Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, The Republic by Plato
A N Whitehead famously said that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I have just finished reading (for the second time in my life) one of the more recent footnotes: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. For a long time I would have said that all bullshit was a series of footnotes to Baudrillard but I think this book has aged well. It has turned out to be something of an oracle for what has happened in the 'real' world in the last few years. More about the scare quotes around 'real' later.
Proving Whitehead's maxim, I suppose Simulacra and Simulation is a very traditional book. It is about what is real, what is, what has meaning. More precisely it addresses the basic ontological question of the primacy of being and/or becoming.
What's more real? Stuff that changes all the time or stuff that stays the same? Is what we see passing before our eyes more real than what is hidden in some higher (or lower, or deeper, or further) place of existence?
The Pre-Socratics all asked these questions. Plato (I went back to the Republic to refresh my memory), Descartes, Hegel, and so on all grappled with them.
Baudrillard answers this question as follows: there are only appearances of what is real - there is no real beyond these appearances. He refers to these appearances as 'simulacra', and claims that there are only ever simulacra - his key concept is the 'precesssion of simulacra'.
In short, there is no reality. There is the 'hyperreal' - appearances, appearances and then appearances, for ever and ever.
This couldn't be further from Plato. For Plato the things that we could see with our senses were not real because they were not permanent:true reality was the form of the good, which was acccessible not by senses but by the intellect. The properly trained intellect was that which understood the difference between what is real and what is not real:
"Its orientation has to be accompanied by turning the mind as a whole away from the world of becoming, until it becomes capable of bearing the sight of real being and reality at its most bright, which we're saying is goodness" (Republic 518d)
Proving Whitehead's maxim, I suppose Simulacra and Simulation is a very traditional book. It is about what is real, what is, what has meaning. More precisely it addresses the basic ontological question of the primacy of being and/or becoming.
What's more real? Stuff that changes all the time or stuff that stays the same? Is what we see passing before our eyes more real than what is hidden in some higher (or lower, or deeper, or further) place of existence?
The Pre-Socratics all asked these questions. Plato (I went back to the Republic to refresh my memory), Descartes, Hegel, and so on all grappled with them.
Baudrillard answers this question as follows: there are only appearances of what is real - there is no real beyond these appearances. He refers to these appearances as 'simulacra', and claims that there are only ever simulacra - his key concept is the 'precesssion of simulacra'.
In short, there is no reality. There is the 'hyperreal' - appearances, appearances and then appearances, for ever and ever.
This couldn't be further from Plato. For Plato the things that we could see with our senses were not real because they were not permanent:true reality was the form of the good, which was acccessible not by senses but by the intellect. The properly trained intellect was that which understood the difference between what is real and what is not real:
"Its orientation has to be accompanied by turning the mind as a whole away from the world of becoming, until it becomes capable of bearing the sight of real being and reality at its most bright, which we're saying is goodness" (Republic 518d)
Baudrillard doesn't hold out much hope that a properly trained mind - to use Plato's term, a mind trained in the skill of 'dialectic' can reach any other reality than just another simulation of reality - such is the radical extent of his ontology.
I might was well say now that I think the problem with Baudrillard was that he probably watched too much TV, too many movies and he was more than a little bit entranced by the coming age of the communications technologies that have virtualised reality in the decades since he first published this book in 1981.
He sees no minds trained in dialectic. He seems to see only a 'precession' of morons. And in fairness, when I look at the effects of social media it is hard to argue against the accuracy of his description of how think and feel, communicate and understand.
Baudrillard was keenly aware of the centrality of metaphor in the history of western thought. What is Plato's Republic when you strip away the metaphysical hope if not the most important metaphorical text in the history of philosophy?
The allegory of the cave would be on a Baudrillardian reading, one big simulacrum - pointing not to the form of the good but rather to just another metaphor. If there is nothing beyond the metaphor then Plato has backed the wrong horse. Instead of finding being, he's just found becoming!
Baudrillard points to the Old Testament as another example of simulacra that doth protest too much. He explains the anger of biblical iconoclasts as a function of their knowledge of the very fact that there is no divinity signing the cheques. The graven images so offend them because their very presence points to the absence of any guarantee of the truth of these images – their potency lies in their impotence – they do not signify God, they signify only other signifiers.
The precession of simulacra is as close as Baudrillard gets to a summation of what is in truth out there (and in here). This formulation is not particularly unique. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit draws the same conclusions about the primacy of phenomena but there are two important differences.
Firstly, like Plato, Hegel stresses the importance of dialectic. Intelligence, development, change, building on premises, logic and interrogation of logic are essential if human beings are to understand and develop anything beyond the most basic levels.
If Baudrillard sees a precession of morons Hegel argues with conviction for the struggle for intellectual autonomy
Secondly, Hegel's becoming is teleological. Geist's coming to full self consciousness of itself is the destination of Hegel's thought.
It may be tempting to ridicule the audacity of philosophical visions such as Plato's and Hegel's but at least they are trying to scale mountains. Baudrillard's is going nowhere.
In his final chapter of Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard proclaims his nihilism. However, his philosophical scepticism seems to me to be a little bit off-the-shelf. He is drawing on the insights of structural linguistics that the vertical and horizontal planes of meaning are not absolute: there is no absolute mimetic connection between signs and things; neither is there anything particularly stable about the boundaries between signs themselves.
He uses the semiological assumption that meaning is never fixed or absolute is to make the ontological claim that reality is not reality. There is no ‘real’; only a ‘hyperreal’. There is no route through simulation to the real.
The allegory of the cave would be on a Baudrillardian reading, one big simulacrum - pointing not to the form of the good but rather to just another metaphor. If there is nothing beyond the metaphor then Plato has backed the wrong horse. Instead of finding being, he's just found becoming!
Baudrillard points to the Old Testament as another example of simulacra that doth protest too much. He explains the anger of biblical iconoclasts as a function of their knowledge of the very fact that there is no divinity signing the cheques. The graven images so offend them because their very presence points to the absence of any guarantee of the truth of these images – their potency lies in their impotence – they do not signify God, they signify only other signifiers.
Firstly, like Plato, Hegel stresses the importance of dialectic. Intelligence, development, change, building on premises, logic and interrogation of logic are essential if human beings are to understand and develop anything beyond the most basic levels.
If Baudrillard sees a precession of morons Hegel argues with conviction for the struggle for intellectual autonomy
Secondly, Hegel's becoming is teleological. Geist's coming to full self consciousness of itself is the destination of Hegel's thought.
It may be tempting to ridicule the audacity of philosophical visions such as Plato's and Hegel's but at least they are trying to scale mountains. Baudrillard's is going nowhere.
In his final chapter of Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard proclaims his nihilism. However, his philosophical scepticism seems to me to be a little bit off-the-shelf. He is drawing on the insights of structural linguistics that the vertical and horizontal planes of meaning are not absolute: there is no absolute mimetic connection between signs and things; neither is there anything particularly stable about the boundaries between signs themselves.
He uses the semiological assumption that meaning is never fixed or absolute is to make the ontological claim that reality is not reality. There is no ‘real’; only a ‘hyperreal’. There is no route through simulation to the real.
Reading Baudrillard challenges me to understand where this
semiotic instability passes from theory into practice. Consider this: In actual
fact language functions just as the structuralists say that it doesn’t. The
point is that most of the time meaning does exist: words mean things and words
mean what they mean and not what other words mean. How could it be otherwise?
Try buying something in a shop or planning to meet a friend and you’ll see;
stuff does actually have meaning.
What is true for meaning is true a fortiori about reality. I don't think I need to do much more than repeat Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's challenge to his certainty there is a reality beyond our ideas (and simulacra) of it:
"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
That’s all fine in practice, but what about the theory?
Baudrillard's theory is most convincing when he talks about the destruction of meaning and ‘destructuration of the social’ through the proliferation of information. In particular, his account of how advertising had become the key simulation in media – saturated societies is compelling.
His account of how advertising literally erases the provisional and provisionally effective planes of meaning and manages to eviscerate meaning and meaningful social relations reads like a prophecy of how social media has come to dominate, moronise, homogenise and deracinate people’s minds and bodies:
"Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes."
Baudrillard's theory is most convincing when he talks about the destruction of meaning and ‘destructuration of the social’ through the proliferation of information. In particular, his account of how advertising had become the key simulation in media – saturated societies is compelling.
His account of how advertising literally erases the provisional and provisionally effective planes of meaning and manages to eviscerate meaning and meaningful social relations reads like a prophecy of how social media has come to dominate, moronise, homogenise and deracinate people’s minds and bodies:
"Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes."
The end of meaning occurs in advertising because of how the medium collapses the differences between its various types of content. Instead of differences between things there is a levelling off that tends to reduce everything to a lowest common denominator. Anything and everything can be used in advertising - almost nothing is sacred, almost anything can be used.
As advertising destroys meaning horizontally it causes the collapse of the signifying distance between the sign and thing being signified. Advertising tells us that we can have the real, that it is ours. It does the very same thing as religious fundamentalism. It suppresses the meaning of images because meaning requires that it be made, that it be negotiable.
I think Baudrillard is accurate in his description of the hyperreality of life lived through the lenses of advertising and commercial media generally. He is ontologically spot on.
I think he is wrong in considering the arrival of the hyperreal as the moment where meaning dies. The opposite I think is true.
There is a paradox in any meaningful understanding of meaning, namely that the moment meaning becomes fixed is the moment that it dies. One to one correspondence of the sign and the thing signified is tautology and tautology says nothing - it is meaningless. In both directions. It erases the difference between signs themselves and the signs and the things they signify.
To my understanding meaning is what is always being made, meaning is what is being unmade, meaning needs the instability that Baudrillard names the precession of simulacra'!
Of course, the best advertising knows this. It hides its meaninglessness by parading the very properties of the most meaningful of texts! 'Good' advertising is thought provoking, mysterious, meaningful. Good advertising engages its readers, names them, allows them to name themselves, gives them a satisfying and meaningful space to feel, to act, to think and to be. Advertising tries to hide its implosion of meaning by aiming to envelop its consumers in meaningful experiences.
Social media is the elaboration of good advertising into a total social experience. So as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Google increase their domination of social life, their intrusion into the lived experience of private and public spaces to the point where they are coming to constitute those experiences they perform and ontological gestalt shift - nothing can ever be the same again.
Social media can have the effect of a world sufficient unto itself - it is has a closed ontology that recalls the middle ages in how it answers every question and places everyone and everything in its place - even, and especially if that place is only pending but, importantly within the space soon to illuminated within the horizon of technological progress.
When Baudrillard takes about the death of meaning, however, I think he is simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic.
He is too optimistic because what happens with the proliferation of advertising is not so much the death of meaning - rather it is the death of intelligence:
It is no longer necessary to understand - it is sufficient to 'like'. Social media does not demand thought and planning - fifteen word tweets are enough. Not only are images reproducible and therefore without their Benjaminian 'aura', they are instantly destroyed as soon as they're created.
Social media makes people very stupid.
He is too pessimistic because I think that he has looked too long into the abyss of commerical mass media and the hyperreal idiot monster has started to look back at him.
The answer is in Hegel and in Plato. Where else could it be? Plato stresses in the chapter after the allegory of the cave the absolute imperative that the philosopher kings in his Republic exercise their intelligence:
"dialectic is the only field of enquiry which sets out methodically to grasp the reality of any and every thing. All the other areas of expertise, on the other hand, are either concerned with fulfilling people's beliefs and desires or are directed towards generation and manufacture or looking after things while they're being generated and manufactured" (Republic 533b)
The 'other areas of expertise' described by Plato sound like the totally alienated modes of thinking and feeling that have been swallowed up by and have in turn swallowed up a fatal dose of commercial social media!
Is there a way out of this? A healthy dose of Ludditism in relation to social media is a good start. At the same time it is imperative to treat prophets of doom like Baudrillard with active and imaginative scepticism. This is precisely because his foresight has been so clear. And so narrow. He sees the problem in horrific detail but he misses the solution that lies in the strengths of character and intelligence that invisible to him.
He is in a kind of prison - to paraphrase Hegel, Baudrillard's is the night where all the cows are simulacra.
I am not sure that Baudrillard could argue that there's a way out of this night. The appalling vista of his social ontology is so absolute that it seems hard to find an escape. I am not sure that there is any distance between considering the precession of simulacra as such and not seeing it as such. His conclusion is ambivalent:
"There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins."
To my understanding he has taken his terms far too seriously. It is as if nothing exists but media. because if there is no outside 'hyperreality' then everything just cancels out and you might as well drop the prefix and just say that there is no outside reality. And this is nothing more than a fancy tautology.
And yet, the concept of 'seduction' seems to leave some hope at the end of a paragraph that explicitly denied it. Baudrillard thought the whole world was being swallowed by advertising and so the only hope he saw (since meaning is imploded in advertising) is seduction.
He was more right than he could possibly have known but he was also, too entranced by the coming age of information saturation to see that human beings are capable of far more than just blind seduction.
Are human beings as programmable and assimilable as they seem to be according to Baudrillard? I don't think so. I think his reports of the death of meaning and intelligence are greatly exaggerated.
If anything he describes a (hyper)reality lays down a challenge: Submit to your fate and live a static drone-like existence in thrall to Facebook and Google or rage with all of your intelligence to create meaningful social, political and psychological spaces in spite of (and because of), against (and with) the tide of simulation.
I think Baudrillard is accurate in his description of the hyperreality of life lived through the lenses of advertising and commercial media generally. He is ontologically spot on.
I think he is wrong in considering the arrival of the hyperreal as the moment where meaning dies. The opposite I think is true.
There is a paradox in any meaningful understanding of meaning, namely that the moment meaning becomes fixed is the moment that it dies. One to one correspondence of the sign and the thing signified is tautology and tautology says nothing - it is meaningless. In both directions. It erases the difference between signs themselves and the signs and the things they signify.
To my understanding meaning is what is always being made, meaning is what is being unmade, meaning needs the instability that Baudrillard names the precession of simulacra'!
Of course, the best advertising knows this. It hides its meaninglessness by parading the very properties of the most meaningful of texts! 'Good' advertising is thought provoking, mysterious, meaningful. Good advertising engages its readers, names them, allows them to name themselves, gives them a satisfying and meaningful space to feel, to act, to think and to be. Advertising tries to hide its implosion of meaning by aiming to envelop its consumers in meaningful experiences.
Social media is the elaboration of good advertising into a total social experience. So as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Google increase their domination of social life, their intrusion into the lived experience of private and public spaces to the point where they are coming to constitute those experiences they perform and ontological gestalt shift - nothing can ever be the same again.
Social media can have the effect of a world sufficient unto itself - it is has a closed ontology that recalls the middle ages in how it answers every question and places everyone and everything in its place - even, and especially if that place is only pending but, importantly within the space soon to illuminated within the horizon of technological progress.
When Baudrillard takes about the death of meaning, however, I think he is simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic.
He is too optimistic because what happens with the proliferation of advertising is not so much the death of meaning - rather it is the death of intelligence:
It is no longer necessary to understand - it is sufficient to 'like'. Social media does not demand thought and planning - fifteen word tweets are enough. Not only are images reproducible and therefore without their Benjaminian 'aura', they are instantly destroyed as soon as they're created.
Social media makes people very stupid.
He is too pessimistic because I think that he has looked too long into the abyss of commerical mass media and the hyperreal idiot monster has started to look back at him.
The answer is in Hegel and in Plato. Where else could it be? Plato stresses in the chapter after the allegory of the cave the absolute imperative that the philosopher kings in his Republic exercise their intelligence:
"dialectic is the only field of enquiry which sets out methodically to grasp the reality of any and every thing. All the other areas of expertise, on the other hand, are either concerned with fulfilling people's beliefs and desires or are directed towards generation and manufacture or looking after things while they're being generated and manufactured" (Republic 533b)
The 'other areas of expertise' described by Plato sound like the totally alienated modes of thinking and feeling that have been swallowed up by and have in turn swallowed up a fatal dose of commercial social media!
Is there a way out of this? A healthy dose of Ludditism in relation to social media is a good start. At the same time it is imperative to treat prophets of doom like Baudrillard with active and imaginative scepticism. This is precisely because his foresight has been so clear. And so narrow. He sees the problem in horrific detail but he misses the solution that lies in the strengths of character and intelligence that invisible to him.
He is in a kind of prison - to paraphrase Hegel, Baudrillard's is the night where all the cows are simulacra.
"There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins."
To my understanding he has taken his terms far too seriously. It is as if nothing exists but media. because if there is no outside 'hyperreality' then everything just cancels out and you might as well drop the prefix and just say that there is no outside reality. And this is nothing more than a fancy tautology.
And yet, the concept of 'seduction' seems to leave some hope at the end of a paragraph that explicitly denied it. Baudrillard thought the whole world was being swallowed by advertising and so the only hope he saw (since meaning is imploded in advertising) is seduction.
He was more right than he could possibly have known but he was also, too entranced by the coming age of information saturation to see that human beings are capable of far more than just blind seduction.
Are human beings as programmable and assimilable as they seem to be according to Baudrillard? I don't think so. I think his reports of the death of meaning and intelligence are greatly exaggerated.
If anything he describes a (hyper)reality lays down a challenge: Submit to your fate and live a static drone-like existence in thrall to Facebook and Google or rage with all of your intelligence to create meaningful social, political and psychological spaces in spite of (and because of), against (and with) the tide of simulation.
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