Simulacra

The word simulacra, or simulacrum in the singular, is often associated with the idea of the “fake.” To simulate means to feign or to pretend; simulation refers to the practice of simulating; and simulacrum refers to something that has the appearance of another thing but supposedly not its “essence.” The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was the first to elevate “simulacra” to one of the central concepts of postmodern cultural analysis and contemporary urban studies. However, the simulacrum is a philosophical problem with a long history dating back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato (ca. 360 BC) argues—using the famous allegory of the cave—that the immediate sensory perception is an illusive reflection of the actual metaphysical reality. In the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze explains that the essential difference between the copy and the simulacrum is that whereas the first is authorized by resemblance, the latter implies corruption by disguise and difference. He advocates that the simulation is not a copy of the second order; on the contrary, it possesses a productive power in and of itself. For example, an insect may use the strategy of camouflage to temporarily mimic the appearance of the surrounding environment in order to protect itself. Interpreted in this way, the power of [Page 722]simulacrum lies in its capacity to transcend the duality of the original and the copy.

Baudrillard acknowledges, with pessimism, that simulation threatens the difference between the original and the copy. For example, he who simulates an illness may also suffer and display the symptoms of that illness. This may be interpreted as a “liquidation,” wherein it is no longer possible to tell the difference between an original and a copy to the point of rendering the very distinction irrelevant. As narrated in a famous short story by Jorge Luis Borges in 1935, the drive for exactitude in science results in the production of a map so detailed that it covers the territory it seeks to represent and becomes indistinguishable from it. At its extreme, the map becomes the territory, forcing a reversal of this traditional relationship into the new concept of hyperreality. Hyperreality, in this case, is the idea of simulating something that never really existed. Baudrillard defines a genealogy for the development of simulacra through successive phases of the image, from the reflection of a reality toward its masking, to its absence, and finally arriving at no relationship with reality at all. Disneyland masks the absence of a “real” country outside the boundaries of the theme park. The America outside this theme park is a simulacrum created by competing signs and simulations. This analysis provides a historical dimension to the philosophical issue and provides an opening that makes simulacra relevant to urban studies because it connects discussions of consumption, media (Marshall McLuhan), discipline (Michel Foucault), and urbanism (Edward Soja).

The concept of simulacra has emerged in recent practices as a fundamental aspect of contemporary urbanism. Film and advertising were the media through which people predominantly experienced and interacted with cities throughout the twentieth century. New media in the twenty-first century, such as computer role-playing games and the Internet, have joined the older twentieth-century “mass” media in shaping urban experience. Despite admonishments by Frankfurt School critics and later others, it is no longer possible to consider media simply as a panoptic system received by a passive mass audience. As McLuhan has argued, the medium and message are indistinguishable. Virtual, reel, or screen cities are not mere representations of the physical environment. One manifestation of this is that urban governments are increasingly investing in the production of media images and manicuring their built environments to fit their popular virtual images. The examination of the relationship between urban space and “cinematic” form has spawned, in the past decade, a new area of scholarship—cinematic urbanism—that seeks to highlight and analyze the continuum between the real and the reel.

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