Baudrillard: The balance of terror is the terror of balance

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

1 The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory-precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. . . . The desert of the real itself.

2 Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. . . . The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational.

It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. . . . A hyperreal henceforth shel- // tered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

3 Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality interact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” . . . For 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. . . . As to psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for “Real” more real than the other—but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious?

6 Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.

The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.

7 Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.

Science loses precious capital there, but the object will be safe, lost to science, but intact in its “virginity.” It is not a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous), but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. The Tasaday, frozen in their natural element, will provide a perfect alibi, an eternal guarantee.

8 . . . again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology.

. . . like a dimension of life. Thus ethnology, rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science, will today, liberated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invisible, like an omnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum.

9 It is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth, according to an unconscious reversion, which only gives a dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation.

pretext of saving the original . . . It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial.

the West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight and far from the light of day.

10 Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.

11 their reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with “reality” through a complete circumvolution.

Repatriating it is nothing but a supplementary subterfuge, acting as if nothing had happened and indulging in retrospective hallucination.

12 Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.

14 (effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the limits of the artificial perimeter) . . . Same operation, tending to regenerate through a scandal a moral and political principle, through the imaginary, a sinking reality principle.

15 Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality—that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the enlightenment up to Communism. . . . It is “enlightened” thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it.

symbolic law

16 It is through the arbitrary cessation of this spiraling causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is through the simulation of a narrow, conventional field of perspective in which the premises and the consequences of an act or of an event can be calculated, that a political credibility can be maintained (and of course “objective” analysis, the struggle, etc.). If one envisions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, all determination evaporates, every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions.

Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact—the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event.

17 This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical po0larity, no more negative electricity, implosion of antagonist poles), is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory—all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalized cycle.

It is the secret of a discourse that is no longer simply ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determined position of power, the impossibility of a determined discursive position. And this logic is neither that of one party nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.

19 To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity, and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and of its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and of its already dead.

20 you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real—that is, to the established order itself, well before institutions and justice come into play.

but never as simulation since it is precisely as such // that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power. . . . Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. . . . beyond rational distinctions upon which the whole of the social and power depend. Thus, lacking the real, it is there that we must aim at order.

This is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. In short, where they function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer at all to their “real” end. But this does not make them harmless. On the contrary it is as hyperreal events, no longer with a specific content or end, but indefinitely refracted by each other (just like so called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.), . . .

22 Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective, they turn against power the deterrent that it used so well for such a long time. Because in the end, throughout its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value, all real equivalence of production and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Well, today it is this same logic that is even more set against capital. And as soon as it wishes to combat this disastrous spiral by secreting a last glimmer of reality, on which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation.

For power, it is a question of life and death. But it is too late.

23 Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. . . . hallucinatory resemblance

demand for signs of power

The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning.

24 political oppositions, the “Left,” critical discourse, etc.—a simulacral contrast through which power attempts to break the vicious circle of its nonexistence, of its fundamental irresponsibility, of its “suspension.” Power floats like money, like language, like theory. Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. If they become weak for one reason or another, power has no other recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them.

that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the negative. End of revolutionary praxis, end of the dialectic.

25 to be taken seriously enough, to constitute a mortal enough danger to the group to be one day relieved of his duties, denounced, and liquidated. Ford doesn’t even have this opportunity anymore: a simulacrum of an already dead power, he can only accumulate against himself the signs of reversion through murder—in fact, he is immunized by his impotence, which infuriates him.

26 is nothing but the simulacrum of himself, and only that gives him the power and the quality to govern. . . . This myth does nothing but translate the persistence . . . of the necessity of the king’s sacrificial death.

As is the fact that power is in essence no longer present except to conceal that there is no more power. A simulation that can last indefinitely, because, as distinct from “true” power—which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake—it is nothing but the object of a social demand, and thus as the object of the law of supply and demand, it is no longer subject to violence and death. Completely purged of a political dimension, it, like any other commodity, is dependent on mass production and consumption. Its spark has disappeared, only the fiction of apolitical universe remains.

27 Ideology only corresponds to a corruption of reality through signs; simulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and to its duplication through signs. It is always the goal of the ideological analysis to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.

28 Thus it is a question of a sacrificial process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to twenty million Americans. the liturgical drama of a mass society.

29  An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion. No more violence or surveillance: only // “information,” secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion, and simulacra of spaces in which the effect of the real again comes into play.

It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival, determinist mode, the “active,” critical mode, the analytic mode—the distinction between cause and effect . . . In all this, one remains dependent on the analytical concept- // tion of the media, on an external active and effective agent, on “perspectival” information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the vanishing point.

31 In fact, this whole process can only be understood in its negative form . . . implosion—an absorption of the radiating mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative charge—an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins.

indifferentiation of the active and the passive

32 The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.

33 The balance of terror is the terror of balance.

34 Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment—nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm—the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law.

Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous moderation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social.

38 What no longer exists is the adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. And al the reality of victory or defeat, war being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances.

crises destined to maintain a historical investment under hypnosis. The media and the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts.

39 Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country by flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means are available—but alas precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence.

40 Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modern revolution.