by Jefferson Hansen
Jean Baudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation by discussing maps, and this is an apt introduction to his theory. "Simulation" applies to topographical maps, ones that use symbols to provide a representation of geography. The land comes first, and the map becomes something that helps us to better understand that geography. "Simulacra" refers to the representation literally becoming reality. In this case, the map becomes applied to the geography itself, like a blueprint. City streets at right angles are a classic example: the map, as blueprint, precedes the real and ultimately becomes it. When we walk the city streets, we walk in a plan, not a natural topography. In a sense, geography comes to represent the map, rather than the other way around. As Baudrillard puts it in relation to a story by Borges, "cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly" (1).
The example of the simulacra map can be applied to other areas of experience: the plan precedes what we might call reality. For instance, self-help books aim to form us in their image. And the law creeps further and further into our lives, legislating how we are to be psychologically: Eccentricity becomes understood as pathological. For instance, a man who chooses to isolate himself in his room in order to create art becomes not a little odd, but an agoraphobic, one who is afraid of the open spaces outside his room. The definition of agoraphobia becomes applied to him, he is understood according to its terms, and professionals attempt to heal him. The idea precedes reality and forms it, completely, point by point. "Healing" occurs when the former agoraphobic conforms to what is understood as health.
This can also be applied to academic disciplines such as literary criticism and history. In criticism, the ideas the critics develop forms the literary work, overwhelms it, to becomes more real than the art work itself. Educational institutions use English classes to encourage and even force students to understand works according to the critical consensus of the time. Commentary, therefore, precedes the work itself.
Similarly, in history the paradigms, techniques, and assumptions of the discipline are used to form the past. It is the discussion of historians that come first, not the past itself, and the areas where they reach consensus become handed to students as the reality of the past. Commentary precedes and forms reality rather than creating a simulation, or representation, of it.
I read 1491 by Charles C. Mann immediately after Simulacra and Simulation. In it, Mann argues that the Americas were heavily populated by well-developed civilizations at the time Europeans contacted them. Not only the Incas of South America, but the mound builders of North America, whose culture stretched from the Mississippi valley throughout what is now known as the American South, had developed into populous, highly structured, and stratified civilizations. In the Northeast of North America, the so-called Iroquois had developed a much different, more egalitarian and somewhat matriarchal civilization.
These civilizations remade their environment. Through controlled burning, the Native Americans created the prairies of the Midwest and West, thereby increasing the bison herds. Soil was created in the Amazonian valley to develop a way to farm amid a natural soil that was less than fertile. Mound builders formed cities that were home to tens of thousands of people who were dependent on sophisticated agricultural practices that made created more food than nature in its pure state.
Mann shows that the Europeans did not encounter a wilderness populated by small groups of hunters and gatherers. What generally happened was that European diseases, such as smallpox, preceded contact. The diseases wiped out sometimes 90% of the population, so that the Europeans encountered not the civilizations at their peak but groups of people reeling from destructive epidemics. Their ability to transform the environment toward their needs was profoundly affected.
As I read 1491, I noticed how Mann repeatedly referred to the heated discussion among archaelogists and historians about the degree to which the Native Americans could be understand as civilized, with large cities and developed agriculture.
And here I returned to Baudrillard. Mann documents two different simulacrums in the discipline of history: one sees the Americas as a pristine wilderness inhabited by sparsely populated hunters and gatherers before and after contact with Europeans. The second sees the Americas as a place that fell from its civilized, pre-contact formations into dissolution and chaos following the introduction, not of Europeans, but of the germs they brought over which preceded contact.
I reflected on how Mann was creating a simulacra of the past and attempting to make it the consensus among historians. This was a Nietzschean moment: archaelogists and historians fight among themselves to see which version of "reality" wins. It is will to power. And it is won by the group who marshals the data using the accepted techniques, assumptions, and paradigms of the discipline of history in the most convincing fashion.
Does this mean that I disagree with Mann, and that history is simply a self-enclosed game that has little to teach us about the world outside it? Hardly. I am sympathetic with Mann's simulacra, and prefer it over the one I, and most of us, were taught during our schooling. This is because we live in the era of simulacra: we cannot escape it or turn our backs on it. Academic disciplines seem to me the area of modern experience that most closely adhere to Baudrillard's theory.
Where Baudrillard falls short, I think, is in his considerations of particularity and the body. His theory is so all-encompassing that he would have a hard time accounting for unusual and alternative singularities. For instance, how would he describe the way a single utterance can splay, doubling and tripling on itself, as it is interpreted and understood by listeners or readers? There is a way that particular utterances are, to an extent, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This opens a possibility for freedom outside the simulacra, in happenstance and unpredictability.
Baudrillard also doesn't account for the body, and I think this is a weakness of much of Postmodern theory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a convincing case in The Phenomenology of Perception, a book published just after World War II, that the way we are in our bodies, the way we experience the world about us, forms our perceptions to a large degree. And, in my reading of the book, this bodily experience precedes language. If this is so, then any theory that claims language organizes all experience suffers from a weakness: the way human beings, as embodied creatures, necessarily are in-the-world forms us as much as languages. In other words, if something either precedes or accompanies language as the basis of our engagement with the world, Baudrillard, and most Postmodern theorists, becomes less all encompassing.
A contemporary book that explores this very possibility, using metaphor as a key, is Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I believe their theory, which names Merleau-Ponty as an important precursor, provides a useful, but not fatal, critique of much of Postmodernism, including Baudrillard.
That said, I believe Baudrillard is most convincing in describing how academic disciplines, such as history, study the very artifact they create, that they create a simulacra that they mistake for "reality." This seems inevitable, and, while it does not create a fatal blow to such disciplines, provides a means to approach them with a degree of skepticism.
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