The acknowledged philosopher, who is famous for blurring the boundaries between reality and simulation, passed away. Yet for him, dying was pointless, one has to know how to disappear...
Following a long illness, French sociologist and leading postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard died at the age of 77. Once he wrote “Dying is pointless. You have to know how to disappear”. Did he disappear? Well, speaking his theory, his death might not have taken place...He once said “What I am I do not know. I am the simulacrum of myself”.
Here comes Baudrillard’s most renowned term “simulacrum”, meaning the virtuality of signs that are generated by culture and media that create the reality we perceive. Baudrillard posed that our perception is captured and accordingly shaped by the simulacra which creates a “simulation” of the real. This simulacra of the real surpasses the real world and thus becomes “hyperreal”, a world that is more real than real. It presupposes and precedes the real.
The Matrix of the matrix
If you are confused, think of the famous Matrix Trilogy of Wachowski Brothers: “Welcome to the desert of the real”. This quote, voiced by the rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in the first episode is Baudrillard’s most famous formula. Believe it or not, Baudrillard was invited to collaborate in the sequels, but he declined. Later, he accused the film Matrix of misunderstanding his philosophy. He found the film too “Platonic” and said “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce”.
Baudrillard is famous for his “outraging” remarks that shocked the audiences and intellectual faculties alike giving him a “notorious” title or “philosophic clown” attributes.
He attracted attentions by predicting that the first Gulf War in 1991 would not take place. During the war he insisted that it was not taking place. And after the war concluded, he went on saying it did not actually take place.
What Baudrillard actually wanted to point out was that the war was conducted as a media spectacle, quite similar to a war game, or a simulation. Considering under his terms of simulacra and simulation; during the war media replaced reality with simulation through reproducing the images of the real, which were selected and displayed according to a certain ideology. People around the world watched the images of war with the same attitude that they watch an advertisement on telly. They just watched the war on TV and went to bed afterwards. Thus, the war did not take place in the realm of the real.
Baudrillard later on went on discussing that there was no need for the media to virtualise events, as in Gulf War, since the war’s participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. That means, we are all captives in the hyperreality...
Baudrillard uses a famous tale by Borges to crystallise the term “hyperreal”: A great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire conquered or lost lands. When the Empire collapsed, all that was left was the map itself. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that we are living in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is decomposing due to disuse.
Well, a sparkling genius in this desert of the real, Baudrillard tried to travel beyond the hyperreal to “see what happens beyond”, as he put it in his words. It remains a mystery whether he achieved or not. Jean Baudrillard, born on July 29, 1929, died on March 6, 2007.
***Published in Caretta, 2007.
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