This is the book in which Baudrillard's apparatus arrives assembled: the precession of simulacra, the hyperreal, the four phases of the image, the three orders of simulacra, implosion, deterrence, and the thesis that the real has not been falsified but liquidated and replaced by its operational double. It is not a treatise. It is eighteen essays, several of them readings of films and events, that circle one reversal from different entry points: the model no longer follows the real, it precedes and produces it, and the real survives only as the model's alibi. The brief reconstructs that movement essay by essay and carries the load-bearing formulations whole, so the passages can be lifted straight into writing. Two pieces of scaffolding are reproduced first, because Baudrillard deploys them throughout without re-explaining them: the four phases of the image, stated in the first essay, and the three orders of simulacra, stated late in "Simulacra and Science Fiction" but operative everywhere.
The book opens by retiring the Borges fable of the map as detailed as the empire, then inverting it. What has disappeared is not the map but the territory, and with it the difference that gave abstraction its charm.
Page 1
Today abstraction 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 does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
The hyperreal is not the unreal. It is produced, indefinitely reproducible, and indexed to nothing outside itself.
Page 2
The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
The hinge of the whole book is a distinction that looks merely lexical and is not. Baudrillard takes the proof from Littré, the simulated illness: where the symptom can be produced, the medicine that treats real illnesses by their objective causes loses its object.
Page 3
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, 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."
The army case runs the same logic to the point where the institution capitulates to the produced symptom.
Page 5
Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" and the authentic symptom. "If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion.
Simulation is then set against representation as its opposite principle, and the relation between them stated as an envelopment rather than a falsification.
Page 6
Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.
The most-cited passage in the book follows immediately: the four phases through which the image passes, and the gloss that names each.
Page 6
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 decisive break is between the third phase and the fourth, and Baudrillard marks it as the passage out of the regime to which ideology still belongs.
Page 6
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.
The periodizing scheme behind the whole book is stated outright only near the end, in the opening lines of "Simulacra and Science Fiction," where the three orders are laid out in succession. Baudrillard footnotes the scheme to his own earlier "L'ordre des simulacres" in L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976), where the counterfeit / production / simulation periodization is first worked out.
Page 121
Three orders of simulacra:
simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God's image;
simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production—a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the Utopias related to this order of simulacra);
simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game—total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.
The matching imaginaries are set out in the same place: Utopia answers to the first order, science fiction to the second, and to the third order perhaps no imaginary at all, because the model now anticipates the real and leaves no gap for projection.
Page 121
To the first category belongs the imaginary of the Utopia. To the second corresponds science fiction, strictly speaking. To the third corresponds—is there an imaginary that might correspond to this order? The most likely answer is that the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well).
Two further terms carry the second half of the book and are defined in place rather than here: implosion, the collapse of the poles whose difference once organized meaning, modeled on stellar collapse into a black hole, stated fully in "The Beaubourg Effect" (page 69); and deterrence, the universal security apparatus that precludes any real event, stated fully in "The Orbital and the Nuclear" (page 32). Both are carried whole in their essays below.
The longest and most-cited essay, running through eight named subsections and a notes apparatus. Its epigraph is attributed to Ecclesiastes; the attribution is Baudrillard's own device, not a canonical verse (see apparatus).
Page 1 · epigraph
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
The subsection that opens the essay, "The Divine Irreference of Images," establishes the dissimulation/simulation distinction, the Littré illness, the army case, the representation/simulation opposition, and the four phases of the image, all carried in the spine above. Two further passages from that subsection do load-bearing work the spine does not. The first is the theological proof, where the Iconoclasts are credited with grasping what images really threaten.
Page 4
This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear—that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum—from this came their urge to destroy the images.
The second is the wager that the whole order of representation made, and what becomes of that order once the guarantor can himself be simulated.
Page 5
All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
The ethnological proof. The argument is that in order for the science to live, its object must be killed and then preserved as an alibi. The Tasaday, returned to virgin forest at the anthropologists' own suggestion, are the case.
Page 7
It is not a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous), but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. The Tasaday, frozen in their natural element, will provide a perfect alibi, an eternal guarantee. Here begins an antiethnology that will never end and to which Jaulin, Castaneda, Clastres are various witnesses.
From the cordoned-off Tasaday, the museumified working-class neighborhoods at Cruesot, and the duplicated Lascaux, the conclusion generalizes: ethnology, liberated from its object, becomes a fourth dimension applied to everything.
Page 8
Thus ethnology, rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science, will today, liberated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invisible, like an omnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum. We are all Tasadays, Indians who have again become what they were—simulacral Indians who at last proclaim the universal truth of ethnology.
The mummy of Ramses II, mobilized by science and given military honors at Orly after decades rotting in a museum, supplies the governing image of museumification as a second death.
Page 10
Because mummies don't rot from worms: they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums, our order, which no longer masters anything, which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science.
Disneyland, the book's most famous single reading. The ideological reading is granted (and credited to L. Marin's Utopiques, jeux d'espace), then shown to be the cover for a third-order operation.
Pages 12–13
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no 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.
The childishness of the park is then read as functional: it certifies an adult reality located elsewhere.
Page 13
This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
Watergate is run as the structural twin of Disneyland: the scandal effect conceals that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation. This is where Baudrillard stages his most direct engagement with Bourdieu, quoting him and then breaking with him. The quotation:
Page 14
One could say along with Bourdieu: "The essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates itself as such," understood as follows: capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital.
Baudrillard quoting Pierre Bourdieu, then glossing him.
The break follows immediately: to denounce the relation of force as scandal is to occupy the position of the journalists, reviving the moral order the system needs.
Page 14
But this would be nothing but the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu states it, he takes the "relation of force" for the truth of capitalist domination, and he himself denounces this relation of force as scandal—he is thus in the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are.
The thesis is then stated flatly, and repeated through the essay as its refrain.
Page 15
Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality—that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism.
The Left's structural role is named here for the first time, in the figure of the mirror it holds out to capital, and capital is recast not as a contract-breaker but as a challenge issued under symbolic law.
Page 15
Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law.
The structural generalization of the Watergate case: Watergate was a lure held out by the system to regenerate itself through simulated scandal. Manipulation here is a wavering causality in which active and passive overlap. The payoff is the claim that every institution now stages its own murder to escape its real death, and that even presidential assassination has been downgraded to simulation.
Page 19
All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political dimension. The others, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phantom attempts, to simulated murders.
The essay's clearest demonstration, the simulated holdup. The simulated crime is more dangerous than the real one, because it leaves open the supposition that law and order are themselves simulation. But the experiment cannot be carried out: the real devours any attempt at simulation.
Page 20
Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible—in short, remain close to the "truth," in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won't be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation.
Order therefore always opts for the real, exactly as the army prefers to take the simulator for a real madman; but the reversibility runs both ways, and it is now equally impossible to prove the real. From this Baudrillard derives the diagnosis the rest of the book elaborates: power's only remaining move is to manufacture reality, capital having been the original liquidator of the referential.
Page 23
Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of values and commodities, that of the belle epoque of political economy, has for a long time had no specific meaning. What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.
End of the preview
You have read the opening of Simulacra and Simulation. Create an account to unlock the full SAARUTU brief and the rest of the research library.
