Baudrillard has a theory of simulacra and simulation which he sets out in SS. He breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:
1. the first stage is a faithful image or/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality", this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
2. the second stage is perversion of reality: this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance -- it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to what Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.
Baudrillard identifies each type of simulacra with a specific state in the history of the West as follows:
1 first order, “the counterfeit”, associated with the premodern period, where the image is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real
item.The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality. From Renaissance to Industrial Revolution: signs both reflected and distorts reality.
2 .Second order, associated with the modernity of the industrial revolution,where distinctions between image and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities.The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the originalversion, especially when the individual person is only concerned with consuming for some utility a functional facsimile. Here the sign disguises the absence of a basic reality.
3.Third order, “simulation” stage, associated with the postmodernity where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept. “ Only signs without referents, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs absorb us” (Seduction 1990 74).
Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra in contemporary society originates in several phenomena:1. Contemporary media including TV, film, print and the internet which are responsible for blurring the line between goods that are needed and goods for which a need is “created” by commercial images.
2. Exchange value in which the value of goods is based on “money” rather than “usefulness”.
3. Multinational capitalism, which separates produced “goods” from the “plants”, minerals and other “original materials” and the “processes” used to create them.
4. Urbanization which separates “humans” from the “natural world”.
5. Language and ideology, in which language is used to “obscure” rather than “reveal reality” when used by dominant, politically powerful groups.
Whatever the true causes may have been, he thinks that in this era of the mad proliferation of the sign, the masses have become immunized to their effects. They have absorbed and neutralized ideology, religion and the accompanying transcendental aspirations like all the old, modern cries for the “revolution” which were formerly such potentially liberating forces. To Baudrillard, the 'Law that is imposed on us is the law of confusion of categories. Everything is sexual.Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once… Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all other categories'. As a result of this 'massification' of society, the old ways of analyzing society through totalizing viewpoints have cease to be valid. To him America has come to resemble more and more their Disneyland and fantasy has come to dominate reality (Simulations 25): Disneyland has become “hyperreal” or more real than real. Bad characters on TV soap operas frequently receive hate mails and have to go out with body guards!
To Baudrillard, whilst modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules. In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individual perceive themselves and relate to other people. Economics, politics, social life, and culture are all governed by the mode of simulation, whereby codes determine how goods are consumed and used, politics unfold, culture is produced and consumed and everyday life is lived. In this new society, former boundaries and distinctions like social classes, genders, political leanings, once autonomous realms of society and culture, lose their power. If classical society are marked by differentiation, the postmodern society is marked by de-differentiation or the collapse of the power of distinctions, an implosion of distinctions and meaning. In this society, economic, politics, culture, sexuality and the social all implode into each other and economics is determined by culture, politics and other spheres and art, once a sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbed into the economic and political, while sexuality overflows everywhere and hyper-real entertainment, information, communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the banal scenes of everyday life (media simulation of reality, Disneyland, amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasyland, TV sports, TV court trial, TV evangelization, TV or computer purchasing, registration for courses, tax forms, passports, payment of bills, transfer of funds and other excursions into the ideal world) is more real than real whereby the model, images, and code of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models any of which may shape our thoughts and behavior.
In Baudrillard’s view, we are now at the historical stage of the age of simulacra where all is composed of references with no referents ie. a world of “hyperreality”. To him, Western societies have progressed historically from first the stage of the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a “real”referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that in reality did not truly exist: they were just “posited” by those in authority to be “real” socially and politically and did not exist in nature, in a spirit of “pretense” and hence “counterfeit”. Then it went through the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum was the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line and the products can be repeated as just so many copies. In our time, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.To him, the real has become an operational effect of symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated and coded before we actually perceive them. It has become “a hallucinatory resemblance of itself” (Simulations1983 23.) He says: " The very definition of the real has become that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation”. We have been so exposed to the hyperreal that for the majority of the masses, it is doubtful if they are still able somehow to access true “reality”. But to Baudrillard, actual reality has virtually disappeared. It has disappeared into the “virtual” world of illusions, fiction, fantasies, inventions and creations. We experience only “prepared realities” – edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the destruction of cultural values and the substitution of 'referendum'. We now live in a world dominated by simulated experiences and feelings and have almost completely lost the capacity to comprehend “reality” as it actually exists. We are now not far from the kind of world portrayed in the science fiction film, the “Matrix”. The only “reality” is a “created reality”. It is always a reality created by others and only rarely by ourselves. It is a world of endless repetition of the same, a completely reproducible world. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari who strove to develop a materialist theory of desire and who insist that the “the real is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial.” (Anti-Oedipus 1983 34), Baudrillard thought that reality has vanished behind a haze of images and signs.
He argued in his next book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) (ISSM) that contemporary society has already entered the “implosion” phase in which the old class structures have dissipated into and swamped by the “void of the masses": 'That spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses'. The masses no longer make themselves evident as a class, a concept which has lost its force because of a proliferation of possible identities of the splintered masses such that the same words and signs have so many different meanings for different sub-groups in different places and contexts that they have come to mean everything and nothing. The ubiquity of information means the end of all classification,the end of all boundaries, the end of all distinctions, the end of all traditional class structures. He says, “Information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation, but to the very contrary, to total entropy.” (ISSM 100). The masses have been so continuously analyzed through statistics, opinion polls and marketing that they do not respond to any so-called “enlightened“ political representation. We are now in the era of “simulation” in which computerization, information processing, media, cybernetics control systems, and organization of society according to the simulation codes and models have replaced production as the organizing principle of society. If modernity is an era in which the economy is controlled by the industrial capitalists, the postmodern era of simulation is governed by those in economic and political control of the models, the codes and cybernetics relating to information technology. The simulacra has replaced the play of textuality or discourses in a universe without any permanent and stable structures in which to anchor theory or politics.At about the same time that he wrote ISSM, Baudrillard began to advocate the idea of a ‘fatal strategies” which he defined as not “banal strategies” whereby “the subject believes itself to always be more clever than the object, whereas in the other (fatal strategies) the object is always supposed to be more shrewd, more cynical, more brilliant than the subject.” L’autre par lui-meme 1987 tr. as The Ecstasy of Communication 1988 259 260)(“EC”). To him, the postmodern world is not moving towards any resolution of its problems. He says “The universe is not dialectical: it moves toward the extremes, and not toward equilibrium; it is devoted to a radical antagonism, and not to reconciliation or to synthesis. And it is the same with the principle of Evil. It is expressed in the cunning genius of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object, and in the victorious strategy over the subject (Les strategies fatales 1987 in Mark Poster ed Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings 1988 185) (“JBSW “) But he is not entirely sure how it would go. He said: “”Things have found a way to elude the dialectic of meaning, a dialectic which bored them: they did this by infinite proliferation, by potentializing themselves, by outmatching their essence, by going to extremes, and by obscenity which henceforth has become their permanent purpose and insane justification” (JBSW 185). To him the objects, the masses, information, media, commodities etc .have exceeded their limits and have eluded control by subjects. Traditionally, western metaphysics is a metaphysics of subjectivity which maintained the superiority of the subject over the object and modern metaphysics legitimated this superiority but to Baudrillard, this game is over and the subject should abandon its pretensions to gain sovereignty over the world of the object. He gives back to the object autonomous powers such that they may circulate independently from the social relations of production and he turns the subject back into objects without creativity and efficacy of action. The potentially
progressive critique of the domination of subjects by their own fetished and alienated object creations or of the hubris of the subject in terms of the exploitation of animal, human and natural life is forfeited in the abstraction of objects from the labor process and in the denial of subjective agency.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to what Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery".
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.
Baudrillard identifies each type of simulacra with a specific state in the history of the West as follows:
1 first order, “the counterfeit”, associated with the premodern period, where the image is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real
item.The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality. From Renaissance to Industrial Revolution: signs both reflected and distorts reality.
2 .Second order, associated with the modernity of the industrial revolution,where distinctions between image and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities.The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the originalversion, especially when the individual person is only concerned with consuming for some utility a functional facsimile. Here the sign disguises the absence of a basic reality.
3.Third order, “simulation” stage, associated with the postmodernity where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept. “ Only signs without referents, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs absorb us” (Seduction 1990 74).
Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra in contemporary society originates in several phenomena:1. Contemporary media including TV, film, print and the internet which are responsible for blurring the line between goods that are needed and goods for which a need is “created” by commercial images.
2. Exchange value in which the value of goods is based on “money” rather than “usefulness”.
3. Multinational capitalism, which separates produced “goods” from the “plants”, minerals and other “original materials” and the “processes” used to create them.
4. Urbanization which separates “humans” from the “natural world”.
5. Language and ideology, in which language is used to “obscure” rather than “reveal reality” when used by dominant, politically powerful groups.
Whatever the true causes may have been, he thinks that in this era of the mad proliferation of the sign, the masses have become immunized to their effects. They have absorbed and neutralized ideology, religion and the accompanying transcendental aspirations like all the old, modern cries for the “revolution” which were formerly such potentially liberating forces. To Baudrillard, the 'Law that is imposed on us is the law of confusion of categories. Everything is sexual.Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once… Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all other categories'. As a result of this 'massification' of society, the old ways of analyzing society through totalizing viewpoints have cease to be valid. To him America has come to resemble more and more their Disneyland and fantasy has come to dominate reality (Simulations 25): Disneyland has become “hyperreal” or more real than real. Bad characters on TV soap operas frequently receive hate mails and have to go out with body guards!
To Baudrillard, whilst modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules. In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individual perceive themselves and relate to other people. Economics, politics, social life, and culture are all governed by the mode of simulation, whereby codes determine how goods are consumed and used, politics unfold, culture is produced and consumed and everyday life is lived. In this new society, former boundaries and distinctions like social classes, genders, political leanings, once autonomous realms of society and culture, lose their power. If classical society are marked by differentiation, the postmodern society is marked by de-differentiation or the collapse of the power of distinctions, an implosion of distinctions and meaning. In this society, economic, politics, culture, sexuality and the social all implode into each other and economics is determined by culture, politics and other spheres and art, once a sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbed into the economic and political, while sexuality overflows everywhere and hyper-real entertainment, information, communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the banal scenes of everyday life (media simulation of reality, Disneyland, amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasyland, TV sports, TV court trial, TV evangelization, TV or computer purchasing, registration for courses, tax forms, passports, payment of bills, transfer of funds and other excursions into the ideal world) is more real than real whereby the model, images, and code of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models any of which may shape our thoughts and behavior.
In Baudrillard’s view, we are now at the historical stage of the age of simulacra where all is composed of references with no referents ie. a world of “hyperreality”. To him, Western societies have progressed historically from first the stage of the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a “real”referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that in reality did not truly exist: they were just “posited” by those in authority to be “real” socially and politically and did not exist in nature, in a spirit of “pretense” and hence “counterfeit”. Then it went through the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum was the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line and the products can be repeated as just so many copies. In our time, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.To him, the real has become an operational effect of symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated and coded before we actually perceive them. It has become “a hallucinatory resemblance of itself” (Simulations1983 23.) He says: " The very definition of the real has become that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation”. We have been so exposed to the hyperreal that for the majority of the masses, it is doubtful if they are still able somehow to access true “reality”. But to Baudrillard, actual reality has virtually disappeared. It has disappeared into the “virtual” world of illusions, fiction, fantasies, inventions and creations. We experience only “prepared realities” – edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the destruction of cultural values and the substitution of 'referendum'. We now live in a world dominated by simulated experiences and feelings and have almost completely lost the capacity to comprehend “reality” as it actually exists. We are now not far from the kind of world portrayed in the science fiction film, the “Matrix”. The only “reality” is a “created reality”. It is always a reality created by others and only rarely by ourselves. It is a world of endless repetition of the same, a completely reproducible world. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari who strove to develop a materialist theory of desire and who insist that the “the real is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial.” (Anti-Oedipus 1983 34), Baudrillard thought that reality has vanished behind a haze of images and signs.
He argued in his next book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) (ISSM) that contemporary society has already entered the “implosion” phase in which the old class structures have dissipated into and swamped by the “void of the masses": 'That spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses'. The masses no longer make themselves evident as a class, a concept which has lost its force because of a proliferation of possible identities of the splintered masses such that the same words and signs have so many different meanings for different sub-groups in different places and contexts that they have come to mean everything and nothing. The ubiquity of information means the end of all classification,the end of all boundaries, the end of all distinctions, the end of all traditional class structures. He says, “Information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation, but to the very contrary, to total entropy.” (ISSM 100). The masses have been so continuously analyzed through statistics, opinion polls and marketing that they do not respond to any so-called “enlightened“ political representation. We are now in the era of “simulation” in which computerization, information processing, media, cybernetics control systems, and organization of society according to the simulation codes and models have replaced production as the organizing principle of society. If modernity is an era in which the economy is controlled by the industrial capitalists, the postmodern era of simulation is governed by those in economic and political control of the models, the codes and cybernetics relating to information technology. The simulacra has replaced the play of textuality or discourses in a universe without any permanent and stable structures in which to anchor theory or politics.At about the same time that he wrote ISSM, Baudrillard began to advocate the idea of a ‘fatal strategies” which he defined as not “banal strategies” whereby “the subject believes itself to always be more clever than the object, whereas in the other (fatal strategies) the object is always supposed to be more shrewd, more cynical, more brilliant than the subject.” L’autre par lui-meme 1987 tr. as The Ecstasy of Communication 1988 259 260)(“EC”). To him, the postmodern world is not moving towards any resolution of its problems. He says “The universe is not dialectical: it moves toward the extremes, and not toward equilibrium; it is devoted to a radical antagonism, and not to reconciliation or to synthesis. And it is the same with the principle of Evil. It is expressed in the cunning genius of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object, and in the victorious strategy over the subject (Les strategies fatales 1987 in Mark Poster ed Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings 1988 185) (“JBSW “) But he is not entirely sure how it would go. He said: “”Things have found a way to elude the dialectic of meaning, a dialectic which bored them: they did this by infinite proliferation, by potentializing themselves, by outmatching their essence, by going to extremes, and by obscenity which henceforth has become their permanent purpose and insane justification” (JBSW 185). To him the objects, the masses, information, media, commodities etc .have exceeded their limits and have eluded control by subjects. Traditionally, western metaphysics is a metaphysics of subjectivity which maintained the superiority of the subject over the object and modern metaphysics legitimated this superiority but to Baudrillard, this game is over and the subject should abandon its pretensions to gain sovereignty over the world of the object. He gives back to the object autonomous powers such that they may circulate independently from the social relations of production and he turns the subject back into objects without creativity and efficacy of action. The potentially
progressive critique of the domination of subjects by their own fetished and alienated object creations or of the hubris of the subject in terms of the exploitation of animal, human and natural life is forfeited in the abstraction of objects from the labor process and in the denial of subjective agency.
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