Research Report: Relating Simulation to Cinema

By Brittany Stern, Borges: An Exploration in Modeling

Work.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations and Simulacra. New York, NY: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983.

Abstract.

In his book “Simulations and Simulacra” Jean Baudrillard explains and historicizes his simulation theory. Baudrillard describes how the contemporary understanding of the world is constructed through a complex system of signs and signifiers. In the process of modernization, which Baudrillard outlines in stages – the Renaissance, industrialization, and the current age of code – signs cease to be obligated to reality. As a result, a sign’s corresponding signified meanings become confused as the signs operate in a world in which polar opposites implode into one continuous meaning.

Description. 

Baudrillard uses exact case study to demonstrate the effect of simulacra and simulation, and their roles in manifested social phenomena. Although Baudrillard attributes the resulted contemporary world to no particular calculating force, but to a general culmination of technologies and economic systems, he contextualizes the evolving simulation that ever increases in its exactness to a reality as a tool for “absolute manipulation” (57). Here it is important to distinguish terms, simulacra proves the condition of the constructed world at any point while simulation indicates a specific moment in simulacra which comes out of the most recent age of code.

Baudrillard defines simulation as a placeholder – an absence. “To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t” (25). The first social problem to which he relates his theory is that of ethnography, for the act of studying a culture inscribes its demise. Baudrillard problematizes ethnography further with the example of the Tasaday, an indigenous tribe transported to an inner jungle so as to keep their culture untouched from the surrounding world. Baudrillard explains that this culture then becomes a simulation as well, for it has been taken out of a natural progression of events – artificially preserved. In this vein, Baudrillard reveals how contemporary conventions operate on a lack of any reality. Moreover, it is precisely an implosion of meanings as the Tasaday (the sign) simultaneously signify an authentic and a preserved culture. In a world operating in removed signs and signifiers these opposites conglomerate into one meaning: “where the distinction between two poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation” (57).

Baudrillard points to the constructed nature of the pervasive ‘reality.’ He speaks of a nostalgia for ‘the real’ that over time disintegrated inside of the changing modes of production. An illustration of this argument is his analysis on the role of museums within contemporary society. The need for museums comes about due to this nostalgia, but it only furthers the construct: “our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not stockpile the past in plain view…we need a visible past, continuum, myth of origin to reassure us to our ends, since ultimately we never believed them” (19). This societal obsession with objects and their ability to mean demonstrates the presence of the simulation as “all materials enter into this sphere of reproduction …the sphere of simulacra and of the code, that the global process of capital is founded” (99).

Commentary.

 Baudrillard uses Jorge Luis Borges “An Exactitude of Science” as an allegory for his concept: he explains that this short story reveals state of the world as a pervasive hyperreality, since the inhabitants of Borges’ world destroy “the real, and not the map…[but it is the] …map that engenders the territory” (2). Territory, meaning the original referent, is given meaning through the process disintegration. Taken in context with Borges works, Baudrillard’s theories work to bring out deeper meanings of the text. Baudrillard theory of simulacra follows the path traced by the cyclical reality mapped inside the magical realist texts. Together, the texts work to elucidate the meanings in the other. Upon specific examination, one looks to Baudrillard’s analysis of the first reality television show “An American Family” featuring The Loud’s. At this moment in the progression of simulacra, the distinctions between reality and simulation blur so that a cycle emerges, one bleeding into and becoming the other. Baudrillard explains the process in which television informs reality just as ‘reality’ informs the television.

    For the purposes of creating a cinematic event, this critique of simulated realities proves elemental – and a critique that positions simulation in context with its ramifications on society is critical. Cinema embodies these qualities of a confused, imploded reality as a mechanism that lives in this limbo. Not to say that all art works, whose nature is to be representative of another reality fall into Baudrillard’s schema – for magical realists specifically encompass these qualities of an imploded reality within their texts.

The Loud’s begin to break down distinctions between reality and simulacra via a certain kind of representation by a specific means. Baudrillard describes this as the last order of simulacra called simulation, in which humans begin to equate hyperreality (signs based on code) with reality: “the machine is man’s equivalent, and annexes him to itself in the unity of its operation process” (93). This is precisely the story of the “Exactitude of Science,” as the map replaces the land. But Borges takes his fiction a step further. Once The Loud’s are viewed as equivalents it is not only the distinction between reality and simulacra that are blurred, but between subject and audience. Similarly, Borges refuses the narrative as defining ‘character,’ ‘narrator,’ and ‘reader.’ Borges creates an infinity within a short story that works to collapse reality in upon itself; in this vein, the beginning collapses into the end – a perfect literary portrayal of Baudrillard’s theory of the implosion of poles. In the act of creating this cycle Borges thrusts his reader into the dimension of his narrative, as reader becomes implicit in the generated cycle. This concept exactly reflects a societal reality when taken in context with Baudrillard’s analysis of The Loud’s.

    Throughout his theory of simulacra Baudrillard’s weaves in the concept of modeling: models as the form from which simulacra emanates. Baudrillard states that “Simulation is the generation by models of a real with out origin or reality: a hyperreal” (2). The best example for this theory lies in the Borges short story. In “An Exactitude of Science” the cartographers build a map so detailed that it becomes as large as the earth itself, and covers it. The purpose of models, (in this example a map) is a process of “remaking … only to render it [the world] more intelligible” (91). In fact Baudrillard explains this venture into a reductive world as a process in which the societal momentum is such that it seeks to turn human beings into models of themselves. We enter:

A truth which his no longer the reflexive truth of the mirror, nor the perspective truth of the panoptic system and of the gaze, but the manipulative truth of the test which probes and interrogates, of the laser which touches and then pierces, of the computer cards which retain your punched out sequences, of the genetic code which regulates your combinations, of cells which inform your sensory universe. (52)

In reality these new understandings are nothing more than ways to turn humanity into a kind of document or model.

    As far as the limitations of this text, Baudrillard’s theories encompass a kind of detail that proves impossible to account for in the simulation we endeavor to create. Much of this particular text deals with the historical states of simulacra and its evolution within society. Baudrillard contextualizes his theory with concrete examples in order to make it relevant to society. For our purposes, the ideas that we present may remain abstracted inside the realm of cinema. For Baudrillard “The age of simulation begins with the liquidation of referentials - by their artificial resurrection of systems and signs” (4). Theories like this one present a problem, for Baudrillard makes them tangible through case study application. Without this contextualization his theories will seem abstract and unrelatable.

Further Research.

This interview with Paul Virilio touches on many of the issues of cinema that are problematized when put into context with Baudrillard’s theories.

This site is created by a UCSB student studying Baudrillard; it is their interpretation of his theories in conversation with the website form.

This article about the magical realism in Borges texts, and demonstrates the threads of Baudrillard’s within his work.