Simulacra and Simulation

I have started reading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Follow me as I puzzle this out in the examples to follow. First, a definition: essentially, a simulacrum is a copy of something, the original of which does not exist. He uses several examples to get the point across that modern culture is itself a simulacrum.

Further clarification: dissimulation is the pretending that you don’t have what you do have. Simulation is pretending to have something you don’t. Dissimulation is better in that there is at least something real that is being covered up. Simulation requires no such reality to account for the act of simulation. (Incidentally, he moves back and forth between simulacra/simulacrum and simulation. I think they refer to the same concept. I will have to reread to see if there are subtle nuances in meaning for each. There doesn’t seem to be any quibbling over definitions.)

He uses several examples, one of which is Watergate. The simulation is that what happened was a scandal. But it was not a scandal, it was business as usual in politics. What it was good for was for simulating that the system corrects itself, which Baudrillard believes, is not true.

Disneyland is another example. He says that Disneyland is created to make us believe that everything not Disneyland is real. Yet, Disneyland (with its gadgetry and manipulation) is the real, and what we believe to be true, the world outside, is actually the simulation (because the signifiers of the real have already been usurped by the simulation.) In this his room of mirrors Disneyland comprises what he calls a third-order simulation.

In another example, he hypothesizes a fake hold-up. Of course, real law enforcement steps in, and if no one actually gets hurt, you still might get charged with involving the cops “for no reason.” In other words, either you get charged with the real crime, or a crime a crime against the judicial system, but “never as a simulation.” He believes that the function of the real is to cast physical activity into real categories, and has no ability to deal with real signifiers used in artificial ways. Hence, simulacra, which have usurped signifiers of the real, cannot be perceived by reality’s blind spot.