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signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer 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