Jean Baudrillard
from
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark
Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
The simulacrum is never
that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which
conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
If
we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where
the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up
exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this
map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the
deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness
to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of
the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real
thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing
but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l
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. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra
- it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable
today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the
map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in
the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire,
but our own. The desert of the real itself.
In fact, even
inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains.
For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the
real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But
it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has
disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's
charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the
map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of
the real. This representational imaginary, which both
culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an
ideal coextensivity between the map and the
territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic,
and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes
all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and
its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity:
rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is
produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command
models - and with these it can be reproduced an
indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative
instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer
enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at
all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating
synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
In this
passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth,
the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials
- worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems
of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend
themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all
combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even
of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the
real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its
operational double, a metastable, programmatic,
perfect descriptive machine which provides all the
signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the
real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system
of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which
no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. 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 the simulated generation of difference.
To dissimulate is to
feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not
simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and
pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of
the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or
dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always
clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between
"true" and "false", between "real" and
"imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms,
is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated
objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this
point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the
illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can
no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be
considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine
loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses
by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge
of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from
the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is
held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation
stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't
the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way
as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.
The alienist, of
course, claims that "for each form of the mental
alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which
the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely
to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost
the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either
side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no
longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the
discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be
unmasked, since it isn't false either?2
What can the army do
with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification,
it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as
though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or
lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian
clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false,
between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If he
acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense
that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of
distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it, classical reason armed
itself with all its categories. But it is this today
which again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.
Outside of medicine
and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion
and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples
because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be
represented." Indeed it can. But
what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is
multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply
incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it
volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of
fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and
intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared
by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their
rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of
simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of
people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that
ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that
God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to
believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there
would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a
distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came
from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they
were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually
perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised
at all cost.
It can be
seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and
denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth,
unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to
venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be
said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most
modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of
God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his
disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew
no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this
was precisely the greatest game - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask
images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
This was the approach of
the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and
on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of
God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which no longer serves
as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the
baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.
Thus perhaps at stake has
always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could
murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity
is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and
intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was
engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth
of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and
that something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of
course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that
is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole
system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for
what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted
circuit without reference or circumference
So it is with simulation, insofar as
it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that
the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it
is a fundamental ax~om).
Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence,
from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and
death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb
simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the
whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the
successive phases of the image:
1 It is the reflection of a
basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a
basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a
basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to
any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the
image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In
the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice.
In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery.
In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of
simulation.
The transition from signs
which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that
there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt.
The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an
age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize
his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth
from false, the real from its art)ficial
resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.
When the real is no longer
what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a
proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality;
of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of
the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of
the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the
referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a
strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose
universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
The objective profile
of the
The
Moreover,
Watergate.
Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no
more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial
perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no
difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are
employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation,
though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and
political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality
principle in distress.
The denunciation of
scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate
above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this
sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a
global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu
that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate
itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so
dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and
unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever
regenerates this public mocality (by indignation,
denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the
Washington Post journalists.
But
this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu
enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of
capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a
scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position
as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine
symbolic violence of the social order is engendered,
well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent
and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of
people.
All that capital asks
of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality,
to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are
identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to
dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.
Watergate
is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what
everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of
morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene
of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its
fundamental immorality - these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in
that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of
leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is
imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more.
Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which
seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And
all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to
reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust;
its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." - as if capital
were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds
out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this
phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its
obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for
revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).
Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates.
It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a
challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to
be denounced according to moral and economic
rationality, but - challenge to take up according to symbolic law.
Hence
Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries - a
simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied
by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a
Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get
rid of Nixon - and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this
one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well,
and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to
see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the
hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For
manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one
another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an
arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political
reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a
conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences
of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be
maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle,
etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system
where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field
unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates
at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all
directions.
Is any given bombing in
The communists attack
the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left.
They sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political
exigency. In fact, it is because they don't want
power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture
because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or because it is unfavorable
for them within the union of the Left - or do they not want it by definition?
When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be
frightened of seeing the communists seize power in
1 That there is
nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change
nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.
2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason
that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever
wield it by proxy.
3 That in fact power,
genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing
it or taking it over.
4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened
of seeing the communists seize power in
5 It can also mean
the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the
communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).
All the above is
simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that
is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys
the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a
determinate position of discourse. And this
logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their
wanting it.
Who will unravel this
imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As
for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it
results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of
resolving its surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the
subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 - where even those condemned
at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western
democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in
return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign
intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions
admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?
The conjunction of the
system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the
"vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized,
circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation,
the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't
it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction
of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire
and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is
so well received at the moment): only capital takes
pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that
we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of
desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings
this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in
wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid
and fascist systems? A malign torsion which
reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the
other, historical revolution.
All the referentials
intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into
the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from
opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on
power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.
It would take too long to
run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios
of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a
moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal
treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real
by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression;
proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by
revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its
object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving
theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by
anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.
Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated
in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by
denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony.
Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and
legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys
are murdered because they still have a political
dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a
right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed
that aura of an art)ficial
menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In
olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he
does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to
preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.
To seek new blood in its
own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and
anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution
attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its
fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.
Of the same order as
the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the
impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because
the real is no longer possible. It is the whole
political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation
or offensive simulation, which is posed here.
For example: it would
be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more
violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a
real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a
simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality.
Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the
distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it
always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might
really be nothing more than a simulation.
But
the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a
violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large
department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a
simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same
gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the
other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the
order of the real.
Go and organize a
fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the
most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise
you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the
operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the
"truth", so as to test the reaction of the
apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably
mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a
bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly
find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to
devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before
institutions and justice come into play.
In this impossibility
of isolating the process of simulation must be seen
the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some
reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation
of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because
it has no "consequences") or be punished as an offence to public
office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for
nothing") - but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no
equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either.
The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power.
How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such
it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and
transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels
out the difference upon which the law is based. The
established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order
simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and
false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions
upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the
real, it is here that we must aim at order.
This is why order
always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this
assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and more
difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of
simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the
inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus
of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to
isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.
Thus all hold ups,
hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that
they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the
media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated
exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their
"real" goal at all. But this does not
make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents
or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like
so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they
are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real
and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only
dominate referentials, a determinate power which can
only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that
indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer
obeying the law of gravitation of the real - power itself eventually breaking
apart in this space and becomnig a simulation of
power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power
effects and mass simulation).
The only weapon of
power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject
realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to
convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the
finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers
the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? - the
discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian
of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious
hyperreality. One remains among principles, and there
power is always right.
Hyperreality
and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they
turn against power this deterrence which is so well
utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the
first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential,
of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and
false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and
exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to
practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization,
etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it
was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of
every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have
of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now,
it is this very logic which is today hardened even
more against it. And when it wants to fight this
catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found
one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the
play of simulation.
As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked
deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the
production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the
threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis,
it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes.
This is a question of life or death for it. But it is
too late.
Whence the
characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction
of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la
belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes
any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through
production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real
which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material"
production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the
features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more
than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking
resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the
profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation
is expressed everywhere by the real's striking
resemblance to itself.
Power, too, for some
time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And
at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective
demand for signs of power - a holy union which forms around the disappearance
of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the
political. And in the end the game of power comes down
to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its
death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears.
When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of
power - a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one
and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any
more, everybody unloads it on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for
societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose
of a powerful referential in a society which cannot
terminate its mourning.
But
we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their
mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in
this same breakdown. And it is by an art)ficial
revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly
this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the
death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of
God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event,
an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that
power is no longer present except to conceal that
there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike
"true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of
force, a stake - this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence
subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death.
Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any
other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared;
only the fiction of a political universe is saved.
Likewise
with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer
exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become
something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the
same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which
it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional
to the loss of stake in the work process.6 The same
change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal the
fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the strike-real too, which is no
longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of
the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work
place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is
the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms as
before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent
strike.
This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question
of a doubling of the work process. And of a double or
locum for the strike process - strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence
in objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or
work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a
wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil,
a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production,
collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the social.
It
is no longer a question of the ideology of work - of the traditional ethic that
obscures the "real" labour process and the
"objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work.
Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the
scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs;
simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality
and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis
to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to
restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
This is ultimately
why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on
ideology, for these are all discourses of truth - always good, even and
especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of
simulation.
1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a
disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like
a witch's trick - and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is
always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness
before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from
the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The Student of
Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black magic, from the
fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being
haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast
technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic
mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that returns to
him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to
the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence;
it makes something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us:
simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still and
always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of
death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo)
always had as objective an operation of black image.
2 There is furthermore in Monod's
book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all current science.
His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does
so still according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order -
objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of knowledge, science's principle
of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the indeterminable
models of the third-order.
3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns
its spectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract
work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just
presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an
individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not
supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual Rorshach test. And furthermore:
"The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh
by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and
tactile."
4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan
of the political economy of the sign, when it enters into the third-order
simulation - the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes
instead signification of the second-order.
5
The entire current "psychological" situation is
characterized by this shortcircuit.
Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the
initial phase of revolt is passed and once there has been established the
principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation of
parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always
more insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice
of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to
them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty.
Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be."
They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional
or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated
and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater than
before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of
libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without
referent, unjust)fied, but
for all that all the more severe - naked demand with no possible answer. The
contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or
familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there
remains only a demand linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse
demand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable"
desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been
fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured
in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back
upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment
with itself. This is literally today the "demand," and it is obvious
that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this
one here is insoluble and interminable.
Simulated Oedipus.
Francois
Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of this and they play the game,
ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak,
you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only:
the more authority is contested, vilified, the greater the need for authority
as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more
vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest,
malaise, the untouchable, at being a tease - in order to de-sexualize
finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who
tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the
"analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request of the analyst,
or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number,
his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't
desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama of simulation
(neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very
different from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a
real mourning for the absence of same (as could have happened after 1968 in the
universities). Now we've reached the phase of desperate reproduction,
and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal - exacerbated and
parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis
and for the same reasons.
The interminable psychoanalysis.
There
is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their liquidation by simulation, of the impossible
psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that produces and reproduces
the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the
exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the
exchange of the critical signs of political economy. This short-circuit was
well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream, or with the
"uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic
knowledge. But this was still interpreted as
resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the
process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing
entirely when the unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable - according to the same scenario of simulative
anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the
third order. The analysis then can no longer end, it
becomes logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed
on demand - an impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole
analysis is rearranged. The messages of the unconscious have
been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is
libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and
the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal,
which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.
6
Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point
where the vote was considered as payment for a service, after all other
repressive solutions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quorum.