Jean Baudrillard: The Precession of Simulacra

The shortcomings of Baudrillard’s mid-Eighties work have apparently been widely documented- the predilection for hyperbole, the reluctance to analyze systemically after making a bold claim, the seemingly warrantless concentration on specific societal phenomena to the exclusion of all sorts of others, etc. All of these make The Precession of Simulacra very frustrating to logically parse, but conveniently the question of whether or not any of the ideas within it can be said to be True in any sense falls way outside the boundaries of this thesis.

Precession begins with an allusion to narrative, specifically a short story by Borges. He then outlines the difference between dissimulation and simulation (“feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only asked,; whereas simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’” [Baudrillard 5]). I guess he was in a scrappy mood at that point, because the first thing he does after defining those terms is assert the nonexistence of God through analysis of iconoclastic movements in Europe:

Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination (Baudrillard 9).

At this point we move into the real meat of the analysis, or at least the place where that SHOULD be. He puts forward his overarching theory on the successive phases of the image:

-it is the reflection of a basic reality

-it masks and perverts a basic reality

-it masks the absence of a basic reality (italics his)

-it bears no relation to any reality (Baudrillard 11).

In the other post I’ll elaborate on what he goes on to talk about, which is an application of this framework to several historical and social phenomena; the general thesis develops a bit throughout, and takes on more nuance with regard to certain cases, but the above more or less summarizes it.

Citation:

Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983.

posted by connor @ 9:25 PM  Permalink