CItizens of the Simulacrum

Part One

Citizens of the Simulacrum
Why have you deserted the Mother ship?
Has she not nurtured you at her bureaucratic table?
Has she not erected her seven corporate values
And slaughtered the competition?

Has she not called to you,
The unsuccessful,
To come and learn, from her, how to be winners?

Citizens of the simulacrum, rejoice
You have no longer blood in your veins!
Therefore you are safe from destruction.

Your death is pre-empted by this;
That you have become an everlasting image
Alive in virtuality
And digitized in perpetuity

An undifferentiated particle
Of superpossibility;
A parallel line that will meet at infinity.

Part Two

From The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 9 (Ronald Knox translation)

See, where wisdom has built herself a house,
Carved out for herself those seven pillars of hers!
And now, her sacrificial victims slain, her wine mingled, her banquet spread,
This way and that her maidens are dispatched,
To city keep and city wall, bidding her guests make haste.

Simple hearts, she says, draw near me;
And to all that lack learning this is her cry,
Come and eat at my table, come and drink of the wine I have brewed for you;
Say farewell to your childishness, and learn to live;
Follow all of you in the path that leads to discernment

Part Three

from an article on Simulation and Simulacra at the University of Chicago by Devin Sandoz

Can you really have bits of an article in a poem?
Will it make the poem more like an article or merely reveal the poetic potential of the article?

Come and see!

..According to the OED’s first definition, a simulacrum is almost impossible to distinguish from a representation, but in the second and third definitions we can see that the simulacrum supercedes representation in terms of the accuracy and power of its imitation.

It is only when the viewer of the simulacrum penetrates the surface that he can tell that it differs from the thing it imitates.

Michael Camille elucidates the classical notion of the simulacrum in his article “Simulacrum” in Critical Terms for Art History. Camille analyzes Plato’s opinion of the simulacrum in The Republic:

“The simulacrum is more than just a useless image, it is a deviation and perversion of imitation itself – a false likeness”

the production of an icon, results in the production of a representation that can be immediately understood as separate from the object it imitates

The simulacrum, however, is indistinguishable from the original; it is “a false claimant to being” (32).

While the simulacrum is defined as static, it nevertheless deceives its viewer on the level of experience, a manipulation of our senses which transforms the unrealistic into the believable.

Camille writes: “what disturbs Plato is…what we would call today the ‘subject position’ of the beholder.

It is the particular perspective of human subjectivity that allows the statue that is ‘unlike’…to seem ‘like’ and, moreover, beautifully proportioned from a certain vantage point’ (32).

The simulacrum uses our experience of reality against us, creating a false likeness that reproduces so exactly our visual experience with the real that we cannot discern the falseness of the imitation.

“The artwork, then, is neither an original nor a copy nor a representation. It is a simulacrum, a work that forms part of a series that cannot be referred to an original beginning” (Kelly ed., 517). When the work of art is viewed in such a way the consequences are not negative, on the model of Baudrillard’s dread at the impending death of the real, but instead reveal new possibilities of interpretation in a critical realm where sensation is the focus instead of meaning.

“Signs are not about the communication of meaning but rather about the learning of the affects, perceptions, and sensations to which we can be subject” (518).

This fits perfectly with the conception of simulation as a process which affects our experience and not (as the image is) a signification of a fundamental reality.

David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ engages the concept of the simulation and presents us with a vision of the future in which impression is valued over content. The film follows the first experience of a bodyguard uninitiated in the world of virtual reality videogames with a new product created by the videogame designed he was hired to protect.

Speaking directly to Baudrillard’s concerns, the film leaves the viewer uncertain as to when the characters are in a virtual world (see: virtuality) and when they are experiencing the real. The self-referentiality within the film, with its framing of a virtual reality videogame inside of another videogame, portrays the simulated world as not only tied directly to the experience of emotion and sensation, but as a world in which logical action is rewarded and meaning sublimated.

Any moral or allegorical conclusion that could be drawn from what appears to be the film’s initial conclusion, that simulations create a system which precipitates its own demise, is invalidated by a further expansion into another reality in which the real videogame designer is congratulated for having created a really fun game. The simulation in the film is reduced to the status of a ride or a contest, containing its own rules and raising the status of the videogame to deific proportions. The port into which the gamepods are plugged (directly into the player’s spine) becomes a metaphor for desire and oblivion in its simultaneous recollection of sexual intercourse and intravenous drug use. This is the realm of the simulation, a process whose responsibility lies only in what it makes us feel.

The simulation, as we can see by contrasting the philosophies of Baudrillard and Deleuze, can be interpreted in nearly opposite ways, as either the death knell for meaning and the “real,” or conversely as an avenue to new methods of interpretation.

For Deleuze, the simulation raises the work of art beyond representation to a level where it is on equal footing with the original, and hence the original is destroyed. Plato’s fear of the simulacrum as described by Michael Camille is based on the distortion of real experience that the convincing image causes.

The terms simulation and simulacrum are important to media study, as the simulation is total mediation without meaning. The content is shifted to a surface level, into the realm of experience

rather than communication of truth,

..the way that the medium affects us

becomes our main interpretive focus.

Part Four

Citizens of the simulacrum, rejoice
You have no longer blood in your veins!
Therefore you are safe from destruction.

Your death is pre-empted by this;
That you have become an everlasting image
Alive in virtuality
And digitized in perpetuity

An undifferentiated particle
Of superpossibility;
A parallel line that will meet at infinity.

But See, where wisdom has built herself a house,
Carved out for herself those seven pillars of hers!
And now, her sacrificial victims slain, her wine mingled, her banquet spread,
This way and that her maidens are dispatched,
To city keep and city wall, bidding her guests make haste.

Simple hearts, she says, draw near me;
And to all that lack learning this is her cry,
Come and eat at my table, come and drink of the wine I have brewed for you;
Say farewell to your childishness, and learn to live;
Follow all of you in the path that leads to discernment

Part Five

from the Gospel of the Day

Blessed are the pure in heart
For they shall see God.