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
Jean Baudrillard was a French social theorist who became known as a prophet of artificial reality. His most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), concerns the point at which representation loses connection with reality, and ultimately displaces it, 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’.
Images can be sacraments to reality, or they can pervert and mask it; or they can obscure the fact of its absence, covering up the ‘death of the real’ — at which point the journey has almost reached its destination, the state Baudrillard calls hyperreality. Culture has traveled through reality and out the other side, into a world where the concept of authenticity no longer has meaning.
Once God is gone, religious iconography becomes a closed circuit of reference without referent. 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. Pseudo-religions such as Marxism must be defined in the same hyperreal terms.
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.
Baudrillard’s theme crystallises the emergent zeitgeist. In 1981 only the merest hints could be discerned of the virtual realities that would offer sanctuary from twenty-first century reality. It was not until 2003 that Linden Labs released its virtual society, Second Life. In 1981, Nintendo had not yet released its first Mario Brothers game. The metaverse was rising, but all you could see of it was a faint glow of artificial light peeping over the horizon. 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.
A contemporary forerunner in articulating these themes was the novelist Philip K Dick, working through the genre of science fiction. The screenplay for Blade Runner, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was in development when Baudrillard published Simulacra and Simulation. The freelance killer Rick Deckard, hired 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 the ‘precession of simulacra’, a profound change in the human condition.
Dick’s slow-burning influence, more than Baudrillard’s, is probably behind the extraordinary proliferation of this particular story type over the past forty or fifty years, in which the main character is awoken from an artificial reality: a variation on the archetype of awakening and rebirth from Plato’s Cave onwards. In The Matrix (1999) Baudrillard is name-checked onscreen, when Neo hides cash and computer files inside a copy of Simulacra and Simulation, and is quoted by the character Morpheus, when he describes the world outside the Matrix as ‘the desert of the real’.
The philosopher 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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A simulacrum is a likeness, image or effigy; bearing a superficial similarity to its original, it is 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, having the appearance or function of another thing: a specious imitation. Jean Baudrillard, however, galvanizes the word with post-modern magic, stratifying its meaning into three or 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 term ‘phase’, as in the phases of matter or of the moon, suggests a cyclic or developmental evolution of the role of images — imagery, representation, figuration — 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, which is something like the metaverse prefigured in the Wachowski’s millennial movie. If the twentieth century brought us the Death of God, the twenty-first 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 that tends to lodge in the Western 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.”
Baudrillard doesn’t clarify whether both twins must be killed, or one twin sacrificed to salvage the reality of the other. The primal intuition is that both cannot continue to exist, and this, perhaps more than any other image or analogy in the treatise, sums up the dilemma we face. Which doppelgänger survives?
Baudrillard springboards his argument on J L Borges’ 1946 short story, On Exactitude in Science, about an empire in which the science of map-making has reached such perfection that eventually the cartographers create a map so detailed and so accurate that it is as big as the Empire itself. This hypersimilitude, like the twins dilemma, 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 discard the map in disgust at its uselessness. Baudrillard’s thought experiment is to make the counter-intuitive suggestion that in the modern (or post-modern) era what would actually happen is that the map would replace the territory. The Empire’s inhabitants would not know that this had happened, and would have no reason to question the reality of their experience.
Any reading of Baudrillard’s prose has to be constructivist to a degree; the reader must find pathways through his layered complications, and it’s risky to take anything literally. The mixing of dramatic rhetoric and the language of academic rigour 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 deep malaise in the contemporary psyche.
God has, of course, been thoroughly exorcised by the time Baudrillard arrives on the scene. He writes: It is from the death of God that religions emerge. This is ultimately what fascinates him: the closed circuit of religious iconography that sustains itself in the absence of God, and which becomes the archetypal form of “a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and 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.”
One shouldn’t underestimate the centrality of Death of God theology in Baudrillard’s thinking — it’s the source of his pure or perfect simulacra idea. And there’s a certain grief there despite the total irretrievability of the idea of God or of truth. Baudrillard understands the grief of the iconoclasts, because it’s not only religious imagery which has been emptied of meaning: the death of God is also the death of art. There is just nothing there any more.
“We too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts – not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images – be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images – are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared.” The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena (2009).
In the end, he’s something of a sad sight: a tourist wandering around a cathedral, looking up in awe, entranced by the beauty of stone and light and his heart aching for something he can never believe in. Modern man in search of a soul.
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The Simulacra (1967) is a novel by Philip K Dick set half-way through the 21st century. The political setting in the novel projects ad absurdum the Straussian model of puppet politicians masking the actual source 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 power 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. The masking of its true power centres is of course the purpose of such a system.
I was getting flashbacks to Dick’s novel during the 2016 US presidential campaign, when it became apparent that Hillary Clinton was seriously 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.
It is well known that political leaders and heads of state often retain body-doubles to stand in for them on various occasions. In the new technological era unfolding around us now, facial capture, voice-cloning and artificial intelligence can create ‘deep-fake’ videos indistinguishable from reality, and you don’t have to be P K Dick to imagine some of the uses to which this could be put. How much easier it would have made it for the CIA to keep the terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden ‘alive’ from 2002 to 2016, rather than the series of videos they put out using unconvincing stand-ins speaking in a variety of dialects and accents. Indeed they wouldn’t have needed Bin Laden at all, but could have created their own terrorist boogey-man to order.
In 2024 the Thibodeaux principle flitted once again across the political stage as Dr Jill Biden took a cabinet meeting in the presence of her octogenarian husband.
Trivial, fanciful thoughts perhaps, better suited to pulp science fiction, taking Baudrillard’s “mannequins of power” to absurd lengths. Nevertheless, it was thoughts like these that sent me back to reread Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and flesh out my scant knowledge of Baudrillard’s subsequent career. I revisited The Perfect Crime (1995), and The Vital Illusion (2000). Then, realising for the first time that Baudrillard 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.
Your breakdown of this man’s work is just mind boggling Paul. Piercingly insightful light on a dense but obviously visionary genius…
Thanks — nice of you to say so. I’m putting all the Baudrillard stuff together in book form, I’ll send you a pdf.