Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations
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.
The divine irreference of images
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.
Hyperreal and imaginary
Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a
play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is
supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is
undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real
America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally
abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent
warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used
there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude
of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range
of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single
gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to
the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have
been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who
awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even
down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in
miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an
ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of
the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a
contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological"
blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal
the fact 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 carceral). 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 of the order of the hyperreal and 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 Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order
to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration
of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the
adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is
everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster
illusions of their real childishness.
Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World:
Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a
town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal
circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as
electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing
more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made
up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.
Political incantation
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.
Moebius: spiralling negativity
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 Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing
provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to
shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to
calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the
objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of
simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is
characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact- the models
come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field
of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of
the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This
anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no
more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or
implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most
contradictory - all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the
models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.
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 Italy," this means
simultaneously:
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 Italy which
might appear evident, but not so evident, since:
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.
Strategy of the real
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 scaleddown
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 productionreal,
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 shortcircuit
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.
Notes
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, unreferential),
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.