SACRAMENT, MALEFICE, SORCERY

The Disappearance of Jean Baudrillard Pt1

“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. The book in question is a copy of Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, published in 1981, and this sets up what the archetypal guiding figure, Morpheus, tells him later in the film.

“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 French 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 — 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.

The flashbacks persisted under the Trump and Biden presidencies. 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. While this is still (as far as we know) an allegorical model of how politics takes place in our era — power-struggle within the establishment existing only in the form of competition for the rights to produce the next presidential simulacrum — it might quite feasibly at some not too distant point become a literal reality.

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 spring 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 was unimpressed by 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 his 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. “Religions emerge from the death of God,” he writes. 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, and then immediately forget, 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 within within it. 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.

It wasn’t just the Wachowskis’ movie that announced the theme of the new millennium; the Oxford English Dictionary, rather presciently, 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 the 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 completely governed by them. Our maps have indeed 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 — an epoch-making Baudrillardian pseudo-event indeed, combining real slaughter and simulation. How would he mark this next watershed in the process of precession?