sociology short answers

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Course: SOC 311

Instructor authorizing: Jepson

Extracted from (source citation): Social Theory: the Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings / edited by Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017.

Source owned by: Instructor

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they represent; rather we must question them on the two levels of their tactical productivity (what recip­ rocal effects of power and knowledge they ensure) and their strategical integration (what conjunction and what force relationship make their utilization necessary in a given episode of the various confron­ tations that occur).

In short, it is a question of orienting ourselves to a conception of power which replaces the privilege of the law with the viewpoint of the objective, the priv­ ilege of prohibition with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced. The strategical model, rather than the model based on law. And this, not out of a speculative choice or theoretical preference, but because in fact it is one of the essen­ tial traits of Western societies that the force relation­ ships which for a long time had found expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually became in­ vested in the order of political power.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was one of France’s most flamboyant social commentators and intellec­ tuals in the fashion that dominated in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. His explorations of the social re­ ality of simulated worlds, like Disneyland, lead some to dismiss him. Yet his writing, like the selec­ tion on simulacra, is deadly serious in an ironic way. Baudrillard, perhaps the most representative of the postmodern cultural leftists, argued (as he does in the selection) that the line between reality and simulation is false. By implication, only mo­ dernity maintained the distinction; by inference, today’s world has erased it, both in philosophy and, so to speak, in “reality.” Baudrillard’s early writings, in the years following 1968, were much more in the tradition of Marxism. At that point, Baudrillard was primarily concerned with developing a social theory of mass society based on Marx and Sauss- ure—a critique of political economy and a semiot­ ics. To this day, his For a C ritique o f P olitica l Economy (1972) is rightly considered the most per­ spicacious interpretation of the close similarity of Marx’s and Saussure’s theories of social values. In this early period, he also wrote The System o f Objects (1968) and C onsum er Society (1970). The selection is obviously from a later period, when Baudrillard had left behind all visible traces of Marxism and his

interest in semiotics had been fully transformed into a general, discursive theory of culture. Cool M em ories (1987) is also from this later phase.

Simulacra and Simulations: Disneyland* Jean Baudrillard (1983)

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true. —Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simu­ lation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, 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 ab­ straction, 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.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Hence­ forth, it is the map that precedes the territory—p r e­ cession o f simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rot­ ting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert o f the real itself

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simula­ tors try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a ques­ tion of either maps or territory. Something has

* Baudrillard, Jean. S im u la cra a n d S im u la tion s. (Brooklyn, NY: Semitotext(e), 1983) pp. 1 - 1 3 , 2 3 -4 9 . Copyright © 1983 by Semiotext(e). Used by permission o f the publisher: http://www. semiotexte.com

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disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstractions charm. For it is the differ­ ence which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imagi­ nary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer’s mad project of an ideal coexten- sivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and ge­ netic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturiza­ tion is the dimension of simulation. The real is pro­ duced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative in­ stance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simu­ lation thus begins with a liquidation of all referen- tials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all sys­ tems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

The Divine Irreference of Images

To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t. One

implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: “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” (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is al­ ways 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. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be “produced,” and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat “true” illnesses by their ob­ jective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psy­ choanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the or­ ganic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the uncon­ scious? Why couldn’t the “work” of the unconscious be “produced” in the same way as any other symp­ tom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.

The alienist, of course, claims that “for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely to be deceived.” This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of ill­ ness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn’t false either?

What can the army do with simulators? Tradi­ tionally, following a direct principle of identifica­ tion, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent to a “real” homosexual, heart-case or lu­ natic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarities and hesitates to draw the distinc­ tion between true and false, between the “produced”

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symptom and the authentic symptom. “If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad.” Nor is it mis­ taken: in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of sub­ version. Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again out­ flanks them, submerging the truth principle.

Outside of medicine and the army, favored ter­ rains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: “I forbade any sim­ ulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented.” In­ deed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in su- mulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, sim­ ply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination—the visible machin­ ery of icons being substituted for the pure and intel­ ligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Their rage to destroy images rose pre­ cisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simu­ lacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. 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 simula­ cra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflec­ tions and were content to venerate God at one re­ move. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possessed the most modern and ad­ venturous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they al­ ready enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the

greatest game—knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences—the evanescence of God in the epiph­ any of power—the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the mur­ derous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of repre­ sentations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was en­ gaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a funda­ mental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, fr o m the radical negation o f the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2. It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3. It masks the ab sen ce of a basic reality. 4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever:

it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a g o o d appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the

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second, it is an ev il appearance: of the order of male- fice. In the third, it plays a t bein g an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugu­ rates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a prolif­ eration of myths of origin and signs of reality; of sec­ ond-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a pan­ ic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material produc­ tion. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Hyperreal and Im aginary

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of il­ lusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the so­ cial microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revel­ ling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that sufficiently exces­ sive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot—a veritable concentration camp—is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into di­ rect flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coinci­ dence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen

infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disney­ land: . . . digest of the American way of life, pane­ gyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that “ideological” blanket ex­ actly serves to cover over a th ird -ord er sim ulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disn­ eyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal om­ nipotence, which is carceral). Disneyland is pre­ sented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of re­ ality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imagi­ nary. It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that real child­ ishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. En­ chanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these “imaginary sta­ tions” which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or di­ mensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpet­ ual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.