Excerpts from:
Simulations
By Jean Baudrillard
(Ed. note: The images
on this page are not from Baudrillard's Simulations.)
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 miniaturised 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
sufficiently 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 magnetise 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 realised by a man
who is himself now cryogenised: Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection
at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
Heinz Haber, Wernher von Braun, and Willy Ley examine
a prop from the Disney movie Man in Space
The objective profile of America, 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 pacified. 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, idealised 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.
Wernher von Braun points to the final stage of the
manned spacecraft he described in the movie Man in Space.
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 is 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 amongst those adults who go there to act the child in
order to foster illusions as to 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.
Click
Here for: Walt Disney's Mars and Beyond: A Science Feature from
Tomorrowland (comic panels) 1957.
(opens in a new window)
Political Incantation
Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland
(an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside
than inside the bounds of the artificial 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 morality (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 jounalists. He does the same job of purging and reviving
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 its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral
and political consciousness of men.
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 - this is what is 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 fulfull 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 a 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 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 characterised 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 generalised
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 musn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize
power in Italy", this means simultaneously:
- that there is nothing to fear,
since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in
its fundamental capitalist mechanism,
- 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 did take it up, they will only ever wield it by
proxy,
- that in fact power, genuine
power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing
it or taking it over,
- but more: I, Berlinguer, am
not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which
might appear evident, but not that much, since
- this can also mean the contrary
(no need of 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
meaning 1
- where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gift from Franco
to Western democracy, which finds in them the occasion to regenerate
its own flagging humanism, 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 magnetised, circularised,
reversibilised from right of left, a torsion that is like the evil
demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded
back over its own surface: 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 powertoday 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 regenerate 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, as for that matter proving ethnology
by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday) - without counting:
- proving theatre by anti-theatre
- 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 artificial menace to conceal thay
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 holdup than to a real one? For the latter only upsets
the order of things, the right of property, whereas the other 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, however, 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 incline 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 organise 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 artificial 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 in 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 third-order, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences,
beyond the rational distinctions upon which function all power and
the entire social. 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. 2), 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 becoming 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 non-referential
world even the confusion 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 utilised 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, deterritorialisation, 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 sometime 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, the 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 compulsion to
get rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everbody unloads it on others)
and the apprehensive pining over its loss. Melancholy for societies
without power: this has already 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 knows how to manage its mourning for the real,
for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this
same breakdown. And it is by an artificial revitalisation 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. 3 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 crisis in production. Then there
is 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.
Notes
1.)
"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.
2.)
The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this
short-circuit.
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) distorted by irony and refusal, parody of
libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without
referent, unjustified, 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 institutionperverse demand, and for
that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is
to say nonreferential, 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 '68 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
puppet-substance 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.
3.)
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.
Excerpt From:
Jean Baudrillard
Simulations
Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman
Foreign Agents Series
Semiotext(e), Inc.
522 Philosophy Hall
Columbia University
New York City, New York 10027 U.S.A.
©1983 Semiotext(e) and Jean Baudrillard
