SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS

"...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.1"

The only way I can put this crazy babble into context of perceiving media (and with the help of a wildly philosophical and talkative friend of a friend) is to understand this map that Baudrillard speaks of as the world in relation to exposure to media. The Empire is clearly those in power who dominate the media and in most cases, law, money, distribution, power, etc. In contrast, the frayed and ruined shreds are those cultures that we don't see and interact with; the cultures that still hold true to oral tradition and traditional living, completely alien to (or from) television and film. Cultures who, if they could, would be "bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass."

Another easy way for me to understand the piece, and in using the knowledge I have of the Matrix, is the first paragraph under "The Divine Irreference of Images" where Baudrillard can help me to understand his concepts in conjunction with another--a metaphor (one of the basic elements of semiotics that we discussed in class). He spoke of reality in terms of a sickness. Citing Littre, Baudrillard says, "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...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."

It then goes on to say that medicine and treatment for such an illness, supposing it is real is irrelevant at this point. If any symptom can be not merely feigned but produced, then every illness can be considered both "simulatable and simulated" and thus medicine loses its meaning in a world where every illness could be simulated, or is simulated, or will be simulated...

Baudrillard then asks, "Why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious?" Putting this in easier terms, I wonder why this simulation should stop at individually faking something, or "producing" effects when we could apply the idea to a whole. We can understand this in terms of a global simulation, making an entire version of reality that is separate from that of the true.


The babbling of my wise and seasoned friend led me to understand this essay in terms of the trail humans leave in relation to the technology we use (just think how all throughout the Bush Administration, all communications in American borders [yes, all of yours too!] were being monitored and basically funneled into a technological sieve). Our media and our digital trail are separate but can be viewed together to help understand both Baudrillard's piece and the Matrix. Think about the portions of the world we are not aware of. There are so many things going on that we are unable to perceive. There are many, many different ways of life that we could see if we were sensitive to other parts of the world. As I understand it, the Matrix is everything outside of what we can perceive and manipulate. Everything that is simply too fast, too invisible. And it's all around us. All the time.