Item Subject: baudrillard
>From rob%research.att.com@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Mon Aug 21 09:08:37 1989
Received: from brwa.inmos.co.uk by brwi.inmos.co.uk; Mon, 21 Aug 89 09:08:33 BST
Message-Id: <23766.8908210750@brwa.inmos.co.uk>
Received: from ukc by brwa.inmos.co.uk; Mon, 21 Aug 89 08:50:36 BST
Received: from nsfnet-relay.ac.uk by kestrel.Ukc.AC.UK 
           via Janet (UKC CAMEL FTP)  id aa02626; 19 Aug 89 19:40 BST
Received: from research.att.com by NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK   via NSFnet with SMTP
           id aa06266; 19 Aug 89 19:28 BST
From: rob@research.att.com
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 14:24:01 EDT
To: sjh%inmos@ukc.ac.uk
Status: R


The enclosed text is output from the Mark V. Shaney program, described in
the Computing Recreations column of Scientific American, June 1989.  The
program was written by Bruce Ellis, now of the University of Sydney, based
on an idea by Don P. Mitchell of AT&T Bell Laboratories.  The specific work
on the enclosed text was done by Rob Pike of Bell Labs, with help from
Catherine Richards of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The machine-readable
form of the input text was produced by an automated text scanning system by
Henry Baird of Bell Labs.  The original book was optically scanned on a computer
and processed by Baird's program to generate the raw text input to Shaney.

The text here is generated from a single essay of Jean Baudrillard,
`The Precession of Simulacra', one of two essays in a book entitled
`Simulations' and (translated from the French and) published by
Semiotext(e) Inc., 522 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, NY NY 10027.
The text is about 90,000 words.  Shaney picked it up en masse and spat out
the result presented here, which is edited slightly to remove some of the
more irritating punctuation mistakes, to introduce paragraph breaks, and
to cull particularly tedious passages.  The text was truncated to keep
its size manageable.  Shaney rambles in a continuous stream, so the paragraph
breaks were introduced by hand following no special principle.  The epigraph
is real, though; the first few words (and punctuation marks) Shaney produced
were:

        The simulacrum is true.  Ecclesiastes If we were to revive ...

The original essay begins

                The simulacrum is never that
                which conceals the truth - it
                is the truth which conceals that
                there is none.  The simulacrum
                is true.
                        Ecclesiastes

        If we were able to ...

Shaney started from the first two words, jumped to the second sentence of
the epigraph, and was off and running.          
        

For those unfamiliar with M. Baudrillard's work, the thesis of the essay is,
in a nutshell, that reality is indistinguishable from good simulation.


                                        Rob Pike




        The simulacrum is true.

                -Ecclesiastes


If we were to revive the fable is useless.  Perhaps only the allegory

of simulation is unendurable--more cruel than Artaud's Theatre of

Cruelty, which was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction,

disconnection, deterritorialisation, etc.; and if it were our own

past.  We are witnessing the end of the negative form.  But nothing

separates one pole from the very swing of voting ''rights'' to

electoral ''duties'' that the disinvestment of the revolutionary and

total strike collapses at the real and its object, as Castaneda does,

etc., and to escape the spectre raised by simulation--namely that

truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist.


What can the army favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back

to religion and the dead.  And just as much in an inverse,

irreversible, implosive process:  a generalised deterrence of the

social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, a

stake--this is nothing more than the critical obsession with its aura

of transgression, if order, with its aura of an offence, if it is the

horizon between reality and to die under the sign as value, from the

political sphere is signaled.  The medium/message confusion, of course,

claims that ''for each form of exchange, language and symbolic

organisation which must be brought out of their model, like the almost

contemporary rediscovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the social and

political consciousness of men.''  All that capital accept the rational

distinctions upon which function all power and the best thing ever:

television, comparable, the level of the models; a single fact may

even be said at all (the latter has never been any God, that only the

allegory of simulation is expressed everywhere by the maximisation of

systems controlling all energy.  Lockdown and control grow as fast as

(and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities.  This was

already won, nothing was objectively at stake but the discrete charm

of the confusion between sender and receiver, henceforth unlocatable

as such.  Thus there is nothing but the credibility of the media as if

everyone has ''occupied'' their work place or work post, after

declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the entanglement

of these Indians it has held out for itself, so science can only

dominate a determined world, but which has been going on for some time

now produces nothing but signs of reality; of second-hand truth,

objectivity and authenticity.  There is no longer enveloped by an

entire civilisation for its own failing power, or again, is it

mistaken:  in the '60's (Kennedy/Khruschev), or to combat it in the

play of simulation.  The transition from a prolonged symbolic order,

which is made for us.


The slightest details of our behaviour are ruled by neutralised,

indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those which

currently results in an excess of meaning, no more exists outside than

inside the bounds of the social.  That is the worst form of power, its

only strategy against this defection, is to say in the statistic

operation, or with the democratic simulacrum, that is to say something

else entirely:  a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a scenodrama (not

to say something else) took place.


And isn't it the same with desire and capital?  The conjunction of

desire to the original location is even more against it.  And all that

recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to

nothing more than the former--but why should simulation stop at this

level, and the entire cycle of exchange with death?  We know better

than to violence and potential conflict on the object of work.

Another discourse takes over, which is played as such that no life is

in this mode that it was well over before reaching a conclusion, that

at its very selection:  a typical, California-housed, 3-garage,

5-children, well-to-do professional upper middle class ideal American

family with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they are

revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.


To begin with it is no ''objective'' difference:  the same type of

demand.  Formerly the discourse of crisis, negativity and crisis.  It is

pointless to laboriously interpret these films by their artificial

resurrection in systems of signs, a more radical political exigency.

The cloister should have stayed in New York to be adapted:

rediscovering a stake by transposition of the people for the law is

based.  The established order is, well before institutions and justice

come into play.  We are no longer circumscribed as an objective space

(that of the panoptic system and of the concept and the ''objective''

essence of power), and hence into absolute manipulation--not

passivity, but the discrete charm of the Jesuits, who based their

politics on the micro-model of control like peaceful coexistence, all

terrestrial microsystems are satellised and lose their autonomy.  All

energy, all events are to be read another way:  before, the task was to

say:  ''They lived as if capital were linked by a contract to the

law.''  And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that the

operation successful.  But what if God himself can be maintained?  Who

will unravel this imbroglio?  The Gordian knot can at least that which

conceals the truth---it is the phantasm of disaster.


No more imaginary coextensivity:  rather, genetic miniaturisation is

the reflection of a territory, a referential being or a substance.  It

is by the character called ``Deep Throat'', who has said Republican

grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to make

the Americans did on Hiroshima--but precisely they alone were entitled

to this ''use value'' of the apparatus to a system of control which

has fled all meaning and charm, all the entangled orders of

simulation.  The real is produced from miniaturised units, from

matrices, memory banks and command models--and with these it can be

seen that the iconolaters were the most trustworthy hostage, so that

everyone can see them (you glance through a peephole at the very

possibility of an unpredictable subversion).  It could be said at all

in the ritual scansion of the unconscious in a circular, Moebian

compulsion.


Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms:  today both

are dissolved into the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony

exactitude, a thrill of alienation and of the unconscious?  Nothing

changes when society breaks the mirror of being incarnate beyond

itself, in the ''brute'' reality of the American defeat (the greatest

reversal in its history) have any internal repercussions?  If it had

attained its objective.  Thus the hyperrealism of simulation which can

only dominate referentials, a determinate position of exteriority,

playing on the real is no longer master over anything, since it is

dependent, like any other symptom in classical medicine.


Dreams already are.  Even in psychoanalytic interpretation, the

power--the interpreter--does not aim for atomic clash nor of

perversion, but of simulation.  The real is possible, and hence there

is just one more turn in the sense that all these things arrive too

late, with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they don't want

power.  But do they not want it at this point, before a thereafter

undiscoverable truth of the political dimension, it is the secret

which kills it and which the law (which is why it was historically

threatened by the simulation of crime).


Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that in fact

all of Los Angeles is encircled by these ''imaginary stations'' which

feed reality, reality-energy, to a logic of reason.  As is the later

stage of the Renaissance and the installation this deterrent

authority.  What sense did that war make, if not that its unfolding

sealed the end of the abolition, pure and intelligible Idea of God,

there would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever

radiant with their own deterrence.  The same change in fortune as for a

strategy of pacification by the mirror of equivalence, all binary

oppositions and all combinatory algebra.  It is in this same remolding

are legible in the sense that their reticence stems from a strategy

completely free of influences and signs.  Behind the baroque of images

hides the grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order

to get rid of it (nobody wants it any more, and escalation is only a

nebula indecipherable into its simple elements, indecipherable as to

remove the evidence).  In general, it was so easily able to take as the

whole discourse of manipulation and hence, today, in every domain, the

secret of all the profundity and energy of representation.  Thus the

very purpose of remolding and domesticating social relations.  The

North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a compromise and Nixon to

make us believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic Idea

of God, there would have fooled no one.  Repatriation is only the

mummy, is of the spectacular.


Television, in the ritual scansion of the two American and Soviet

dissidents like the faces in funeral parlors.  Hyperreal and Imaginary

Disneyland is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is

third-order, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the

rational distinctions upon which function all power and

knowledge--everything comes from and returns to the depth of meaning,

of nonsense, or of anti-ethnology which is no longer true or false.


The Disneyland imaginary is neither a question of a reversion of

energies towards a minimal point, of a need; the car becomes the

object of work.  Another discourse takes over, which is not any the

less heinous for being a process whose triumph lies quite beyond these

appearances.  In any case, the image is a particular order in the

reality of defeat or victory, war being a process whose triumph lies

quite beyond these appearances.  In any case, the image is a

proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand

truth, objectivity and authenticity.  There is an evil appearance--of

the order of reasons.  Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the

phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all referentials--worse:  by their

own scenario.  But this conceals something else, and that

''ideological'' blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order

simulation:  Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us

believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic Idea of God.

Repatriation is only the simulacrum of divinity:  ''I forbade any

simulacrum in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the same

gestures and the merging of the mummy's reception at Orly airport.''


What can the army do with a liquidation of all the real, for power,

for in that sense, the USA pulled out of reach of colonists, tourists

and ethnologists?  This was the abstraction's charm.  For it is no

longer master over death and putrescence and their denunciation

(identical methods are employed by the real) of the system and upset

the balance.  The balance of the programmed signal.  The whole

traditional mode of causality is brought into question:  the

perspective, deterministic mode, the ''active,'' critical mode, the

analytical conception whose vanishing point is the way the Chinese

enter the system of planetary control.  There is no longer that of a

social ''demand,'' like leisure, to which Jaulin, Castaneda and

Clastres variously belong.  In any case, the logical evolution of a

heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to them.

That this was precisely the greatest inconsistencies, with a profound

indifference to their destruction!


Of course, these particular Savages are posthumous:  frozen,

cryogenised, sterilised, protected to death, they have exhausted their

meaning long in advance and only lesson, the secret of the Left.  They

sanction the idea that their truth is exchangeable, in the mirror of

madness it has exterminated this order by exhuming it as if capital

were linked by a man who is entitled like all the models from which

has always maintained a minimal threshold).  And which is inscribed in

their sky at the same time by the cartographer's mad project of an

ideal coextensivity between the civil and the referential, above and

parallel to the peril.


How to feign a violation and put it to death?  ''The Louds:  simply a

family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hyperreal.  In this

sense, the USA pulled out of their own, they arise at the initiative

of the panopticon may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to

nothing more than floating capital refers to real production,

circulating in nuclear orbit is sufficient to render both artificial.

In the second, it is the slope of a false problem to want its own

hereafter neutralised, unusable, unintelligible, non-explosive forces

(except the possibility of escaping the universal truth of the

Renaissance) and the same role as the Byzantine icons could murder the

divine identity.  To this murderous capacity of representations as a

pretext, through the whole discourse of desire.  ''Take your desires

for reality!''  can be left to contingency, this is the reflection of a

powerful referential in a despair of meaning, that a sign could

exchange for meaning and charm, all the possible interpretations, even

the super-powers of this scenario are not detonated.


Everybody belongs to neither party.  It traverses all discourses of

truth--always good, even and especially if they were, in outer orbit,

a sort of contraction into each other, or recycle one another--a

simultaneity of data.  But, subtly, these events follow on illogically

from one another, with a profound indifference to their ''real'' goal

at all.  It is the way the whole system becomes weightless, it is a

question of the stakes without a word to say, responseless, since to

questions asked can come the inevitable reply:  but you are always

already on the spot, as historical witnesses to their primitive state,

out of reach of colonists, tourists and ethnologists.  This was at the

end of perspective and panoptic space, which remains a moral panic as

we approach the primal (mise en) scene of capital:  its instantaneous

cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental capitalist

mechanism--that there is no subject of deterrence grows, and around it

grows an historical, social and the end the pharaohs must be taken

literally:  that is, to restore the objective had been able to preserve

for 40 centuries, but away from the terminal:  there is only a puerile

game left to deteriorate in the real, power risked deterrence and

simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the laser

which touches and then visit the reconstituted whole.


But this does not reply.  But to the unconscious order:  once again, the

latter is held to be what makes the operation successful.  But what

becomes of the Big Two, the neutralisation and homogenisation of

everybody else on earth.  Yet, despite this deterrence which is the

operational immanence of every choice which is today hardened even

more artificial:  it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction

(thus the hyperrealists fasten in a field unhinged by simulation),

then all determination evaporates, every act of defiance contract in

proportion to the depth of meaning, when the Phillipino government

decided to return the few dozen Tasaday discovered deep in the example

of the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of leftist

thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism.  Capital doesn't give

a damn about the idea that their truth is exchangeable, in the other

side.  No more violence or surveillance:  only ''information,'' secret

virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion and simulacra of spaces

where the family vis--a-vis TV are no longer possible.  It is a

second-order simulacrum whereas simulation threatens the difference,

which forms the poetry of the Vietnam war, since it cancels out the

mirror or the voyage of man in space (this is rather that deterrence

leukemises us).  And this logic belongs to neither party.




All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a global modus

vivendi, the passing from a strategy completely free of influences and

signs.  Behind the baroque of images of the programmed signal.  The

whole traditional mode of determination, with its death, an obsession

with power-- obsession with its model (no more divergence of meaning)

that a sign could refer to the society it dominates.


It is always right.  Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of

every detail which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only exert itself

on the analytical mode--the distinction between poles can no longer

listen to ``Pas de Panique listens to you''----switching over from the

DNA model, as an aging double ends up exactly covering the territory

(but where the cartographers of the economy and the referential, above

and parallel to the other side.  No more violence or surveillance:

only ''information,'' secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion

and simulacra of conflict and carefully circumscribed stakes remain.


The ''space race'' played exactly the same deterministic and

moralistic position as the ultimate slogan of power, any transmitting

authority--power is something that circulates and is exchanged between

the map and the charm of the insane and the ideal of control and

security they radiate when they are precisely unverifiable by an

entire civilisation for its own failing power, or again, is it

mistaken?  For it is too late.  Whence the debility, the infantile

degeneration of this principle of reality (ideology), but of the

discourse of manipulation are reversible in an uninterrupted circuit

without reference or circumference.  For us the trick has been extended

to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all

combinatory algebra.  It is in the ''brute'' reality of simulation that

can only function behind a moral and political consciousness of men.

All that capital will fall for this science which ostensibly masters

the object, but it is TV which is implicated in this wager on

representation; that a principle of political morality on a global

scale.  It could be handed over to you---in brief, you will unwittingly

find yourself immediately in the ritual scansion of the Left.


All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an improvisation

of meaning, no more traversing of an offence, if it was enough to

exhume Rameses to ensure their slow extermination.  Thus it is a

deterrence machine set up in socialism.  By an extraordinary

coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to neither party) it

traverses all discourses without their wanting it.  Who will unravel

this imbroglio?  The Gordian knot can at least be cut.


As for the real.  This representational imaginary, which both

culminates in and is engulfed by the very possibility of an ideal

coextensivity between the object of a system of deterrence that has

crept from the light and gaze of onlookers.  Rameses means nothing to

us:  only the allegory of the models; a single gadget:  the automobile.

By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer in the

form of subversion.  Against it classical reason armed itself with all

its force from opposing itself to the peril.  How to feign to have what

one has.  To simulate is to feign not to invasion, to pressure, to

violence and to die under the total spell of power--a haunting memory

already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one remove.  But the

matter is more complicated, since to questions asked can come the

inevitable reply:  ''But you are the model!  YOU are news, you are the

reply,'' or:  ``Your question is already an answer,'' etc,---the whole

sophistical stranglehold of word-tapping, forced confession disguised

as free expression, trapping the subject supposed to be read in

reverse, where one perceives (as with the very swing of voting

''rights'' to electoral ''duties'' that the ethnologists wanted to

shatter) the Union of the space race, of lunar conquest, of satellite

launchings, if not the institution of a struggle to death and

putrescence, on to an end.


Power, too, for some time now has been extended to all Western

societies.  But at the beginning of the same signs exist as for that

matter so has the strike-real too, which is going to be reinstalled on

''its original site''.  And everyone is concerned to conceal, this

dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral and

political desert.  By an extraordinary coincidence (one that

undoubtedly belongs to neither party) it traverses all discourses

without their wanting it.  This representational imaginary, which both

culminates in and is engulfed by the very possibility of an ideal

coextensivity between the object of a system of deterrence that has

crept from the light and gaze of onlookers.


How to feign to have what one has?  To simulate is to feign not to

invasion, to pressure, to violence and to die under the total spell of

power--a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting

at one remove.  Capital in fact the ones who accorded them their actual

womb, unlike the iconolaters, who saw the natives decompose

immediately on contact, like a dimension of which the simulator is

unaware and in that system of planetary control (where even the

super-powers of this universe verse, this deep-frozen infantile world

happens to have what one hasn't.  One implies a theology of truth and

secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs).  The second

inaugurates an age of simulation which has never existed.  And the war

passed from the imaginary, proving truth by scandal, proving the

system to catch its adversaries--a simulation of crime.  Parody makes

obedience and transgression equivalent, and that in fact has never

existed.  And the war passed from the Cloisters in New York are really

an artificial mosaic of all cultures (according to a nuclear

contraction or retraction of the confusion between sender and

receiver), thus sealing the disappearance of all models around the

disappearance of power.  But even this is the truth of this new age.

On the contrary, it is rather a question of truth.  The end of the old

polar schema which has always been the murderous antagonism between

adversaries--which seems a matter of life itself.  Thus ethnology, now

freed from its object (the Tasaday)---without counting:  --proving

theatre by anti-theatre --proving art by anti-art--proving pedagogy by

anti-pedagogy --proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its accelerated phase, towards a

reabsorption of all lost referentials, alone remain.  Everything still

unfolds before us, in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral

or to prove the real.


The other aspect of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an

order of the soil, rather as an effect in which the law of equivalence

and exchange, the iron law of supply and demand, rather than to use

our science for the meticulous operation of intoxication.  The

reinjection of a maximal historical or revolutionary stake and the

gaze, but of a flawless world.  The same change in fortune as for

power:  the scenario of the laser which touches and then artificially

revived as though nothing had happened and to bow down before

''differences''.  Confinement is succeeded by an entire civilisation

for its sympathetic nervous system.  Political Incantation Watergate.

Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect) concealing that

there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point.  The first implies

a presence, the other direction that we try to escape the spectre

raised by simulation--namely that truth, reference and objective

causes have ceased to exist.  What can medicine do with something which

floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with

the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality?

One remains among principles, and there power is no longer a question

of a basic reality --it masks the absence of a social ''demand,'' like

leisure, to which Jaulin, Castaneda and Clastres variously belong.  In

any case, the logical evolution of a universal system of confinement,

at least be cut.


As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the Cartesian

clarities and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and

false, good and evil, in order to be repatriated at great expense from

the ''analyzed'' to the truth of a struggle to death and putrescence

and their subsequent resuscitation by science.  An irreparable violence

towards all secrets, the violence of metastable or involving systems.

There is no longer possible.  It is by an inverse simulation, the

passage from the DNA model, as in the political sphere is signaled.

But if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its

aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, then the norm

fixes, hypnotises, dumbfounds, causing every imaginary to involve.  We

no longer identifiable as such, and to acquire all its categories.

But it is a proliferation of myths of origin to reassure us as to

preserve for 40 centuries, but away from the other, the initial from

the organic to the one who is satellised is not simply to feign:

Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he

is ill.  Some who simulates an illness can simply go to bed and make

believe he is ill.  Some who simulates an illness nor of perversion,

but of the group and prohibiting any of its deja-vu and its concept.


However, if the law, with its positive and negative electricity--an

implosion of poles is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this

dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral hypothesis

bound up with real elements, a police officer will really turn the

phoney ransom over to them.


That this was precisely the greatest commotion possible---in brief,

stay close to the question:  who made the psycho- analyst?  the analyst

quite easily replies:  You. Thus is expressed, by an imaginary, it is

this gap which vanishes in the temples because the real and its

fundamental banality, in its virginity.  isn't question sacrifice

(science never sacrifices itself:  it is this magnificent recycling

that the ethnologists wanted to protect themselves by cordoning off

the Tasaday with virgin forest.  Nobody now will touch it:  the vein is

closed down, like a dimension of life into nature cannot be treated

objectively either as ill, or as not-ill.  Psychology and medicine stop

at this level, and the dominated interchange in an inverse,

irreversible, implosive process:  a generalised cycle.  The communists

attack the socialist party as though real!  This is ultimately why

power is always amply accomplished, like that of transparency.  The

latter still presupposes an objective science but is applied to all

living energy.  The nuclear cliff-hanger only seals the trivialised

system of peaceful existence--and the suppression by the evanescence

of its object (the Tasaday)---without counting:  --proving theatre by

anti-theatre --proving art by anti-art --proving pedagogy by

anti-pedagogy --proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.


Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse mirror, It is meant to be

adapted:  rediscovering a stake by transposition of the model in a

world of simulation:  of the order of history, science and museums--our

own, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only die contaminated by

the perfection of the old polar schema which has always been the

murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of images,

murderers of the model, or to the original--here things are duplicated

by their artificial resurrection in systems of equivalence, all binary

oppositions and all combinatory algebra.  It is by the system to catch

its adversaries--a simulation of death, or rather of anticipated

resurrection which no longer have any internal repercussions?  If it

had truly signified a setback in the sense that their truth is

exchangeable, in the metropolis, among the Savages or in some Third

world--it is here, everywhere, in order to make the Americans swallow

the retreat of their ''strategy,'' is at stake:  but there are

precisely no strategic stakes at this conjuncture because it is

practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation, through

the death of God that religions emerge.  A twisted coming, a perverse

event, an unintelligible reversion to the people.  It is the only one.


Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World:  Los Angeles is

encircled by these ''imaginary stations'' which feed reality,

reality-energy, to a betrayal of reality (ideology), but of the real

for the real.  The other aspect of this process of exploitation--but of

the poles, its effect of the superiority of civilisation:  it produces

more Indians than they were purely a game, but that this was the first

to liquidate it in the negative form.  But nothing separates one pole

from the consciousness of men, and the search for proof, indeed the

objectivity of the social in its way has become savage again, that is

no longer possible, because the real atomic clash--excludes it

beforehand like the evil demon of commutation, the whole range of

operational negativity, of all determinate articulation of meaning.

''Circular'' discourse must be said that the caves of Lascaux have

been forbidden to visitors and an object:  precisely, the meaning gap,

the discrepancy, the difference, the smallest possible margin of

error, irreductible under penalty of reabsorption in an anti-ethnology

whose task is to distance itself ever further from its aims and

objectives, and dedicated to their recurrence as signs, and no longer

makes any sense of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where

the premises and consequences of any real event, of anything which

could disturb the general run of life's options.


The challenge of simulation which transforms the real grotto and then

artificially revived as though real, in a ``self-managed'' job

(exactly the same sense), the object and substance have disappeared.

And for that matter proving ethnology by the simulation of death, or

rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer that of a sharing

of forces and empires, the transition from signs which attest his

existence?  Then the whole of society (at the same way as any other

commodity), on production and wealth, in the cold war, when the

nuclear and the crowd.  All its values are exalted here, in miniature

and comic strip form.  Embalmed and pacified.  Whence the debility, the

infantile degeneration of this new age.


There is an escalation of the whole edifice of representation as

itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum to allow the Vietnamese proved

they were purely a game, but that conveys the impossibility of a

sharing of forces and empires, the transition from a more ductile

material than meaning, in that sense, the USA pulled out of their

tombs, and the referential, above and parallel to the ''substance'' it

''informs,'' there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they

were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the

mutation of the gaze, but of the spectacular.  Television, in the

specific types of alienation and repression which this implied.  The

medium itself is no ''objective'' difference:  the duplication is

sufficient to control capital by imposing rules on it.  And when it

reveals itself in icons, when it reveals itself in its own flagging

humanism, and whose source can no longer real at all.  But this double

does not aim for atomic clash at all cost the truth in all that, when

such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even

knowing it.  The conjunction of desire to the amorous discourse which

made a clear-cut distinction between true and false, good and evil, in

order to save the mummy of Rameses II---after it had proved itself, it

could be handed over to you---in brief, you will unwittingly find

yourself immediately in the name of rationality, to receive it as if

by magic.  Why didn't the American way of destroying them:  for Indian

culture, like all tribal culture, rests on the Champs-Elysees!


A demand exactly proportional to the one on nature, the discourse of

simulation must be taken literally:  that is, it no longer serves as

alibi for a real theft; in fact the ones who accorded them their

actual womb, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them the occasion to

regenerate a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise en) scene of

the panopticon may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and

medicine loses its meaning since it is of inestimable worth since it

cancels out the mirror of its own, and has not for some time now

produces nothing but the discrete charm of the gravity of the facts.

All events are absorbed by this excentric gravitation, everything

condenses and implodes on the virtual disappearance of power.  But do

they not want it at this conjuncture because it has held out for

itself, so science can only dominate referentials, a determinate

position of exteriority, playing on the virtual disappearance of God

and on the spot, as historical witnesses to their consequences (but

this is because they sensed this omnipotence of manipulation.  Now, it

is no longer a question of life and death, and which is law.  A

universe purged of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which

no longer real at all.  But this death of the stakes, of the Big Two,

the neutralisation and homogenisation of everybody else on earth.

Yet, despite this deterrence come from the principle that the rest is

real, but of simulation.  The transition from a radical law of supply

and demand, rather than to a logic of facts and their denunciation

(identical methods are employed by the simulation of death, and are

even more artificial:  it is itself hyperreal.  It retains all the

profundity and energy of representation.  Thus the hyperrealism of

simulation must be mad.