Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. 2nd
ed. Ed. and introd. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 169-187.
“Simulacra and Simulations” represents excerpts from “The Precession of Simulacra,” a
chapter in Baudrillard’s book, Simulacra and Simulation.
Baudrillard's idea of simulacra exemplifies the separation of an ideal existence and the
existence apprehensible to the senses. This separation is fundamental to an understanding
of the postmodern temper. The modernist temper preserved the semblance of an
architectonic reality "behind" the reality that we deal with in the daily dimension. The
modernist thought of the quotidian manifestation as a "copy" or reflection of the "really"
real: this goes back to Plato. Baudrillard says that the "copy" has no original. The copy is all
we have to go on.
Pages 1-7
1. B. starts defining "precession of simulacra" with a contrast drawn from a Borges fable. In
the fable, cartographers draw a map in such detail that it ends up exactly covering the real
territory of the empire. The map frays as the empire declines. The reality and the
abstraction (map) decline together. By contrast, today that pairing has disappeared.
Abstractions are no longer "the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept." [1] No longer
is there simulation of a "territory, a referential being, or a substance." [1] Instead, B. sees a
"real without origin or reality" being generated "by models." [1] This is the hyperreal. In the
hyperreal, (referring again to the Borges fable), the map "precedes the territory." [1] And
this precessive map, or simulacrum, then "engenders the territory," such as it is.
The Borges fable thus is useful only as a contrast to current reality, not as an illustration of
it. B. squeezes one more figurative meaning out of the fable, the notion of empire.
With this reference he turns his attention to the model builders, the simulators, identified
above as the destroyers of a viable relationship between the real and the simulated. The
simulators are imperialistic in that they "attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide
with their models of simulation." [2] In doing so, they destroy "the sovereign difference"
between the map and the territory, the simulation and the real. He refers nostalgically to
"the charm of abstraction" which has been lost along with the sense of difference between
the two--"the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory." [2] These simulators
operate on "nuclear and genetic" principles, not on the older principles, which were
"specular and discursive." [2]
The "simulators" are the information technologies of today: "miniaturized cells, matrices,
and memory banks, models of control." [2] They can produce and reproduce the "real,"
which now is the hyperreal, as many times as they like. They can do that because the
hyperreal is no longer anchored to an ideal, to a territory.
In the hyperreality of pure simulacra, then, there is no more imitation, duplication, or
parody. The simulator's model offers us "all the signs of the real" without its "vicissitudes."
[2]
. . .
Under the subhead, "The Divine Irreference of Images," B. contrasts the meaning of
"dissimulation" and "simulation" in order to clarify further his definition of the simulacra. To
dissimulate is to pretend; in pretending, one imitates something real and thus affirms it:
one "leaves the principle of reality intact." [3] To simulate, on the other hand, is "to feign to
have what one doesn't have." [3] This destroys any connection to reality.
B. shows simulation in action in three different "terrains of simulation:" [3] medicine, the
army, and religion. In the "simulacrum of divinity," he explains that the disputes over the
value of icons points up the contemporary problem of simulacra. Iconoclasts were right, he
says, because they saw that the icons (simulacra) would become omnipotent in themselves;
they would efface God. The iconolaters, by contrast, thought that the icons could retain
their representative function, standing in for God and not effacing him. When God himself
could be simulated, "that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith," [4]
then a "gigantic simulation" [5] results.
B. concludes this section by showing the successive phases of the movement toward
simulation. We quote the entire passage because it is so basic to the understanding of his
concept:
"[the image] 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." [6]
With the disappearance of reality as it once was, nostalgia takes on critical importance.