Let me start out by saying I found this reading to be very difficult to understand and respond to. After reading it over, a second time, I believe I got the gist of some of his main claims. I don’t think that I understand his message well enough to apply it to my own situations and experiences, but I will begin by hopefully attempting to summarize his main arguments.
In the introduction, Baudrillard claims that simulators have started to replace reality. Basically, he explains that there are three different levels: reality, imaginary, and simulation. He uses the analogy of illness to explicate his case. The first level, reality, is when someone actually has an illness. The second level, imaginary, is when someone is faking an illness, and the third level, simulation, is when someone is simulating an illness. When a person is simulating an illness, they begin to take on the actual characteristics of being sick, and this begins to smudge the line between imaginary and reality. The sickness is imagined; the symptoms are real. He states on the second page, “…simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false”, between “real” and “imaginary”.
He argues that with the development of simulations comes the destruction of the ability to recognize the difference between reality and simulation models. “Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction’s charm” (1). He illustrates this point using the model of religions. He argues that the “reality” of God has slowly been replaced with the symbols of God. “It is rather a question of substituting sins of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (2). So according to Baudrillard, religions are creating a “short-circuit” between our conception of God and the symbols we use to represent God. God is no longer what people are worshipping… only the icons.
He finalizes this argument with the idea that the iconoclasts (the people who want to destroy the icons) are the ones who give power to the symbols. They want to destroy them because they believe that they will undermine the existence of God. The iconolaters, however, recognize that they are simply signs, and they are not a true substitution for the real God. But then his argument gets a little hazy. He believes that iconolaters are the “most modern and adventurous” thinkers, because they understand that “it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them” (2).
He supports this notion with his examples of Disneyland and Watergate. This is where his piece becomes difficult to put into context. For Disneyland, I believe that he is arguing that it starts out as a real place people can drive to (just as God starts out as a real creator). But what makes up Disneyland actually distorts reality (like icons distort religion). Once people begin to make connections that Disneyland not a true reflection of our reality, we begin to question what is real in life (in the same way people begin to question the reality of their religion). Eventually, he concludes that these images bear no relation to reality… they are there own simulacrum.
From here, the paper gets fairly hard to follow. I believe that he is making it difficult to follow on purpose. He talks in circles, making it very difficult to follow both his claims and his examples. The language he chooses is very complex, and unnecessarily “byzantine,” as he would put it. It seems as though there are intentional typos. For example, he often replaces the letter ‘m’ for the combination of ‘in’. He repeatedly spells artificial as art)ficial, and unjustified as unjust)fied. It reminds me of a paper that was written in one language, and then translated. Much of the meaning seems to be lost. I still am not even sure if I understand the main concept of his paper… there is a good chance that I misinterpreted everything that he discussed.
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