Page 126 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Image 109

such as Internet and video. Whatever Lippmann might have thought of
these new media and their countercultural uses, his Platonist hackles would
surely have been raised by the postmodern delight in the surface, screen, and
simulacrum.
Jean Baudrillard contended that the relation of sign and signified bore
an inherent movement from the regime of representation to the regime of
simulation, marked out as “successive phases of the image” (Baudrillard
2001: 173). The first is the image as a faithful or trustworthy reflection of
a fundamental reality. Viewers believe the image delivers reality to them,
undistorted and true. When difference between the two becomes apparent,
such as in the conflict between rival images, one version is vilified as perverse
and said to mask or hide the truth. The next phase of the image unfolds when
it is determined that neither representation may lay claim to validity because
the very notion of representing reality itself is impossible. The truth is absent
from all representations, whose real purpose is to mask that absence, to make
people think they have access to something they do not. This is the juncture
at which simulation becomes a possibility, because the sign plays as a surface,
covering nothing but the absence of what was once assumed to be accessible
in the sign. The last step in this cascade of deconstruction is the complete
detachment of the sign or image as surface from any putative depth. There is
nothing behind it and therefore no need to regard it as referring to anything
but itself. The result is the simulacrum, the final moment in Baudrillard’s
evolution of the sign. The simulacrum is not a representation—it does not
refer to something behind, above, or ontologically superior (more real) to
itself. Indeed, he says that the simulacrum precedes the thing that it used to
follow: a map that no longer refers to actual terrain but generates endless
maps. The simulacrum is what Boorstin meant by a pseudo-event—a sign
that was its own referent and therefore lacked foundation in the metaphysical
substance of God. The diagnosis of the postmodern condition for both
writers turned on the absence of a bedrock reality. In what Baudrillard called
the “hyperreal,” images endlessly generate other images. 2
Some writers like to compare this process of simulation to The Matrix
(1999), which featured a computer-generated simulacrum in the place of
reality. However, the film doubles back to endorse a regime of representation
when Neo and fellow rebels infiltrate the digital world, attempting to liberate
its captives from the illusion and to destroy the hyperreal. Perhaps a better
instance of what Baudrillard has in mind is the film Blade Runner (1982),
in which a replicant destroys its maker and humans hunt replicants with
lethal force in order to bolster the compromised distinction between human
and artificial human. The hero who executes renegade replicants changes
his view of them when he falls in love with a replicant and abandons an
ontology of the real as endorsed by Platonic metaphysics.