7 . Ran! ?ose,'lS"nfint unjrl. .

simulacra and Simulations ( ct-lS, gK

&ru

Smulacra anil Simulations

t67

boqr\\

which forms the poetry of rhe map and the charm of the territory, the magic of rhe conccpr and-the charm of the real. This

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the nuth which conceals that there is none.

it

is the

rurh

The simulacrum is

true'

Eccresiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the canographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing wimess to an imperial pride and rorting like a carcass, returning ro rhe substance of rhe soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-ordcr simulacra.r Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, rhe mirror or the concept. Simuladon is no longer thar of a rerritory, a referential being or a substancei.--lt is the generarion by models of a real without origin.or realiry: a hyperreal. The territry longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, ii is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly roning across rhc ' map. [t is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our orvn. The desert of tbe real itself. ln fact, even invened, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with rhe same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference berween them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference

The divine irreference of images

168

Simulacra and Simulations

Simulacra and

Simulatons

169

its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks

them,

t\)

'

i medicine? Dreans alreadY

are.

The alienist, of course, claims rhat "for each form of the mental alienation theie is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely ro be deceived.' This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at n .ort the trurh principle, and to escape the specter

he ecrs crezy is it mistaken: in the sense that lack of distinction is the worst ical reason armed itself with all ntic symPtom.

"lf

uits,

don
anes

_.d

170
of power

Simulacra and Simulatiots

Simulacra and

Simulatots

Itt

the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics. Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capaciry of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capaciry is opposed the dialectical capacity of representetions as a

\onger 9od o[ simuacra an simu\ation, in which there is no ""y from judgement to separte truth. to

fa al

t'it

resurrection, since everything

is

visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could. exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange God, of course. But what f God himself can be simulated, that is ro say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the

its full meaning. There is a!roliferation of myths of origin.andSn' I here of reality; of second-hand truth, obiectiviry and authentrctty' a resurrection experience; lived the of ir .tf"tion of the true, .ir.-ngri"tive where rhe obiect and substance have disappeared. f "" is a panic-stiicken prduction of the real and the referendal,

u"d to be, nostalgia assumes

rr.t.r

N (t

whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulecrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupred circuit without reference or circumference. So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation sterts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this cquivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamenral axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negotion of the sign as ualue, from the sign as reversion and death sentenc# of every reference. Whereas repre5ehtation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum. These would be the successive phases of the image:

This is row ;-";;i.f . the panic of material production. us: a strategy of the ;;"di." pp."r, in the'phase that conceins of ;."1, ;;*.;ind nyf.it."i, *hos. universal double is a strategy
deterrence.

HYPerreal and imaginary

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2 It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3 It masks the bsence of a basic reality. 4 It bears no relation to any realiry whatever: it is its own pure _-_ , f
simulacrum.

sorcery. In the founh, it is,no longer in the order of appearance at all, but bf simulation. f__ The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive tuming point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age

t" the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is zn eailappearance: of the order of male6ce. In the third, it plays at being an eppearance:

it is of the order of

172

Simulacra and Simulations digest of the lized transpo ceals someth ro cover o

Utopies, Ameri To be su blanker "

to

rowards the imagina

in distress.

:'l':":::::';:",e

a rearity

0...;;

N
o)

their real childishness.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither rrue nor false: it is a deterrence machine ser up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infandle degeneration of this imaginary. It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the 'real' world, and to concear the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go rhere ro act rhe child in oider to foster iltuJi,ons of

which is norhing on picturc, needs

faked phanrasms

Political incantation Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effecr concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the_artificial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciatio employed by the CI operation, though th regenerate a moral

Th denunciation of.scandal always pays homage to the law. And water!bo-vdli-iticeded in impsiig ihe id"ea that Watergate utas a scandal - in this sense'it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The j spcific characer of every relation of frce is to dissimulare itself as /, such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; ' understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc') spontaneously furthers the order of capital, as did the Washington Posf journalists. But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force' to mean the truth of. capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the W4sr2ington Post journalists. He does the same iob of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the noral and political consciousnesses of people. All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationaliry, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of moraliry. For they are identical, meaning tbey can be read another way: bef.ore, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none. Wa!rte is not a scandal: this is what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelry; its incomprchensible ferocity; its fundamental immoraliry - these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a li damn about the idea of the conact which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened' thought which seeks to control capital by imposing i rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolurionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. *Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice;
.'

b---,

174
i

Simulacra and Simulatiots

capital exploits us; etc.' - as if capital were linked by a contract to th society it rules. lt is the left which holds out the mirror of ,equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of l ttre social contiact and fulfill its obligation towards the whole of '; sociery (at the same time' no need for revolution: it is enough that d capital eccept the rational formula of exchange). -Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge dorninates. it to socety and should be responded to as such. lt is not a scandal but to be deiounced according t moral and economiiinl-, a challen$'t take u!'acrding to symbolic lw.'' Moebius: sPiralling negativitY

175 Simulations fact - does not check this vertigo of - indeed the objectiviryi.of the of simulation which has nothing to logic lL interpretatio". "t. " Simulacra and

do

.h"r".t.rir.d In.r"* fact -

6y a precession of tbe model, of all models around the the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory f their own, they arise at the.intersecdon of ihe modelsi titgl.-fact may even be engendered- by all the " nticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, models ar once. This the fact with its model (no rnore divergence of of this confusion dialectical polarity, no more 1regaliu9 electriciry more no meaning, or implsion of poles) is whai each time allows for all the possible interpetationr, u.r, the most contradictory - all are-true, in the
sens

*ith a logic of facts and an order of reesons. Simulation is

s N

--

a tr^P set by the system to catch its sandal to regenerative ends. This is of adversaries - L-srmglaiqn. embodied by th character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in ordei to get rid of Nixon - and why not? All hypotheses re possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is on. u.ry we[, nd spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also sPonteneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality -where-positivity and ngtivity .ttgend.r and overlap with one another; where there is no lnger any active or passive. It is by puning an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political realiry can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that po[tical credibiliry can be maintained (including, of course, "obiective' analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle in a system where linear continuiry of any cr or event is envisaged -longer exist, in a 6eld unbinged by no polarity ialectical and , simulation, then-all determination evaporates, every- act terminates i at the end of the cycle having b:neted everyone and been scattercd '.\ directions. \vin allany given bombing in ltaly the work of leftist exrremists; or of Is extr.- right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every
Hence Watergate was only

that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle. The communisti a*ack rhe socialist parry as though they wanted to shatter rhe union of the Left, They sanction the idea that their redcence stems from e more radical political exigency. [n fact, it is because they don't wanr power. But do they not- want it at. this coniuncmre because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or becuse it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left - or do they not vrnt it by de6nition? lflhen Berlinguer declares, "'We .urmt be frightened of seeing rhe communists seize power in ltaly," this means simultaneously:

1 2 3 4 5

That there is nothing to fear, since rhe communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist

That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to Power (for the eason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy. Tht in fact po*"t, genuine )ower' no longcr exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over' But more: I, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing. the communists seize power in ltaly - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since: It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of. seeing the communists seize Power (and with good reason, even for a communist).

mechanism.

terrorist .t.-. it disrepute and to shore up its own failing po\rrer; or again, is ir a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for p"ublc security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof

discourse'that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but thar conveyJ the impossibility of a determinate position

All the above is simulnneously true. This is the secret of

Simulacra

and

Simulations

117

176

Simulacra and Simulotions

erminate Position of discourse' arrY' lt traverses all discourses

StrategY

of the real

wents,
fascist
desire

178

Simulacra and Simulations

Simulacra ad

Simutatior's

\?9

--n

5 N
<)

But rhe difficulty is in proporrion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the res? Go and simulate a rheft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no 'objective" difference: rhe same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the orher. As far as rhe esrablished ordr is concerned, they are always of the order of the real. Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the gleatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the 'rrurh', so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney rensom over to you). In brief, you will unwiningly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every anempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some realiry: that's exactly how the established order is, well before instintions and justice come into play. " In this impossibiliry of isolating the process of simularion musr be //seen the whole trust of an order that can only see and understand /-p t.r-, of some reality, because it can functin nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patenr, will either be punished more lightty (because it has no 'consequences') or b punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing") - but neuer as simulaton, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as thc simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out tbc difference tupon ubich the law is based. The esta-blishcd order can do nothing against it, for he law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-der , sirlim;-bydtie and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distinctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order. This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, it always prefers this assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and

more difficult, for it is pracdcally impossible to isolate the process of simulation;-through the for.e oi ineitia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is at rue (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation ad of power's.impotency): namely, ir is noli impossible to isolate the proess of the real, or to Prove the
real.

Thus all hold ups, hiiacks 'and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in r:he sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode f presenrarion and possible consequences. In brief, where they functin as a set of sigrrs dedicated exclusively to- their ,..o.r.rr.. as signs, and no longer to their 'real' goal at all' But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having,eny Particular contents or aims, bui indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.s), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exerr irself on the i."l att the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which

can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which. can only dominaie a determined world, but which can do nothing about that bout that weightless nebula no

on of the real

Polv--qr i-5-lf

:"i:'i:::i:l'^io'
n).

lL?'

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject rahess and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the realiry of the social' of the gravity of the economy

and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? - the discourse of desire. .Take your desires for reality!' can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferenrial wo of the realiry principle with the desire prin than contagious hyperreality. One remains there power is always right. Hyierrealiry and iimulation are deterrents of every princip-le and of every obiective; they turn against Power this deterrence which is me itself. For, so well oughout its his which w human goal, of every and false, good and evil, in order to ideal dii establish a radical law of qquivalence. 4-nd--excha, the iron law of its p-lrer'-ft-f5_.il-first to practice deterrence, abstraction,

180

Simulacra attd Simulations

Simulacra and Smulations

l8t

;h;,;;;;;se of a p*ttrtr

for

has.already given rise, sociedes without power: this

to

fascism,

referential

in

a societv which cannot

o)
o

182

Smulacra and Simulatons

Simulacra and

Simulations

183

empty stage of _rhe social. li i.s n9 longer a quesrion of the ideology of work - of the traditional ethic that obscures rhe "real" labour process and rhe 'objective" process of exploitation - but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of tlC-TeTffi-oaorver, but ,i i of the .scmario of po.r. Ideology only correspoi', ,o'" betrayal of reali corrspons to a short-circuit of r."iry and ro grs. It is always th iiri of ideological analysi ve process; it is atways a false prol.rn to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum. This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological .. discourses and discourses on ideology, {'or these are all discours of truth - always goodr- even and- especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of imulation. Notes

to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the

3 'lt's the

1 counrerfeit and reproduction imply alweys an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness befort the photographl considered'like a
()

witch's trick - and more generally before-any technical apparatus, which is always a of reproduction, is relared by njamin'ro the -epparatus uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already ior...y at work in the mirror, But how much morc so when this imge can be detached from rhe miiror and be transported, stocked, reprodced at wtll (c. The student of Pragu.e, where the devil detaches the image of the sudent to death by the intermediary of this erefore a kind of black magic, from wn image in the warer, Iike Narcissus,

fceble 'denition' of TV which condemns its sPectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a realiry that was only iust presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblos that rc not supposed to represent anything.' TV as pcrpctual Rorshach test. And furthermorc: 'Thc TV imagc requires each instant rhat we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous pardcipation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile.' 4 *The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of rc sign, when it cntcrs into the third-order simulation - the disrinction beween the medium and the message characterizes instead signification of the second-order. 5 The entire current 'psychological" situation is characterized by this shoncircuir. Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, oncc the initial phase of revolt is passed and once therc has bcen established the principle of the ight to emancipation, seem like the real emancpation of PrentsAnd the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more insistent demand (though still as paradoxicl) for the prcsencc and advicc of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsiblc, i seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly havc absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be.' They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional or material sponraneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledgc. refusal, parody of libidinous original mecbanisms. Demand without content, without referent, unjustified, but for all that all the more severe - naked demand with no possible enswer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, rhe pedagogical or familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a dcmand linked to the empty form of the institution - perverse dernand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable' desire (that is to sey non-referential, un-referential), desire thet has been fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated,' desire capturcd in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Dcprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the *demandr' and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" obiective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble and intcrminable.
Franois Richard: 'students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they arc aware of this and thcy play the game, ironically'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak, you are rhere for rhat.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authoriry
Simulated Oedipus. Hyperdependence (much greater than before) distored

by irony

and

back or this vast technicar "oo",lTl image (the narcissistic mirage of tcchnique, Mcluhaij and rhat rerurns to him, cancelled and distorted - endless reproduction of himself and his s diabolical in its very

:::i"uhm:'#

late. This has hardly

as the operation of the

_ lnr.g. of photo) always had as obiective an opeiation of black imagc. 2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, *i.h reflects the ambiguity of all currer t science. Ii, dir.ourr. conc.-r th. code, that is but it does so still according to _ objectiveness, .sciend6c" ehic 'scientific' s of knowledg rf truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with rhe indeterminable models of the rhird-order.

e irn i tative .

b,

lJ'r'jt ;:'i':i:

184

Simulacra anil Simulatiots

is contested, vili6ed, the greater the need for authoriry as such. They play at Oedipus also, to dcny it all rhe more vehemently, The 'teach;,
he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play ar incesr, malaise, the untouchable, at being a rease in order ro de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who tells the "oedipal' srories, who has the 'analytical" dreams ro satisfy the supposed request of the nalyst, or ro resisr him? In thc same way the sudcnt goes rhrough his oedipal number, his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approches,

dominates

but this isn't desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama

(,)
N

exacerbated and parodied simulation at one and the same ime - es interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same rcasons. The interminable psychoanalysis. There is a whole chapter to add ro the history of rrensference and countertransference: rht of their liquidadon by simularion, of thc impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, thar produces and reproduces rhe unconscious as its instirurional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the exchange of rhe signs of. the unconscious. Just as revolution dics of the exchange of the crirical signs of political economy. This shon-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the

- according to he samc scenario of simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third ordcr. The analysis tren can no longer end, it bccomcs logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppersubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demad an impossiblc-to-brcak-through poinr around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The mcssages of the unconscious have been shon-circuited
becomes unfindable

dinal hyperrealism. To the

functioning of the three ordersmuch more advanced han our own, had reached the point where the vote wes considered as paymenr for a service, after all orher rressive solurions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quonm. d the imaginary, it is going captures and obstructs the

6 Athenian democracy,