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.

6 Comments

  1. Ah, I laughed out loud when I read "slaughtered the competition". I love this multi-literary media poem. John Tavener began his oratorio "The Whale" with a very BBC reading of the encyclopedia article on the Whale. I myself have quoted automated telephone messages in my poem, though that's not quite as highbrow as academic articles… Keep it up, Sarah.

  2. I've been meditating on these things myself – simulating a world is like living in your own narcissistic fantasy – with you as god. Is the post modern world post real? I went to an art exhibition that 'questioned' notions of cultural and religious identity on Friday. It seemed that it was a faux pas to ask any questions myself as if the art was "saying" : "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".

    It's still possible to unplug from the Matrix though – through pure eyes, as you say. 🙂

    – Karol x

  3. I thoroughly enjoyed this post Sarah. I love things that make me think. I am reminded of when I was at university studying mathematics and they told me that two parallel lines will eventually meet at infinity! I was like NO!!!!!!! How?!

    Now I'm like… it doesn't surprise me that God created such mind blowing things (like touching parallel lines)!

    As humans we have a tendency to get bored thinking about God… which really shouldn't be possible. We end up creating our own "mind blowing" things… simulacrums… to which I'm sure God chuckles and sighs and says something like "look at Me and I'll show you things that will REALLY blow your mind!" He takes our hand and shows us two parallel lines and gets us to follow them for a REALLY long time. Then all of a sudden they touch! It's moments like that when we see the simulacrum for what it really is. It's moments like that that turn our attention and our gaze onto He is is uncreated. The God who makes parallel lines touch!

    Helen xxx

  4. This made me think about counterfeits. I have often thought the presence of the counterfeit signifies the real thing but flowing in the 'wrong channel' – kind of inevitable if not we are not plugged into the source. Are tabloid journalists using the same 'bit' as prophet, building up, tearing down, forecasting, interpreting the times for us? Is the cult of fame and celebrity a counterfeit, or the inverse working, of how we are programmed to use our gifts to make Jesus known, so that God becomes rich with the souls of men and women? Instead we get X factor and a very rich Simon Cowell. Just some musings … I am not sure how the counterfeit idea relates to the simulacrum, if at all!

  5. "two parallel lines will eventually meet at infinity"

    (?) I think that might assume the curvature of space-time, which Einstein theorised (at the risk of sounding like a total egghead). It's like lines of longitude, parallel at our scale, eventually converging. Anyone following them will eventually meet at the pole.

    To me, part of the tiring futility of our society is the way that someone comes up with an idea like the Matrix, but it turns out that it, too, is just another created thing, and something that's ultimately familiar – and trite! Something that promises to rock our world is just – a virtual-reality exercise?? Pur-lease!

    So, yes, I agree Helen, that God sees our silly little efforts to be amazing and says, 'Listen people, just keep with the programme, and I'll show you even cooler stuff, that you can't even imagine now!'

    I fully expect science in Heaven to be utterly mind-boggling squared! Our planet and universe are just the sandbox mode of creation…

    James H

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