Simulation and Civilization

For Baudrillard, simulation is the substitution of signs of the real for the real. He defines simulation first by explaining what existed before the “hyperreal” society, when reality was identifiable because of a difference between a representation and its referent. Simulation, on the other hand, “substitutes signs of the real for the real,” or as he says later, is a situation where a resemblance of reality destroys its “real” referent by becoming reality itself. This is a short summary of Baudrillard’s explicit definition of simulation, but I wonder if there is another layer to simulation that is implied but not defined. In his example of a simulated sickness, Baudrillard states that “Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms…. If any symptom can be produced, and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat “real” illnesses according to their objective causes….Truth, reference, objective cause have ceased to exist.” If a symptom is real, it is always (objectively) a sign of real sickness. A simulated symptom, then is defined by the anonymity of its origin, or its referent. I wonder, though, if another implication of this question of intent and causality is that the real is produced naturally and organically, where as a simulation originates from intended production. Another example of this unspecified difference between the organic real and the contrived simulation is in Baudrillard’s discussion of Disneyland. “People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.” The differences, then between touching and contactotherapy, and walking and jogging, the modern and the savage are slight: they are the differences between the natural/organic and the contrived.

I also noticed traces of this contrived X in B’d discussion of power. Though power decidedly tries to protect itself from the threat of simulation, B writes that” “power itself ends by becoming a simulation of power (disconnected from its ends and its objectives, and dedicated to the effects of power and mass simulation.)” Power becomes a simulation when it becomes obsessed with strategies positing itself as power. Unlike “true power, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force or a stake” which proved itself as power by demonstrating its natural control, simulated power expressly produces signs of power, such as a Watergate or political figureheads, to position itself as controlling. So the power simulation is a contrived simulation of “true power,” yet the interesting point I think Baudrillard is making is that simulate power becomes true power because it is self perpetuating, self creating. Signs of power, even if they have no real referent, create true power.

So what I am really interested in is the relation of the real or the organic to simulation. In a way, simulation it reminds me of the discussion in snow-crash of a civilization’s emergence from a pre-conscious Sumerian society. In Snow Crash, civilization is the result of an informational virus that caused men to think for themselves, or in other words, to plan, to contrive, and to orchestrate their own languages rules their society. This informational virus is also a self-perpetuating, “recursive informational process,” (258) which pretty similar to the self-perpetuating, recursive notions of power that B discusses. Though Baudrillard defines contemporary civilization as simulated and “hyperreal,” could Snow Crash be implying that civilization itself is a simulation? This simulation is certainly also reflected and exaggerated in the "dystopia" of America and capitalism that is the contemporary setting in Snow Crash.