Simulation

Simulation refers to a theory proposing the absolute loss of reality in contemporary society. Often associated with postmodernism, the theory's major protagonist, Jean Baudrillard, moved from an attempt to update Marxism to a refusal of all political doctrines on the grounds of the fundamentally illusory nature of society and meaning. Reacting against the structuralist school, Baudrillard proposed that what is perceived as the social is really an effect of the self-replication of a code. The term code derives from structural linguistics, where it denotes the unit of discourse; from genetics; and from information science. Amalgamating these concepts with a residual Marxism and with the media theory of Marshall MacLuhan, Baudrillard proposed that the equivalence of commodities in exchange implied the equivalence of signs in communication. Just as commodities had been freed from use-value in consumerism, so signs had been freed of the necessity of reference to reality. In historical stages, signification had moved from masking reality to masking its absence and, finally, to circulating without reference to reality at all. Both value and meaning proliferate without distinction, de-realizing the world and devaluing all values. The economics of production have been superseded by those of equivalence in which, since all differences are suppressed, all specificity and therefore all reality also disappear. In a nod to Guy Debord, Baudrillard suggests that the era of the spectacle is over, superseded by that of the hyperreal.

The concept of hyperreality has had the broadest use of the terms developed in simulation theory. In Plato's Republic, the term simulacrum (or its Greek equivalent eidolon) was used to define an extreme degree of removal from the foundations of reality: The ideal table was imitated by the real carpenter, but the painter who made an image of the result was no longer in touch with the ideal, and his work was therefore not a representation (like the carpenter's) but a simulacrum. In Baudrillard, the use-value of commodities, what distinguishes them as real, has disappeared first under exchange value but now under sign-value, so that the original use is so remote as to have vanished. Since the definition of the real is that which can be represented, but since all representation is serial in form, the real has become indistinguishable from its representations, distinguishable if at all only by its startling resemblance to itself. The real that is already an imitation and a representation, and one now lacking an original, becomes subject to a spiral of self-realizing code, producing ever more extravagant and ever less grounded figurations and hallucinations.

One of Baudrillard's examples is public opinion: on one hand, an artefact of the questions asked, on the other the sole proof of the existence of a public that otherwise has no presence in the social world. The opinion poll thus achieves a greater degree of reality than the public whose opinion it supposedly expresses. At the same time, there can be no question of an ideological analysis of opinion polls, since there is by definition no reality behind them that would give the lie to the ideological. Like the perfect recording of music that has only ever existed as a technological mediation, the media and social technologies of simulation abolish the distance between audience and performer, observer and observed, even ruler and ruled, on which meaning and political action are premised. As a result, global politics enters the age of the stalemated Cold War.

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