This is the book in which Baudrillard's apparatus arrives assembled: the precession of simulacra, the hyperreal, the four phases of the image, the three orders of simulacra, implosion, deterrence, and the thesis that the real has not been falsified but liquidated and replaced by its operational double. It is not a treatise. It is eighteen essays, several of them readings of films and events, that circle one reversal from different entry points: the model no longer follows the real, it precedes and produces it, and the real survives only as the model's alibi. The brief reconstructs that movement essay by essay and carries the load-bearing formulations whole, so the passages can be lifted straight into writing. Two pieces of scaffolding are reproduced first, because Baudrillard deploys them throughout without re-explaining them: the four phases of the image, stated in the first essay, and the three orders of simulacra, stated late in "Simulacra and Science Fiction" but operative everywhere.
The book opens by retiring the Borges fable of the map as detailed as the empire, then inverting it. What has disappeared is not the map but the territory, and with it the difference that gave abstraction its charm.
Page 1
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
The hyperreal is not the unreal. It is produced, indefinitely reproducible, and indexed to nothing outside itself.
Page 2
The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
The hinge of the whole book is a distinction that looks merely lexical and is not. Baudrillard takes the proof from Littré, the simulated illness: where the symptom can be produced, the medicine that treats real illnesses by their objective causes loses its object.
Page 3
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."
The army case runs the same logic to the point where the institution capitulates to the produced symptom.
Page 5
Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" and the authentic symptom. "If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion.
Simulation is then set against representation as its opposite principle, and the relation between them stated as an envelopment rather than a falsification.
Page 6
Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.
The most-cited passage in the book follows immediately: the four phases through which the image passes, and the gloss that names each.
Page 6
Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum.In the first case, the image is a good appearance—representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance—it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.
The decisive break is between the third phase and the fourth, and Baudrillard marks it as the passage out of the regime to which ideology still belongs.
Page 6
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.
The periodizing scheme behind the whole book is stated outright only near the end, in the opening lines of "Simulacra and Science Fiction," where the three orders are laid out in succession. Baudrillard footnotes the scheme to his own earlier "L'ordre des simulacres" in L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976), where the counterfeit / production / simulation periodization is first worked out.
Page 121
Three orders of simulacra:
simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God's image;
simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production—a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the Utopias related to this order of simulacra);
simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game—total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.
The matching imaginaries are set out in the same place: Utopia answers to the first order, science fiction to the second, and to the third order perhaps no imaginary at all, because the model now anticipates the real and leaves no gap for projection.
Page 121
To the first category belongs the imaginary of the Utopia. To the second corresponds science fiction, strictly speaking. To the third corresponds—is there an imaginary that might correspond to this order? The most likely answer is that the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well).
Two further terms carry the second half of the book and are defined in place rather than here: implosion, the collapse of the poles whose difference once organized meaning, modeled on stellar collapse into a black hole, stated fully in "The Beaubourg Effect" (page 69); and deterrence, the universal security apparatus that precludes any real event, stated fully in "The Orbital and the Nuclear" (page 32). Both are carried whole in their essays below.
The longest and most-cited essay, running through eight named subsections and a notes apparatus. Its epigraph is attributed to Ecclesiastes; the attribution is Baudrillard's own device, not a canonical verse (see apparatus).
Page 1 · epigraph
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
The subsection that opens the essay, "The Divine Irreference of Images," establishes the dissimulation/simulation distinction, the Littré illness, the army case, the representation/simulation opposition, and the four phases of the image, all carried in the spine above. Two further passages from that subsection do load-bearing work the spine does not. The first is the theological proof, where the Iconoclasts are credited with grasping what images really threaten.
Page 4
This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear—that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum—from this came their urge to destroy the images.
The second is the wager that the whole order of representation made, and what becomes of that order once the guarantor can himself be simulated.
Page 5
All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
The ethnological proof. The argument is that in order for the science to live, its object must be killed and then preserved as an alibi. The Tasaday, returned to virgin forest at the anthropologists' own suggestion, are the case.
Page 7
It is not a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous), but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. The Tasaday, frozen in their natural element, will provide a perfect alibi, an eternal guarantee. Here begins an antiethnology that will never end and to which Jaulin, Castaneda, Clastres are various witnesses.
From the cordoned-off Tasaday, the museumified working-class neighborhoods at Cruesot, and the duplicated Lascaux, the conclusion generalizes: ethnology, liberated from its object, becomes a fourth dimension applied to everything.
Page 8
Thus ethnology, rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science, will today, liberated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invisible, like an omnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum. We are all Tasadays, Indians who have again become what they were—simulacral Indians who at last proclaim the universal truth of ethnology.
The mummy of Ramses II, mobilized by science and given military honors at Orly after decades rotting in a museum, supplies the governing image of museumification as a second death.
Page 10
Because mummies don't rot from worms: they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums, our order, which no longer masters anything, which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science.
Disneyland, the book's most famous single reading. The ideological reading is granted (and credited to L. Marin's Utopiques, jeux d'espace), then shown to be the cover for a third-order operation.
Pages 12–13
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The childishness of the park is then read as functional: it certifies an adult reality located elsewhere.
Page 13
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—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
Watergate is run as the structural twin of Disneyland: the scandal effect conceals that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation. This is where Baudrillard stages his most direct engagement with Bourdieu, quoting him and then breaking with him. The quotation:
Page 14
One could say along with Bourdieu: "The essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates itself as such," understood as follows: capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital.
Baudrillard quoting Pierre Bourdieu, then glossing him.
The break follows immediately: to denounce the relation of force as scandal is to occupy the position of the journalists, reviving the moral order the system needs.
Page 14
But this would be nothing but the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu states it, he takes the "relation of force" for the truth of capitalist domination, and he himself denounces this relation of force as scandal—he is thus in the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are.
The thesis is then stated flatly, and repeated through the essay as its refrain.
Page 15
Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality—that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism.
The Left's structural role is named here for the first time, in the figure of the mirror it holds out to capital, and capital is recast not as a contract-breaker but as a challenge issued under symbolic law.
Page 15
Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law.
The structural generalization of the Watergate case: Watergate was a lure held out by the system to regenerate itself through simulated scandal. Manipulation here is a wavering causality in which active and passive overlap. The payoff is the claim that every institution now stages its own murder to escape its real death, and that even presidential assassination has been downgraded to simulation.
Page 19
All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political dimension. The others, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phantom attempts, to simulated murders.
The essay's clearest demonstration, the simulated holdup. The simulated crime is more dangerous than the real one, because it leaves open the supposition that law and order are themselves simulation. But the experiment cannot be carried out: the real devours any attempt at simulation.
Page 20
Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible—in short, remain close to the "truth," in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won't be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation.
Order therefore always opts for the real, exactly as the army prefers to take the simulator for a real madman; but the reversibility runs both ways, and it is now equally impossible to prove the real. From this Baudrillard derives the diagnosis the rest of the book elaborates: power's only remaining move is to manufacture reality, capital having been the original liquidator of the referential.
Page 23
Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of values and commodities, that of the belle epoque of political economy, has for a long time had no specific meaning. What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.
The Loud family, the 1971 American TV-vérité experiment: seven months of shooting, three hundred hours broadcast, the family disintegrating on camera. Baudrillard sets aside the insoluble controversy (was TV responsible?) for the producer's Utopian boast, which he reads as the formula of the hyperreal.
Page 28
More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren't there. The producer's triumph was to say: "They lived as if we were not there." An absurd, paradoxical formula—neither true nor false: Utopian. The "as if we were not there" being equal to "as if you were there." It is this Utopia, this paradox that fascinated the twenty million viewers, much more than did the "perverse" pleasure of violating someone's privacy.
The family is read as a sacrificial offering, selected for its hyperreal perfection, and the director's own words are carried as the confirmation.
Page 29
"The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television, and to die by it," the director will say. Thus it is a question of a sacrificial process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to twenty million Americans. The liturgical drama of a mass society.
The director of the Loud broadcast, quoted by Baudrillard.
The structural claim is the title's: the panoptic system ends, and surveillance gives way to deterrence. The reversal of the gaze is stated in the slogans, and the break with the Situationists and with Foucault is explicit.
Page 29
"You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live)," or again: "You are no longer listening to Don't Panic, it is Don't Panic that is listening to you"—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze "YOU are the model!" "YOU are the majority!"
Page 30
We are no longer in the society of the spectacle, of which the situationists spoke, nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new era. There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it.
The corrective Baudrillard appends matters for the rest of the book: the media are not to be thought as disease but as a genetic code, on the model of DNA, directing the mutation of the real into the hyperreal.
The deterrence thesis at full strength. The nuclear is the apotheosis of simulation, but the balance of terror is only the spectacular face of a deterrence already lodged in daily life. The first load-bearing reversal: the fallout is not radioactive but social.
Page 32
It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded—precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs.
The risk of annihilation is then recast as a pretext: the apparatus exists to preclude not the bomb but any real event whatever.
Page 33
The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons ... for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question ...) but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance.
The internal ellipsis falls within a single sentence on page 33; the passage is continuous in the source.
Deterrence circulates between nuclear protagonists exactly as international capital circulates in monetary speculation. The space race is read as having played the identical role, and from it Baudrillard draws the inversion that gives the essay its title: through orbital inscription, the earth itself becomes the satellite.
Page 35
Resist the evidence: in satellization, he who is satellized is not who one might think. Through the orbital inscription of a spatial object, it is the planet earth that becomes a satellite, it is the terrestrial principle of reality that becomes eccentric, hyperreal, and insignificant.
Vietnam is the crucial case, because it sat at the intersection of a maximal historical stake and the installation of the deterrent order. The war vanished overnight, Baudrillard argues, because it was never the historical event it appeared to be.
Page 36
This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. ... the shift from a global strategy of revolution to one of shared forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to political alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking–Washington relations): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled out of Vietnam but won the war.
The two ellipses fall within a single continuous passage on page 36.
NotesThe essay's apparatus develops the medium/message confusion into the disappearance of all polar discursive structure and the inverse psychoanalytic simulation ("who made you a psychoanalyst? ... You"); a further note states that all bombs are clean, their only pollution the security and control they radiate so long as they do not explode. Note 1 sends the order of simulacra to L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976).
Cinema as the index of history's disappearance. Once myth took refuge in cinema; now history itself does, because it has been chased from lived experience by peaceful coexistence. The hinge sentence:
Page 43
History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen.
The privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the postwar) is explained through Freud's theory of fetishism, and the conclusion drawn is that the fascination with fascism is not political and signals no renewal of it.
Page 44
This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our "irreferential" era.
The hyperrealist film is the type-case, and Baudrillard names the cycle: their very perfection is what makes them leave us indifferent.
Page 45
All, but not only, those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President's Men, etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or McLuhanesque mosaic) ... rather than one of veritable films.
The general law of the essay, stated as an aphorism, and elsewhere applied to the obsession with historical fidelity (where Jeanne Hilmann doing the dishes in real time is the index): page 47 "Terrorism is always that of the real." A long note reads fascism itself as the "irrational" excess of mythic and political referentials, a demented resistance to something worse, the disenchantment and operationalization of all life.
On the 1978 television series. Forgetting extermination is itself part of extermination, and the broadcast is an artificial memory that perpetuates rather than lifts the event. The governing claim follows McLuhan's rule: the object is the cold medium, not the historical event.
Page 50
What no one wants to understand is that Holocaust is primarily (and exclusively) an event, or, rather, a televised object (fundamental rule of McLuhan's, which must not be forgotten), that is to say, that one attempts to rekindle a cold historical event, tragic but cold, the first major event of cold systems, of cooling systems, of systems of deterrence and extermination ... to rekindle this cold event through a cold medium, television, and for the masses who are themselves cold, who will only have the opportunity for a tactile thrill and a posthumous emotion.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 50.
The polemical core is the contrast of cinema and television: cinema still carries an intense imaginary because it is an image; the TV image is a miniaturized terminal that suggests nothing.
Page 51
Nothing of any of this in the "TV" image, which suggests nothing, which mesmerizes, which itself is nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head—you are the screen, and the TV watches you—it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape—a tape, not an image.
The 1979 film, paired with the Three Mile Island (Harrisburg) accident that followed its release. The structural claim is the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event, which remains improbable and imaginary; TV and the nuclear are read as the same kind of cold deterrent system. The constellation is named as a trilogy in which cause and symptom can no longer be told apart.
Page 54
Harrisburg, Watergate, and Network: such is the trilogy of The China Syndrome—an indissoluble trilogy in which one no longer knows which is the effect and which is the symptom ... Marvelous indifferentiation, ideal constellation of simulation.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 54.
The "precession" is literal here and is the essay's point: the film preceded the real accident, and the real reproduced the simulacrum point for point, including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe.
Page 54
Strange precession of a film over the real, the most surprising that was given us to witness: the real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum, including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is essential from the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself, in the image of the film, to produce a simulation of catastrophe.
From there Baudrillard takes the reversible step "cheerfully": one may equally see The China Syndrome as the event and Harrisburg as its simulacrum. The essay closes on the general media dream of creating the event by their presence, and on the law that what comes is never the explosion but the implosion. Catastrophe theory is invoked through René Thom (printed "Rene Thom"); the Three Mile Island incident is identified in note 1 as following the film's release.
The shortest essay. Coppola is read as making his film exactly as the Americans made the war, so that the film is the war's extension and apotheosis rather than its critique.
Page 59
Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war—in this sense, it is the best possible testimonial—with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same monstrous candor . . . and the same success. ... The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology.
The ellipses fall within one continuous passage on page 59; the first is Baudrillard's own suspension points.
Coppola is set beside Westmoreland, Philippine villages napalmed to retrace South Vietnam. The absence of critical distance is read not as a failing but as the film's brutal truth, and the verdict reverses the war's outcome.
Page 59
if the Americans (seemingly) lost the other one, they certainly won this one. Apocalypse Now is a global victory. Cinematographic power equal and superior to that of the industrial and military complexes, equal or superior to that of the Pentagon and of governments.
The closing image gives the essay its thesis about the reciprocity of destruction and production: page 60 "the carpet of bombs in the strip of film . . ."
On the Centre Pompidou, read as a machine for the deterrence and liquidation of culture, on the model of the nuclear power station whose real danger is not explosion but the security it radiates. The building is an imperial compression, its culture "ground, twisted, cut up, and pressed into its smallest simple elements" like one of César's crushed automobiles. The governing axiom:
Page 66
One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a monument of cultural deterrence. Within a museal scenario that only serves to keep up the humanist fiction of culture, it is a veritable fashioning of the death of culture that takes place, and it is a veritable cultural mourning for which the masses are joyously gathered.
The masses are then named as the true content and the catastrophic agent. They come not to learn but to manipulate, and their weight and number annihilate the cultural project; the real content of the building is the human flux it processes.
Page 66
To tell the truth, the only content of Beaubourg is the masses themselves, whom the building treats like a converter, like a black box, or, in terms of input-output, just like a refinery handles petroleum products or a flood of unprocessed material.
This issues in the essay's notorious slogan, where the way to destroy Beaubourg is not to attack it but to over-obey its own invitation until the structure bends.
Page 69
Make Beaubourg bend! New motto of a revolutionary order. Useless to set fire to it, useless to contest it. Do it! It is the best way of destroying it. The success of Beaubourg is no longer a mystery: the people go there for that, they throw themselves on this building, whose fragility already breathes catastrophe, with the single goal of making it bend.
The masses' response to mental deterrence is a physical counter-deterrence, a hypersimulation that overshoots the system's own terms.
Page 69
To the challenge of mass acculturation to a sterilized culture, the masses respond with a destructive irruption, which is prolonged in a brutal manipulation. To mental deterrence the masses respond with a direct physical deterrence. It is their own challenge.
Because everything is foreseen, Beaubourg cannot even burn; explosion is no longer the available form of its destruction. This pivots into the book's fullest statement of the difference between two violences, which the second half of the volume relies on throughout. Implosion is first defined in a single compressed line.
Page 70
Panic in slow motion, no external variable. It is the violence internal to a saturated ensemble. Implosion.
The two violences are then set against each other: the determined, dialectical, cathartic explosive violence of expanding systems, against the unintelligible implosive violence of saturated, retracting ones.
Page 71
We were a culture of liberating violence (rationality). Whether it be that of capital, of the liberation of productive forces, of the irreversible extension of the field of reason and of the field of value ... whether it be that of the revolution, which anticipates the future forms of the social and of the energy of the social—the schema is the same: that of an expanding sphere, whether through slow or violent phases, that of a liberated energy—the imaginary of radiation.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 71.
Bataille's concepts of loss and expenditure are named as the last explosive and radiating myth of our philosophy, now drained of meaning; May 1968 is read as the first implosive episode, misread by its own participants as a deeper entry into the social. The notes warn against taking implosion as a negative or regressive process.
The hypermarket as the model of a future controlled socialization. Objects there are no longer commodities or decipherable signs but tests that interrogate the consumer, who answers in terms already included in the question. The structural claim is that the hypermarket precedes and produces the metropolitan area rather than sitting inside a city.
Page 77
The hypermarket as nucleus. The city, even a modern one, no longer absorbs it. It is the hypermarket that establishes an orbit along which suburbanizaiton moves. It functions as an implant for the new aggregates, as the university or even the factory sometimes also does.
"Suburbanizaiton" so spelled in the source; preserved as printed (see apparatus).
These hyperspecialized nuclei (hypermarket, automated factory, new university) lose the finality proper to them and become poles of simulation radiating deterrence, of which the nuclear power station is the absolute model. The essay closes by tying this back to May 1968, located not at the Sorbonne but at the satellized, deterritorialized campus.
Page 78
May 1968 begins at Nanterre, and not at the Sorbonne, that is to say in a place where, for the first time in France, the hyperfunctionalization "extra muros" of a place of learning is equivalent to deterritorialization, to disaffection, to the loss of the function and of the finality of knowledge in a programmed neofunctional whole. There, a new, original violence was born in response to the orbital satellization of a model (knowledge, culture) whose referential is lost.
The thesis essay on information. It opens on the formula that organizes everything after it, then lays out three hypotheses about the relation of information to meaning, of which the third (against all received opinion) is the one Baudrillard holds.
Page 79
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
The first hypothesis is that information produces meaning but cannot keep up with its loss (the ideology of free speech and antimedia); the second, Shannon's, that information is a functional code with nothing to do with signification (Monod's Chance and Necessity is named); the third, which Baudrillard takes, is that information is directly destructive of meaning.
Page 80
Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social.
It does so for two reasons: it exhausts itself in staging communication ("You are concerned, you are the event"), and behind that staging it pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social toward total entropy. McLuhan's formula is then pushed past where its author took it: not only the message imploding in the medium, but the medium itself imploding in the real.
Page 82
that is—and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit—there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.
The consequence is stated flatly: there are no more media in the literal sense, and the catastrophe of meaning is real but only catastrophic relative to a linear idealism of accumulation. Past the horizon of meaning Baudrillard sets fascination, and past the horizon of the social, the masses.
Page 83
Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social.
The essay's standing contribution is its reading of the masses' silence as a strategy rather than a passivity: the refusal of meaning, hyperconformist simulation that reflects meaning like a mirror without absorbing it, which is the only resistance adequate to a system whose imperative is the overproduction of meaning.
Page 84
What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance)—the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge.
Baudrillard cross-references his own earlier "Requiem for the Media" and revises it: the absence of response is no longer a strategy of power but a counterstrategy of the masses. Note 1 poses the cybernetic version, INFORMATION = ENTROPY, and warns that universalizing struggles through information is a mortal trap, the black box that neutralized the virulence of May 1968.
Advertising as the form into which all expression is absorbed. Not advertising as such but the form of advertising, in which all contents are annulled at the moment they become translatable into one another.
Page 87
Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possiblity of metamorphosis, has power over all the others.
The genealogy runs advertising and propaganda from the October Revolution and the 1929 crash to their convergence, ending in a society where the economic and the political are no longer distinct and the social itself turns into advertising. Then the reversal: advertising's interest now lies in its disappearance, overtaken by the more functional language of computer science, and Philip K. Dick's papula (the transistorized advertising implant) is named as the anticipatory figure. The commodity/publicity relation is inverted.
Page 90
If at a given moment, the commodity was its own publicity (there was no other) today publicity has become its own commodity.
Las Vegas is the type-case, where advertising is read not as decoration on the walls but as their effacement.
Page 92
When one sees Las Vegas rise whole from the desert in the radiance of advertising at dusk, and return to the desert when dawn breaks, one sees that advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls, it is what effaces the walls, effaces the streets, the facades, and all the architecture, effaces any support and any depth, and that it is this liquidation, this reabsorption of everything into the surface ... that plunges us into this stupefied, hyperreal euphoria.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 92. Virilio's "aesthetic of disappearance" is named on page 91.
A subsection of the essay is set under an epigraph carried verbatim from Bouttes, which Baudrillard then takes up directly.
Page 91 · epigraph
Language allows itself to be dragged along by its double, and joins the best to the worst for a phantom of rationality whose formula is "Everyone must believe in it." Such is the message of what unites us.
J. L. Bouttes, Le destructeur d'intensités (The Destroyer of Intensities), as Baudrillard epigraphs it.
The close reads advertising on the analogy of pornography (both consumed in their mockery, "without any faith, with the same tired obscenity"), and the Forum des Halles, like Beaubourg, as a supergadget proving that our social monumentality has become advertising. The final image entombs the commodity.
Page 93
The commodity is buried, like information is in archives, like archives are in bunkers, like missiles are in atomic silos.
On cloning, organized around the figure of the double. The double is an imaginary figure whose power rests on its immateriality; cloning tries to realize it in flesh, converting the double from an exchange of death with the Other into the eternity of the Same. The reported case opens the essay.
Page 95
In the United States, a child was born a few months ago like a geranium: from cuttings. The first clone child (the lineage of an individual via vegetal multiplication). The first born from a single cell of a single individual, his "father," the sole progenitor, of which he would be the exact replica, the perfect twin, the double.
Footnoted to D. Rorvik, In His Image: The Copy of a Man (Paris: Grasset, 1978).
The structural claim is that cloning abolishes not only the parents but the act of procreation, replacing them with the code.
Page 96
Whereas cloning radically abolishe's the Mother, but also the Father, the intertwining of their genes, the imbrication of their differences, but above all the joint act that is procreation. ... The Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code. No more mother, no more father: a matrix.
"Abolishe's" so printed; preserved as printed. The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 96.
The subject is abolished with them, the mirror stage parodied; the clone belongs to none of the older categories.
Page 97
Neither child, nor twin, nor narcissistic reflection, the clone is the materialization of the double by genetic means, that is to say the abolition of all alterity and of any imaginary.
The fragment-and-whole logic is shared with the hologram and the earthworm and, decisively, with cancer; the DNA molecule is named the prosthesis par excellence. A long quotation from the geneticist Jacquard is carried as the voice of the code itself.
Page 99
My genetic patrimony was fixed once and for all when a certain spermatozoa encountered a certain ovum. This heritage contains the recipe for all the biochemical processes that realized me and ensure my functioning. A copy of this recipe is inscribed in each of the dozens of millions of cells that constitute me today. Each of these cells knows how to manufacture me; before being a cell of my liver or of my blood, it is a cell of me. It is thus theoretically possible to manufacture an individual identical to me starting with one of these cells.
Professor A. Jacquard, quoted by Baudrillard.
Walter Benjamin is the pivot: what serial reproduction loses is the aura, and the account now applies at the level of individuals, not only messages.
Page 99
This is what happens to us with cloning, no longer only at the level of messages, but at the level of individuals. ... There is a precession of reproduction over production, a precession of the genetic model over all possible bodies.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 99.
The prostheses have gone from external and exotechnical to internalized and esotechnical: page 100 "We are in the age of soft technologies—genetic and mental software." The notes register the ambiguity (the clonic twin will in fact never be identical, demonstrating the impossibility of mastering a process simply by mastering the code), and the translator notes that a version with a different ending appeared as "The Hell of the Same" in The Transparency of Evil.
The hologram as the materialized double and the end of the imaginary. The fantasy of seizing the real live runs from Narcissus onward; with the hologram one passes through one's own spectral body, and the hand passed through it is itself rendered unreal. The hologram is set against trompe l'oeil unfavorably: trompe l'oeil seduces by allusion and ellipsis, the hologram fascinates by passing to the side of the double. Mach supplies the criterion.
Page 106
If, according to Mach, the universe is that of which there is no double, no equivalent in the mirror, then with the hologram we are already virtually in another universe: which is nothing but the mirrored equivalent of this one.
The verdict on the hologram itself:
Page 106
The hologram, perfect image and end of the imaginary. Or rather, it is no longer an image at all—the real medium is the laser, concentrated light, quintessentialized, which is no longer a visible or reflexive light, but an abstract light of simulation.
The deeper argument concerns dimensionality: adding a dimension does not bring us closer to the real but renders us sensitive to a hidden further dimension, so that the perfection of the simulacrum makes the escape of everything from representation more evident. The billiard-ball paradox (one ball touches the other before being touched) is used to deny both simultaneity in time and similitude in figures.
Page 108
Nothing resembles itself, and holographic reproduction, like all fantasies of the exact synthesis or resurrection of the real (this also goes for scientific experimentation), is already no longer real, is already hyperreal. It thus never has reproductive (truth) value, but always already simulation value. Not an exact, but a transgressive truth, that is to say already on the other side of the truth.
On J. G. Ballard's Crash. This essay carries the highest density of primary quotation in the book: long passages of Ballard's novel are reproduced verbatim and cited to the novel's own pages (the translation gives them as page 134, pages 124–25, page 143, page 151, page 156, pages 189–90). One representative Ballard passage is carried below; the rest of this entry gathers Baudrillard's analytical formulations, which are what the brief is built to deliver. The argument opposes two accounts of technology: the classical extension-of-the-body view ("From Marx to McLuhan"), and Ballard's, in which technology is grasped only in the accident.
Page 112
Technology is never grasped except in the (automobile) accident, that is to say in the violence done to technology itself and in the violence done to the body. It is the same: any shock, any blow, any impact, all the metallurgy of the accident can be read in the semiurgy of the body—neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, wounds that are so many new sexual organs opened on the body.
The reading insists there is no affect, psychology, libido, or death drive beneath this, and refuses the perverse reading the novel's own author proposes.
Page 112
No affect behind all that, no psychology, no flux or desire, no libido or death drive. Naturally, death is implicated in an unlimited exploration of the possible violence done to the body, but this is never, as in sadism or masochism, with an express and perverse aim of violence, a distortion of meaning and of sex.
A representative Ballard passage, the one Baudrillard's reading turns on, is carried verbatim in the source:
Page 114
As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neon sign over the portico flared across these grainy photographs of appalling injuries: the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles, the partial mamoplasties ... nipples sectioned by manufacturers' dashboard medallions ... These unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules, units in a new currency of pain and desire.
J. G. Ballard, Crash, page 134, as quoted on page 114 of Simulacra and Simulation. "Mamoplasties" so printed; the ellipses elide within the single quoted passage.
Kafka's machine in In the Penal Colony is set against Ballard's: Kafka's is still a signifying, puritan machine, the body the support of a textual inscription; Ballard's technology is denuded of meaning.
Page 113
Thus one, Kafka's machine, is still puritan, repressive, "a signifying machine" Deleuze would say, whereas the technology in Crash is shining, seductive, or dull and innocent. Seductive because denuded of meaning, and because it is the simple mirror of torn-up bodies.
The valedictory placement comes at the essay's close: no moral gaze surfaces, which Baudrillard names hypercriticism, and the book is positioned as the inaugural novel of the simulation universe.
Page 119
Crash is hypercriticism (there also in contrast to its author who, in the introduction, speaks of the "warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape"). Few books, few films reach this resolution of all finality or critical negativity, this dull splendor of banality or of violence.
Page 119
After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the one with which we will all now be concerned—a symbolic universe, but one which, through a sort of reversal of the mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, car, erotic machinery), appears as if traversed by an intense force of initiation.
The essay that states the three orders of simulacra outright (carried in the spine above, page 121) and assigns each its imaginary: Utopia to the first, science fiction to the second, and to the third order perhaps no imaginary at all. Classical science fiction is read as an unbounded projection of the world of production, qualitatively the same as it. The reversal Baudrillard proposes as the genre's future is that it can no longer make the unreal from the real.
Page 124
It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real. The process will, rather, be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations, models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life.
Philip K. Dick is the first exemplar (his stories are "antigravitational," always already in the other world); Ballard's Crash is the fuller one, "the current model of this science fiction that is no longer one." The crowning case is the East German simulacra factories, science fiction emerging in its crude state from the operational world.
Page 125
What is fascinating here is not the opposition between real factories and fake factories, but on the contrary the lack of distinction between the two, the fact that all the rest of production has no greater referent or deeper finality than this "simulacra!" business. It is this hyperreal indifference that constitutes the real "science-fictional" quality of this episode.
"Simulacra!" so printed; preserved as printed. Earlier in the passage: factories that reemploy the unemployed but produce nothing, one of which "really" failed and put its own unemployed out of work a second time.
The essay closes by mapping the three orders onto three regimes of the machine, with the computer noted as capable of functioning as a mere second-order super-robot (HAL in 2001, Shalmaneser in Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar).
Page 127
Between the operatic (the theatrical status of theatrical and fantastical machinery, the "grand opera" of technique) that corresponds to the first order, the operative (the industrial, productive status, productive of power and energy) that corresponds to the second order, and the operational (the cybernetic, aleatory, uncertain status of "metatechnique") that corresponds to the third order, all interference can still be produced today at the level of science fiction. But only the last order can still truly interest us.
The longest essay after the first, pushing the book's logic past the human. It opens on the Inquisition, then reads experimentation as a contemporary torture seeking the same confession (that bestiality resolves into physiological mechanisms). The evidentiary core is reportage from a 1973 Lyons veterinary convention (cited to Science and the Future, July 1973): rabbits turned coprophagous and sterile, hysterical chickens, cannibalism in pigs, calves licking themselves to death, animals somatizing cancers, ulcers, infarctions. The author's conclusion that the remedy is space yields Baudrillard's thesis about why psychic life is granted at all.
Page 132
The worker also needs responsibility, self-management in order to better respond to the imperative of production. Everyone needs a psychic life to adapt. There is no other reason for the arrival of the psychic life, conscious or unconscious. ... Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 132.
Animals were demoted as humanism advanced, on a logic Baudrillard places parallel to racism.
Page 133
this abyss that separates them follows domestication, just as true racism follows slavery.
The crux is the silence of animals, read not as a deficiency but as what indicts the regime of forced speech (the mad, children, the savage have all been made to speak; Foucault is in the background, Lévi-Strauss named).
Page 137
They, the animals, do not speak. In a universe of increasing speech, of the constraint to confess and to speak, only they remain mute, and for this reason they seem to retreat far from us, behind the horizon of truth. But it is what makes us intimate with them. ... In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 137.
Deleuze's "becoming-animal" is criticized directly, in a parenthesis, as taking the territorial being for a model of its opposite.
Page 137
as a model for the absolute deterritorialization of desire in Deleuze's "becoming-animal" (paradoxical: to take the animal as a model of deterritorialization when he is the territorial being par excellence).
The positive claim is the territory, defined against space, instinct, need, and the unconscious: a completed, reversible cycle in which there is no subject and no death because everything is metamorphosed.
Page 139
The territory is the site of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges—without a subject, but without exception: animal and vegetal cycle, cycle of goods and wealth, cycle of parentage and the species, cycle of women and ritual—there is no subject and everything is exchanged. The obligations are absolute therein—total reversibility—but no one knows death there, since all is metamorphosed.
From which the essay's most-cited formulation follows directly:
Page 139
Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory. At once territories and metamorphoses have been taken from them—the unconscious is the individual structure of mourning in which this loss is incessantly, hopelessly replayed—animals are the nostalgia for it.
The essay closes by returning the silence as an unanswered question, and refusing to let the animals answer it: page 140 "But the animals do not ask questions. They are silent." The long note 3 attacks the whole "liberatory phantasmagoria" of nomadic desire, arguing that free virgin nature never existed except in the imaginary of the dominant order, and that the demand for liberty only ever goes further in the system's own direction.
A formal essay on what is left over. It opens by stating, then refusing, the equation it is named for.
Page 143
When everything is taken away, nothing is left.
This is false.
The equation of everything and nothing, the subtraction of the remainder, is totally false.
The remainder has no autonomous reality and, decisively, no opposing term: the structure is not a distinctive opposition but a reversible one in which one never knows which is the remainder of the other.
Page 143
What is strange is precisely that there is no opposing term in a binary opposition: one can say the right/the left, the same/the other, the majority/the minority, the crazy/the normal, etc.—but the remainder/ ? Nothing on the other side of the slash.
Applied to the social, the inversion is exact: as the social eliminates its residue it becomes residual itself.
Page 144
As the social in its progression eliminates all the residue, it itself becomes residual. In designating residual categories as "Society," the social designates itself as a remainder.
A second register: the remainder, like sex and death, makes you laugh, because one laughs only at reversibility, and the remainder runs after its own slash "like Peter Schlemihl after his shadow." The contemporary inversion is then named, with psychoanalysis as the first theorization of residues.
Page 145
Today, the remainder has become the weighty term. It is on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. ... Psychoanalysis itself is the first great theorization of residues (lapses, dreams, etc.).
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 145.
The genuinely new situation, Baudrillard insists, is not the promotion of the remainder but the instability that puts it everywhere and so annuls it, stated in a litany: page 146 birth is residual if not symbolically revisited through initiation, death residual if not resolved in mourning, value residual if not reabsorbed in the cycle of exchanges, sexuality residual once it becomes the production of sexual relations. Note 1 develops the shadow and the mirror-image (Schlemihl, The Student of Prague, Andersen's The Shadow) and closes on the objet petit a.
The first of two essays on the university, and the more sweepingly political. The university is in ruins, but so is power; the May 1968 effect (nonknowledge turned against power) cannot recur because power has now likewise dispossessed itself. A strike has the opposite of its intended effect, regenerating the fiction of a possible university. Here the Left is given its structural role.
Page 150
It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay seige to them one day.
The only subversive option is to accelerate the rotting, which is what May 1968 did: the students did not defend the Sorbonne but brandished its cadaver.
Page 151
They were not there to save the Sorbonne, but to brandish its cadaver in the face of the others, just as black people in Watts and in Detroit brandished the ruins of their neighborhoods to which they had themselves set fire.
That gesture cannot be repeated; the ruins themselves are now defunct. page 151 "We have mourned Nanterre for seven years. 1968 is dead." The essay's nearest thing to a positive program follows, and it is explicitly without hope as a value.
Page 152
Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight—without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination.
The spectacle of capital staging its own decomposition is set explicitly above the situationists' spectacle of the commodity: page 152 "This spectacle, which is at once that of the death throes and the apogee of capital, surpasses by far that of the commodity described by the situationists."
The second university essay, narrower and sharper. It is set under a Brecht epigraph.
Page 155 · epigraph
Where nothing is in its place, lies disorder
Where in the desired place there is nothing, lies order
Brecht, as Baudrillard epigraphs it.
The administrators' panic at awarding diplomas without a work counterpart is read not as fear of subversion but of value functioning on its own form, devalorized yet still circulating.
Page 155
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 ... Terror of value without equivalence.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 155.
The 1968 reversal is stated as self-indictment: in giving diplomas to everybody, the Left inaugurated exactly the pure form of value the system wants.
Page 156
It is also why we were trapped, we trapped ourselves, after 1968, into giving diplomas to everybody. Subversion? Not at all. Once again, we were the promoters of the advanced form, of the pure form of value: diplomas without work. The system does not want any more diplomas, but it wants that—operational values in the void—and we were the ones who inaugurated it, with the illusion of doing the opposite.
The essay grants a startling line on why authoritarian methods still have good days: they restore a violence the simulacrum has drained away.
Page 156
This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods, because they revive something of the violence necessary to life—whether suffered or inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good!
The pedagogical scene continues only as a phantom compromise, and this, unlike value and work, has no end: page 158 "Because there is an end to value and to work, there is none to the simulacrum of value and of work." Note 1 closes on the strike taking on the qualities of work itself, and on Nietzsche: "One must push what is collapsing."
The closing essay, written in the first person, the only place Baudrillard declares a position in his own name. Today's nihilism, he argues, is one of transparency, indissolubly the nihilism of the system and of the theory that analyzes it. Where Nietzsche could still announce the death of God, before the simulated transparency of things there is no longer a God to recognize his own.
Page 159
But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.
A three-stage history is given: Romanticism (with the Revolution) destroys the order of appearances; Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism destroy the order of meaning; the first is aesthetic (dandyism), the second political and metaphysical (terrorism). The nihilism of transparency is neither. The declaration is then made outright, and twice.
Page 160
I am a nihilist.
I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning ... that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 160.
Analysis is not exempt from the freezing-over it describes, and the diagnosis lands on an aphorism and a refrain from Nietzsche's desert.
Page 161
He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.
Page 161
One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows.
The book's running terms are gathered into a final cadence, and the diagnosis settles on a mood traced through Adorno and Benjamin.
Page 162
It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us. ... Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic.
The ellipsis falls within one continuous passage on page 162.
Against the system's hegemony, only one thing checks it in broad daylight, and Baudrillard names his own position as terrorism in theory, immediately qualifying it as Utopian because the system answers active nihilism with its own nihilism of neutralization.
Page 163
If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.
The dead of Bologna and the Munich Oktoberfest are annulled by indifference, making terrorism the involuntary accomplice of the system: page 164 "We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences)." The last reversal closes the book: meaning is mortal and its death no loss, but appearances are immortal and invulnerable. The final sentence:
Page 164
This is where seduction begins.
Pointing past this book to De la séduction (1979). Note 1 sketches a typology of cultures by their imaginary of origin and of end, placing "our culture" as the nihilistic one having an imaginary only of the end, and naming as "coming" the aleatory culture with no imaginary of either.
The operative vocabulary, each term with the page where it receives its canonical statement, so it can be retrieved at speed. Several of these are not coined here but receive their definitive formulation in this book.
Verified against the Michigan 1994 print edition. The items below are genuine features of that print text, preserved as printed in the body above and recorded so a later researcher does not propagate the slips. (Several apparent anomalies turned up only in an earlier re-typeset digital file, not in the print edition, and are noted as such at the end; they are not Baudrillard's, nor the translation's.)
Figures and texts Baudrillard cites or leans on, gathered so the brief can be footnoted without returning to the source.
Jean Baudrillard. "L'ordre des simulacres." In L'échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. — Source of the three-order periodization (essay I, note 1; restated in essay XIII).
J. G. Ballard. Crash. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. — The sole sustained primary object of essay XII; quoted to its own pages.
D. Rorvik. In His Image: The Copy of a Man. Paris: Grasset, 1978. — The reported clone-child case (essay X).
Walter Benjamin. On the work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility. — The pivot of essay X (aura, the lost original).
Pierre Bourdieu. — Quoted and then turned against in "Political Incantation" on the relation of force that dissimulates itself (page 14).
Marshall Sahlins. — The market, not nature, secretes penury (Disneyland section, page 13).
L. (Louis) Marin. Utopiques, jeux d'espace. — Credited with the ideological reading of Disneyland (page 12).
Marshall McLuhan. "The medium is the message." — Invoked across essays I, III, IV, and VIII, and pushed past its author in essay VIII.
Claude Shannon; Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity. — The information-as-code hypothesis (essay VIII, page 80).
Pierre Clastres; Jaulin; Castaneda. — Witnesses to antiethnology ("Ramses," page 7).
Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir). — Essay I, "The End of the Panopticon" (page 29); the making-speak of madness, children, sex (essay XIV).
Gilles Deleuze; Lyotard. — Desire and capital (essay I); "becoming-animal," criticized in essay XIV (page 137).
Georges Bataille. — Loss and expenditure (essay VI); the squandering of excess (essay XV).
Theodor Adorno; Walter Benjamin. — The melancholy attached to the system itself (essay XVIII, page 162).
Friedrich Nietzsche. "One must push what is collapsing" (essay XVII, note 1); the great nihilist "before the Eternal" (essay XVIII).
Also named in passing: Émile Littré (the simulated illness, page 3); A. Jacquard (the genetic-patrimony passage, page 99); Ernst Mach (the universe without a double, page 106); René Thom, printed "Rene Thom" (catastrophe theory, essay IV); J. L. Bouttes, Le destructeur d'intensités (epigraph, essay IX); Yves Stourdze (the "asyntactic nebula," essay IX); Paul Virilio (the "aesthetic of disappearance," page 91); Philip K. Dick, Norman Spinrad ("Bug Jack Barron"), John Brunner ("Stand on Zanzibar") in essay XIII.