Symbolic Exchange and Death - Chapter 2, “Order of the Simulacra”
Symbolic Exchange and Death - Chapter 2, “Order of the Simulacra”
I. Three orders of simulacra:
1. The counterfeit: Renaissance painting, stucco work
2. Production the industrial era: flattening of simulacra into a relationship of equivalence and indifference. The rendering of laborers and their products into indistinct objects
3. Simulacra as a code-governed field of control, not repression. Hyperreality.
II. The Stucco Angel
A. The destructuration of the feudal order by the bourgeois order
1. The feudal order/caste society: strict codes and prohibition, no class mobility. The cruel society. The obligatory sign
2. Birth of the bourgeois order: the emancipation of the sign.
3. The emergence of counterfeiting as an order of simulacra, the sign of modernity
a. The counterfeit does not alter the nature of the original referent but through altering a material whose ‘clarity is dependent upon restriction’ stucco
b. The sign is liberated from the obligatory order; the production of designatory bond that is only obliged to its natural referent
B. Examples of the counterfeit, the forgery
1. Baroque theater
2. Stucco work of the Baroque era
a. The Renaissance man as the demiurge of the new era capable of the transubstantiation of nature into a single substance, to imitate nature
C. The Politics of the Counterfeit
1. Jesuits and the Promethean ambition to imitate nature
2. The invention of a universal substance through which to create infinite combinations of signs
3. Contemporaneous with the post-Reformation demand to create the homogeneity required for a bourgeois political order.
4. The counterfeit works on substance and form and not on relations (the cook from Ardennes); his concrete garden as an attempt to freeze the world as a tableau of social control through a singular, unified substance (concrete)
5. The creation of a closed, universal and indestructible substance of simulacra which aims at political and mental hegemony.
D. The emergence of the automaton
1. The end of the theatrical as the dominant order of simulacra and the rise of the machine as a functional equivalent to man
2. The destiny of the automaton is assume a position parallel to man in the social field, to become an equivalent doubling of man
3. The robot doesn’t question truth wrt the order of representation but is only concerned with mechanical efficiency; first order simulacrum never abolishes the dispute between simulacra and nature
4. Absorbs appearances, liquidates the real
5. The proliferation of the hegemony of machines collapses the law of the obligatory sign and the counterfeit sign.
6. Exit the counterfeit; enter production and reproduction
E. The Industrial Simulacrum
1. Typified by relations of equivalence and indifference; unmoored from the counterfeit relation
2. Production as possibly an intervention in the series of the order of simulacra which creates the infinite series of object-signs
3. Benjamin: reproduction instigates a shift in the process of production by changing its goals and changes the status of the product and producer; the opening of new venues of production (film, etc.)
4. McLuhan and Benjamin: technology not just a productive force but a medium (where Marx is insufficient to describe); “social finality is lost in the series” of reproduction; technique as medium overcome’s Marx’s concept of use-value; how simulacra some to prevail over production
5. The simulacrum of production gives way to the vertiginous delirium experience in the absence of referential reason
F. The Metaphysics of Code
1. The coming to pass of the initial orders of simulacrum involve revealing a deeper operational configuration of the sign, one that is cybernetic in nature.
2. The sign is revealed as reducible to a kind of code with an implicit digital command structure operative at the micro/molecular level
3. The finality of code has been destroyed in this revelation
4. The aura of sign resolves into/reduces to inscription and encoding
5. The resolution of the world into code is the the unification of the world into a homogenous substance.
6. The system of infinite reproduction puts an end to the myth of origin/end, even evacuating the the notion of capitalism’s origin and end.
7. The notion of social control via simulation, programmed determination, and indeterminate mutation supplants a model of control based on finality and prophecy.
8. The singular threat to capital was the question of its own rationality, but it is a question short circuited by a presupposition birthed by capital which is the emergence of code as an indeterminate, aleatory force.
9. Science has depended upon the presupposition of a ‘real’ objectivity to ground and formalize its claims.
G. The Tactile and the Digital
1. Digitality is among us at the most banal levels. The invention of the question-response feedback circuit has imposed itself at the most minuscule levels.
2. Referendum model versus a referential model: every message is presented to us in the form of the question answer model in which the answer(s) is/are determined in advance.
3. Benjamin and the test-function: The relationship the audience maintains with a screen actor is in fact the relationship between the camera person and the actor. Takes comprise a series of tests which are then evaluated in the editing process and redeployed as a completed film. Hence, the audience as critic becomes subject to the test-function.
a. The standardization of modern film could be seen as an effect of this function: the feedback loop creates ready made audiences and equally readymade viewing experiences with respect to the predictability of viewing experience.
4. Everything today is presented via a range or spectrum of selectivity. Experiences register within predetermined ranges. E.g. algorithms
5. Public opinion is the paradigmatic domain of the test-function, hence it is the ultimate hyperreality
6.”There are no longer and signifiers whose signifieds are their function”
7. No longer an issue of true or false but a contrasting range of reactions for every stimuli
8. McLuhan and the tactility media: everywhere the message becomes tactile as a way of probing and sampling. Gone is the distance of visuality; third order simulacra is the paradigm of constant intimate contact with signs.
a. My story about Twitter Ukraine news. Not a confirmation of my desire or an establishing of trust with my preferences, but a means to inventory my predilection to deploy signs algorithmically.
9. “Opinion polls are beyond the social production of opinion.”: Opinion polls comprise an apparatus which merely reproduces a binaristic spectrum of opinions; they do not allow for the formation of opinions.
a. The apparatus of reproduction functions via issuing commands
b. The ideological ghettos of Twitter could be seen as a more sophisticated manifestation of the opinion poll. (Occasional teasing of rival opinions)
10. Polls manipulate the undecidable. They leave no room for ambiguity.
11. Systems of advanced democracies depend up on a very narrow spectrum of debate allowable within the two party system. Democracy maintains equivalence between the two party binary by means of a “minuscule divergence”.
a. The system of voting becomes obligatory in the sense of the only viable register of political opinion but also it becomes aleatory in the sense that the managed domain of debate ensures the main tendency of a relative equivalence between the two parties.
12. The third order simulacra operates beyond the representative and the represented: a pure form of simulation which manifests in an aleatory field of signs and their circulation.
13. The tactical division of capitalist monopoly marks its ultimate stage of development.
14. The field of opposition under advanced capital is defined by couplets of oppositions (USA vs. USSR, etc.)
15. “Binary scansion is affirmed as the metastable or homeostatic form of all contemporary systems.”
16. Baudrillard believed that the Twin Towers signified the end to a competitive paradigm of capitalism and inaugurated a correlative form of capital; they exists as a twin set of prongs which binaristically mediate the metastable flows of monopolistic capital. The doubling (also in Warhol) forecloses upon the order of representation familiar to industrial capital.
H. The Hyperrealism of Simulations
1. The industrial system employed Pavlovian terror to compel obedience. Third-order simulacra comprises a diffraction model of control through a series of mini-tests. The movement from injunction to disjunction.
2. The construction of superlative tactile-kinetic feedback systems of simulation which operate via a constructed ambience or ecology.
3. Operationalizing Artaud’s theater of cruelty but not as an abjection of space but through creating highly responsive thresholds of intensity in the simulation.
5. The collapse of the real into the hyperreal casts the real as a volatile space, an allegory of death as the negation or annhilation of hyperreal intensities.
6. The real becomes radically altered to the point of becoming a pure objectivity stripped of all subjective elements. The hyperreal is is a hallucination of the real.
7. The collapse of meaning and syntax versus a new successive immanence of fragments subject to the gaze of authority
8. Possible modalities of realistic simulation:
a. A detailed construction of the real, serialist of partial objects
b. Abyssal vision: intense duplication of objects to the extent that the real is not reflected, but an infinite refraction of splitting objects
c. Warholian seriality: infinite repetition of the same which annhiliates the reality of the original.
d. Binarity and digitality as the”true” generative formula which encompasses all others. Not pure repetition but a function which reproduces a spectrum of minimal difference.
9. The definition of the real: that which is able to provide an equivalent reproduction. The real is always already that which is reproduced: the hyperreal.
10. Surrealism suggested that everyday could become surreal, it was something that could be elicited from reality. Now reality is always already hyperreal as an aesthetic hallucination of reality.
11. Hyperreal is ‘cool’, cybernetic, radically disaffected vs. the ‘hot’ phantasms of representation under the sign of meaning.
12. Jouissance of the sign (ex. The condensation/training of feeling and affect with respect to media content, memes, games, etc.)
13. “We are in a movie!” Fails to be an appropriate denunciation. The simulation interpenetrates/contaminates the real.
14. The immanence of the code: all signs are magnetized in the hyperreal, hence an ‘unintentional parody’ hovers over everything.
15. Art has no time to have an effect on reality.The cool universe of digitality absorbs a lot meaning.
16. “The simulation principal is greater than the reality principle or the pleasure principle.”
a. What is the relationship between simulation and pleasure? To what extent do we desire the simulation as such?
I. Kool Killer, or The Insurrection of Signs
1. An irruption of graf artists and taggers in urban America in the 70s marked a shift from the city as a site of labor production to one of semiotic production.
2. The new monopoly of semiotic code becomes the fabric of social relations.
3. One of the functions of graf art is to undermine the semiocracy through injections of its own indeterminacy, a retalitation of code
4. Tags as empty signifiers which disrupt ‘full signs’, radical exclusivity from dominant semiotic systems
5. Graffiti opposes advertising, both are rival festivals
6. The city is the body without organs of D&G. The ghetto is part of the territorial order which claims decoded urban landscapes.
7. For Baudrillard, the biggest upshot of graffiti as a form of retaliation is that it revealed that the important area of political construction was the signifier itself, not the deep ideological signified.
8. Thus a split occurs in the manner of revolt akin analogous to the division between organized state-socialist orgs and their autonomist rivals.
9. Graffiti as insurrection, scrambling codes, disheveling maps
10. The act of tagging or writing resembles the polymorphous perversity of the child who ignores the delineations imposed by the order of authority.
11. The murals and frescos familiar to the ethnic enclaves of the city are differentiated from the academic/avant-garde beautification projects but also graffiti trends. Counter-cultural movements but not underground ones.
12. Bau claims that grafitti is ‘trans-ideological’ and ‘trans-artistic’
13. What can grafitti signify? What can it be recuperated as? 2 things:
a. It can be recuperated in the form of popular art.
b. Bourgeois expressions of personal identity.