anything he might write after this point. Nothing after The Vital Illusion can address reality, by his own argument. And yet he continued to write as if it could. Every word of The Spirit of Terrorism, however infused with Baudrillardian poetry, is epistemologically worthless, since in his mind the distinction between fact and fiction has disappeared. The sophistry of his rationale for abandoning any critical attention to his premises masks a reversion to artful naiveté – the second childhood of the master.

In Baudrillard’s hyperreal trance, the territory clings only in rotting shreds to the map, but this does not matter, according to him. The simulacrum is now true – and always was, therefore. The result is a superstitious primitivism masquerading as critique of late capitalism: “When the two towers collapsed,” he writes, “it was as if they met the suicide-planes with their own suicide.” A fanciful idea, but it’s not as if he could approve any other explanation that might actually make sense.

He mythologizes the terrorists as geniuses who ‘have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power’ – meaning cellphones, aeroplanes and, er, boxcutters I suppose – granting them powers which the dominant power itself, possessed of the same and infinitely greater weapons, is helpless to resist. Archetypically, whether in mythology or propaganda, the monster must appear superhuman, and Baudrillard dutifully contributes to its aura, arguing throughout the essay that the tactic of terrorism, though immoral, reveals an instinct so infallible that in its face the superpower spontaneously commits suicide, just like the towers hurling themselves to the ground.

What we were seeing was, of course, the monstrous superhuman power not of the enemies of the state but of the state itself. The relevant weapons in this case were all wielded by ‘the dominant power’, and the ‘terrorists’ were among those weapons. Mohammed Atta and company were allowed into the United States on CIA orders, watched by FBI handlers, trained at military bases. None of them was remotely capable of pulling off this operation, but that didn’t matter – their job was over once they’d made exhibitions of themselves in various bars and strip clubs the night before. They weren’t required on planes which didn’t fly into buildings or crash in fields, and so they didn’t board any planes on 9/11, as shown by the flight manifests. Atta’s son says he received a phone call from his father the following day, and that is an entirely reasonable claim.

Meanwhile, Baudrillard continues to dress his mythical terrorists with spine-chilling cinematic qualities:

As their most cunning trick, the terrorists even used the banality of American everyday life as a mask and a doubleplay: sleeping in suburbs, reading and studying in a family environment, before going off one day like a time bomb. The faultless mastery of this clandestine style of operation is almost as terroristic as the spectacular act of September 11, since it casts suspicion on any and every individual. Might not any inoffensive person be a potential terrorist?

Yes, indeed, but the naivety here – la naïveté astucieuse – is staggering. The police state will arise as a response to terrorism, he implies, without considering that the terrorism might be engineered precisely to justify the rise of the police state. Baudrillard would know, if he had studied GLADIO, that the response of the system is not, never was, and never will be, to collapse in the face of such puny, ‘symbolic’ attacks, but to become more centralised, intrusive and authoritarian. What collapses or comes under threat is not ‘the system’ but the spirit of the West – free speech, critical thinking, scientific truth, individual liberty and innate rights. Baudrillard could only make his statement in front of an audience completely unaware of the role of deception in the terrorist model, an audience which has forgotten the revelations concerning the state-sponsored GLADIO terror networks.

In 1981, Baudrillard wrote about the murderous capacity of images. In 2001, he watched a disaster movie on television, and was dazzled by its ‘incandescent imagery’ into suspending disbelief, completely and forever. Thus Baudrillard in 2002 fulfils his own prophecy: in The Spirit of Terrorism, nothing is of the order of simulation at all; there is no sorcery in the ‘flash of unforgettable images’. Reality is short-circuited, as the simulacrum of a philosopher serenades the simulation as ‘the absolute event, the mother of all events, the pure event’.

What he should have done is stop publishing altogether, and made The Vital Illusion (2000) his last word. When asked why, he could have said, because events have outstripped my theory, and left that hanging. He could have said that philosophy is dead, when its sylIogisms are literalised into reality. His silence would perhaps have been honoured as the ultimate essay on hyperreality. But his death came too late to prevent the self-murder of his reputation through publications such as The Spirit of Terrorism.

The philosopher who warned us of the death of reality was dissembling all along – it was never a warning but an escapist wish fulfilment, the desire to wander in wonderland, lost in a Utopian dream. Never a battle-cry but a suicide note, Baudrillard’s work embodies the intellectual stand-down of the West.