A look at the first page of Simulacra and Simulation
The dense first page of the Baudrillard classic of Matrix fame captures perfectly our modern social ails. But can it cure them?
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
- Ecclesiastes
Jean Baudrillard begins his book with a quote from the Book of Ecclesiastes that is, in fact, not a quote from Ecclesiastes, and so far as I can tell, not a quotation at all.
I expect he was counting on the reader noticing this misattribution, and thereby drawing them closer to understanding his point: this notion of simulacrum as a copy without an original is central to Baudrillard’s ideas. It’s central to understanding the conundrums we face in modern life.
Even in a medium as solid as a book, a quotation is a very slippery thing. Besides, there are many ways to reference the written word beyond mere quotation. How many more are introduced in the digital era?
Images of all kinds present themselves to us, not in their original form, but as digital reproductions. Almost everything that we interact with through media is not the thing itself, but its reproduction or simulation. And with so many layers of this going on, who can say how much these reproductions correspond to the original?
When I was in college, in the early 2010s, memes started passing around with a picture of Gandalf, Obi Wan, Dumbledore, or other popular sage characters, and a deliberately incorrect quotation, like attributing “the force will be with you, always” to Gandalf. We generally laughed this off, not being fooled, and noticed how this deliberate leveraging of the false managed to get a rise out of people. We see many layers of this same interaction unfolding online to this day, only the purposes and origins are much more obscure, and more seamlessly integrated with what presents itself to us as news, current events, culture, and the very patterns of life.
When I first read the book, Simulacra and Simulation, I did not really grasp why this was an important concept. Okay, images are simulations and reproductions of things, so what?
This interpretation is largely my own, I am sure I’ll get some things wrong. I am no philosophy major, just a filmmaker trying to understand what purpose images have in our culture. My background does not incline me to be interested or sympathetic to Baudrillard, and in the past I dismissed this book as Post-Modern drivel. However, over the last year, little turns of phrase like desert of the real and precession of simulacra kept popping into my mind, and I’d find myself reaching for Baudrillard on the shelf. Reading through Simulacra and Simulation again, I realized how much of it applied not just to AI, but to social media, the internet, television, and much of our bizarre cultural developments of the last half century. Baudrillard is quite the pessimist at times, and I do not want to follow him to his conclusions, but his diagnosis of our ailments is astute in ways that we can begin to appreciate now, when patterns that were once obscure are becoming so obvious.
In spite of all that has changed, it does not make Simulacra and Simulation an easy book to read. At times, it feels deliberately obscure, and never more so than on the very first page, which begins with a paragraph long run on sentence about a story he does not name, using a concept he does not define for several more chapters.
But this first page, though it is very difficult, contains a microcosm of almost everything Baudrillard will go on to say in Simulacra and Simulation. Today we are going to break this up into bite sized pieces and try to understand its message.
First we’ve got to define two words: the eponymous simulation, and simulacra.
When Baudrillard speaks of simulation, he is not referring to the kind of simulation that is featured in The Matrix, from which Neo wakes up, or the idle thought experiment of physicists, a solipsistic, existential vision in which all of reality is a construct; he is concerned with the way we have turned our own civilization into a precession of falsehoods. Simulation is, for Baudrillard, a process, the “whole show” of modern life in so much as we experience it through media and not through direct interaction with the material world.
Simulacra, plural for simulacrum, are the individual instances of simulation. It is merely an act of representation of a place, person, thing, or statement; a reproduction of an event, a likeness taken from the physical world and captured in a medium, be it a painting, a photograph, a map, a recording, a book or whatever else. Baudrillard is skeptical that simulacra actually correspond to the world at all, which is something we’ll need to tease out as we go along.
The First Paragraph:
Take a deep breath:
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) – as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Baudrillard begins with a reference to a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that he does not name, making it difficult to track down the original – I suspect this is again a deliberate obfuscation between the copy and the original, but it goes deeper than that. It’s worth the digression to understand the context of this story.
Jorge Luis Borges was a brilliant writer of the 20th Century with an incredible body of short stories focusing on strange, impossible conundrums of geometry, time, and space. He has been cited as an inspiration by generations of film directors and writers, including Christopher Nolan, Guillermo Del Toro and many others. If you haven’t read his short stories, The Aleph, The Book of Sand, or The Garden of Forking Paths, and many others, I highly recommend them.
In this case, thanks to the internet, it is possible to find out what story Baudrillard is referencing. The entire short story is a mere one-hundred-forty-five words (in this translation — shorter in original Spanish), entitled “On Exactitude in Science.” It is both brief and vivid.
Interestingly, with Baudrillard’s first paragraph/sentence being one-hundred-twenty-six words, it is nearly the same length as the Borges original. The opening sentence is an almost complete summary of the Borges short story. Is the sentence itself a “map so detailed that it covers the territory of the original exactly?”
The Borges story ends with yet another false attribution, a reference to a deliberately obscure sounding Suarez, Miranda... 1658. But it doesn’t end there, the most cursory research reveals that the Borges short story itself bears a strong resemblance to a Lewis Carroll episode from Sylvie and Bruno.
One sentence and we are already three levels into the dream.
If this makes you feel awfully cynical about everything I want to pause and say there may yet be a way out. This problem of copies, and copies of copies, (the same problem of our endless Hollywood remakes and reboots) is not really something new. Indeed, it might have always been with us, and it may not have always presented itself to us as a scandal. What are the myths of antiquity and folktales if not stories that have an internal vitality so potent that they have survived being copied and “stolen” so many times that it ceases to be meaningful to ask who first wrote them? When we don’t engage with this process in a cynical way, obscuring the past, elevating ourselves in the process, it ceases to be a theft. It merely becomes an artistic tradition in which we participate. We draw from our own past, distill down the best elements that feel most vital, and recapitulate the same themes in the language most relevant and vital to our own generation.
Let the imagery of Borges sit in your mind — an immaculately detailed page of paper, as wide as the horizon, shredding and rotting away in the desert.
Like the map, there are times when the internet feels so large as to be useless. I sometimes wonder why there isn’t any popular website with which it is possible to navigate the internet, or to see it from “top down,” like a map. You are always just right there in the middle of it, in the middle of the scroll. There are experiments of this kind, but I am not aware of any reaching practical use.
Certainly, Borges and Baudrillard would have been fascinated by Google Maps, the crowning achievement of the World Wide Web, that best embodies its limitless capacity for connectivity. While Borges’ map of perfect correspondence is nearly realized in Google Maps, we have no equivalent map of the internet itself.
With those pages rotting away in the desert in mind, let’s return to the first sentence and have another go at it. Baudrillard starts with a conditional “If” statement, followed by a massive parenthetical describing the Borges story which is sure to make us forget what “If” is in reference to. But suppose we exclude the parenthetical since we’ve familiarized ourselves with the content of the story he is referencing, perhaps his concept will become more clear.
If once we were able to view the Borges fable, [on exactitude in science,] … as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
We have run into another problem. What is a second-order simulacra? There is a footnote referencing another Baudrillard publication next to this word, but in this book it will take several more pages before Baudrillard offers an oblique description, and many chapters until he makes it his primary aim to define orders of simulacra. We’ll jump ahead to better understand this concept.
Three Orders of Simulacra
At a fundamental level when speaking of simulacra, we can ask the question, “what are you trying to imitate?” The answer, we find, changes in each order in fundamental ways that correspond to eras in history.
From the chapter, “Simulacra and Science Fiction:”
First Order Simulacra: (Begins to end in the West in 15th Century)
1. Simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious optimistic and aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God’s image.
This first order we will quickly associate with traditional religious imagery, especially that of Medieval and Orthodox Christianity, with its sacred relics and its rich body of iconography, suffused with representation, yet ignorant of both the renaissance era constraints of perspective, and the mechanical proliferation of uniformity in the industrial revolution.
Putting it another way, we might say that this first category aims at imitation of the divine, rather than correspondence with nature.
It will take too long for me to argue here that the shift away from this first order begins as early as the renaissance, a gradual change in the value and fundamental purpose of an image, slowly shifting over centuries, but the comparison of these two images, roughly three hundred years apart, can hint at the gravity of the shift.
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Second Order Simulacra: (15th-20th Century)
2. Simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production…
This shift, the move toward total representation, the rendering of 3d space into two dimensions, the eye-level perspective, does not begin with the photograph, but finds perfection in it. The photograph, with its mechanical realization and capacity for reproduction, largely ends the quest of representation in painting, and forces it into abstraction and representation of emotional states rather than physical ones.
Of equal importance are the spaces in which images are viewed. Gone is the supremacy of the walls of Churches and of formal, elevated places as the primary space for image viewing. Enter the woodcut, the printing press, the engraving, the newspaper, the comic book, the cinema.
Work of the former order is relegated to the museums, masoleums, and reliquaries of the past. Images are now common both in production and in reproduction.
This is art stripped of its divine aspiration, aiming instead at achieving material ends. In this manner do we often decorate our walls, with no particular aim beyond to “spice them up.” For this purpose, a trip to target or hobby lobby will often suffice. Uniform and repetitious art is born in this era as a bi-product of industrialization, and this means that we no longer interact with original works of art, but with their facsimiles.
Baudrillard associates science fiction with Second Order Simulacra. For like the Science fiction story, although this kind of simulacra is ubiquitous, it is nonetheless finite, and its falsehood is obvious to the observer. Excluding Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, a foreshadowing of third order simulacrum, one can perceive the edges of a sci-fi fable, like we can perceive the edges of the map rotting in the desert. If he is dismissive of Borges in this opening paragraph, he was similarly critical of The Matrix, which owes so much to him. I suppose he would have considered the film to belong also to this category, and therefore, like Borges’ fable, possessing the “discrete charm of second order simulacra.” If this is indeed such a quaint and out-modded fable, we must ask then, what is to replace it? We are beginning to understand this first sentence.
Third Order Simulacra: (20th Century - Present)
3. Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game – total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.
I happen to think that Baudrillard was wrong about The Matrix. It is true that for us, the viewers, The Matrix is indeed a discrete thing, and we can perceive the edges of it. We can see that the “Real World” is represented with a blue color palette, “The Matrix” with green. The film tells us both implicitly and explicitly what sequences are inside, and which are outside. Most importantly, The Matrix can be woken up from, and therefore it is not a suitable metaphor for our present situation. However in this conclusion, Baudrillard doubted the audience. For now, as we have seen over the past two decades, we are no longer charmed by the novelty of a computational space in which we can manifest our strengths. Now metaphor of The Matrix is, for us, exactly what he describes as the third order of simulacra — a system of total control and immersion founded on information. It is with metaphors of The Matrix — the blue pill, and red pill — that some describe escaping from the impenetrable media landscape that dominate the narratives of our present day.
This is the third order of simulacra — the simulacra of a simulation, the copy without referent, and it is the real subject of Baudrillard’s book. At this level, the correspondence between copy and original break down completely, and our ability to sort out the difference between the two collapses. We can no longer perceive the edges of the map. Fake things behave with the causation of real things, and real things lose their power of causation entirely. We should note that Baudrillard does not apply these concepts merely to images, or artistry. He would think that these notions pervade our entire experience of modern life. Our politics are a simulacrum of politics, modern dating, a simulacrum of relationships. The AI generated headshot a simulacrum of a photo. In this landscape, fake things and real things all exist together, right next to each other, and there is no escaping their proliferation. It is in this light that the 20th Century Science Fiction dystopias begin to look quaint, perhaps possessing even a “discrete charm.”
Second Paragraph:
Today abstraction 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 does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
Baudrillard has inverted the Borges story, turned it upside down. Now the real is declining, and the fake is ascending. Here we are treated to that memorable line, recapitulated in The Matrix by Morpheus, as he shows Neo the apocalyptic desolation that has become the real world, he tells him, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.”
Yet what is rendered on screen as a barren wasteland is, for us, the increasingly tenuous grip that we hold on the actual world, which we can rarely touch without our external layer of media garments. What restaurant is unsullied by its Google reviews, what place untouched by Maps, what business exists if it does not have a website? What film is without its IMDB page?
So it is that Google Maps precedes us in our advancement through the territory. The internet is now the superstructure that connects the real world together.
Those fragments of matter not worthy of the internet now “slowly rot across the extent of the map.”
The AI generates art not based on direct observation of the material world, but by subsuming into itself all former observations. Out of it procedes the “generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”
Baudrillard explores the problems arising from this further the chapter, The implosion of Meaning in the Media:
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning… Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social… Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the process of the staging of meaning… Thus the media are producers not of socialization but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses.
We should not misconstrue Baudrillard’s language here. “The media” should not be thought of as a couple networks of news media providers, but the entire landscape of electronic information delivery, be it films, streaming platforms, social media, radio, news, podcasting, advertising, search engines, sports, and so on. By socialization he means merely to become sociable — capable of pleasantly communicating and co-existing with other people as a coherent culture without anxiety. For Baudrillard, the modern landscape “implodes” our capacity to communicate with one another by drowning us in an unsortable miasma of information without content, truth, or direction.
Notice how little the movement (or lack thereof) of politics corresponds with public discourse and the writing or repealing of laws. Notice how much the politician’s time is consumed with communicating and posturing and how little is actually spent on law giving, legislating, and deliberating.
Why bother actually posing for a photo when it can be generated instantly? So too, as we have previously discussed, are certain filmmakers surprisingly ready and willing to give up their mantle as directors and writers to AI, with not trepidation, but actual excitement. We must see these things as manifestations of the same pattern unfolding in our culture at a macro level rather than as unrelated phenomena, or the mere ambitions of individuals, if we are to understand our present moment.
The solutions posed by generative AI are only solutions for persons who have accepted the terms of living in the world of third order simulacra, and who are willing to overlook the personal consternation caused by its endless precession if it means their own advancement within the system.
So too are almost all forms of political action, both left and right, mere forms of self-advancement, advertising, and fundraising; the proliferation of information at the cost of true conversation and socialization.
As a filmmaker, I have no choice but to recognize my own participation in this process. But beyond me, who that works toward success in the digital ecosystem can avoid this? We have been given no choice but to endlessly shill our brands, proliferating our own identities and ideas, gathering what vestiges of attention we can to increase our power and influence in the world. What else can we do if we ever hope to have a career?
“Welcome to the Desert of the Real.”
Escaping from the dreams of dead philosophers
Although Baudrillard’s concepts may diagnose modern ailments well, we should not be content with his categories. I have often found that the sweeping generalizations of philosophers find a certain percentage of people nodding their heads, and another waving their fists. There are always exceptions and reactions to the trends of a time. In the Desert of the Real, a walk in the mountains, or a family meal is an act of rebellion. However disconnected these things may be from the media landscape, they are certainly quite real and of the utmost value.
But Baudrillard’s frame cannot see them. The very words simulation and simulacra reek of cynicism about the very concepts they describe. Even the first order of simulacra is still that — a falsehood. It is ultimately a view that would make us skeptical of all acts of representation in the human experience.
Let us defiantly argue against the inevitable march of progress, that it is the real that continues to bear fruit and it is the hyperreal soup of connectivity, with all its anxiety, paranoia and distraction, that has begun to rot away in the desert of the hyperreal.
Let the words Simulacra and Simulation suffice for describing our dystopian condition. But if we are going to describe any positive relationship that humanity can have to image making and representation, it will not be with these words. First order simulacra may not be a simulacra at all. The better word would be a symbol. Symbolism, in spite of what the Post Modernists tell us, is not arbitrary; no more subjective than concepts like Up and Down, or water, fire and earth. A symbol is not that which obscures the truth. It is the symbol that reveals the fact that there is truth.
Brilliant article. Wonderful research.