Page 178 - Cultural Theory

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••• Speculation to the Death •••

product of simulacra, of the signs produced in each era and their epistemological
effects. The simulacrum, therefore, is not a postmodern phenomena; indeed, it is
instead an ancient theological and philosophical concept, used to describe the effi-
cacy and power of an image to simulate and thus to assume for us the force of real-
ity, and appear as what it represents, thereby abolishing the very distinction of ‘real’
and ‘image’, of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’. The simulacrum, therefore, has no relationship to
‘pretending’ (1994b: 3) as it does not produce an ‘unreality’ but precisely an effica-
cious reality that destabilizes this distinction and the simplistic materialist–idealist
dichotomy it rests upon. Although the West has repeatedly tried to demonize and
domesticate this simulacral process (Merrin, 2001), it returns today, as Baudrillard
recognizes, in the development of our reproductive technologies and their produc-
tion of our experience of the real.
For Baudrillard, our contemporary simulacra are semiotic productions, generated from
and operating according to their precessionary models, ‘substituting signs of the real for
the real’ (1994b: 2), to produce our reality from their circulation and commutation. He
sees the process of simulation as having four main effects. First, it leads to ‘indetermi-
nacy’, as the simulacrum erases the possibility of distinguishing truth and falsity, and
moves beyond any grounding or objective external reference or value as its own effec-
tive reality (1993b: 57). Second, and paradoxically simultaneously, it leads to an
increased determination, in its production and programming of the real, as the simu-
lacrum has no finality, destination or possibilities other than those ‘there in advance,
inscribed in the code’ (ibid.: 59), its reality being produced from the playing out and
materialization of this model. Third, in this programming of experience and expecta-
tion, it functions as a means of integration and ‘social control’ (ibid.: 60), Baudrillard
argues, as the ‘diffraction of models’ and their realization play a ‘regulative role’ today
(ibid.: 70). Fourth, the result of this simulation is both ‘hyperrealism’ and ‘indifference’
as experience is both heightened by the passage of the real into the hyperreal – the semi-
otic ‘aesthetic’ hallucination of reality’ (ibid.: 74) but also fundamentally dissuaded by
its ‘neutralization’ of symbolic relations, meaning, passions and possibilities (ibid.: 9).
If Baudrillard’s description of the simulacrum has a clear lineage in his earlier
description of the sign and its processes and of the social logic of consumption, these
ideas are extended here as Baudrillard now sees all of social life as dominated by
this ‘operational simulation’ (ibid.: 57). ‘Today reality itself is hyperrealist’, he writes:
‘reality is immediately contaminated by its simulacrum’ (ibid.: 74). Of the many
examples he gives of this, from political economy, fashion, the body and sexuality
(1993b), to ethnology, Disneyland, Watergate, reality TV, cinema, advertising, and
hypermarkets, etc. (1994b), one of the best is his discussion of polls and referenda
(1993b: 61–70). Here, from a critique of opinion polls and the ‘simulacrum of public
opinion’ they produce whose only effect is within the equally simulacral party sys-
tem (ibid.: 65–6), Baudrillard develops a critique of the ‘referendum mode’ operating
throughout our consumer and communicational culture, and its continuous testing
and prompting of audience responses along pre-programmed ‘stimulus/response’
lines whose anticipated, designated and pre-coded replies function not to discover
our reality but to produce and contain us within the system. Simulation operates

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