Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and Simulations

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it

The simulacrum is true.

~Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation 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 abstraction, 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.l
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. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the
territory - precession of 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 rotting
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 of 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 simulators try to make the
real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of
either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between
them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference 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 imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the
cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory,
disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, 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
miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced 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 instance. 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 simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their
art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than
meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems 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 always 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 objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a
dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the
symptom from the organic 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
unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same
way as any other symptom 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 caues 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 illness 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?2

What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of
identification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator
as though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military
psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction
between true and false, between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If
he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all
lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion.
Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which
again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.
Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to
religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples
because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can.
But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in
simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible
theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of
fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible
Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial
quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because
theysensed this omnipotence of simulacra, 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 simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the
divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

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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 reflections and were content to venerate God at one
remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most
modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the
mirror of images, they already 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 epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as