Baudrillard’s Simulacrum:

The End of Visibility

The involuntary Platonist

Baudrillard has been often criticized for his bleak interpretation of
postmodern culture. In place of his “‘sour’ post-structuralism,” we are
urged to accept “a ‘sweet’ post-structuralism…for example, Derridean
post-structuralism, with its emphasis upon the delirious free play of the
signifier” (Coulter-Smith 1997: 92). Baudrillard is strangely out of place
in this technological age because he is too apocalyptic and at the same
time too ‘romantic’ (read ‘neo-Platonic’) in his inability to overcome the
melancholy provoked by “the loss of the real, the natural and the hu-
man” (98). Scott Durham’s Phantom Communities: the Simulacrum and
the Limits of Postmodernism is representative of this line of criticism.
Durham distinguishes two different interpretations of the simulacrum—
that of Jameson and Baudrillard and, on the other hand, that of Foucault
and Deleuze. Durham finds Baudrillard’s version of the simulacrum as
“the non-representation of the object or as the non-participation in the
Idea” (1998: 8) a “strangely inverted Platonism, where the desire to
pass judgment on existence has survived the belief in any ‘true world’
in the name of which it might be judged”(86). Deleuze, on the other
hand, presents the simulacrum “in its daemonic aspect, as the positive
expression of metaphoric and creative ‘powers of the false’ (8). The
Deleuzian simulacrum is not a simple imitation but rather the challeng-
ing of the very idea of a model or a privileged position; it is rooted in
Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s will to power as a creative power
of falsification, metamorphosis and becoming (11). That Durham prefers
the Deleuzian simulacrum to Baudrillard’s “performative simulation
model” (54) is clear from his decision to link the simulacrum to memory
rather than to communication, thereby recuperating the simulacrum as
that through which “one recalls, awaits, or imagines what is virtual or
unactualized in the very object that one sees” (17-18).
172 The Image in French Philosophy

Echoing some of the familiar criticisms of Bergson, other critics warn

against Baudrillard’s seductive, aphoristic style, which merely disguises
what are generally insubstantial ideas or, if we were to go with Durham,
merely an inverted form of Platonism. Finally, there are those who point
out that the simple fact that much of the criticism on Baudrillard has
been written by his devoted confirms that his works “[can] be regarded
as little more than strings of aphorisms, and thus not worthy of critical
engagement” (Willis 1997: 138). There is a strange incongruity between
these two critiques: according to the first, Baudrillard is not sufficiently
postmodernist, and according to the second he is too postmodernist,
as his fragmented, aphoristic style testifies. Rather than discrediting
Baudrillard’s work these criticisms present it as worthy of critical atten-
tion, especially now that postmodernism is drawing closer and closer to
the brink of self-exhaustion and we are less and less interested in “the
sweet and delirious free play of the signifier.”

The real: Bergson and Baudrillard

In many ways Baudrillard’s ontology of the image gestures back to,
while also reworking, Bergson’s image ontology in Matter and Memory.
Although both Bergson and Baudrillard begin their analyses by exam-
ining the ontological and epistemological significance of light as the
prime guarantor of the real, their concepts of the image, and therefore
of the real, differ significantly. As we saw in chapter one, Bergson does
not distinguish an image from a thing: things do not ‘have’ images
and neither do we ‘produce’ their images. Insofar as they are made of
light vibrations, things are already images or, taken more metaphori-
cally, a thing is an image (or a representation) of the totality of images
from which perception isolates it like a picture. However, Baudrillard
regards images as capable of detaching themselves from things and ei-
ther preceding or following them: having lost their solidity things have
been dematerialized into images, reduced to their pre-given meanings.
Images, as such, are neither exclusively visual nor exclusively mental;
rather, Baudrillard emphasizes their pre(over)determination, their ex-
treme proximity to us, which makes them virtually invisible.
In Baudrillard’s work, then, the image becomes a metaphor, and a
deliberate misnomer, for the end of visibility. When everything has been
rendered visible, nothing is visible any more and we are left with im-
ages. The image is a sign of overexposure or oversignification. Bergson
describes the ‘production’ of images as a process of dissociation or