Simulacra: Example 1 – An archeologist walks into a cave
Lascaux II was opened in 1983, it is an facsimile o the original caves found at Lascaux, France in1940, It was made to protect the caves for ( and from) tourists.
For Baudrillard this is another example of the simulacra effacing the original.
“the very memory of the original caves will fade in the mind of future generations . . . from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication is sufficient to render both artificial
The proximity of the original Lascaux to Lascaux II reinforces the illusion of the veracity of the simulation.
The danger is that the original is not preserved by its copy but replaced by it.
Thus rendering neither authentic Baudrillard in a later comment joked about the possibility of closing Lascaux II to make further copies to preserve it.
Simulacra: Example 2 – We all take a trip to a Theme park …
Disneyland, according to Baudrillard is a totally simulated world that attempts to saturate us in “Americaness.”
It is a sign for ‘Americaness’ that is more potent and more desirable than the ‘real America.
What this simulated America (Disneyland) actually ends up doing is betraying the profound ‘unreality’ of the Los Angeles metropolis surrounding the amusement park.
The danger is that once disneyland stands for ‘americaness’ that everything thing else around it isn’t american anymore. It isn’t wanted to be promoted as american anymore.
It is for all intents and purposes less real, less authentic.
“Disneyland exists,” Baudrillard wrote:
“to conceal the face that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real america,’ which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is circular).”
i.e. there is no authentic or ‘real America only hyperreality.
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but or the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” (Simulations p.25)
Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation (1994)
In ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ Baudrillard asks what happens in a world that is ultimately denied all access to the real and in which only simulacra and simulation exists.
For baudrillard situations take over our relationship with the real life, creating a hyperreality, a copy that has no original.
This hyperreality happens when the difference between reality and representation collapses and we are no longer able to see an image as reflecting anything other than a symbolic trade of signifiers in cultural exchanges, not the real world.
His main point is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice.
He argues that there are three “orders of simulation”
- in the first order ( pre-modern period), the image is a clear counterfeit of the real; the image is recognised as just an illusion.
- in the second order ( the industrial revolution), the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. These copies masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening o replace t (e.g. in photography or ideology.)
- in the third order ( the postmodern age), we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only hyperreality.
Jean Baudrillard – The Gulf War did not take place (1991)
In Baudrillard’s controversial book it is important to note that what he argues is that what took place was not a was ( as we know it), not that nothing took place at all.
In the book he states that instead of a ‘total war’
“we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse.”
In other words virtual war replaces ’total war’:
“Our virtual has definitively over-taken the actual
We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.”
“we prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real
“The war is also pure and speculative, to the extent that we do not see the real event that is could be or that it would signify.”
Quoting Paul Virillio, Baudrillard says:
“at a certain speed, the speed of information, things lose their sense”
… we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation …
we have moved towards the principle of simulation which governs all information and the structural unreality of images”
War has not escaped this virtualisation which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted war, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death
The Matrix Trilogy Wachowski Brothers
The Matrix Trilogy operates within a logic derived from some of the ideas of Baudrillard, whose book ‘ Simulacra and Simulation’ features in one scene of the film.
Ideas of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation are woven in to the narrative