Divine Irreference of Images.
Simulation is not pretending, pretending/dissimulation leaves the principle of reality intact; the difference is always clear, just simply masked. Whereas simulation threatens the difference between what is true and what is false. If there's a lack of distinction between the two, it is the worst kind of subversion as it submerges the principle of truth.
According to Baudrillard, simulation stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as 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 simulacrum.
Such would be the successive phases of an image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy, whereas the second inaugurates the era of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer a last judgement to separate the false from the true. Simulation's phase that concerns us is a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.
Hypermarket and Hyper-commodity.
Despite the purpose of a Hypermarket, another kind of work is issued in these places, the work of acculturation, of confrontation, of examination, of the social code. People go there to find and select objects/responses to all the questions they may ask themselves. Objects become tests, they are the ones who interrogate us, and we are then summoned to answer them, and the answer is always included in the question. This is neither information nor communication, but referendum, a verification of the code. Growing reliance on self-service adds to this absence of depth, it's a space of direct manipulation.
The hypermarket is already beyond the traditional institutions of capital, it is the model of all future forms of controlled socialisation. A model of directed anticipation, it is what gives rise to metro areas - delimited functional urban zoning - whereas traditional markets were in the hearts of cities. This means that it is the hypermarket that acts as a nucleus, it establishes an orbit along which suburbanisation moves - as the university or factory sometimes does.
Ground-Zero Advertising.
We are currently experiencing the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. The convergence caused by propaganda approaching advertising, defines our society - in which there is no longer any difference between the economic and political, because the same language reigns in both. This leads to a society where the political economy is finally fully realised.
Following the convergence of politics and advertising, the social turns itself into advertising in an attempt to impose its trademark image. A sociality that is ever present, finally realised in absolute advertising - a vestige of sociality hallucinated on every wall in the simplified form of a demand of the social that is immediately met by the echo of advertising. The social as a script, whose bewildered audience we are.
Arguably, according to Baudrillard the power and fascination to simplify all languages with advertising has been stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and more functional: the languages of computer science. These systems polarise the fascination that formerly devolved on advertising. It's information, that will put/is already putting an end to the reign of advertising. The thrill of advertising has been displaced onto computers.
Currently, Baudrillard believes that the most interesting aspect of advertising is its disappearance, its dilution as a specific form. Advertising is completely in unison with the social, whose historical necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social. Today, true advertising lies therein: in the design of the social, the need for which makes itself rudely felt. I fully agree with this as a young creative, as it is interesting to experiment with advertising as a variety of forms, as they all are in unison with the social yet some forms are a lot more effective than others.
Baudrillard, J & Glaser, S (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. 3-94.
