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Simulacrum: An Aesthetization or An-aesthetization

Huimin Jin
Theory Culture Society 2008; 25; 141
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095548

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Simulacrum
An Aesthetization or An-aesthetization

Huimin Jin

Abstract
Aesthetization, or aestheticization, has recently become a new key word in
scholarly debates about culture and society, roughly concerned with the kind
of phenomenon that pictorial turn describes. It is not that ‘aesthetization’,
in its literal sense, is making the unaesthetic aesthetic, nor does it point to
the sort of topics typical of an aestheticized human life as favored by some
traditional Chinese intellectuals; rather it is about a transaesthetization. This
process differs not just in the range and extent of aesthetization, but in its
essence and nature: reality will no longer exist when it is transaesthetized
and what is left is an aesthetic realm only; in other words, there will be no
reality, but purely the ‘hyperreal’. Accordingly, transaesthetization can then
often be associated with the concept of simulacrum, or the proliferation of
images; it would thus result from the expansion of simulacra. However, there
arises the problem that simulacrum is not identical with image. Assuming
that the beauty of image consists in its rich connotations and its presen-
tation at the level of form, it is doubtful that transaesthetization is config-
ured merely by the simulacral. Why, and how could it be so?

Key words
Baudrillard ■ beauty ■ Heidegger ■ hyperreal ■ Idea ■ image ■ Jameson ■
picture ■ simulacrum ■ transaesthetization

A
ESTHETIZATION, OR aestheticization, has recently become a new
key word in scholarly debates about culture and society, roughly
concerned with the kind of extensively emerging phenomenon that
pictorial turn describes. It is not, or not simply, that ‘aesthetization’ in its
literal sense is making the unaesthetic aesthetic (see Welsch, 1996: 7), nor
does it point to the sort of topics typical of an aestheticized human life as
favored by traditional Chinese intellectuals, such as, for example, ‘holding

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 25(6): 141–149
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095548

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142 Theory, Culture & Society 25(6)

chrysanthemums in a secluded life’, or ‘visitation on a snowy night’;1 rather

it is about a transaesthetization. This process differs not in the range and
extent of aesthetization, but in its essence and nature: reality will no longer
exist when it is transaesthetized and what is left is an aesthetic realm only;
in other words, there will be no reality but purely the ‘hyperreal’, which
Baudrillard (1990: 26) defines as ‘more real than real’ (‘plus réel que le réel’,
my emphasis). Accordingly, transaesthetization can then often be associated
with the concept of simulacrum, or the proliferation of images; to put it
another way, transaesthetization results from the expansion of simulacra.
However, there arises the problem that simulacrum is not identical with
image. Assuming that the beauty of image consists in its rich connotations
and the presentation at the level of form, it is doubtful that transaesthetiza-
tion is configured merely by the simulacra, and it remains of beauty and
aesthetic quality. Why, and how could it be so?
Here it should be pointed out that those like Jean Baudrillard,
Wolfgang Welsch, Mike Featherstone and Aless Erjavec who have addressed
the thesis of transaesthetization have neglected to elaborate its analysis,
perhaps because it appears self-evident to them. So the problem remains
overlooked, clamouring for a clear and full interpretation; otherwise we will
fail to grasp the peculiarity of transaesthetization, of the pictorial era and,
therefore, of the crisis of the humanities as well.
Let us begin with German idealism. It seems that so far we still have
not gained a proper understanding of the Hegelian classic definition that
‘the beautiful is the sensuous semblance of the Idea’, but rather it is habit-
ually regarded as the thesis of Platonic objective idealism. Adorno (1997:
86–7), for instance, maintains that ‘spirit is not only the spiritus, the breadth
that animates artworks into a phenomenon, but is as much the force of the
interior of artworks, the force of their objectivation’.2 Similarly, Guangqian
Zhu (1996: 345), a very respectable Chinese translator of Hegel’s lectures
on aesthetics, holds that this definition ‘has uplifted the rational content to
the highest’.3 Idea, or Spirit in Adorno’s terminology, is decisive and funda-
mental for the arts to appear as art, and this is in accordance with Hegel’s
intention – he values Idea rather than its appearance, and contends that the
appearance is the epoché (in its Greek sense) of the circulation of Idea per
se, and thus belongs to Idea. However, why is the appearance of Idea the
necessary way to beauty? In other words, if Idea is originarily vital for the
arts, then what is finally vital is its resorting to appearance at the level of
the senses. As for the production of arts, this naturally stresses the import-
ance of the form (not in Aristotle’s sense, which inspires inert materials),
including all its sensual elements such as gestalt, imagery, and also all
artistic means that make them possible. Nevertheless, why and how can Idea
be beautified so long as it is formalized? Or, why is the form so vital? This
involves the nature of Form, and for this, it is impossible for Hegel to provide
a satisfactory answer within his objective idealistic framework; at most he
might say that while the notion (Begriff) is the object for abstract reflection,
art as Idea must become sensuous so as to be art; and beauty as Idea must

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Jin – Simulacrum 143

be Ideal, that is, the realization of Idea in a determinate form, or the unity
of the notion and its reality (see Hegel, 1955: 141ff.). Yet this in fact says
nothing regarding the nature of Form that we have been seeking, and there-
fore a different exploration is required.
Form as a term can be traced back etymologically to eidos in Greek,
implying visibility, and such visibility is available as well to the mental eye
in Plotinum, a Neo-Platonist. The Latin version for form is forma, meaning
the expressed (for contains the meaning of to tell, to declare, to predict, etc.),
and hence it is image, appearance, sketch, icon, representation and the like.
Moreover, it is even simply identified with the shöne Gestalt, or shönheit,
which unfortunately has almost fallen into oblivion in modern Western
languages (see Hau, 2002: S. 404–5). That is to say, the form as such is
always already of beauty. The Chinese compound (xingshi, form) is
nothing other than something so expressed as to be visible, palpable and
imaginable. If form does really feature visibility, we need to explore further
why and how a thing of visibility can be that of beauty, and what the nature
of visibility is.
Where this is concerned, Die Zeit des Weltbildes by Martin Heidegger
is most revealing. What does the Weltbild (world picture) imply? It does not
mean that our world has been filled with images, but that our world has been
represented in the form of images and therefore imaged. Such a statement
echoes with the idea of the society of spectacle, of hyperréel, of visualiza-
tion and hence of the postmodern society; but compared with Baudrillard’s
four phases of the image’s elaboration, Heidegger’s world picture inclines
to the first phase, the reflection of the basic reality, rather than the fourth
phase, simulacrum, which is totally irrelevant to any reality whatsoever. If
Baudrillard’s simulacrum is of postmodernity, Heidegger’s world picture is
of modernity: the world picture he means had never existed before, but only
appeared in modern times as a sign of modernity. As such, Heidegger (1977:
130) explains: ‘The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval
one into one of the new age, but rather the fact that the world becomes
picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the new age.’4 Heidegger
does not deny the fact of pictorial activities in ancient times; where
there are arts, there are pictures (visible or mentally visible). For
Heidegger, the picture has specific connotations: it refers to representation,
the world being represented and so a mirrored world in the Western
epistemological context, during which process a human being becomes the
subject of his world and himself (as he has been represented as well, or
represented in Reflexion). ‘Representation [Vorstellen] here,’ Heidegger
(1977) tells us:

. . . means to bring what is present at hand [das Vorhandene] before oneself

as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one who
represents it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the
normative realm. Wherever this happens, man gets into the picture in prece-
dence over what-is [Seiende]. But in that man puts himself into the picture

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144 Theory, Culture & Society 25(6)

in this way, he puts himself into the scene [Szene], i.e., into the open sphere
of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets
himself up as the scene in which what-is must henceforth set itself forth, must
present itself, i.e., be picture. Man becomes the representative of what-is in
the sense of that which has the character of object. (1977: 131–2)5

Beneath the superficially stagnant statements surges an inner onrush of the

critical attitude: the pictorialization of the world is the same as the repre-
sentation of the world as held by modern philosophy, from which there
originates the centralization of Ego, ‘the dialectics of Enlightenment’, the
arrogance of humanism and so forth. We will not further explicate such a
weighty topic, as Heidegger’s suggestion that picture is identical with
representation has brought us to what we have been urgently pursuing.
The German word Bild is the same as image, also the same as the
Hegelian semblance, as Gestalt or as any other thing that is visible.6 If we
think the essence of picture to be of representation, the same is true of
image. The quality of representation shared with image is the final key to
the riddle of why beauty lies in image per se, or why a visible form straight-
forwardly pertains to beauty. According to this understanding, the reason
image brings out beauty is that it makes a representation and represents the
Vorhandene and also the Seiende, i.e. our world, our being and our In-
der-Welt-Sein. Therefore, prior to the individual viewer, an image always
stipulates an epistemological dichotomy, a distance of knowledge, between
the viewing and the viewed, the representing and the represented. That is
also to say, image is nothing but a distance, and distance amounts to beauty
and literature, which has been well-known for a long time. In this sense,
images, represented or self-presenting as it were, are all dwelling in the
world of mind, of consciousness, which is opposite to the outside. That
accounts for why even the poorest photography has a minimum aesthetic
sense. Aristotle does not get this point, and he therefore maintains that
pictures, and even corpses, may be appreciated solely with regard to the
impulsive desire for knowledge.7 As a matter of fact, where distance is
concerned, there is a communication between knowledge-seeking and the
aesthetic. The pleasure in knowledge acquisition, as he suggests, is always
mingled with that of aesthetic appreciation, because it is only by maintain-
ing an epistemological dichotomy that aesthetic appreciation can occur, or
rather, the aesthetic sense consists in a distancing from knowledge.
Baudrillard (1993b: 69), seemingly in support of Heidegger’s emphasis
on the representation-quality of picture, image and scene, says: ‘In order to
have an image, you need to have a scene, a certain distance without which
there can be no looking, no play of glances, and it is that play that makes
things appear or disappear.’ However, television alters the representation-
quality of images, no longer being an image in this sense. Baudrillard finds:

. . . television obscene, as there is no stage, no depth, no place for a possible

glance and therefore no place either for a possible seduction. The image plays

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with the real, and play between the imaginary and the real must work.
Television does not send us back to the real, it is in the hyper-real, it is the
hyper-real world and does not send us to another scene. This dialectics
between the real and the imaginary, necessary in order to make an image
exist, and necessary to permit the jouissance of the image, is not, it seems to
me, realized by television. (1993a: 69)

According to Baudrillard, television does not care about the play, the dialec-
tical tension between reality and imagination, and it turns reality into simu-
lacrum, which signifies no real things and has no depth; as Fredric Jameson
(1997: 224) puts it: ‘Things become the images of the things . . . then, it
appears as if the things would no longer exist. This is a loss of the real sense,
or of the referents.’8 In the present case, the modern logicality of the world
picture, towards which Heidegger holds a sharply critical attitude, has been
thoroughly disembedded from the ‘earth’ and the ‘world’.
Without images as such, how could we make sense of our assertion of
aesthetization? Furthermore, the vanishing of images means the end of art.
We are, therefore, puzzled by such a Baudrillardian statement as: ‘[A]rt has
been dissolved within a universal aesthetization (esthétisation) of everyday
life, a transaesthetics of banality, giving way to a pure circulation of images’
(1993a: 16 [1990: 19]). Here, with Baudrillard, there is apparently a kind
of verbal paradox: with its dissolution, art will no longer exist; but strangely,
it is still alive there and exists everywhere in the world of the so-called
aesthetization. A problem arises here because of the contradiction implied:
an aesthetization without the aesthetic?! Now this looks like a return to the
initial question, but after theoretically roaming around at length, we are
approaching the solution.
If only those images which bear meaning and distance may be said to
be of beauty, then those simulacra which have no depth and do not signify
will have nothing to do with the beautiful. We do not care how logical or
illogical this theorization is, but will just concentrate on Baudrillard’s (1996:
170) definition of simulacrum: ‘It bears no relation to any reality whatever:
it is its own pure simulacrum.’ And he immediately adds: ‘it is no longer in
the order of appearance at all, but of simulation’ (1996: 170). As a matter
of fact, simulacrum is double-edged: that a simulacrum is called a simu-
lacrum but not an image depends on its anti-representative and anti-
semiotic character; however, on the other hand, because it has never
thoroughly completed its acclaimed task of universal aesthetization, i.e. of
everyday life, and has never made everything into simulacra, it remains to
some extent a representation by our subjectivity, or the appearance of some-
thing that appears. The reason is very simple: epistemologically there is no
way to get rid of an ‘ever-transcendent ego’ that looks at, and with the gaze
of, the logic for knowing; whilst ontologically, we must have possessed,
employing the terms of Heidegger and R. Bultmann, a Vor-Struktur or Vorver-
ständnis, which always refuses to be represented but represents something
against, i.e. Gegenstand. In short, Ich could by no means be deconstructed.

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146 Theory, Culture & Society 25(6)

Since the simulacrum is still located in the domain of appearance, and

remains a representation, it is possible for it to be aesthetic and of beauty
– this is my first argument.
Second, to make a differentiation, there are the modern image-
representation and the postmodern simulacrum-representation. In the light
of image-representation, the picture says and implies, or in other words, the
picture is symbolic and linguistic. However, in the light of the simulacrum-
representation, the meaning exceeds the picture without being contained by
it, so as to become the untruthful, decried appearance. The simulacrum-
representation carries meaning in two ways: first, it signifies something – it
is then in the first phase of image as Baudrillard defines it; second, it gives
the thing more meanings than that thing originally has, and then the thing
is no longer the thing itself only, but a surplus-thing, or an untruthful
appearance of the thing. But we do not much mind those simulacra, for
instance in everyday advertisements, which reorganize grotesquely the
signifier and the signified, because they appeal to the utopian ideals we may
cherish in our unconscious. Simulacrum has never been the word without
thing, but always inscribed the signified, the peculiarly signified, and the
distance for the beautiful – no distance, no representation; so, it is not the
distance between reality and the image that mirrors the reality, but between
our reality and our utopia which is beyond our present reality, or in other
words, not between the thing and its image, but the thing and its surplus-
image which has been over-signified.
It is a pity that the beauty of the simulacrum is intentionally to replace
reality, to implode the demarcation between the aesthetic and the truthful,
to terminate the dialectical play between the imaginary and the real, and
finally to build up an exclusive realm of transaesthetics or aesthetization.
This is then a fatal threat to literature. Literature is generally thought to
produce an imaginary and fictional world, but those imaginations and
fictions are always based on a dichotomy between reality and ideality, from
which a comparative perspective, hence a critical distance, is constituted
with reference to reality. This accounts for why all great literary works
concern the real in one way or another. Transaesthetics deprives literature
of its pole of reality, and thus overthrows the foundation of literature. Litera-
ture lives by the interaction between the imaginative and the real, and there-
fore, if you like, the simulacrum’s murder of the real is actually the murder
of literature.
Another consequence caused by the simulacrum is that as it has dis-
engaged itself from signifying reality, which has been tossed out of itself,
or, to put it the other way round, as the simulacrum has gained its indepen-
dence and autonomy from reference to reality, it may amplify as much as it
wants a purely formal aesthetic effect. This is to say, literature, which has
long been proud of its via-imaging-images, the mediate or mental images,
is nowadays in jeopardy of being driven out of the entertainment market by
the immediate pictures, especially by those boldly impudent simulacra. The
entertainment function codified by such traditional literary canons is no

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Jin – Simulacrum 147

longer satisfying the consumers’ needs for imagery, such as when poetry
contains painting, spirit roams with things, ideas and their surroundings
cohabit, and poetry demands the way of thinking in imagery, etc. It is seen
that literary entertainments are being replaced by those electronic image-
products, at least being partaken of and dissected: the brilliance of images
of which literature has ever boasted is now growing dimmer and dimmer, or
has become insignificant to the consumers of commerce-dominated society.
Ironically, the imagery-literature is going nowhere but to its end at such a
moment as the time of images approaches, and as images are liberated from
the linguistic cage.
As far as this is concerned, Baudrillard’s simulacrum-and-trans-
aesthetics-phobia, and his paranoia over the fate of this image-century, are
by no means overreacting at all. The crisis is one of theorization, but it is
also occurring in real life. Nonetheless, while we are critical of the simu-
lacrum’s formal and false natures, we need to show the other side of the coin
that so far we have not touched on yet, that is, the aesthetic nature of the
representation not only consists textually in its signification, and its
distance, to the reality, but also receptively in the contribution and endow-
ment of the viewers as subjects to the objects; so-called purely formal
appreciation is never purely formal, as we have more or less interpretations
of the form, at least instilling it with our emotions, tastes, wishes and desires.
As long as the pure forms become our objects and are represented by
ourselves, we have been engaged with them, or we have paid attention to
them. Although we are not clear what engagement has been made with the
forms, and what attention has been paid to them, definitely something must
already be there. Zhang Yimou’s films are vision-centered, which invites you
just to look, not to think. We may blame them for their depthlessness and
meaninglessness, but they do not really lack meanings at all: we love them
to the extent that we love the meanings we give them, though vague and
ambiguous, and what is more, we love the meaning-giving act itself, so we
construct meanings through the pleasure of formal appreciation, and enter
into the aesthetic activity. With vision-centered films and those formal arts
without traditional depth, we need to be tolerant and sympathetic, for we
have entered a consumer society, and we know that expressions of beauty
are various and changeable.
A creed of the image-aesthetic is being ‘museumized’, and at the same
time an avalanche of the simulacrum-consumption is pouring into our daily
life. Literature will not die of the upheaval, but it needs to be vigilant lest
it be an-aesthetized by the simulacrum; its strategy must be to tighten the
tie with reality, and to deal with it in the way Althusser did with so-called
‘ideology’.

Notes
1. Chrysanthemums and snow, among many others, were the classical Chinese
symbols of spiritual independence and freedom from the authorities, and also from
worldly calculations. As a herb, chrysanthemum can be used to remove the Huo

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148 Theory, Culture & Society 25(6)

(fire – a metaphor of strong desire) from the body, while snow, because of its clean-
ness, can wash away the dirt. This is why they were often taken as aesthetic objects
in ancient China.
2. Translation altered against Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (1996:
S. 134).
3. Guangqian Zhu, ‘Translator’s Postscripts’ (1996: 345, my translation). Before he
did the translation, Zhu had been politically attacked, for at one time he embraced
aestheticism or aesthetic formalism, which was widely viewed as contradictory and
therefore harmful to revolutionary utilitarianism, the prevailing ideology at that
time. From the quoted words, in which he strongly emphasized the rational content
of artworks, we can spot that he had more or less changed his original position.
4. Translation altered against Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’ (1994
[1938]: S. 90).
5. Translation altered against Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’ (1994 [1938]:
S. 91, italics added).
6. Hegel’s formula that ‘the beautiful as the sensuous semblance of the Idea’ could
be re-stated as ‘the beautiful as image’, because the ‘semblance’ means to appear
as an image, not as a phenomenon that has not been formed yet.
7. At the very beginning of his Metaphysica, Aristotle said:

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take
in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for them-
selves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to
action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one
might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses,
makes us know and brings us to light many differences between things. (1954:
Book A, 980a)

Here, according to Aristotle, the delight of seeing results from seeing as knowl-
edge-seeking. Much more vividly, in his De Poetica, Aristotle writes:

[T]hough the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view

the most realistic representation of them in art, the forms for example of
the lowest animals and of dead bodies. . . . [T]he reason of the delight in
seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning – gathering
the meaning of things. (1952, vol. XI: from the sheets of the 1st edn,
1448b–1449a).

8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Cultural Theory (trans. Xiaobing Tang,

Beijing: Peking University Press, 1997). This book is a collection of Jameson’s
lectures given at Peking University in 1985, and the English manuscripts have not
been published.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1996) Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften 7. Frank-
furt a. Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Jin – Simulacrum 149

Aristotle (1952) The Works of Aristotle, vol. XI, De Poetica, trans. into English under
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under the editorship of W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1990) La Transparence du mal. Paris: Galilée.
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Gane. London: Routledge.
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Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hau, Rita (2002) PONS Wörterbuch für Schule and Studium Latein-Deutsch.
Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Sprachen.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1955) Ästhetik. Berlin: Auf-Bau Verlag.
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a. Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Jameson, Fredric (1997) Postmodernism and Cultural Theory, trans. Xiaobing Tang.
Beijing: Peking University Press.
Welsch, Wolfgang (1996) ‘Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and
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Huimin Jin is Professor of Literary Theory and Aesthetics at Henan

University, Kaifeng, and also at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
Beijing, China. His publications (in Chinese), among others, include The
Post-Confucian Turn (2008), Consequences of New Media: A Critical Theory
Concerning the End of Literature (2005), Postmodernity and Dialectical
Hermeneutics (2002), Beyond the Will: A Study of Arthur Schopenhauer’s
Philosophy and Aesthetics (1999), Anti-Metaphysics and Contemporary
Aesthetics (1997). He is editor of the journal Difference (Kaifeng: Henan
University Press).

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