simulation, simulacrum (1)

http://hum.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/simulationsimulacrum.htm

Whether or not we live in a world of simulacra, the term is certainly

important in light of how we view media. Media theorists, especially
Jean Baudrillard, have been intensely concerned with the concept of
the simulation in lieu of its interaction with our notion of the real and
the original, revealing in this preoccupation media's identity not as a
means of communication, but as a means of representation (the work
of art as a reflection of something fundamentally "real"). When media
reach a certain advanced state, they integrate themselves into daily
"real" experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is
indistinguishable from the mediated, and the simulation becomes
confused with its source. The simulation differs from the image and
the icon (and the simulacrum) in the active nature of its
representation. What are forged or represented are not likenesses of
static entities, but instead the processes of feeling and experiencing
themselves. Beginning as a primarily visual representation, the
simulacrum (provisionally: the image of a simulation) has since been
extended theoretically, and in the recent theory exemplified by the
work of Baudrillard functions as a catch-all term for systems still
operating despite the loss of what previous meaning they had held.
The terms simulation and simulacrum have subtly different meanings.
Simulation is defined first as "the action or practice of simulating,
with an intent to deceive," then as "a false assumption or display, a
surface resemblance or imitation, of something," and finally as "the
technique of imitating the behavior of some situation or process...by
means of a suitably analogous situation or apparatus" (OED online).
In total these three definitions convey the ideas that the simulation is
usually of a set of actions, and furthermore is deceitful in its display
of "some situation or process." In comparison simulacrum is defined
as "a material image, made as a representation of some deity,
person, or thing," as "something having merely the form or
appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or
proper qualities," and as "a mere image, a specious imitation or
likeness, of something" (OED). Like the simulation, the simulacrum
bears a resemblance to the thing that it imitates only on the surface
level (see: surface), but as opposed to the simulation's mimicry of a
process or situation, the simulacrum is defined as a static entity, a
"mere image" rather than something that "imitat[es] the behavior" of
the real thing on which it is based (see mimesis).

Simulations are now a part of everyday life. A fire drill is one

example, as it is a process which has all the outward appearance of
an orderly escape from danger but none of the danger itself. Pilots
and astronauts now train in flight simulators before taking to the air.
Simulacrum has very little modern and vernacular use, and instead is
employed almost entirely in the theoretical field. According to the
OED's first definition, a simulacrum is almost impossible to distinguish
from a representation (see: representation). But in the second and
third definitions we can see that the simulacrum supercedes
representation in terms of the accuracy and power of its imitation. It
is only when the viewer of the simulacrum penetrates the surface that
he can tell that it differs from the thing it imitates.
Michael Camille elucidates the classical notion of the simulacrum in
his article "Simulacrum" in Critical Terms for Art History. Camille
analyzes Plato's opinion of the simulacrum in The Republic: "The
simulacrum is more than just a useless image, it is a deviation and
perversion of imitation itself - a false likeness" (Camille, 31-32).
Imitation, resulting in the production of an icon or image (see:
image), results in the production of a representation that can be
immediately understood as separate from the object it imitates. The
likeness, however, is indistinguishable from the original; it is "a false
claimant to being" (32). While the simulacrum is defined as static, it
nevertheless deceives its viewer on the level of experience, a
manipulation of our senses which transforms the unrealistic into the
believable. Camille writes: "what disturbs Plato is...what we would
call today the 'subject position' of the beholder. It is the particular
perspective of human subjectivity that allows the statue that is
'unlike'...to seem 'like' and, moreover, beautifully proportioned from a
certain vantage point' (32). The simulacrum uses our experience of
reality against us, creating a false likeness that reproduces so exactly
our visual experience with the real that we cannot discern the
falseness of the imitation.
Jean Baudrillard writes in Simulations that an effective simulation will
not merely deceive one into believing in a false entity, but in fact
signifies the destruction of an original reality that it has replaced. He
writes: "to simulate is not simply to feign...feigning or dissimulation
leaves the reality intact...whereas simulation threatens the difference
between 'true' and 'false,' between 'real' and 'imaginary' (Baudrillard,
5). As evidence he provides the example of psychosomatic disorders,
conditions whose surfaces are complete likenesses of real disorders
yet are untreatable using standard medical techniques. The
simulation in this case destroys all notions of truth underlying the
original illness in its complete replacement of everything apart from

the logical reality of the disorder in medical practice. This reality is so

nebulous, couched in metaphysical terms like "truth" and the "real,"
that an effective enough simulation will destroy it completely, leaving
the deceived in a world devoid of meaning. The simulation for
Baudrillard brings us into a circular world in which the sign is not
exchanged for meaning, but merely for another sign. He poses the
question: "what if God himself could be simulated, that is to say,
reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole
system becomes weightless...never again exchanging for what is real,
but exchanging in itself in an uninterrupted circuit..." (10).
If for Baudrillard the simulation is the process through which reality is
usurped, then simulacrum is the term for the condition produced,
namely a system where empty signs refer to themselves and where
meaning and value are absent. In continued discussion of a God with
a fear of divinity "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" (8). Fascination
is here a term for empty occupation, a state in which we are held rapt
by the visible and disregard anything beneath the surface. For
Baudrillard work has become a simulacrum, existing for its own sake
instead of with any definite purpose: "Everybody still produces, and
more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a
need...the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the workreal, the production-real, has disappeared" (47).
According to Baudrillard, what is simulated is what is mediated and
vice versa. Those experiences in our lives that are explicitly presented
as mediated the author classifies as simply of a higher order of
simulation, one which simulates simulating in order to falsely suggest
a real that exists outside of the surface truth. Baudrillard uses
Disneyland as the prime example of this phenomenon: "Disneyland is
presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is
real, when in fact Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no
longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation" (25).
For Baudrillard, the explicitly mediated betrays us in its suggestion of
an unmediated system outside of it (see immediate, immediacy). As
there is nothing that is not simulated (e.g. devoid of what previous
meaning it may have had), our everyday experience is mediated
through simulacra.
Our experience in a "hyperreal" world (held in the grip of simulacra
and where nothing is unmediated) is one in which media and medium
are not simply located in their own hermetically sealed spaces, but

dispersed around us, in all forms of experience [see:

reality/hyperreality, (2)]: "No more violence or surveillance, only
'information,'...and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect comes
into play...There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is
now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real" (54). The medium is
no longer presented to us as a medium in the sense of a mediator,
and the diffuseness of the medium means that what the individual
still believes to be the "real" is never unmediated. We know that we
are living in a mediated world, but in result of the ubiquity of the
simulation life is now "spectralised...the event filtered by the
medium--the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV"
(55).
Gilles Deleuze agrees with Baudrillards conception of the simulacrum
as a system of empty signs that signals the destruction of the original
reality it is modeled after, though for Deleuze this destruction is
brought about because the simulation of the original is so perfect that
it is no longer clear where or what the original is. The original could
still exist, but its existence is irrelevant as we do not know where to
locate it. The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics summarizes his philosophy:
"The artwork, then, is neither an original nor a copy nor a
representation. It is a simulacrum, a work that forms part of a series
that cannot be referred to an original beginning" (Kelly ed., 517).
When the work of art is viewed in such a way the consequences are
not negative, on the model of Baudrillards dread at the impending
death of the real, but instead reveal new possibilities of interpretation
in a critical realm where sensation is the focus instead of meaning.
"Signs are not about the communication of meaning but rather about
the learning of the affects, perceptions, and sensations to which we
can be subject" (518). This fits perfectly with the conception of
simulation as a process which affects our experience and not (as the
image is) a signification of a fundamental reality. Michael Camille
selects a quote from Deleuzes essay "Plato and the Simulacrum"
which ably demonstrates the simulations positivity: "The simulacrum
is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the
original and the copy, the model and the reproductionThere is no
longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common
to all points of view" (Camille, 33). The simulation changes the way
that we view a work of art or experience a sensation, disposing with
an earlier hierarchy that valued the original work highest, and what
we are left with is exactly what Plato condemned, a system in which
the viewer and his manipulation become more important than any
underlying ideas.
David Cronenberg's film eXistenZ engages the concept of the

simulation and presents us with a vision of the future in which

impression is valued over content. The film follows the first
experience of a bodyguard uninitiated in the world of virtual reality
videogames with a new product created by the videogame designed
he was hired to protect. Speaking directly to Baudrillard's concerns,
the film leaves the viewer uncertain as to when the characters are in
a virtual world (see: virtuality) and when they are experiencing the
real. The self-referentiality within the film, with its framing of a virtual
reality videogame inside of another videogame, portrays the
simulated world as not only tied directly to the experience of emotion
and sensation, but as a world in which logical action is rewarded and
meaning sublimated. Any moral or allegorical conclusion that could be
drawn from what appears to be the film's initial conclusion, that
simulations create a system which precipitates its own demise, is
invalidated by a further expansion into another reality in which the
real videogame designer is congratulated for having created a really
fun game. The simulation in the film is reduced to the status of a ride
or a contest, containing its own rules and raising the status of the
videogame to deific proportions. The port into which the gamepods
are plugged (directly into the player's spine) becomes a metaphor for
desire and oblivion in its simultaneous recollection of sexual
intercourse and intravenous drug use. This is the realm of the
simulation, a process whose responsibility lies only in what it makes
us feel.
The simulation, as we can see by contrasting the philosophies of
Baudrillard and Deleuze, can be interpreted in nearly opposite ways,
as either the death knell for meaning and the "real," or conversely as
an avenue to new methods of interpretation. For Deleuze, the
simulation raises the work of art beyond representation to a level
where it is on equal footing with the original, and hence the original is
destroyed. Plato's fear of the simulacrum as described by Michael
Camille is based on the distortion of real experience that the
convincing image causes. The terms simulation and simulacrum are
important to media study, as the simulation is total mediation without
meaning. The content is shifted to a surface level, into the realm of
experience rather than communication of truth, and the way that the
medium affects us becomes our main interpretive focus.
Devin Sandoz
Winter 2003