Realer than Real The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari

REALER THAN REAL 

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari 

Brian Massumi.  

From Copyright no.1, 1987, pp. 90-97. 

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our 

world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of 

postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, 

leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an 

ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality 

whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of 

signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer 

to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to 

other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes 

of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But 

postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground 

them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become 

interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter 

indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic 

slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the 

secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no 

longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic 

surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that 

creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur 

together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. Hidden in the 

images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6 Meaning is 

out of reach and out of sight, but not because it has receded into the distance. 

It is because the code has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are 

signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces 

to a molecular binarism. The generalized digitality of the computerized 

society.7

Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is reaching a 

new transnational level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and 

territorialities and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far 

more mobility and combinatory potential than ever before.26 As always, this 

deterritorialization is effected only in order to make possible a 

reterritorialization on an even grander and more glorious land of worldwide 

capital reborn. But in the meantime, a breach has opened. The challenge is to 

assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point 

of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by 

marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of 

representation once and for all.  

This cannot be done by whining. The work of Baudrillard is one long lament. 

Both linear and dialectical causality no longer function, therefore everything is 

indetermination. The center of meaning is empty, therefore we are satellites in 

lost orbit. We can no longer act like legislator-subjects or be passive like 

slaves, therefore we are sponges. Images are no longer anchored by 

representation, therefore they float weightless in hyperspace. Words are no 

longer univocal, therefore signifiers slip chaotically over each other. A circuit 

has been created between the real and the imaginary, therefore reality has 

imploded into the undecidable proximity of hyperreality. All of these 

statements make sense only if it is assumed that the only conceivable 

alternative to representative order is absolute indetermination, whereas 

indetermination as he speaks of it is in fact only the flipside of order, as 

necessary to it as the fake copy is to the model, and every bit as much a part 

of its system. Baudrillard's framework can only be the result of a nostalgia for 

the old reality so intense that it has difformed his vision of everything outside 

of it. He cannot clearly see that all the things he says have crumbled were 

simulacra all along: simulacra produced by analyzable procedures of simulation 

that were as real as real, or actually realer than real, because they carried the 

real back to its principle of production and in so doing prepared their own 

rebirth in a new regime of simulation. He cannot see becoming, of either 

variety. He cannot see that the simulacrum envelops a proliferating play of 

differences and galactic distances. What Deleuze and Guattari offer, 

particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard's 

failing world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which 

opens a glimmer of possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of 

ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own 

making.  

Post Modernism values

PostModernism- Humour and Pastiche, "it's all surface/copying so let's have fun" - fit's well with capitalism?

Different views of what PM is

The term postmodernism is used in a confusing variety of ways. For some it means anti–modern, while for others it means the revision of modernist premises. (Get/Make chart/list of authors) The seemingly anti–modern stance involves a basic rejection of the tenets of modernism, such as belief in the supremacy of reason, the notion of truth, and the idea that it is possible through the application of reason and truth to create a better society

As an anti–modernist movement, therefore, postmodernism is seen as rejecting those elements that comprise the modernist worldview, including the ideas of truth, self, meaning, and purpose. In this respect, deconstructive postmodernism is seen by some as nihilistic.

Questions are then raised about who constructed these intellectual ideals and what were their motives. Who does modernism serve? When considered in a global context, it should be clear from the history outlined is this essay that modernism serves Western social and political aspirations.

In contrast to the anti–modern position, an alternative understanding seeks to revise Modernism’s premises and traditional concepts, which have become institutionalized, corrupt, and entrenched.

In support of the core values of modernism — liberty, equality, rights, the pursuit of happiness — the aim is to challenge the logic of the oppressive modernist state and undermine the legitimacy of prevailing conservative forces. Sometimes termed constructive postmodernism, it seeks to provide a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions.

It rejects not science and religion as such, but only those scientific approaches and religious practices in which only prescribed data and beliefs are permitted to contribute to the construction of our worldview.

Constructive postmodernism seeks to recover truths and values from various forms of pre–modern thought and practice. This is necessary because the pursuit of modernism, especially in its unfettered capitalistic and consumerist manifestations, is not sustainable and threatens the very survival of human life on the planet.


The postmodern is deliberately elusive as a concept, due in part to its willingness to accept, in contrast to modernism, uncertainty and ambiguity. (**** Levels of type (cant you be clear at a meta linguistic level (if not can be exploited by the elite? (mystification of Modern Art) (and reification used as a door to it) (as here)???l!!!)  (explore metalanguage its place in postmodern) (knowledge-intuition) Whereas Modernism was concerned with reasoned progress and logical conclusions, postmodernism respects ‘process’ and ‘becoming,’ preferring openness, transparency, and the unbounded.

Whitcombe C

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/modpostmod.html

The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as "order" or "disorder" have to do with the effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard (the theorist whose works Sarup describes in his article on postmodernism) equates that stability with the idea of "totality," or a totalized system (think here of Derrida's idea of "totality" as the wholeness or completeness of a system). Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology????, that is, an ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the belief systems that exist.


??? Grand Narrative = Meta Theory?? is this true? doesnt this create confusion? cant this be used by those divisive elements (duakistic constructs) that are exposed by meta theories,  what about their liberating value?
(Meta language is essential for wisdom -?) clarity about levels of  typing (dialectic) - eg (safety openness, union-freedom)
add too with references

Another way of saying this, according to Jean Baudrillard, is that in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings, where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of Baudrillard's "simulacrum" would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations--think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc


Lyotard says (and this is what Sarup spends a lot of time explaining) that the important question for postmodern societies is who decides what knowledge is (and what "noise" is), and who knows what needs to be decided. Such decisions about knowledge don't involve the old modern/humanist qualifications: for example, to assess knowledge as truth (its technical quality), or as goodness or justice (its ethical quality) or as beauty (its aesthetic quality). Rather, Lyotard argues, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein. I won't go into the details of Wittgenstein's ideas of language games; Sarup gives a pretty good explanation of this concept in his article, for those who are interested.

There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most important is about the politics involved--or, more simply, is this movement toward fragmentation, provisionality, performance, and instability something good or something bad? There are various answers to that; in our contemporary society, however, the desire to return to the pre-postmodern era (modern/humanist/Enlightenment thinking) tends to get associated with conservative political, religious, and philosophical groups. In fact, one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious fundamentalism, as a form of resistance to the questioning of the "grand narratives" of religious truth. 

This association between the rejection of postmodernism and conservatism or fundamentalism may explain in part why the postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity tends to attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist theorists have found postmodernism so attractive, as Sarup, Flax, and Butler all point out.

On another level, however, postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individual's control. These alternatives focus on thinking of any and all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial--but nonetheless effective. By discarding "grand narratives" (like the liberation of the entire working class) and focusing on specific local goals (such as improved day care centers for working mothers in your own community), postmodernist politics offers a way to theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends. Hence the motto for postmodern politics might well be "think globally, act locally"--and don't worry about any grand scheme or master plan.

 Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder.


http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html