There is no hidden or deeper meaning behind signs anymore, Baudrillard considers these signs without referents. Value judgements are rendered pointless by Baudrillard in postmodern America because any value assigned to them has no meaning in the American hyperreality. This brings a worry of an empty future, one with no real meaning and no real direction. This empty future will only create a continuation of hyperreality as meaning continues to persist as meaningless Laughey, This reality is inescapable, the media has infected us with lack of meaning restricting our ability to be critical beings.
This lack of criticalness has trapped us, we mindlessly consume media, further burying us into hyperreality. Theorists working within hyperreality and simulacra, especially Baudrillard, are concerned with power and control.
The mass cannot realize their disadvantages caused by the elite when they exist within this mindless hyperreality. The media, political, economic, and cultural elite use hyperreality and its simulacra to destroy the will of the masses. Ideas of freedom and choice seem to be there, but they only exist in the simulation. Therefore, they have no real meaning.
They exist to keep the masses subordinate to the elite, freedom within hyperreality is not freedom at all. A large part of what constitutes the simulacrum within hyperreality is nonevents. Baudrillard transforms the postmodernist idea of a nonevent into the idea of non-war. We are bombarded by images of war on our screens day by day, and are trapped in this hyperreality as hostage. This directly applies to his overarching ideas of hyperreality and simulacra. War of excess in which over equipped countries can expend their resources, even human.
Stupidity therefore is the product of non-war and its media coverage. The elite powers controlling war need stupidity and misinformation to glaze over the entire populous in order for their actions and procedures to be widely accepted. In a passage of Simulacra and Simulation s Baudrillard applies his theory of simulation to Disneyland. Baudrillard found that Disneyland is not a representation of America, but America itself. In actuality there is no difference between what is inside and outside the gates of Disneyland.
The same simulation that exists within Disneyland is constant throughout America. Baudrillard believes that Disneyland is simply another tool used by the media elite to reinforce hyperreality, it allows reality to exist in the minds of the people, but not in actuality.
The belief that something is less real than reality itself reinforces the publics false sense reality. When discussing hyperreality and simulacra it seems difficult to place into context.
Although there are multiple common examples of its presence in our everyday experiences. One could consider themed restaurants a product of hyperreality and simulation. These restaurants use their atmosphere and experience as a selling point. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it. Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its surfaces here the reversible continuity of hypotheses.
Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 - where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?
And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law which is why it is so well received at the moment : only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems?
A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution. All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.
It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object the Tasaday.
Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc. Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony.
Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension.
Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art ficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king also the god had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power.
But even this is gone. To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.
Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.
For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.
But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other.
As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real. Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger otherwise you risk committing an offence.
Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you. In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.
In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly because it has no "consequences" or be punished as an offence to public office for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing" - but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either.
The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based.
The established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum.
Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order. This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman.
But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency : namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.
Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences.
In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc. The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.
For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? One remains among principles, and there power is always right. Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power.
It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it.
And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation.
As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation the threat of vanishing in the play of signs , power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes.
This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late. Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it.
That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation.
Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself. Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance.
And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political.
And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power - a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others and grieving its loss.
Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning. But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an art ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it.
Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason.
As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake - this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death.
Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved. Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense , the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options.
The mass simulacrum of signs become meaningless, functioning as groundless, hollow indicators that self-replicate in endless reproduction.
Saussure outlines the nature of the sign as the signified a concept of the real and the signifier a sound-image. Baudrillard claims the Saussurian model is made arbitrary by the advent of hyperreality wherein the two poles of the signified and signifier implode in upon eachother destroying meaning, causing all signs to be unhinged and point back to a non-existing reality Another basic characteristic of the hyperreal is the dislocation of object materiality and concrete spatial relations see objecthood.
This machinery "gives way to the televised instantaneity of a prospective observation, of a glance that pierces through the appearances of the greatest distances and the widest expanses" p. These ethereal qualities of hyperreality mean drastic revision for media theory surrounding the spectacle. This theory was famously articulated by Guy Debord who argued through neo-Marxian criticism that the spectacle has become central to capitalist modes of reproduction p.
Yet, the world of hyperreality overturns any hope of a Marxist understanding of mass media, for the entire web of human meaning-making activities has been transformed into the symbolic exchange of empty signs, the modes of production have been liquefied and leukemized into the giant political economy of exchanging signs. The system of monetary exchange is an example of the hyperreal that should help to prevent any definitional confusion. At some point, a common good was substituted as a ground for exchange, and then later pecuniary units were produced in order to simulate the common exchange.
At first the monetary units had inherent value in that they were made of precious metals, but they were eventually replaced with worthless paper units, and many contemporary economies are now substituting these papers for credit information stored in computer databanks.
During the process of countless successive copies the essential reality of exchange has long since been lost, with commodities now completely disconnected from their use value, their production cost, and even their function. Moreover, the foundational lie of exchange has long since been forgotten over the weight of countless simulacra: that there was never any trade grounded in reality, that symbolic exchange is precisely and only that which can only refer to other signs for meaning and definition.
The next important intersection between the theory of hyperreality and media studies is performativity. Although the problem of performance is not one unique to modernity, it does seem as though it has been exacerbated in the hyperrealist environment with the proliferation of identities and recognizable performative actions.
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