November: Baudrillard

In November we read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.

Here are my notes/thoughts/vague memories of our conversation. Please feel free to post and correct me!

Present were: Debra Baxter, Jen Graves, Margot Q Knight, Isaac Layman, Timea Tihanyi

Timea set the stage, identifying the grains of salt seasoning Baudrillard: he was a socialist European intellectual out to critique capitalism.

Jen identified Obama as a recent example of the media-made hyperreal. Obama’s books created a persona more “real” than Obama himself; the presidential campaigns discussed at length events that never happened; “the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials” (pg 2). On the other hand, Obama seems like a potential lightning rod back to the real since he is a candidate for assassination. B differentiates between the Kennedys who “died because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures” (24) and thus only warrant attempted assassination, not actual death. Now that power is simulated, it needs smokescreens of crisis, attempted assassinations, etc to hide its own disappearance.

B gives other examples of similar smokescreens: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order” (12). Scandals like Watergate allow the “fundamental immorality” of capitalism to appear less scandalous in comparison (15).

I was curious about institutional death. B’s claim that “all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes” (19) made me think about "the end of painting" and the current "crisis" in photography that is cropping up lately. For example, www.wordswithoutpictures.org started on the premise that photography and its critical discourse are languishing, but the site has itself stimulated discourse; the act of crying wolf keeps the wolf at bay.

Most of us remained skeptical about B’s claim that our current world was a simulation totally dissociated from the real. The whole book seems like a dare to return to the real. Jen brought up bodily experience as a contact point with the real (when you are dead you are dead). B talks about illness at the start of the book, differentiating between a dissimulator who pretends not to have what he has, and a simulator who produces in himself the symptoms of sickness: “Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces true symptoms?” (2). Can’t we tell fakers apart from the truly ill? Despite her medical training, Timea thought not and noted that when her doctor reversed his diagnosis of her foot injury, she immediately felt less physical pain. Deb brought up the condition of being in love, when it is hard to tell what is real and what is in one’s head.

Isaac was skeptical about where B drew his time-line in the sand: where was the break between a “real” past and our simulated present? The 60’s? Why then? I wished B had more clearly described the mechanism by which images break off their varied relationships to the real and gain independence. B identifies “the successive phases of the image:
It is the reflection of a profound reality;
It masks and denatures a profound reality;
It masks the absence of a profound reality;
It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (6). Later in the book he implicates “the media” as “the vehicle” (84). Is it a problem of representation? Jen brought up Martha Rosler’s inadequate description of the Bowery. A representation of a thing is not the same as the thing, but doesn’t some relationship remain, even if compressed for the sake of communication? Isaac came up with a smart analogy using ketchup, but I’m not able to remember it well enough to repeat. Deb is teaching at a school for videogame programmers; are digitally generated images totally free from the moorings of reality?

So what was the answer to the simulation situation? At the end of the book B seems to advocate a hyperhomeopathic remedy for meaning’s slow decline: “the students [of 1968], far from wishing to… revive the lost object… retorted by confronting power with… the challenge of a deterritorialization even more intense than the one that came from the system” (151). However, B has drawn his line in the sand and from our present position 1968 is “repeatable only as a phantasm of mourning”(151). Now B claims we are stuck, “because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization” (163). I left the conversation feeling I had gained a better understanding of B’s claims, but still not believing all of them.