Baudrillard - The Precession of Simulacra

The postmodern notion that we are in an age in which “...everything and everyone is consumable...the medium becomes the message...[and] there is no hidden depth beneath the surface...truth is just another illusion...” (Snipp-Walmsley In Waugh 2006:412-3), owes much of its views to Baudrillard, especially his theory of Simulations. Baudrillard states that simulation has now entered the realm of the hyperreal, present day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation using imperialism. The differences between one and the other has been lost at the most basic level, the sign has been depleted to the extent that meaning – produced by the relationships between signs – is being lost at an alarming rate. Baudrillard proposes four phases of the sign:

1. Truth – reality at its most basic and “faithfully’ represented.

2. Distorted or warped truth/reality – “truth perverted through representation” (Snipp-Walmsley In Waugh 2006:413).

3. Absence of truth/reality – we try to mask reality/truth’s disappearance through representation because we still attempt to cling on to it.

4. Complete lack of relationship between the sign and reality – due to the fact that “there is no longer anything real to reflect” (Snipp-Walmsley In Waugh 2006:413)

This final stage, the hyperreal, is the one into which Western society, according to Baudrillard, has entered. The image is now dominant, previously perceived ‘normal’ relationships have been inverted and production has given way to simulation. This can be exemplified by the fact that products are now sold before they exist; advertising and media create a desire in consumers for a new product, which is then created to satisfy the desire (Snipp-Walmsley In Waugh 2006:413). Baudrillard highlights that the reality principle has been irrevocably lost, we are now pre-coded with simulacra, “...we cannot escape from them [simulacra], or express ourselves in terms other than through the codes which saturate us” (Snipp-Walmsley 2006:413). The real has been consumed by what Baudrillard terms ‘genetic miniaturization’, the new dimension of simulation. “The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an infinite number of times from these.” (1997[1981]:2). As a result this simulation of the real is no longer required to be rational because it is measured by neither and ideal or ‘negative instance’, this is what makes it the hyperreal “...produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (ibid).