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2: The Order of Simulacra, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [50]-86. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents] |
The Three Orders of Simulacra
There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive
mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance:
-- The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the `classical' period, from the
Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution.
-- Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era.
-- Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase.
The first-order simulacrum operates on the natural law of value, the
second-order simulacrum on the market law of value, and the third-order
simulacrum on the structural law of value.
The Stucco Angel
The counterfeit (and, simultaneously, fashion) is born with the Renaissance,
with the destructuration of the feudal order by the bourgeois order
and the emergence of overt competition at the level of signs of distinction.
There is no fashion in a caste society, nor in a society based on rank, since
assignation is absolute and there is no class mobility. Signs are protected by
a prohibition which ensures their total clarity and confers an unequivocal
status on each. Counterfeit is not possible in the ceremonial, unless in the
form of black magic and sacrilege, which is precisely what makes the
mixing of signs punishable as a serious offence against the very order of
things. If we take to dreaming once more -- particularly today -- of a world
where signs are certain, of a strong `symbolic order', let's be under no
illusions. For this order has existed, and it was a brutal hierarchy, since the
sign's transparency is indissociably also its cruelty. In feudal or archaic
caste societies, in cruel societies, signs are limited in number and their
circulation is restricted. Each retains its full value as a prohibition, and
each carries with it a reciprocal obligation between castes, clans or persons,
so signs are not arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the sign begins when,
instead of bonding two persons in an inescapable reciprocity, the signifier
starts to refer to a disenchanted universe of the signified, the common
denominator of the real world, towards which no-one any longer has the
least obligation.
The end of the obligatory sign is succeeded by the reign of the
The modern sign then finds its value as the simulacrum of a `nature'. This
problematic of the `natural' and the metaphysics of reality was, for the
bourgeoisie since the Renaissance, the mirror of both the bourgeois and
the classical sign. Even today there is a thriving nostalgia for the natural
referent of the sign, despite several revolutions which have begun to
shatter this configuration (such as the revolution of production when signs
ceased to refer to a nature and referred instead to the law of exchange,
passing into the market law of value). We will come back to these second-order
simulacra.
It is with the Renaissance, then, that the forgery is born along with the
natural, ranging from the deceptive finery on people's backs to the
prosthetic fork, from the stucco interiors to Baroque theatrical scenery.
The entire classical era was the age of the theatre par excellence. The
theatre is a form that gripped social life in its entirety as well as all
architecture from the Renaissance on. From these incredible achievements
with stucco and Baroque art we can unravel the metaphysics of the
counterfeit, as well as the new ambitions of Renaissance man. These latter
consist in an earthly demiurgy, the transubstantiation of all nature into a
single substance, a theatrical sociality unified under the sign of bourgeois
values, beyond differences of blood, rank or caste. Stucco is the triumphant
democracy of all artificial signs, the apotheosis of the theatre and
fashion, revealing the unlimited potential of the new class, as soon as it was
able to end the sign's exclusivity. The way is clear for unheard of
But simulacra do not consist only of the play of signs, they involve social
relations and a social power. Stucco may appear to be extolling the
expansion of science and technology, but it is also and especially bound to
the Baroque, which is in turn bound to the matter of the Counter-Reformation
and to the hegemony of the political and mental world which,
for the first time, the Jesuits tried to institute in accordance with a modern
conception of power.
There is a direct relation between the Jesuits' mental obedience (perinde
ac cadaver) and the demiurgic ambition to exorcise the natural substance of
things in order to replace it with a synthetic substance. Just as man submits
to organisation, so things take on the ideal functionality of the corpse.
Technology and technocracy are already fully operative in the notion of an
ideal counterfeit of the world, expressed in the invention of a universal
substance and a universal combinatory of substances. To reunify the world,
split asunder after the Reformation, under a homogeneous doctrine, to
universalise the world under a single word (from New Spain to Japan: the
Missions), to constitute a State political élite with one and the same
centralised strategy: such are the Jesuits' objectives. To do this, they will
need to create efficient simulacra, such as the organisation's apparatus, as
well as bureaucratic, theatrical (the great theatre of the Cardinals and the
Grey Eminences), training and educational machinery, which aims, for the
first time in a systematic fashion, to fashion an ideal nature on the model of
the child. The stucco cladding of Baroque architecture is a major apparatus
of the same order. All this issues from the productivist rationality of
capital, but it already bears witness, not in production but in the
counterfeit, to the same project of universal control and hegemony, to a
social schema in whose foundations the internal coherence of a system
already operates.
In the Ardennes there used to live an old cook for whom the
construction of tiered cakes and the science of pâtisserie-sculpture had
given him the arrogance to attempt to capture the world as God had left it
(that is, in its natural state), to eliminate all its organic spontaneity and
replace it with a single polymorphous material: reinforced concrete.
Concrete furniture, chairs, chests of drawers, concrete sewing machines;
and outside, in the courtyard, an entire orchestra, including the violins, in
concrete. Everything in concrete! Concrete trees planted out with genuine
leaves, a reinforced concrete boar with a real boar's skull inside it, concrete
sheep covered in real wool. At last Camille Renault discovered the original
The Automaton and the Robot
A world separates these two artificial beings. One is the theatrical,
mechanical and clockwork counterfeit of man where the technique is to
submit everything to analogy and to the simulacrum-effect. The other is
dominated by a technical principle where the machine has the upper hand,
and where, with the machine, equivalence is established. The automaton
plays the man of the court, the socialite, it takes part in the social and
theatrical drama of pre-Revolutionary France. As for the robot, as its
name implies, it works; end of the theatre, beginning of human mechanics.
The automaton is the analogon of man and remains responsive to him
(even playing draughts with him!). The machine is the equivalent of
man, appropriating him to itself as an equal in the unity of a functional
process. This sums up the difference between first-- and second-order
simulacra.
We must not be fooled by `figurative' resemblance. Like God, the
automaton questions nature (if not the mystery of the soul), the dilemma
of being and appearance: what underlies nature; what is within us; what is
There is nothing like this with the robot. The robot no longer questions
appearances, its only truth is its mechanical efficiency. It no longer needs
to resemble man, to whom it is inevitably compared. The infamous
metaphysical difference which gives the automaton mystery and charm no
longer exists: the robot emphasises this difference for its own benefit.
Being and appearance are founded on a single substance of production and
labour. The first-order simulacrum never abolishes the difference: it
presupposes the dispute always in evidence between the simulacrum and
the real (a particularly subtle game in trompe-l'oeil painting, but all art
thrives on this difference). The second-order simulacrum simplifies the
problem by the absorption of appearances, or by the liquidation of the
real, whichever you prefer. In any case it erects a reality without images,
without echo, without mirrors, without appearances: such indeed is labour,
such is the machine, such is the entire industrial system of production in
that it is radically opposed to the principle of theatrical illusion. No more
semblance or dissemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic
of the principle of operativity.
After this, robots and machines can proliferate -- this is even their law --
as automata, being sublime and singular mechanisms, have never done.
Men themselves only began to proliferate when, with the Industrial
Revolution, they took on the status of machines: freed of all semblance,
freed even from their double, they grew increasingly similar to the system
of production of which they were nothing more than the miniaturised
equivalent. The simulacrum's revenge, which gave rise to the myth of the
sorcerer's apprentice, did not take place with the automaton; on the
contrary, this is the law of the second order, from which there still proceeds
a hegemony of the robot, of the machine, of dead labour over living
labour. This hegemony is necessary to the cycle of production and
reproduction. It is with this reversal that we leave the counterfeit in order
to enter into (re)production. We are leaving natural law and its play of
The Industrial Simulacrum
A new generation of signs and objects arises with the Industrial Revolution
-- signs with no caste tradition that will never have known restrictions on
their status, and which will never have to be counterfeits, since from the
outset they will be products on a gigantic scale. The problem of their
specificity and their origin is no longer posed: technics is their origin, they
have meaning only within the dimension of the industrial simulacrum.
That is, the series: the very possibility of two or n identical objects. The
relation between them is no longer one of an original and its counterfeit,
analogy or reflection, but is instead one of equivalence and indifference. In
the series, objects become indistinct simulacra of one another and, along
with objects, of the men that produce them. The extinction of the original
reference alone facilitates the general law of equivalences, that is to say,
the very possibility of production.
The entire analysis of production will be swept aside if we stop regarding
it as an original process, as the process at the origin of all the others, but
conversely as a process which reabsorbs every original being and introduces
a series of identical beings. Up to this point, we have considered
production and labour as potential, as force and historical process, as a
generic activity: an energetic-economic myth proper to modernity. We
must ask ourselves whether production is not rather an intervention, a
particular phase, in the order of signs -- whether it is basically only one
episode in the line of simulacra, that episode of producing an infinite series
of potentially identical beings (object-signs) by means of technics.
The fabulous energies at work in technics, industry and economics
should not hide the fact that it is at bottom only a matter of attaining this
indefinite reproducibility, which is a definite challenge to the `natural'
order, and ultimately only a `second-order' simulacrum and a somewhat
weak imaginary solution to the question of world mastery. In relation to
the era of the counterfeit, the double, the mirror and the theatre, games of
masks and appearances, the serial and technical era of reproduction is
basically an era of less ambitious scope (the following era of simulation
models and third-order simulacra is of much more considerable dimensions).
Walter Benjamin, in `The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction' [in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt,
London: Jonathan Cape, 1970], was the first to draw out the essential
implications of the principle of reproduction. He shows that reproduction
absorbs the process of production, changes its goals, and alters the status of
the product and the producer. He shows this in the fields of art, cinema and
photography, because it is there that new territories are opened up in the
Moreover, the stage of serial reproduction (that of the industrial
mechanism, the production line, the growth of reproduction, etc.) is
ephemeral. As soon as dead labour gains the upper hand over living labour
(that is to say, since the end of primitive accumulation), serial production
gives way to generation through models. In this case it is a matter of a
reversal of origin and end, since all forms change from the moment that
they are no longer mechanically reproduced, but conceived according to
their very reproducibility, their diffraction from a generative core called a
`model'. We are dealing with third-order simulacra here. There is no more
counterfeiting of an original, as there was in the first order, and no more
pure series as there were in the second; there are models from which all
forms proceed according to modulated differences. Only affiliation to the
model has any meaning, since nothing proceeds in accordance with its end
any more, but issues instead from the model, the `signifier of reference',
functioning as a foregone, and the only credible, conclusion. We are
dealing with simulation in the modern sense of the term, where industrialisation
is only its initial form. Modulation is ultimately more fundamental
than serial reproducibility, distinct oppositions more than quantitative
equivalences, and the commutation of terms more than the law of
equivalences; the structural, not the market, law of value. Not only do we
not need to search for the secrets of the code in technique or economics, it
is on the contrary the very possibility of industrial production that we must
The analyses of both Benjamin and McLuhan stand on the borders of
reproduction and simulation, at the point where referential reason disappears
and production is seized by vertigo. These analyses mark a decisive
advance over Veblen and Goblot, who, describing, for example, the signs
of fashion still refer to a classical configuration where signs constitute a
distinct material having a finality and are used for prestige, status and
social differentiation. The strategy they deploy is contemporaneous with
Marx's strategy of profit and commodity, at a moment where they could
still speak of a use-value of the sign, or quite simply of economics at all,
because there was still a Reason of the sign and a Reason of production.
The Metaphysics of the Code
The mathematically minded Leibniz saw in the mystical elegance of the
binary system where only the zero and the one count, the very image of
creation. The unity of the Supreme Being, operating by means of a
binary function against the nothing, was sufficient ground, he thought,
from which all things could be made.
Marshall McLuhan
The great man-made simulacra pass from a universe of natural laws into a
universe of forces and tensions, and today pass into a universe of structures
and binary oppositions. After the metaphysics of being and appearance,
after energy and determinacy, the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the
code. Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation,
feedback, question/answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration
(industrial simulacra being mere operations). Digitality is its metaphysical
principle (Leibniz's God), and DNA is its prophet. In fact, it is in
the genetic code that the `genesis of simulacra' today finds its completed
form. At the limits of an ever more forceful extermination of references
and finalities, of a loss of semblances and designators, we find the digital,
programmatic sign, which has a purely tactical value, at the intersection of
other signals (`bits' of information/tests) and which has the structure of a
micro-molecular code of command and control.
At this level, the question of signs and their rational destinations, their
`real' and their `imaginary', their repression, reversal, the illusions they
form of what they silence or of their parallel significations, is completely
effaced. We have already seen the signs of the first order, complex signs
with a wealth of illusion, change with the advent of machines into crude,
dull, industrial, repetitive, echoless, functional and efficient signs. There is
a still more radical mutation as regards the code's signals, which become
illegible, and for which no possible interpretation can be provided, buried
Such is our third-order simulacrum, such is the `mystical elegance of the
binary system of zero and one', from which all beings issue. Such also is the
status of the sign at the end of signification: DNA or operational
simulation.
This is all perfectly summed up by Thomas Sebeok in `Genetics and
Semiotics' (Versus):
Innumerable observations confirm the hypothesis that the internal world of the
organic descends directly from the primordial forms of life. The most remarkable
fact is the omnipresence of the DNA molecule. The genetic material of all the
earth's known organisms is in large part composed of the nucleic acids DNA and
RNA, whose structure contains information transmitted through reproduction
from one generation to the next, and furthermore endowed with the capacity to
reproduce itself and to imitate. In short, the genetic code is universal, or almost.
Decoding it was an immense discovery to the extent that it showed that `the two
languages of the great polymers, the languages of nucleic acid and protein,
correlate directly' ... The Soviet mathematician Liapunov demonstrated in
1963 that every living system transmits a small but precise quantity of energy or
matter containing a great volume of information through channels laid down in
advance. This information is responsible for the subsequent control of large
quantities of energy and matter. From this perspective numerous biological and
cultural phenomena (storing, feedback, channelling messages and so on) can be
conceived as manifestations of information processing. In the final analysis,
information appears in large part to be the repetition of information, but still
another kind of information, a kind of control which seems to be a universal
property of terrestrial life, irrespective of its form or substance.
Five years ago I drew attention to the convergence of genetics and linguistics
as autonomous but parallel disciplines in the larger field of the science of
communication (which is also a part of zoosemiotics). The terminology of
So the outline of the current strategic model emerges, everywhere taking
over from the great ideological model which political economy was in its
time.
We find this again, under the rigorous sign of `science', in Jacques
Monod's Chance and Necessity [tr. Austyn Wainhouse, London: Collins,
1970]. The end of dialectical evolution. Life is now ruled by the discontinuous
indeterminacy of the genetic code, by the teleonomic principle.
Finality is no longer at the end, there is no more finality, nor any
determinacy. Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code. We can see
that nothing has changed -- the order of ends has ceded its place to
molecular play, as the order of signifieds has yielded to the play of
infinitesimal signifiers, condensed into their aleatory commutation. All the
transcendental finalities are reduced to an instrument panel. This is still to
make recourse to nature however, to an inscription in a `biological' nature;
a phantasm of nature in fact, as it has always been, no longer a
metaphysical sanctuary for the origin and substance, but this time, for the
code. The code must have an `objective' basis. What better than molecules
and genetics? Monod is the strict theologian of this molecular transcendence,
Edgar Morin its ecstatic supporter (DNA = ADoNaï!). In each of
them, however, the phantasm of the code, which is equivalent to the reality
of power, is confused with the idealism of the molecule.
Again we find the hallucination or illusion of a world reunited under a
single principle -- a homogeneous substance according to the Counter-Reformation
Jesuits. With Leibniz and his binary deity as their precursor,
the technocrats of the biological (as well as the linguistic) sciences opt for
the genetic code, for their intended programme has nothing to do with
genetics, but is a social and historical programme. Biochemistry hypostatises
the ideal of a social order governed by a kind of genetic code, a
macromolecular calculus by the PPBS (Planning Programming Budgeting
System), its operational circuits radiating over the social body. Here
techno-cybernetics finds its `natural philosophy', as Monod said. The
biological and the biochemical have always exerted a fascination, ever
since the beginnings of science. In Spencer's organicism (bio-sociologism)
Coded similarities and dissimilarities: the exact image of cyberneticised
social exchange. We need only add the `stereospecific complex' to reinject
the intracellular communication that Morin will transform into a molecular
Eros.
Practically and historically, this means that social control by means of
the end (and the more or less dialectical providence that ministers to the
fulfilment of this end) is replaced with social control by means of
prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation,
all governed, however, by the code. Instead of a process finalised in
accordance with its ideal development, we are dealing with generative
models. Instead of prophecy, we fall subject to `inscription'. There is no
radical difference between the two. Only the schemata of control change
and, it has to be said, reach a fantastic degree of perfection. From a
capitalist productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order, aiming
this time at absolute control: the biological theory of the code has taken up
arms in the service of this mutation. Far from `indeterminate', this
mutation is the outcome of an entire history where God, Man, Progress
and even History have successively passed away to the advantage of the
code, where the death of transcendence benefits immanence, which
corresponds to a far more advanced phase of the vertiginous manipulation
of social relations.
In its infinite reproduction, the system puts an end to the myth of its
origin and to all the referential values it has itself secreted in the course of
its process. By putting an end to the myth of its origin, it puts an end to its
internal contradictions (there is no longer a real or a referential to which to
oppose them) and also puts an end to the myth of its end, the revolution
itself. With the revolution you could still make out the outline of a
victorious human and generic reference, the original potential of man. But
what if capital wiped generic man himself off the map (in favour of genetic
man)? The revolution's golden age was the age of capital, where myths of
the origin and the end were still in circulation. Once these myths were
short-circuited (the only threat that capital had ever faced historically came
from this mythical demand for rationality which pervaded it from the start)
in a de facto operationality, a non-discursive operationality -- once it
became its own myth, or rather an indeterminate, aleatory machine,
something like a social genetic code -- capital no longer left the slightest
opportunity for a determinate reversal. This is the real violence of capital.
However, it remains to be seen whether this operationality is itself a myth,
whether DNA is itself a myth.
This effectively poses the problem of the discursive status of science once
and for all. In Monod, this discourse is so candidly absolutised that it
provides a perfect opportunity for posing the problem:
Plato, Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx ...: these ideological edifices, represented as a
priori, were in reality a posteriori constructions designed to justify preconceived
ethico-political theories.... For science, objectivity is the only a priori
postulate of objectivity, which spares, or rather forbids it from taking part in this
debate. [Chance and Necessity, p. 98]
However, this postulate is itself a result of the never innocent decision to
objectify the world and the `real'. In fact, it postulates the coherence of a
specific discourse, and scientificity is doubtless only the space of this
discourse, never manifest as such, whose simulacrum of `objectivity' covers
over this political and strategic speech. Besides, Monod clearly expresses
the arbitrariness of this discourse a little further on:
It may be asked, of course, whether all the invariants, conservations and
symmetries that make up the texture of scientific discourse are not fictions
substituted for reality in order to obtain a workable image.... A logic itself
founded upon a purely abstract, perhaps `conventional', principle of identity -- a
convention with which, however, human reason seems to be incapable of doing
without, [ibid., p. 99]
We couldn't put it more clearly: science itself determines its generative
formula and its discourse model on the basis of a faith in a conventional
order (and moreover not just any order, but the order of a total reduction).
But Monod quickly glosses over this dangerous hypothesis of `conventional'
identity. A rigid basis would serve science better, an `objective'
reality for example. Physics will testify that identity is not only a postulate,
but that it is in things, since there is an `absolute identity of two atoms when
they are found to be in the same quantitative state'. So, is it convention or
is it objective reality? The truth is that science, like any other discourse, is
organised on the basis of a conventional logic, but, like any other
ideological discourse, requires a real, `objective' reference within the
processes of substance in order to justify it. If the principle of identity is in
any way `true', even if this is at the infinitesimal level of two atoms, then
the entire conventional edifice of science which draws its inspiration from it
is also `true'. The hypothesis of the genetic code DNA is also true and
cannot be defeated. The same goes for metaphysics. Science explains
things which have been defined and formalised in advance and which
subsequently conform to these explanations, that's all that `objectivity' is.
The ethics that come to sanction this objective knowledge are just systems
of defence and misconstrual [méconnaissance] that aim to preserve this
vicious circle.
[32]
As Nietzsche said: `Down with all hypotheses that have allowed belief in
a real world.'
The Tactile and the Digital
Regulation on the model of the genetic code is in no way limited to effects
in the laboratory or the exalted visions of theoreticians: these models
invest life at its most banal level. Digitality is among us. It haunts all the
We live in a referendum mode precisely because there is no longer any
referential. Every sign and every message (objects of `functional' utility just
as much as fashion features or any televised information, polls or
discussions) is presented to us as a question/answer. The entire communications
system has passed from a complex syntactic structure of language to
a binary system of question/answer signals -- perpetual testing. Tests and
referenda are, as we know, perfect forms of simulation: the question
induces the answer, it is design-ated in advance. The referendum, then, is
only an ultimatum: the unilateral question is precisely not an interrogation
any more, but the immediate imposition of a meaning which simultaneously
completes the cycle. Every message is a verdict, delivered like the
verdict of polling statistics. The simulacrum of distance (or indeed of
contradiction) between the two poles is nothing but a tactical hallucination,
like the reality effect on the interior of the sign itself.
Benjamin provides this test-function at the concrete level of the technical
apparatus:
The artistic performance of the screen actor is presented by a camera, with a
twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film
actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole.
Guided by the camera-man, the camera continually changes its position with
respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor
composes with the material supplied him constitutes the completed film ...
Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This
is the first consequence of the fact that the actor's performance is presented by
means of the camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor
to adjust to the audience during the performance, since he does not present his
performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the
position of the critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor.
The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the
[Note:] The expansion of the field of the testable which mechanical equipment
brings about for the actor corresponds to the extraordinary expansion of the field
of the testable brought about for the individual through economic conditions.
Thus, vocational aptitude tests become constantly more important. What
matters in these tests are segmental performances of the individual. The film shot
and the vocational aptitude test are taken before a committee of experts. The
camera director in the studio occupies a place identical with that of the examiner
during aptitude tests.
[T]he work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the
spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It
promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also
primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically
assail the spectator. (`The Work of Art', pp. 230, 240)
Contemplation is impossible, images fragment perception into successive
sequences and stimuli to which the only response is an instantaneous
yes or no -- reaction time is maximally reduced. The film no longer allows
you to contemplate it, it interrogates you directly. According to McLuhan,
it is in this sense that the modern media demand greater immediate
participation,
[33]
incessant response and total plasticity (Benjamin compares
the camera-man's operation to the surgeon's: tactility and manipulation).
Messages no longer have an informational role, they test and take polls,
ultimately so as to control (`contra-role' in the sense that all your responses
are already inscribed in the `role', on the anticipated register of the code).
Editing [montage] and encoding in fact demand that the recipient dismantle
[démonte] and decode in accordance with the same process. Every
reading of a message is thus nothing more than a perpetual test of the code.
Every image, every media message and also every surrounding functional
object is a test. That is to say, in all the rigour of the term, it triggers
response mechanisms in accordance with stereotypes or analytic models.
The object today is no longer `functional' in the traditional sense of the
term; it doesn't serve you, it tests you. It no longer has anything to do with
yesterday's object, any more than `mediatised' information has with the
`reality' of facts. Both object and information already result from a
selection, an edited sequence of camera angles, they have already tested
`reality' and have only asked those questions to which it has responded.
Reality has been analysed into simple elements which have been recomposed
into scenarios of stable oppositions, just as the photographer
imposes his own contrasts, lighting and angles onto his subject (any
photographer will tell you that no matter what you do it is enough to catch
the original from a good angle at the moment or inflection that turns it into
the exact response to the instantaneous test of the apparatus and its code);
exactly like the test or referendum when they translate a given conflict or
problem into a question/answer game. Thus tested, reality tests you in
return according to the same score-card, and you decode it following the
same code, inscribed in its every message and object like a miniature
genetic code.
You already test the mere fact that everything is presented today
according to a spectrum or range, since it imposes selectivity on you. This
conforms to the global usage we have of the surrounding world of reading
and selective decoding -- we live less as users than as readers and selectors,
reading cells. But beware, since by the same token you are yourself
constantly selected and tested by the medium itself. Just as we select a
sample for purposes of a survey, the media frame and cut sample receivers
by means of beamed messages which are in fact a network of selected
questions. By a circular operation of experimental modifications and
incessant interference, like nervous, tactile and retractile impulses, probing
an object by means of short perceptual sequences until it has been
localised and controlled, the media localise and structure not real,
autonomous groups, but samples, modelled socially and mentally by a
barrage of messages. `Public opinion' is evidently the finest of these
samples -- not an unreal but a hyperreal political substance, the fantastic
hyperreality which survives only by editing and manipulation by the test.
The irruption of the binary question/answer schema is of incalculable
importance. Dislocating all discourse in a now bygone golden age, this
schema short-circuits every dialectic of the signifier and the signified, a
representative and a represented. There are no longer any objects whose
signifieds are their functions, with opinion that `representative' representatives
would vote for, and the real interrogation to which the answer
responds (and there are especially no longer any questions to which there
are no answers). This entire process is dislocated: the contradictory
processes of the true and the false, the real and the imaginary are abolished
in this hyperreal logic of the montage. Michel Tort provides a fine analysis
of this in his book on the Intelligence Quotient:
The question as such does not determine its response in the form in which it was
posed, it is the meaning given to it by the person to whom it was posed and also
the idea the interrogated subject forms of the most appropriate tactic to adopt in
order to respond according to the idea he forms of the interrogation's expectations.
[Le quotient intellectual, Paris: Maspéro, 1974]
Tort again:
The artifact is something other than a controlled transformation of the object for
purposes of knowledge: it is a savage intervention in reality, at the end of which
it is impossible to distinguish what in this reality arises out of objective
knowledge and what results from the technical intervention (the medium). The
IQ is such an artifact.
No more true and false since we can no longer find any gap between
question and answer. In the light of these tests, intelligence, like opinion
and more generally every process of signification, is reduced to the
`capacity to produce contrasting reactions to an increasing range of
appropriate stimuli'.
This whole analysis directly reflects McLuhan's formula `The Medium is
The entire political sphere loses its specificity as soon as it enters the
media's polling game, that is to say, when it enters the integrated circuit of
the question/answer. The electoral sphere is in any case the first large-scale
institution where social exchange is reduced to getting a response. Thanks
to these simplified signals, the electoral sphere is also the first institution to
be universalised: universal suffrage is the first of the mass-media. Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, political and economic practice
merge increasingly into the same type of discourse; propaganda and
publicity were fused, marketing and merchandising both objects and
powerful ideas. This linguistic convergence between the economic and the
political is moreover what marks a society such as ours, where `political
economy' has been fully realised. By the same token, it is also its end, since
the two spheres are abolished in another reality or media hyperreality.
Here again, each term is elevated to a higher power, that of third-order
simulacra.
While many regret the media's `corruption of politics' and deplore the fact that
the TV switch and the public opinion polls have cheerfully replaced opinion
formation, this merely testifies that they have not understood polities at all.
(Le Monde)
This phase of political hyperrealism is characterised by the necessary
conjunction of the two-party system and the emergence of opinion polls as
the mirror of this alternating equivalence of the political game.
Opinion polls are situated beyond all social production of opinion. They
now refer only to a simulacrum of public opinion. This mirror of opinion is
analogous in its way to that of the Gross National Product: the imaginary
mirror of productive forces without regard for their social finality or
counter-finality, the essential thing being merely that `it' [ça] is reproduced.
The same goes for public opinion, where what matters most is that
it grows incessantly in its own image: this is the secret of mass representation.
Nobody need produce an opinion any more, but everyone must
If McLuhan's formula becomes significant anywhere, it is certainly
here.
[34]
Public opinion is par excellence both the medium and the message.
The polls informing this opinion are the unceasing imposition of the
medium as the message. They thereby belong to the same order as TV and
the electronic media, which, as we have seen, are also a perpetual
question/answer game, an instrument of perpetual polling.
Polls manipulate the undecidable. Do they affect votes? True or false?
Do they yield exact photographs of reality, or of mere tendencies, or a
refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation whose curvature we
do not even know? True or false? Undecidable. However sophisticated
their analyses, they always leave room for the reversibility of hypotheses.
Statistics is just casuistry. This undecidability is proper to every simulation
process (see above for the undecidability of the crisis). The internal logic of
these processes (statistics, probabilities, operational cybernetics) is certainly
rigorous and `scientific', yet it somehow doesn't get any purchase on
anything, it is a fabulous fiction whose index of refraction in (true or false)
reality is zero. This condition is all that gives these models any force, but
the only truth it leaves them comes from paranoid projection tests of a
caste or group, undecidability dreaming of a miraculous adequation
between the real and their own models, and therefore an absolute
manipulation.
What is true in the scenario of statistics is also true of the regulated
partition of the political sphere: the alternation of the forces in power,
minority/majority substitutions and so on. At the limit of pure representation,
`it' [ça] no longer represents anything. Politics dies from the overregulated
play of its distinct oppositions. The political sphere (more
generally, the sphere of power) is emptied. In some ways this is the ransom
for the fulfilment of the desire of the political class for a perfect
manipulation of social representation. Smoothly and surreptitiously, all
social substance vanishes from this machine at the very moment of its
perfected reproduction.
The same goes for opinion polls: it is ultimately only members of the
political classes who believe in them, just as it is only brokers and
advertising executives who really believe in publicity and market analyses.
This is not due to a particular stupidity (although we can't rule this out),
but because the polls are homogeneous to the way contemporary politics
operate. They therefore take on a `real' tactical value, operating as a
regulating factor of the political classes in accordance with their own gamerules.
The political classes, then, have good reason to believe in polls, as in
fact they do. Ultimately, though, who else does? It is the burlesque
spectacle of the hyperrepresentative (that is, not representative at all)
political sphere that people savour and sample through opinion polls and
The problem of opinion polls, then, is not their objective influence at all.
As far as propaganda and advertising are concerned, such influence is, as
we know, largely annulled by individual or collective resistance or inertia.
Their problem is the operational simulation that they institute across the
entire range of social practices, the leukaemia infecting all social substance,
replacing blood with the white lymph of the media.
The question/answer circularity runs through every domain. We are
slowly beginning to notice that the whole domain of surveys, polls and
statistics must be revised according to the radical suspicion brought to bear
on their methods. The same suspicion bears, however, on ethnology.
Unless you admit that the natives are totally `natural' and incapable of
simulation, then the problem is the same with the above as it is here: it is
impossible to obtain a non-simulated response to a direct question, apart
from merely reproducing the question. It is not even certain that we can
test plants, animals or inert matter in the exact sciences with any hope of an
`objective' response. As to how those polled respond to the pollsters, how
natives respond to ethnologists, the analysand to the analyst, you may be
sure that there is total circularity in every case: those questioned always
behave as the questioner imagines they will and solicits them to. Even the
psychoanalytic transference and counter-transference collapses today
under the shock of this stimulated, simulated and anticipated response,
which is simply a modality of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
[35]
So we come up
against the strange paradox where whatever those polled, analysands and
natives say, it is irremediably short-circuited and lost. Indeed, it is on the
basis of this foreclosure that these disciplines -- sociology, psychoanalysis
and ethnology -- will be able to develop in leaps and bounds. Such amazing
development is just hot air, however, since the circular response of those
polled, the analysands and the natives is nevertheless a challenge and a
victorious revenge: when they turn the question back on itself, isolating it
by holding the expected mirror-image response up to it, then there is no
hope that the question can ever get out of what is in fact the vicious circle
of power. It is exactly the same in the electoral system, where `representatives'
no longer represent anything, by dint of controlling the electoral
body's responses so well: somewhere, everything has escaped them. That is
why the controlled responses of the dominated are nevertheless somehow a
genuine response, a desperate vengeance which lets power bury power.
The systems of the `advanced democracies' become stable through the
formula of the two-party system. The de facto monopoly remains in the
At this point, it matters little what the parties in power express
historically and socially -- it is even necessary that they no longer represent
anything: the fascination of the game and the polls, the formal and
statistical compulsion, is so much greater.
`Classical' universal suffrage already implies a certain neutralisation of
the political field, in the name of a consensus over the rules of the game.
But we can still distinguish the representatives and the represented in this
game, on the basis of a real social antagonism in opinions. The neutralisation
of this contradictory referential, under the sign of a public opinion
which from now on is equal to itself, mediatised and homogenised by
means of anticipation (polls), will make possible an alternation, not of
parties, but of their `heads', creating a simulated opposition between the
two parties, absorbing their respective objectives, and a reversibility of
every discourse into any other. Beyond the representative and the
represented, this is the pure form of representation; just as, beyond the
signifier and the signified, simulation marks the pure form of the political
economy of the sign; just as, beyond use-value and exchange-value,
beyond every substance of production, the flotation of currencies and their
accountable drift marks the pure form of value.
It may seem that the historical movement of capital carries it from open
competition towards oligopoly and then towards monopoly, that democracy
moves from a multi-party system to a two-party system and then
towards single-party rule: oligopoly, or real duopoly, results from the
tactical division of the monopoly. In every domain duopoly is the completed
From the smallest disjunctive unit (the question/answer particle) up to
the macroscopic level of the great `two-party' systems that govern the
economy, politics and global co-existence, the matrix never changes. It is
always the 0/1, the binary scansion that is affirmed as the metastable or
homeostatic form of contemporary systems. It is the core of the processes
of simulation that dominate us. It can be organised into a game of unstable
variations, from polyvalence to tautology, without putting the strategic
form of the duopoly into question. It is the divine form of simulation.
[37]
Why has the World Trade Center in New York got two towers? All
Manhattan's great buildings are always content to confront each other in a
competitive verticality, from which there results an architectural panorama
that is the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, every building
on the offensive against every other. The system itself can be spotted in the
famous image we have of New York on arriving by sea. This image has
changed completely in a few years. The effigy of the capitalist system has
passed from the pyramid to the punch card. The buildings are no longer
obelisks, but trustingly stand next to one another like the columns of a
statistical graph. This new architecture no longer embodies a competitive
system, but a countable one where competition has disappeared in favour
of correlation. (New York is the only city in the world to have retraced,
throughout the entire length and breadth of its history, the contemporary
form of the capitalist system in this way, instantaneously changing
according to this system. No European city has ever done this.) This
architectural graphism belongs to the monopoly: the World Trade Center's
two towers are perfect parallelepipeds, four hundred metres high on a
square base; they are perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels.
The fact that there are two identical towers signifies the end of all
competition, the end of every original reference. Paradoxically, if there
were only one, the WTC would not embody the monopoly, since we have
seen that it becomes stable in a dual form. For the sign to remain pure it
must become its own double: this doubling of the sign really put an end to
what it designated. Every Andy Warhol does this: the multiple replicas of
Marilyn Monroe's face are of course at the same time the death of the
This doubling, this replication, inspires a particular fascination. However
high they are and however much higher than all the others, the two
towers nevertheless signify an arrested verticality. They ignore the other
buildings, they are not of the same race, they no longer challenge them nor
compare themselves to them; the two towers reflect one another and reach
their highest point in the prestige of similitude. They echo the idea of the
model they are for one another, and their semi-detached altitude no longer
has a transcendent value, but only signifies that the commutative strategy
of the model will now historically prevail over the heart of the system itself
(as New York truly is), over the traditional strategy of competition. The
buildings of the Rockefeller Center also mirror their glass and steel façades
in one another, in the city's infinite specularity. The towers are themselves
blind and no longer have a façade. Every reference to habitat, to the
façade as `face', to the interior and exterior, that we still find even in
the Chase Manhattan Bank or in the most daring mirror buildings from the
sixties has been erased. At the same moment that the rhetoric of verticality
is disappearing, so too is the rhetoric of the mirror. There now remains
only a series based on the binary code, as if architecture, in the image of
the system, proceeded only by means of an unchanging genetic code, a
definitive model.
The Hyperrealism of Simulation
We have just defined a digital space, a magnetic field of the code with its
modelled polarisations, diffractions and gravitations, with the insistent and
perpetual flux of the smallest disjunctive units (the question/answer cell
operates like the cybernetic atom of signification). We must now measure
the disparity between this field of control and the traditional field of
repression, the police-space which used to correspond to a violence of
signification. This space was one of reactionary conditioning, inspired by
the Pavlovian apparatus of programmed and repetitive aggression which
we also saw scaled up in `hard sell' advertising and the political propaganda
of the thirties. A crafted but industrial violence that aimed to produce
terrified behaviour and animal obedience. This no longer has any meaning.
Totalitarian, bureaucratic concentration is a schema dating from the era of
the market law of value. The schema of equivalences effectively imposes
the form of a general equivalent, and hence the centralisation of a global
process. This is an archaic rationality compared to simulation, in which it is
no longer a single general equivalent but a diffraction of models that plays
the regulative role: no longer the form of the general equivalent, but the
form of distinct oppositions. We pass from injunction to disjunction
Here comes the great Culture of tactile communication, under the sign
of techno-lumino-kinetic space and total spatio-dynamic theatre!
A whole imaginary based on contact, a sensory mimicry and a tactile
mysticism, basically ecology in its entirety, comes to be grafted on to this
universe of operational simulation, multi-stimulation and multi-response.
This incessant test of successful adaptation is naturalised by assimilating it
to animal mimicry (`the phenomenon of animals' adaptation to the colours
and forms of their habitat also holds for man' -- Nicolas Schöffer), and even
to the Indians with their `innate sense of ecology'! Tropisms, mimicry and
empathy: the ecological evangelism of open systems, with positive or
negative feedback, will be engulfed in this breach, with an ideology of
regulation through information that is only the avatar, in accordance with a
more flexible rationality, of the Pavlov reflex. Hence electro-shock is
replaced by body attitude as the condition of mental health. When notions
of need, perception, desire, etc., become operational, then the apparatuses
of force and forcing yield to ambient apparatuses. A generalised,
mystical ecology of the `niche' and the context, a simulated environment
eventually including the `Centres for Cultural and Aesthetic Re-animation'
planned for the Left Bank (why not?) and the Centre for Sexual Leisure,
which, built in the form of a breast, will offer `a superlative euphoria
thanks to a pulsating ambience.... Workers from all classes will be able
to enter these stimulating centres.' A spatio-dynamic fascination, just like
`total theatre', set up `according to a hyperbolic, circular apparatus turning
around a cylindrical spindle'. No more scenes, no more cuts, no more
`gaze', the end of the spectacle and the spectacular, towards the total,
fusional, tactile and aesthesic (and no longer the aesthetic) etc., environment.
We can only think of Artaud's total theatre, his Theatre of Cruelty,
of which this spatio-dynamic simulation is the abject, black-humour
caricature. Here cruelty is replaced by minimum and maximum `stimulus
thresholds', by the invention of `perceptual codes calculated on the basis of
saturation thresholds'. Even the good old `catharsis' of the classical theatre
of the passions has today become a homeopathy by means of simulation.
The end of the spectacle brings with it the collapse of reality into
hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through
another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography.
Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes
volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its
Realism had already inaugurated this tendency. The rhetoric of the real
already signals that its status has been radically altered (the golden age of
the innocence of language where what is said need not be doubled in an
effect of reality). Surrealism was still in solidarity with the realism it
contested, but which it doubled and ruptured in the imaginary. The
hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase insofar as it effaces the
contradiction of the real and the imaginary. Irreality no longer belongs to
the dream or the phantasm, to a beyond or a hidden interiority, but to the
hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself. To gain exit from the crisis of
representation, the real must be sealed off in a pure repetition. Before
emerging in pop art and painterly neo-realism, this tendency can already
be discerned in the nouveau roman. Here the project is to construct a void
around the real, to eradicate all psychology and subjectivity from it in
order to give it a pure objectivity. In fact, this is only the objectivity of the
pure gaze, an objectivity finally free of the object, but which merely
remains a blind relay of the gaze that scans it. It is easy to detect the
unconscious trying to remain hidden in this circular seduction.
This is indeed the impression made by the nouveau roman, a wild elision
of meaning in a meticulous but blind reality. Syntax and semantics have
disappeared: the object now only appears in court, where its scattered
fragments are subjected to unremitting cross-examination. There is neither
metaphor nor metonymy, only a successive immanence under the law
enforcing authority of the gaze. This `objective' microscopy incites reality
to vertiginous motion, the vertiginous death of representation within the
confines of representation. The old illusions of relief, perspective and
depth (both spatial and psychological) bound up with the perception of the
object are over with: optics in its entirety, scopics, has begun to operate on
the surface of things -- the gaze has become the object's molecular code.
There are several possible modalities of this vertigo of realistic simulation:
1. The detailed deconstruction of the real, the paradigmatic close
`reading' of the object: the flattening out, linearity and seriality of part-objects.
2. Abyssal vision: all the games of splitting the object in two and
duplicating it in every detail. This reduction is taken to be a depth, indeed
a critical metalanguage, and doubtless this was true of a reflective
configuration of the sign in a dialectics of the mirror. From now on this
infinite refraction is nothing more than another type of seriality in which
the real is no longer reflected, but folds in on itself to the point of
exhaustion.
3. The properly serial form (Andy Warhol). Here the paradigmatic
dimension is abolished along with the syntagmatic dimension, since there is
no longer a flexion of forms, nor even an internal reflexion, only a
4. This pure machinality is doubtless only a paradoxical limit, however.
Binarity and digitality constitute the true generative formula which
encompasses all the others and is, in a way, the stabilised form of the code.
This does not mean pure repetition, but minimal difference, the minimal
inflexion between two terms, that is, the `smallest common paradigm' that
can sustain the fiction of meaning. A combinatory of differentiation
internal to the painterly object as well as to the consumer object, this
simulation contracts, in contemporary art, to the point of being nothing
more than the infinitesimal difference that still separates hyperreality from
hyperpainting. Hyperpainting claims to exhaust itself to the point of its
sacrificial eclipse in the face of the real, but we know how all painting's
prestige is revived in this infinitesimal difference: painting retreats into the
border that separates the painted surface and the wall. It also hides in the
signature, the metaphysical sign of painting and the metaphysics of
representation at the limit, where it takes itself as its own model (the `pure
gaze') and turns around itself in the compulsive repetition of the code.
The very definition of the real is that of which it is possible to provide an
equivalent reproduction. It is a contemporary of science, which postulates
that a process can be reproduced exactly within given conditions, with an
industrial rationality which postulates a universal system of equivalences
(classical representation is not equivalence but transcription, interpretation
and commentary). At the end of this process of reproducibility, the
real is not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is always
already reproduced: the hyperreal.
So are we then at the end of the real and the end of art due to a total
mutual reabsorption? No, since at the level of simulacra, hyperrealism is
the apex of both art and the real, by means of a mutual exchange of the
privileges and prejudices that found them. The hyperreal is beyond
representation (cf. Jean-François Lyotard, `Esquisse d'une économique de
l'hyperrealisme', L'Art vivant, 36, 1973)
[38]
only because it is entirely within
simulation, in which the barriers of representation rotate crazily, an
implosive madness which, far from being ex-centric, keeps its gaze fixed on
In fact, hyperrealism must be interpreted in inverse manner: today
reality itself is hyperrealist. The secret of surrealism was that the most
everyday reality could become surreal, but only at privileged instants
which again arose out of art and the imaginary. Today everyday, political,
social, historical, economic, etc., reality has already incorporated the
hyperrealist dimension of simulation so that we are now living entirely
within the `aesthetic' hallucination of reality. The old slogan `reality is
stranger than fiction', which still corresponded to the surrealist stage in the
aestheticisation of life, has been outrun, since there is no longer any fiction
that life can possibly confront, even as its conqueror. Reality has passed
completely into the game of reality. Radical disaffection, the cool and
cybernetic stage, replaces the hot, phantasmatic phase.
The consummate enjoyment [jouissance] of the signs of guilt, despair,
violence and death are replacing guilt, anxiety and even death in the total
euphoria of simulation. This euphoria aims to abolish cause and effect,
origin and end, and replace them with reduplication. Every closed system
protects itself in this way from the referential and the anxiety of the
referential, as well as from all metalanguage that the system wards off by
operating its own metalanguage, that is, by duplicating itself as its own
critique. In simulation, the metalinguistic illusion reduplicates and completes
the referential illusion (the pathetic hallucination of the sign and the
pathetic hallucination of the real).
`It's a circus', `it's a theatre', `it's a movie'; all these old adages are
ancient naturalist denunciations. This is no longer what is at issue. What is
at issue this time is turning the real into a satellite, putting an undefinable
reality with no common measure into orbit with the phantasma that once
illustrated it. This satellisation has subsequently been materialised as the
two-room-kitchen-shower which we really have sent into orbit, to the
`spatial power' you could say, with the latest lunar module. The most
everyday aspect of the terrestrial environment raised to the rank of a
cosmic value, an absolute decor, hypostatised in space. This is the end of
metaphysics and the beginning of the era of hyperreality.
[39]
The spatial
transcendence of the banality of the two-room apartment by a cool,
machinic figuration in hyperrealism
[40]
tells us only one thing, however: this
module, such as it is, participates in a hyperspace of representation where
everyone is already in possession of the technical means for the instant
reproduction of his or her own life. Thus the Tupolev's pilots who crashed
in Bourget were able, by means of their cameras, to see themselves dying
at first hand. This is nothing other than the short-circuit of the response by
the question in the test, a process of instant renewal whereby reality is
immediately contaminated by its simulacrum.
A specific class of allegorical and somewhat diabolical objects used to
exist, made up of mirrors, images, works of art (concepts?). Although
simulacra, they were transparent and manifest (you could distinguish
craftsmanship [façon] from the counterfeit [contrefaçon]) with their own
characteristic style and savoir-faire. Pleasure, then, consisted in locating
what was `natural' within what was artificial and counterfeit. Today, where
the real and the imaginary are intermixed in one and the same operational
totality, aesthetic fascination reigns supreme: with subliminal perception (a
sort of sixth sense) of special effects, editing and script, reality is over-exposed
to the glare of models. This is no longer a space of production, but
a reading strip, a coding and decoding strip, magnetised by signs. Aesthetic
reality is no longer achieved through art's premeditation and distancing,
but by its elevation to the second degree, to the power of two, by the
anticipation and immanence of the code. A kind of unintentional parody
hovers over everything, a tactical simulation, a consummate aesthetic
enjoyment [jouissance], is attached to the indefinable play of reading and
the rules of the game. Travelling signs, media, fashion and models, the
blind but brilliant ambience of simulacra.
Art has for a long time prefigured this turn, by veering towards what
today is a turn to everyday life. Very early on the work of art produced a
double of itself as the manipulation of the signs of art, bringing about an
oversignification of art, or, as Lévi-Strauss said, an `academicisation of the
signifier', irreversibly introducing art to the form of the sign. At this point
art entered into infinite reproduction, with everything that doubles itself,
even the banal reality of the everyday, falling by the same token under the
sign of art and becoming aesthetic. The same goes for production, which
we might say has today entered into aesthetic reduplication, the phase
where, expelling all content and all finality, it becomes somehow abstract
and non-figurative. In this way it expresses the pure form of production,
taking upon itself, as art does, the value of the finality without end. Art and
industry may then exchange their signs: art can become a reproductive
machine (Andy Warhol) without ceasing to be art, since the machine is
now nothing but a sign. Production can also lose all its social finality as its
means of verification, and finally glorify in the prestigious, hyperbolic and
aesthetic signs that the great industrial complexes are, 400 m high towers
or the numerical mysteries of the Gross National Product.
So art is everywhere, since artifice lies at the heart of reality. So art is
dead, since not only is its critical transcendence dead, but reality itself,
entirely impregnated by an aesthetic that holds onto its very structurality,
has become inseparable from its own image. It no longer even has the time
to take on the effect of reality. Reality is no longer stranger than fiction: it
captures every dream before it can take on the dream effect. A schizophrenic
vertigo of serial signs that have no counterfeit, no possible sublimation,
and are immanent to their own repetition -- who will say where the reality
they simulate now lies? They no longer even repress anything (which, if
you like, keeps simulation from entering the sphere of psychosis): even the
Kool Killer, or The Insurrection of Signs
In the spring of 1972 in New York a spate of graffiti broke out which,
starting with ghetto walls and fences, finally overcame subways and buses,
lorries and elevators, corridors and monuments, completely covering them
in graphics ranging from the rudimentary to the sophisticated, whose
content was neither political nor pornographic. These graphics consisted
solely of names, surnames drawn from underground comics such as DUKE
SPIRIT SUPERKOOL KOOLKILLER ACE VIPERE SPIDER EDDIE
KOLA and so on, followed by their street number -- EDDIE 135
WOODIE 110 SHADOW 137, etc. -- or even by a number in Roman
numerals, a dynastic or filiatory index -- SNAKE I SNAKE II SNAKE III,
etc. -- up to L (50), depending on which name, which totemic designation is
taken up by these new graffitists.
This was all done with Magic Markers or spray-paint, allowing the
inscriptions to be a metre or more in height by the entire length of the
subway car. At night, youths would work their way into bus depots or
subways, even getting inside the cars, breaking out into an orgy of
graphics. The following day all these subway trains cross Manhattan in
both directions. The graphics are erased (but this is difficult), the graffitists
are arrested and imprisoned, the sale of marker pens and spray cans is
forbidden, but to no avail, since the youths manufacture them by hand and
start again every night.
Today this movement has stopped, or at least is no longer so extraordinarily
violent. It could only have been ephemeral, and, besides, in a single
year of history it developed greatly. The graffitists became more expert,
with incredible baroque graphics, and ramified into styles and schools
connected to the different groups in operation. Young Blacks and Puerto
Ricans originated the movement, and the graffitists were particular to New
York. Several wall paintings are found in other cities with large ethnic
minorities, improvised collective works with an ethno-political content, but
very little graffiti.
One thing is certain: both the graffitists and the muralists sprang up after
the repressions of the great urban riots of 1966-70. Like the riots, graffiti
was a savage offensive, but of another kind, changing content and terrain.
A new type of intervention in the city, no longer as a site of economic and
political power, but as a space-time of the terrorist power of the media,
signs and the dominant culture.
The urban city is also a neutralised, homogenised space, a space where
indifference, the segregation of urban ghettos, and the downgrading of
districts, races and certain age groups are on the increase. In short, it is the
There is a horizontal and vertical expansion of the city in the image of
the economic system itself. Political economy, however, has a third
dimension where all sociality is invested, covered and dismantled by signs.
Neither architecture nor urbanism can do anything about this, since they
themselves result from this new turn taken by the general economy of the
system: they are its operational semiology.
The city was first and foremost a site for the production and realisation
of commodities, a site of industrial concentration and exploitation. Today
the city is first and foremost the site of the sign's execution, as in its life or
death sentence.
In the city's `red belt' of factories, and in the working-class outskirts, this
is no longer the case for us. In this city, in the same space, the historical
dimension of the class struggle, the negativity of labour power, were still
inscribed, an irreducible social specificity. The factory, as the model of
socialisation through capital, has not disappeared today but, in line with
the general strategy, has been replaced by the entire city as the space of the
code. The urban matrix no longer realises a power (labour power) but a
difference (the operation of the sign): metallurgy has become semiurgy.
We see this urban scenario materialised in the new cities which directly
result from the operational analysis of needs and sign-functions, and in
which everything is conceived, projected and realised on the basis of an
analytic definition: environment, transport, labour, leisure, play and
culture become so many commutable terms on the chessboard of the city, a
homogeneous space defined as a total environment. Hence the connection
between the urban landscape and racism: there is no difference between
the act of packing people into one homogeneous space (which we call a
ghetto) on the basis of a racial definition, and the act of making people
homogeneous in a new city on the basis of a functional definition of their
needs. It follows one and the same logic.
The city is no longer the politico-industrial zone that it was in the
nineteenth century, it is the zone of signs, the media and the code. By the
same token, its truth no longer lies in its geographical situation, as it did for
the factory or even the traditional ghetto. Its truth, enclosure in the sign-form,
lies all around us. It is the ghetto of television and advertising, the
ghetto of consumers and the consumed, of readers read in advance,
encoded decoders of every message, those circulating in, and circulated by,
the subway, leisure-time entertainers and the entertained, etc. Every
space-time of urban life is a ghetto, each of which is connected to every
other. Today a multiplicity of codes submit socialisation, or rather
It is possible to conceive of the decentralisation of the sphere of material
production, even that the historical relation between the city and commodity
production is coming to an end. The system can do without the
industrial, productive city, the space-time of the commodity and market-based
social relations. The signs of this development are evident. It cannot,
however, do without the urban as the space-time of the code and
reproduction, for the centrality of the code is the definition of power itself.
Whatever attacks contemporary semiocracy, this new form of value, is
therefore politically essential: graffiti for example. According to this new
form there is a total commutability of elements within a functional set,
each taking on meaning only insofar as it is a term that is capable of
structural variation in accordance with the code.
Under these conditions, radical revolt effectively consists in saying `I
exist, I am so and so, I live on such and such street, I am alive here and
now.' This would still be an identitarian revolt however, combating
anonymity by demanding a proper name and a reality. The graffitists went
further in that they opposed pseudonyms rather than names to anonymity.
They are seeking not to escape the combinatory in order to regain an
identity (which is impossible in any case), but to turn indeterminacy against
the system, to turn indeterminacy into extermination. Retaliation, reversion
of the code according to its own logic, on its own terrain, gaining
victory over it because k exceeds semiocracy's own non-referentiality.
SUPERBEE SPIX COLA 139 KOOL GUY CRAZY CROSS 136
means nothing, it is not even a proper name, but a symbolic matriculation
number whose function it is to derail the common system of designations.
Such terms are not at all original, they all come from comic strips where
they were imprisoned in fiction. They blasted their way out however, so as
to burst into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the
waste of all syntactic, poetic and political development, as the smallest
radical element that cannot be caught by any organised discourse.
Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every interpretation and
every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything. In this way,
Names without intimacy, just as the ghettos have no intimacy, no private
life, but thrive on an intense collective exchange. These names make no
claim to an identity or a personality, but claim the radical exclusivity of the
clan, gang, age group, group or ethnicity which, as we know, passes
through the devolution of the name, coupled with an absolute loyalty, to
this totemic designation, even if it came directly from the pages of
underground comics. This form of symbolic designation is annihilated by
our social structure which imposes a proper name and a private individuality
on everyone, shattering all solidarity in the name of an urban, abstract
and universal sociality. These names or tribal appellations have, by
contrast, a real symbolic charge: they are made to be given, exchanged,
transmitted and relayed in a collective anonymity, where these names are
exchanged as terms to introduce group members amongst each other,
although they are no more private a property than language.
This is the real force of a symbolic ritual, and, in this sense, graffiti runs
contrary to all media and advertising signs, although they might create the
illusion, on our city walls, that they are the same incantation. Advertising
has been spoken of as a `festival', since, without it, the urban environment
would be dismal. But in fact it is only a cold bustle, a simulacrum of appeal
and warmth, it makes no contacts, it cannot be revived by an autonomous
or collective reading, and it does not create a symbolic network. More so
than the walls that support it, advertising is itself a wall of functional signs
made to be decoded, and its effects are exhausted in this decoding.
All media signs issue from this space without qualities, from this surface
of inscription set up between producers and consumers, transmitters and
receivers of signs. The city is a `body without organs', as Deleuze says,
[41]
an
intersection of channelled flows. The graffitists themselves come from the
territorial order. They territorialise decoded urban spaces -- a particular
street, wall or district comes to life through them, becoming a collective
territory again. They do not confine themselves to the ghetto, they export
the ghetto through all the arteries of the city, they invade the white city and
reveal that it is the real ghetto of the Western world.
A linguistic ghetto erupts into the city with graffiti, a kind of riot of signs.
In the becoming-sign of the sign, graffiti has until now always constituted
the basest form (the sexual and pornographic base), the shameful,
repressed inscriptions in pissoirs and waste grounds. Only political and
propagandistic slogans have conquered the walls in a direct offensive, full
signs for which the wall is still a support and language a traditional
medium. They are not aiming at the wall itself, nor at the pure functionality
of signs as such. Doubtless it was only in May '68 in France that the
graffiti and posters swept through the city in a different manner, attacking
the support itself, producing a savage mobility on the walls, an inscription
so sudden that it amounted to annihilating them. The inscriptions and
There has also been the ephemeral onslaught of the advertising hijack,
limited by its own support, but already utilising the avenues the media have
themselves opened up: subways, stations and posters. Consider also the
assault on television by Jerry Rubin and America's counter-culture. This is
a political attempt to hijack a great mass-medium, but only at the level of
content and without changing the media themselves.
New York graffiti utilised urban clearways and mobile supports for the
first time in a free and wide-ranging offensive. Above all, however, the
very form of the media themselves, that is, their mode of production and
distribution, was attacked for the first time. This was precisely because
graffiti has no content and no message: this emptiness gives it its strength.
So it was no accident that the total offensive was accompanied by a
recession in terms of content. This comes from a sort of revolutionary
intuition, namely that deep ideology no longer functions at the level of
political signifieds, but at the level of the signifier, and that this is where the
system is vulnerable and must be dismantled.
Thus the political significance of graffiti becomes clear. It grew out of the
repression of the urban riots in the ghettos. Struck by this repression, the
revolt underwent a split into a doctrinal pur et dur Marxist-Leninist
political organisation on the one hand, and, on the other, a savage cultural
process with neither goal, ideology, nor content, at the level of signs. The
first group called for a genuinely revolutionary practice and accused the
graffitists of folklore, but it's the other way round: the defeat of 1970
brought about a regression into traditional political activism, but it also
necessitated the radicalisation of revolt on the real strategic terrain of the
total manipulation of codes and significations. This is not at all a flight into
signs, but on the contrary an extraordinary development in theory and
practice (these two terms now no longer being kept distinct by the party).
Insurrection and eruption in the urban landscape as the site of the
reproduction of the code. At this level, relations of forces no longer count,
since signs don't operate on the basis of force, but on the basis of
difference. We must therefore attack by means of difference, dismantling
the network of codes, attacking coded differences by means of an
uncodeable absolute difference, over which the system will stumble and
disintegrate. There is no need for organised masses, nor for a political
consciousness to do this -- a thousand youths armed with marker pens and
cans of spray-paint are enough to scramble the signals of urbania and
Despite appearances, the City Walls Project, the painted walls, have
nothing to do with graffiti. Moreover, they are prior to graffiti and will
survive it. The initiative for these painted walls comes from the top as an
innovatory attempt to enliven urbania set up with municipal subsidies. The
`City Walls Incorporated' organisation was founded in 1969 `to promote
the program and technical aspects of wall-painting'. Its budget was covered
by the New York Department of Cultural Affairs along with various other
foundations such as that of David Rockefeller. His artistic ideology: `The
natural alliance between buildings and monumental painting.' His goal:
`To make a gift of art to the people of New York.' Consider also the
`Billboard Art Project' in Los Angeles:
This project was set up to promote artistic representations that use the billboard
as a medium in the urban environment. Thanks to the collaboration of Foster
and Kleiser [two large advertising agencies], public billposting spaces have thus
become an art showcase for the painters of Los Angeles. They create a dynamic
medium and take art out of the restricted circle of the galleries and museums.
Of course, these operations are confined to professionals, artists brought
together in a consortium from New York. No possible ambiguity here: this
is a question of a politics of the environment, of large-scale urban planning,
where both the city and art gain. They gain because the city does not
explode with the eruption of art `out in the open', in the streets, nor does
art explode on contact with the city. The entire city becomes an art gallery,
art finds a whole new parading ground in the city. Neither undergoes any
structural alteration, they merely exchange their privileges.
`To make a gift of art to the people of New York'! We need only
compare this to SUPERKOOL's formula: `There are those who don't like
it, man, but whether they like it or not, we've become the strongest art
movement to hit the city of New York.'
This makes all the difference. Some of the painted walls may be
beautiful, but that has nothing to do with it. They will find a place in the
history of art for having been able to create space on the blind, bare walls,
by means of line and colour alone: the trompe-l'oeils are always the most
beautiful, those painted walls that create an illusion of space and depth,
those that `enhance architecture with imagination', according to one of the
artists' formulas. But this is precisely where their limits lie. They play at
architecture without breaking the rules of the game, they recycle architecture
in the imaginary, but retain the sacrament of architecture (from the
technical support to the monumental structure, including even its social,
class aspect, since most of the City Walls of this kind are in the white,
civilised areas of the cities).
So architecture and town planning, even if they are transfigured by the
imagination, cannot change anything, since they are mass-media themselves
and, even in their most daring conception, they reproduce mass
The graffitists themselves care little for architecture; they defile it, forget
about it and cross the street. The mural artist respects the wall as he used to
respect the limitations of his easel. Graffiti runs from one house to the
next, from one wall of a building to the next, from the wall onto the
window or the door, or windows on subway trains, or the pavements.
Graffiti overlaps, is thrown up, superimposes (superimposition amounting
to the abolition of the support as a framework, just as it is abolished as
frame when its limits are not respected). Its graphics resemble the child's
polymorphous perversity, ignoring the boundaries between the sexes and
the delimitation of erogenous zones. Curiously, moreover, graffiti turns
the city's walls and corners, the subway's cars and the buses, into a body, a
body without beginning or end, made erotogenic in its entirety by writing
just as the body may be in the primitive inscription (tattooing). Tattooing
takes place on the body. In primitive societies, along with other ritual
signs, it makes the body what it is -- material for symbolic exchange:
without tattooing, as without masks, the body is only what it is, naked and
expressionless. By tattooing walls, SUPERSEX and SUPERKOOL free
them from architecture and turn them once again into living, social matter,
into the moving body of the city before it has been branded with functions
and institutions. The end of the `four walls' when they are tattooed like
archaic effigies. End of the repressive space-time of urban transport
systems where the subway cars fly past like missiles or living hydras
tattooed up to the eyes. Something about the city has become tribal,
parietal, before writing, with these powerful emblems stripped of meaning.
An incision into the flesh of empty signs that do not signify personal
identity, but group initiation and affiliation: `A biocybernetic self-fulfilling
prophecy world orgy I.'
[42]
It is nevertheless astonishing to see this unfold in a Quaternary
cybernetic city dominated by the two glass and aluminium towers of the
World Trade Center, invulnerable metasigns of the system's omnipotence.
There are also frescoes and murals in the ghettos, the spontaneous
artworks of ethnic groups who paint their own walls. Socially and
politically, the impulse is the same as with graffiti. These are savage
painted walls, not financed by the urban administration. Moreover, they all
focus on political themes, on a revolutionary message: the unity of the
oppressed, world peace, the cultural promotion of ethnic communities,
solidarity, and only rarely the violence of open struggle. In short, as
opposed to graffiti, they have a meaning, a message. And, contrary to the
City Walls project, which drew its inspiration from abstract, geometrical or
Here again, some of these walls are beautiful, others less so. That this
aesthetic criterion can operate is in a certain way a sign of weakness. What
I mean is that even though they are savages and anonymous collectives,
they respect their support as well as the language of painting, even if this is
in order to articulate a political act. In this sense, they can very easily be
looked on as decorative works of art (some of them are even conceived as
such), and have an eye turned towards their own value. Most of them are
protected from this museum-culturalisation by the rapid destruction of the
fences and the crumbling walls -- here the municipal authorities do not
patronise through art, and the negritude of the support is in the image of
the ghetto. However, their mortality is not the same as the mortality of
graffiti, which is systematically condemned to police repression (it is even
forbidden to take photographs of it). This is because graffiti is more
offensive and more radical, bursting into the white city; above all it is transideological,
trans-artistic. This is almost a paradox: whereas the Black and
Puerto Rican walls, even if they have not been signed, always carry a
virtual signature (a political or cultural, if not an artistic, reference),
graffiti, composed of nothing but names, effectively avoids every reference
and every origin. It alone is savage, in that its message is zero.
We will come to what it signifies elsewhere, by analysing the two types of
recuperation of which it is the object (apart from police repression):
1. It is recuperated as art. Jay Jacobs: `A primitive, millenial, communitarian
form, not an elitist one like Abstract Expressionism.' Or again:
`The subway cars rumble past one after the other throughout the station,
like so many Jackson Pollocks hurtling by, roaring through the corridors of
the history of art.' We speak of `graffiti artists' and `an eruption of popular
art' created by youth, which `will remain one of the important and
characteristic manifestations of the art of the `70s', and so on. Always the
aesthetic reduction, the very form of our dominant culture.
2. It is interpreted (and I am talking about the most admiring
interpretations here) in terms of a reclamation of identity and personal
freedom, as non-conformism: `The indestructible survival of the individual
in an inhuman environment' (Mitzi Cunliffe in The New York Times). A
bourgeois humanist interpretation that comes from our feelings of frustration
in the anonymity of large cities. Cunliffe again: `It says [the graffiti
says]: I AM, I am real, I have lived here. It says: KIKI, OR DUKE, OR
Note from page 54:
1. Counterfeit and reproduction always imply an anxiety, a disquieting strangeness. There
is unease in front of the photograph, which has been assimilated into a sorcerer's
trickery, an unease, more generally, in front of any technical equipment. Benjamin
relates this to the unease bound up with the appearance of a mirror-image. There is
already a little sorcery at work in the mirror, but how much more there would be were
the image to be detached from the mirror, transported, stockpiled and reproduced at
whim (cf. The Student of Prague, where the Devil detaches the student's image from the
mirror and then hunts him down through the intermediary of this image). In this way all
reproduction implies maleficence, from the event of being seduced by one's own image
in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double, and, who knows, even to
the mortal reversal of the vast array of technical equipment that today man disguises in
his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technology, as McLuhan says), and that sends
back endless halting and distorted reproductions of himself and his power, to the ends of
the earth. Reproduction is diabolical in its essence, sending tremors down to our roots.
This has hardly changed for us: simulation (which we describe here as the operation of
the code) remains and will always remain the site of an immense project of control and
death, just as the simulacrum-object (the primitive statue, the image or the photo) has
from the outset always had black magic as its objective.
Note from page 61:
2.
Furthermore, there is a flagrant contradiction in Monod's book, reflecting the ambiguity
of all contemporary science: its discourse is directed at the code, that is, at third-order
simulacra, but it still follows second-order `scientific' schemata such as objectivity, the
scientific `ethic' of knowledge, the truth-principle and the transcendence of science, and
so on. These things are all incompatible with third-order models of indeterminacy.
Note from page 63:
3.
`The weak "definition" of TV condemns its viewer to rearrange the few points he retains
into a kind of abstract work of art. He thereby participates in the creation of
a reality which is only pointilistically presented: the televiewer is in the situation of an individual
who is asked to project his own phantasma onto inkblots which are not supposed to
represent anything.' TV as a perpetual Rorschach test. Again: `The TV image obliges us
to always be filling in the blanks on the screen in a convulsive, kinetic and tactile sensory
participation.'
Note from page 66:
4. `The Medium is the Message' is even the formula of the political economy of the sign
when it leads on to third-order simulation. A distinction of the medium from the
message remains characteristic of second-order signification.
Note from page 67:
5. The whole contemporary `psychological' situation is characterised by this short-circuit.
Note from page 68:
6.
Athenian democracy, far more advanced than our own, logically came to pay for votes
as a service, after having tried every other repressive solution to complete the quorum.
Note from page 69:
7. In this sense it is necessary to undertake a radical critique of Lévi-Strauss's extension of
binary structures as `anthropological' mental structures, and dualistic organisation as the
basic structure of primitive societies. The dualistic form with which Lévi-Strauss would
like to grace primitive societies is only ever our structural logic, our own code. Indeed, it
is the very structure of our domination of `archaic' societies. Lévi-Strauss is kind enough
to slip this to them in the form of the mental structures common to the human race. So
they will be all the better prepared to receive the baptism of the West.
Note from page 73:
8. [See also Jean-François Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionels, Paris: Christian Bourgeois,
1979, pp. 99-108 -- tr.]
Note from page 74:
9. The coefficient of reality is proportionate to the reserve of the imaginary that gives it its
specific weight. This is true of terrestrial as well as space exploration: when there is no
more virgin, and hence available to the imaginary, territory, when the map covers the
whole territory, something like the reality principle disappears. In this sense, the
conquest of space constitutes an irreversible threshold on the way to the loss of
terrestrial references. Reality haemorrhages to the precise extent that the limits of an
internally coherent universe are infinitely pushed back. The conquest of space comes
after the conquest of the planet, as the last phantasmatic attempt to extend the
jurisdiction of the real (for example, when the flag, technology and two-room
apartments are carried to the moon); it is even an attempt to substantiate concepts or
territorialise the unconscious, which is equivalent to the derealisation of human space,
or its reversal into a hyperreality of simulation.
Note from page 74:
10. What about the cool figuration of the metallic caravan and the supermarket so beloved
of the hyperrealists, or the Campbell's soup cans dear to Andy Warhol, or even that of
the Mona Lisa when it was satellited into planetary orbit as the absolute model of the
earth's art. The Mona Lisa was not even sent as a work of art, but as a planetary
simulacrum where a whole world bears testimony to its existence (testifying, in reality,
to its own death) for the gaze of a future universe.
Note from page 79:
11. [See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I,
tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Athlone, 1984, and A Thousand
Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, tr. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone, 1988,
for the BWO -- tr.]
Note from page 82:
12. [In English in the original -- tr.]
2: The Order of Simulacra
[p. 51]
emancipated sign, in which any and every class will be able to participate.
Competitive democracy succeeds the endogamy of signs proper to status-based
orders. With the transit of values or signs of prestige from one class
to another, we simultaneously and necessarily enter into the age of the
counterfeit. For from a limited order of signs, the `free' production of which
is prevented by a prohibition, we pass into a proliferation of signs
according to demand. These multiple signs, however, no longer have
anything to do with the restricted circulation of the obligatory sign, but
counterfeit the latter. Counterfeiting does not take place by means of
changing the nature of an `original', but, by extension, through completely
altering a material whose clarity is completely dependent upon a restriction.
Non-discriminatory (the sign is nothing any longer if not competitive),
relieved of every constraint, universally available, the modern sign
nevertheless still simulates necessity by giving the appearance that it is
bound to the world. The modern sign dreams of its predecessor, and would
dearly love to rediscover an obligation in its reference to the real. It finds
only a reason, a referential reason, a real and a `natural' on which it will
feed. This designatory bond, however, is only a simulacrum of symbolic
obligation, producing nothing more than neutral values which are
exchanged one for the other in an objective world. Here the sign suffers
the same fate as labour, for just as the `free' worker is only free to produce
equivalents, the `free and emancipated' sign is only free to produce
equivalent signifieds.
[p. 52]
combinations, for every game, every counterfeit -- the Promethean designs
of the bourgeoisie are first engrossed in the imitation of nature, before it
throws itself into production. In the churches and palaces, stucco embraces
all forms, imitates all materials: velvet curtains, wooden cornices, and
fleshy curves of the body. Stucco transfigures all this incredible material
disorder into a single new substance, a sort of general equivalent for all the
others, accruing a theatrical prestige, since it is itself a representative
substance, a mirror of all the others.
[p. 53]
substance, the pastry from which the diversity of things are distinguished
solely by `realistic' nuances such as the boar's skull and the leaves on the
trees. Doubtless, however, this was only a concession from the demiurge to
his visitors, for it was with a delighted smile that this good eighty-year-old
god welcomed them to his creation. He sought no quarrel with divine
creation, he simply remodelled it in order to make it more intelligible.
There was no Luciferian revolt, no will-to-parody, nor a partisan and retro
affinity with `naïve' art. The Ardennes cook simply reigned over a unified
mental substance (for concrete is a mental substance: like the concept, it
enables phenomena to be ordered and separated at will). His project was
not so far removed from the stucco builders of Baroque art, nor very
different from projecting an urban community on to the terrain of a large
contemporary group. The counterfeit still only works on substance and
form, not yet on relations and structures, but at this level, it is already
aiming at control of a pacified society, cast in a synthetic substance which
evades death, an indestructible artifact that will guarantee eternal power.
Isn't it a miracle that with plastics, man has invented an undegradable
matter, thus interrupting the cycle which through corruption and death
reverses each and every substance on the earth into another? Even fire
leaves an indestructible residue of this substance outside the cycle. Here is
something we did not expect: a simulacrum in which the project of a
universal semiotics is condensed. This has no longer anything to do with
the `progress' of technology or the rational aims of science. It is a project
which aims at political and mental hegemony, the phantasy of a closed
mental substance like the Baroque stucco angels whose wing-tips touch in a
curved mirror.
[p. 54]
behind appearances? Only the counterfeit of man allows these questions to
be asked. Every metaphysics of man as the protagonist in the natural
theatre of creation is embodied in the automaton before disappearing with
the French Revolution, and the automaton has no other destiny than to be
compared with the living man -- with the aim of being more natural than
him -- whose ideal image the automaton is. The automaton is man's perfect
double, even down to the subtlety of its gestures, in the workings of its
organs and intelligence, almost inducing anxiety when we perceive that
there is no difference between them, and that therefore the automaton has
no need of a soul since it possesses an ideally naturalised body. Because
this would be sacrilege, the difference between them is still maintained, as
in the case of an automaton so perfect that on stage the illusionist
mimicked its staccato movements in order that at least, even if the roles
were reversed, confusion would be impossible. Thus the automaton's
questions remain open, making it an optimistic mechanics, even if the
counterfeit always retains a diabolical connotation.
[31]
[p. 55]
forms in order to enter the market law of value and its calculations of
forces.
[p. 56]
twentieth century, with no `classical' tradition of productivity, placed from
the outset under the sign of reproduction. Today, however, we know that
all material production remains within the same sphere. Today we know
that it is at the level of reproduction (fashion, the media, advertising,
information and communications networks), at the level of what Marx
rather carelessly used to call the faux frais of capital (immense historical
irony!), that is, in the sphere of simulacra and the code, that the unity of
the whole process of capital is formed. Benjamin was also the first (with
McLuhan after him) to grasp technology as a medium rather than a
`productive force' (at which point the Marxian analysis retreats), as the
form and principle of an entirely new generation of meaning. The mere
fact that any given thing can simply be reproduced, as such, in an
exemplary double is already a revolution: one need only think of the
stupefaction of the Black boy seeing two identical books for the first time.
That these two technical products are equivalent under the sign of
necessary social labour is less important in the long term than the serial
repetition of the same object (which is also the serial repetition of
individuals as labour power). Technique as a medium gains the upper hand
not only over the product's `message' (its use-value) but also over labour
power, which Marx wanted to turn into the revolutionary message of
production. Benjamin and McLuhan saw more clearly than Marx, they saw
that the real message, the real ultimatum, lay in reproduction itself.
Production itself has no meaning: its social finality is lost in the series.
Simulacra prevail over history.
[p. 57]
seek in the genesis of the code and the simulacrum. Every order subsumes
the previous order. Just as the order of the counterfeit was captured by the
order of serial reproduction (look at how art passed entirely into `machinality'),
so the entire order of production is in the process of toppling into
operational simulation.
[p. 58]
like programmatic matrices, light years, ultimately, from the `biological'
body, black boxes where every command and response are in ferment. End
of the theatre of representation, the space of the conflicts and silences of
the sign: only the black box of the code remains, the molecule emitting
signals which irradiate us, networking questions/answers through us as
identifying signals, and continuously tested .by the programme we have
hardwired into our own cells. Whether it is prison cells, electronic cells,
party cells or microbiological cells we are dealing with, we are always
searching for the smallest indivisible element, the organic synthesis of
which will follow in accordance with the givens of the code. The code itself
is nothing other than a genetic, generative cell where the myriad intersections
produce all the questions and all the possible solutions from which to
select (for whom?). There is no finality to these `questions' (informational
signals, impulses) other than the response which is either genetic and
immutable or inflected with minuscule and aleatory differences. Even
space is no longer linear or unidimensional but cellular, indefinitely
generating the same signals like the lonely and repetitive habits of a stir-crazy
prisoner. The genetic code is the perpetual jump in a floppy disk, and
we are nothing more than VDUs [cellules de lecture]. The whole aura of the
sign and signification itself is determinately resolved: everything is resolved
into inscription and decoding.
[p. 59]
genetics is full of expressions taken from linguistics and communication theory
..., which emphasised both the principal similarities and the important
differences in the structure and function of genetic and verbal codes ... Today it
is clear that the genetic code must be considered as the most basic semiotic
network, and therefore as the prototype of all the other systems of signification
used by the animals, including man. From this point of view, molecules, which
are systems of quanta of, and which act as stable vehicles of physical information,
zoosemiotic and cultural systems including language, constitute a
continuous chain of stages, with ever more complex energy levels, in the context
of a unique and universal evolution. It is therefore possible to describe both
language or living systems from a unifying cybernetic point of view. For the
moment, this is only a useful and provisional analogy.... A reciprocal
rapprochement between genetics, animal communication and linguistics may
lead to a complete science of the dynamics of semiosis, which science may turn
out, in the final analysis, to be nothing other than a definition of life.
[p. 60]
it was operative at the level of second and third order structures (following
Jacob's classification in The Logic of Life [Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1989]), while today, in modern biochemistry, this applies to the level of
fourth-order structures.
[p. 61]
[p. 62]
messages and signs of our society, and we can clearly locate its most
concrete form in the test, the question/answer, the stimulus/response. All
content is neutralised by a continuous process of orchestrated interrogations,
verdicts and ultimatums to be decoded, which this time no longer
come from the depths of the genetic code but still possess the same tactical
indeterminacy -- the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter in the
cycles of the question/answer, the bit or the return of a minuscule quantity
of energy/information to its point of departure. This cycle merely describes
the perpetual reactualisation of the same models. The equivalent of the
total neutralisation of signifieds by the code is the instantaneous verdict of
fashion or of every billboard or TV advertising message. Everywhere
supply devours demand, the question devours the answer, either absorbing
and regurgitating it in a decodable form, or inventing it and anticipating its
predictable corroboration. Everywhere the same `scenario' of `trials and
errors' (the burden of which, in laboratory tests, is borne by guinea-pigs),
the scenario of the spectrum of choices on offer or the multiple choice (`test
your personality'). The test is everywhere the fundamental social form of
control, which works by infinitely dividing practices and responses.
[p. 63]
camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its
approach is that of testing.
[p. 64]
[p. 65]
the Message'. It is in fact the medium, the very mode of editing, cutting,
questioning, enticement, and demand by the medium that rules the process
of signification. So we can understand why McLuhan saw an era of tactile
communication in the era of electronic mass-media. In this we are closer in
effect to the tactile than we are to `the visual universe, where there is
greater distance, and reflection is always possible. At the moment that
touching loses its sensory, sensual value for us (`touching is an interaction
of the senses rather than a simple contact between a skin and an object'), it
is possible that it might once more become the schema of a universe of
communication -- but this time as a field of tactile and tactical simulation
where the message becomes a `message', a tentacular enticement, a test. In
every field we are tested, probed and sampled; the method is `tactical' and
the sphere of communication `tactile'. Not to mention the ideology of
`contact', which in all of its forms, seeks to replace the idea of social
relations. A whole strategic configuration revolves around the test (the
question/answer cell) as it does around a molecular command-code.
[p. 66]
reproduce public opinion, in the sense that all opinions are swallowed up in
this kind of general equivalent and proceed from it thereafter (reproduce
it, or what they take it to be, at the level of individual choice). For opinion
as for material goods, production is dead: Long Live Reproduction!
[p. 67]
the media. There is a jubilation proper to this spectacular nullity, and the
final form that it takes is that of statistical contemplation. Such contemplation,
moreover, is always coupled, as we know, with a profound
disappointment -- the species of disillusion that the polls provoke by
absorbing all public speaking, by short-circuiting every means of expression.
They exert fascination in proportion to this neutralisation through
emptiness, to the vertigo they create by anticipating every possible reality
in the image.
[p. 68]
hands of a homogeneous political class, from the left to the right, but must
not be exercised in this way. This is because single party rule, totalitarianism,
is an unstable form which drains the political stage and can no longer
ensure the feedback of public opinion, the minimal current in the
integrated circuit that constitutes the transistorised political machine. The
two-party system, by contrast, is the end of the end of representation since
solicitation reaches its highest degree, in the name of a simple formal
constraint, when you approach the greatest perfect competitive equation
between the two parties. This is only logical: democracy attains the law of
equivalence in the political order, and this law is fulfilled by the see-sawing
of the two terms, which thus maintains their equivalence but by means of
this minuscule divergence allows for public consensus and the closure of
the cycle of representation: a theatre of operations where only the smoky
reflections of political Reason continue to function. Democracy's credo of
the individual's `free choice' effectively turns into its exact opposite: voting
has become absolutely obligatory. If this is not the case de jure, then it is
through the structural, statistical constraint of the two-party system,
reinforced by the opinion polls.
[36]
Voting has become absolutely aleatory:
when democracy reaches a formally advanced stage, it is distributed in
equal quantities (50/50). Voting merges with the Brownian motion of
particles or probability calculus, as if the whole world were voting
according to chance, as if signs were voting.
[p. 69]
stage of monopoly. It is not that a political will (State intervention,
anti-trust laws, etc.) shatters the market's monopoly: any unitary system, if
it wants to survive, must find a binary regulation. This does not change
anything as regards monopoly, on the contrary, power is only absolute if it
is able to diffract into various equivalents, if it knows how to divide in
order to become stronger. This goes for detergent brands as much as for a
`peaceful co-existence'. Two superpowers are necessary in order to keep
the universe under control: a single empire would crumble by itself. The
balance of terror merely allows regulated oppositions to be put in place, for
strategy is structural, never atomic. Even if this regulated opposition can
be ramified into a more complex scenario, the matrix remains binary. From
now on, it will never again be a question of a duel or open competitive
struggle, but one of couplets of simultaneous oppositions.
[p. 70]
original and the end of representation. The two towers of the WTC are
the visible sign of the closure of a system in the vertigo of doubling, while
the other skyscrapers are each the original moment of a system continually
surpassing itself in the crisis and the challenge.
[p. 71]
through the code, from the ultimatum to solicitation, from obligatory
passivity to models constructed from the outset on the basis of the subject's
`active response', and this subject's involvement and `ludic' participation,
towards a total environment model made up of incessant spontaneous
responses, joyous feedback and irradiated contacts. According to Nicolas
Schöffer, this is a `concretisation of the general ambience': the great
festival of Participation is made up of myriad stimuli, miniaturised tests,
and infinitely divisible question/answers, all magnetised by several great
models in the luminous field of the code.
[p. 72]
own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost
object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of
denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.
[p. 73]
contiguity of the same: zero degree flexion and reflexion. Take this erotic
photograph of twin sisters where the fleshy reality of their bodies is
annihilated by their similarity. How do you invest when the beauty of the
one is immediately duplicated in the other? The gaze can only go from one
to the other, and these poles enclose all vision. This is a subtle means of
murdering the original, but it is also a singular seduction, where the total
extent of the object is intercepted by its infinite diffraction into itself (this
scenario reverses the Platonic myth of the reunion of two halves separated
by a symbol. In the series, signs subdivide like protozoa). Perhaps this is
the seduction of death, in the sense that, for we sexually differentiated
beings, death is perhaps not nothingness, but quite simply the mode of
reproduction prior to sexual differentiation. The models that generate in
infinite chains effectively bring us closer to the generation of protozoa; sex,
which for us is confused with life, being the only remaining difference.
[p. 74]
the centre, on its own abyssal repetition. Analogous to the effect of an
internal distance from the dream, allowing us to say that we are dreaming,
hyperrealism is only the play of censorship and the perpetuation of the
dream, becoming an integral part of a coded reality that it perpetuates and
leaves unaltered.
[p. 75]
[p. 76]
primary processes have been annihilated. The cool universe of digitality
absorbs the universe of metaphor and metonymy. The simulation principle
dominates the reality principle as well as the pleasure principle.
[p. 77]
cut-up space of distinctive signs. Multiple codes assign a determinate
space-time to every act and instant of everyday life. The racial ghettos on
the outskirts or in the city centre are only the limit expression of this urban
configuration: an immense centre for marshalling and enclosure where the
system reproduces itself not only economically and spatially, but also in
depth by the ramifications of signs and codes, by the symbolic destruction
of social relations.
[p. 78]
desocialisation, to this structural breakdown. The era of production,
commodities and labour power merely amounts to the interdependence of
all social processes, including exploitation, and it was on this socialisation,
realised in part by capital itself, that Marx based his revolutionary
perspective. But this historical solidarity (whether factory, local or class
solidarity) has disappeared. From now on they are separate and indifferent
under the sign of television and the automobile, under the sign of
behaviour models inscribed everywhere in the media or in the layout of the
city. Everyone falls into line in their delirious identification with leading
models, orchestrated models of simulation. Everyone is commutable, like
the models themselves. This is the era of geometrically variable individuals.
As for the geometry of the code, it remains fixed and centralised.
The monopoly of this code, circulating throughout the urban fabric, is the
genuine form of social relations.
[p. 79]
with neither connotation nor denotation, they escape the principle of
signification and, as empty signifiers, erupt into the sphere of the full signs
of the city, dissolving it on contact.
[p. 80]
frescoes at Nanterre actually hijacked the wall as a signifier of terrorist,
functional gridded space: an anti-media action. The proof is that the
government has been careful enough neither to efface nor to repaint the
walls: the mass political slogans and posters have taken responsibility for
this. There is no need for repression since the media themselves, the far-
left media, have given the walls back their blind function. Since then, we
have met with the Stockholm `protest wall' where one is at liberty to
protest on a certain surface, but where it is forbidden to put graffiti on
neighbouring surfaces.
[p. 81]
dismantle the order of signs. Graffiti covers every subway map in New
York, just as the Czechs changed the names of the streets in Prague to
disconcert the Russians: guerrilla action.
[p. 82]
social relations, which is to say that collectively they allow people no
response. All they can do is enliven, and participate in urban recycling,
design in the largest sense: the simulation of exchange and collective
values, the simulation of play and non-functional spaces. Hence the
adventure parks for the children, the green spaces, the houses of culture;
hence the City Walls and the protest walls, the green spaces of language
[parole].
[p. 83]
surrealist art, they are always inspired by figurative and idealist forms. We
can also see the difference between a scholarly and cultivated avant-garde
art and the popular, realist forms with a strong ideological content but
formally `less advanced' (even though they have a variety of inspirations,
from children's drawings to Mexican frescoes, from a scholarly art to
Douannier Rousseau, or from Fernand Léger up to the simple images of
Epinal, the sentimental illustrations of popular struggles). In any case, it is
a matter of a counter-culture that, far from being underground, is reflexive
and connected to the political and cultural consciousness of the oppressed
group.
[p. 84]
MIKE, OR GINO is alive, he's doing well and he lives in New York.' OK,
but `it' does not speak like that, it is our bourgeois-existentialist romanticism
that speaks like that, the unique and incomparable being that each of
us is, but who gets ground down by the city. Black youths themselves have
no personality to defend, from the outset they are defending the community.
Their revolt challenges bourgeois identity and anonymity at the same
time. COOL COKE SUPERSTRUT SNAKE SODA VIRGIN -- this
Sioux litany, this subversive litany of anonymity, the symbolic explosion of
these war names in the heart of the white city, must be heard and
understood.
[p. 86]
2: The Order of Simulacra
[p. nts]
The emancipation of children and adolescents, after a first phase of revolt and once
the principle of the right to emancipation has been established, appears to be the real
emancipation of parents. Youth (students, high school pupils and adolescents) seem to
sense this in their increasingly relentless (although also always unreconciled) demands
that parents or educators be present and speak. Alone at last, free and responsible, it
suddenly occurs to them that in the process the others have pocketed the real freedom.
Nor is there any question of simply leaving them in peace. Instead they will be plagued,
not by affective or spontaneous material demands but by a demand revised and
corrected by implicit Oedipal knowledge. A hyperdependency (far greater than the
other) distorted by irony and rejection, a parody of the original libidinal mechanisms. A
demand without content or reference, unfounded, but so much more ferocious for all
that: a naked demand to which there is no possible response. The content of knowledge
(education) or affective relations (family), the familial or pedagogic referential having
been eliminated during the act of emancipation, remains nothing more than a demand
bound up with the empty form of the institution, a perverse, but so much more
obstinate, demand. A `transferential' desire (that is non-- or irreferential), a desire
fuelled by lack, by the vacant place, a `liberated' desire, desire caught in its own
vertiginous image, a desire to desire thereby also abyssal [en abyme]: a hyperreal desire.
Stripped of symbolic substance, desire flows ever more intensely into its double, drawing
its energy from its own reflection and from its own disillusionment. That is literally what
the `demand' is today, and it is clear that as opposed to `classical' object or transference
relations, this demand is insoluble and interminable.
Simulated Oedipus.
François Richard writes:
The students demanded to be seduced, bodily or verbally. But they are also aware of
this and play their part ironically. `Give your knowledge and your presence: you've
got the floor, so speak, that's what you're there for.' While this is certainly a protest,
that is not all it is: the more authority is contested, the more laughable it appears, the
greater the demand for an authority in itself. They also play Oedipus, so as to be able
to annihilate him absolutely. They say that `the prof is Papa' for a laugh, they play at
incest, discontented, untouchable, they play the tease, ultimately to be desexualised.
Does the analysand constantly demand Oedipus, recite `Oedipal' tricks and have
`analytic' dreams in order to respond to the analyst's supposed demand or to resist him?
What about the student doing his `Oedipus' number, his seduction number, familiarly
brushing up against the seductee, moving closer in order to dominate? This is not desire,
however, but its simulation, a simulated Oedipal psychodrama (but no less real or
dramatic for all that). It is quite different when there are real libidinal stakes such as
knowledge and power, or even a real work of mourning over knowledge and power (as
was able to take place in the universities after '68). Now is the stage of desperate
reproduction, where the stakes are zero and the simulacrum at a maximum, a simulation
at once aggravated and parodic, as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same
reasons.
Interminable psychoanalysis
There is a whole chapter to be added to the history of the transference and the countertransference
concerning their elimination through simulation. This chapter would also
deal with the insolubility of the transference and the impossibility of psychoanalysis,
because it is now psychoanalysis that produces and reproduces the unconscious as its
institutional substance. Psychoanalysis too dies from the exchange of unconscious signs,
just as the revolution dies from the exchange of political-economic signs. This short-circuit
was indeed glimpsed by Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream or,
with a `prepared' analysand, the gift of their analytic knowledge. This was still
interpreted as resistance, however, as a detour, and did not fundamentally question the
analytic process or the principle of the transference. It is quite different though when the
unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious, becomes impossible to find in
accordance with the same scenario of simulatory anticipation as we have seen at work at
all levels in machines of the third order. Analysis then can no longer be resolved, it
becomes logically and historically interminable, since it settles on a substance that is a
puppet of reproduction, an unconscious programmed by the demand, an insurmountable
instance from which the entire analysis is redistributed. Here again the unconscious's
`messages' have been short-circuited by the `medium' of psychoanalysis. This is a
libidinal hyperrealism. We must add the `hyperreal' to the celebrated categories of the
real, the symbolic and the imaginary, since it captures and redirects, perverts, the play of
the three others.
2: The Order of Simulacra, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [50]-86. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents]
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