Home · Book Reports · 2017 · Simulacra and Simulation

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Thoughts

While this book is somewhat hard to read, owing to its colorful language, possible sketchy translation, and interesting sentence structure, it is well worth the effort.

It is interesting to see how, in 1995, such a complete description of the ill-effects of film and television were seen. How things like WW2 and the Vietnam war could be relived by generations that did not have the pleasure of living through them. Films like Apocalypse become the reality of the Vietnam war for every subsequent generation. These films stylise and caricature the real until no memory of the real is left. The same effect can be seen in books and television.

From the historical to the futuristic science fiction, all meaning is being lost to the fantasy. Our values are being molded by the media we can no longer discern from that which it originally represented. This leads to a blending of the fantasy and reality into an undistinguishable hyperreality.

The social implications of this are discussed in such a way that it feels prescient to the modern social media (via smart phone) crazy the world is currently caught up in. The holograms and clones seem relevant to me in this context. It seems that it would not be a great leap to equate the online personalities so many have adopted to holograms or clones, sculpted by the aforementioned media.

Universities are also looked at as being in a state (again 1995) of rot. What was once a set of institutions used to transmit knowledge to the future, and only those who were capable of receiving said knowledge, have become diploma Mills used to indoctrinate entire generation. The value of knowledge has been lost to the, temporarily, self-perpetuating value of the diploma. Teaching has been replaced by a social experience shared between the students and the faculty. This, like the allusion to social media’s dominance, feels eerily on point to the current absurd going-ons in university - safe spaced and racially charged conflict.

This is one of three books that inspired the Matrix movie. This one is actually shown in the movie as a hollow book holding digital paraphernalia. The other two are Evolutionary Biology and Out of Control.

What happened 10 May 1968?

• Civil unrest in France. General strikes, occupation of universities and factories. The French economy was virtually halted.

Movies

• The Last Picture Show, 1900, All The President’s Men, Visconti

Books

• Crash, Everyone to Zanzibar

Exceptional Excerpts

“the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social."

“Who made you king? You."

“Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system."

“no longer any difference between the economic and the political”

“information is ending advertising”

“Universities are only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class”

“diplomas will be awarded without a ‘real’-work counterpart, without an equivalence in knowledge."

Table of Contents

• Chapter 01: The Precession of Simulacra
• Chapter 02: History: A Retro Scenario
• Chapter 03: Holocaust
• Chapter 04: The China Syndrome
• Chapter 05: Apocalypse Now
• Chapter 06: The Beaubourg Effect : Implosion and Deterrence
• Chapter 07: Hypermarked and Hypercommodity
• Chapter 08: The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
• Chapter 09: Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising
• Chapter 10: Clone Story
• Chapter 11: Holograms
• Chapter 12: Crash
• Chapter 13: Simulacra and Science Fiction
• Chapter 14: The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses
• Chapter 15: The Remainder
• Chapter 16: The Spiraling Cadaver
• Chapter 17: Value's Last Tango
• Chapter 18: On Nihilism

· CHAPTER 1: The Precession of Simulacra

page 9:

• Witness the cloister of Saint-Michel de Cuxa, which one will repatriate at great cost from the Cloisters in New York to reinstall it in “its original site.” And everyone is supposed to applaud this restitution… Well, if the exportation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act, if the Cloisters in New York are an artificial mosaic of all cultures (following a logic of the capitalist centralization of value), their reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with “reality” through a complete circumvolution. The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment, which at least fooled no one. Repatriating it is nothing but a supplementary subterfuge, acting as if nothing had happened and indulging in retrospective hallucination. In the same way, Americans flatter themselves for having brought the population of Indians back to pre-Conquest levels. One effaces everything and starts over.

page 11:

• This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere…

page 22:

• One must think instead of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal,…

• Now, one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA…

page 24:

What is hatched in the shadow of this [nuclear] mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, “objective,” threat, and thanks to Damocles’ nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security.

page 25:

• Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social.

page 26:

• …behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will be founded… for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations.

page 28:

• Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any inclination toward violent intervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order.

page 29:

• Who made you duke? The king. Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can well reply: You.

· CHAPTER 2: History: A Retro Scenario

page 31:

• History has been lost and become our modern myth. It is now reanimated in cinema.

page 32:

• …fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty,

• Cinema itself is lost to itself. The “classics” are remade better than the original.

· CHAPTER 3: HOLOCAUST

page 36:

• One lacks stakes, investment, history, speech. That is the fundamental problem. The objective is thus to produce them at all cost, and this broadcast served this purpose: to capture the artificial heat of a dead event to warm the dead body of the social.

· CHAPTER 4: THE CHINA SYNDROME

page 38:

• What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence?

· CHAPTER 5: APOCALYPSE NOW

page 41:

• The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology.

· CHAPTER 6: THE BEAUBOURG EFFECT: IMPLOSION AND DETERRENCE

page 49:

• Subversion, violent destruction is what corresponds to a mode of production. To a universe of networks, of combinatory theory, and of flow correspond reversal and implosion.

· CHAPTER 7: HYPERMARKET AND HYPERCOMMODITY

page 52:

• Thus all the messages in the media function in a similar fashion: neither information nor communication, but referendum, perpetual test, circular response, verification of the code.

· CHAPTER 8: THE IMPLOSION OF MEANING IN THE MEDIA

page 55:

• We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

• Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial.

page 60:

• One should be wary of the universalization of struggles through information. One should be wary of solidarity campaigns at every level, of this simultaneously electronic and worldly solidarity. Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system.

· CHAPTER 9: ABSOLUTE ADVERTISING, GROUND-ZERO ADVERTISING

page 61:

• Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten.

• The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and the market crash of 1929.

• This convergence [of propaganda and advertising] defines a society- ours-in which there is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both…

page 62:

• Microprocessing, digitality, cybernetic languages go much further in the direction of the absolute simplification of processes than advertising did on its humble - still imaginary and spectacular-level.

• It is information, in the sense of data processing, that will put an end to, that is already putting an end to the reign of advertising.

• The anticipatory illustration of this transformation was Philip K. Dick’s papula - that transistorized advertising implant, a sort of broadcasting leech, an electronic parasite that attaches itself to the body and that is very hard to get rid of. But the papula is still an intermediary form: it is already a kind of incorporated prosthesis, but it still incessantly repeats advertising messages. A hybrid, then, but a prefiguration of the psychotropic and dataprocessing networks of the automatic piloting of individuals, next to which the “conditioning” by advertising looks like a delightful change in fortune.

• Smart phones take this to the next level.

page 63:

• …advertising is completely in unison with the social, whose historical necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social…

• …innumerable campaigns for security…

• …repeating incessantly, “I buy, I consume, I take pleasure,” today repeats in other forms, “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned”…

· CHAPTER 10: CLONE STORY

page 70:

• The stage of the body changes in the course of an irreversible technological “progression”: from tanning in the sun, which already corresponds to an artificial use of the natural medium, that is to say to making it a prosthesis of the body (itself becoming a simulated body, but where lies the truth of the body?) - to domestic tanning with an iodine lamp (yet another good old mechanical technique) - to tanning with pills and hormones (chemical and ingested prosthesis) - and finally to tanning by intervening in the genetic formula (an incomparably more advanced stage, but a prosthesis nonetheless, that is, it is simply definitively integrated, it no longer even passes through either the surface or the orifices of the body), one passes by different bodies.

• Organ transplants are still of this order. But what should be said of mental modeling via psychotropic agents and drugs? It is the stage of the body that is changed by them. The psychotropic body is a body modeled “from the inside,”

· CHAPTER 11: HOLOGRAMS

page 74:

• The universe itself, taken globally, is what cannot be represented, what does not have a possible complement in the mirror,…

· CHAPTER 12: CRASH

· CHAPTER 13: SIMULACRA AND SCIENCE FICTION

page 82:

• Science fiction has moved from imagining expansion in a vast universe to reimagining our history.

· CHAPTER 14: THE ANIMALS: TERRITORY AND METAMORPHOSES

page 86:

• The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value [overcrowding] and humans sick from industrial concentration, from the scientific organization of work and assembly - line factories is illuminating.

• Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.

· CHAPTER 15: THE REMAINDER

· CHAPTER 16: THE ANIMALS: TERRITORY AND METAMORPHOSES

page 98:

• The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge.

• Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select - it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody…

page 99:

• It is necessary to transform this rotting into a violent process, …

· CHAPTER 17: VALUE’S LAST TANGO

page 102:

• Panic on the part of university administrators at the idea that diplomas will be awarded without a “real”-work counterpart, without an equivalence in knowledge. This panic is not that of political subversion, it is that of seeing value become dissociated from its contents and begin to function alone, according to its very form. The values of the university (diplomas, etc.) will proliferate and continue to circulate, a bit like floating capital or Eurodollars, they will spiral without referential criteria, completely devalorized in the end, but that is unimportant: their circulation alone is enough to create a social horizon of value, and the ghostly presence of the phantom value will only be greater, even when its reference point (its use value, its exchange value, the academic “work force” that the university recoops) is lost.

· CHAPTER 18: ON NIHILISM

page 106:

• The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic.