Episode 124 ... Simulacra and Simulation

hello everyone I'm Stephen West this is philosophized this this show is made possible by people that support it using the service patreon a crowdfunding platform for episodic content like this show shows also made possible by people that go through the amazon banner located on the front page of philosophizes org today's episode is the beginning of a look into what at the time was a new attitude that's emerging in the post structuralist world we're looking at the book simulacra and simulation by jean baudrillard i hope you love the show today so for the sake of time at the beginning here I need to move pretty quickly through several points we've already covered on the show without rheic splaining them so if any of this seems like it needs more explanation you can always go back and listen to all the episodes we've done so far on structuralism and post-structuralism but for the sake of right now we just talked about fucose work his famous genealogies and archaeology's of the way we've looked at madness and criminal punishment and sexuality and while there's a lot of subtext to these works one of the major points Foucault is making with these books overall is that terms like sanity versus insanity heterosexual versus homosexual a criminal mind versus a mind that's been properly reformed these are just three of hundreds of different new ways in our modern world that science categorizes human beings and labels them normal or abnormal in an attempt to classify and understand them and that just in the relatively short period of recorded human history that we have access to there's no shortage of examples Foucault can point to of societies that just never use these terms to categorize people nobody ever used to classify people in these terms they had their own terms they use to categorize people and we can see that those terms had huge effects on the way these groups were treated within those societies but aside from pointing out that our new scientific categories similarly affect the way people are looked at in our modern world Foucault would just want us to consider for a second the science is one day just created these categories that we use to define people science did this in an attempt to make sense of and understand the world that we live in that's kind of the job of science but Foucault would say something we all have to realize is that there's nothing about these new scientific categories that somehow written into the universe sane versus insane is not a property of the universe I mean it wasn't like you know and on the first day the Lord created the heavens and earth and on the second he created the scientific category of sanity and insanity no sanity and insanity are two terms that we use in a modern cultural discourse to be able to describe the mental health of people there have been countless other ways of categorizing mental health in the past based on different criteria countless other words used countless other ways it could be done and just how these other ways of categorizing people in the past have come and gone our methods without question will come to pass as well not only to Foucault are there no stable identities or categories written into the universe that can be arrived at like sane versus insane but more generally to the post structuralist there is no stable point from which anyone can ever assert that they've arrived at the truth with a capital T because it would be delusional to think that you somehow have access to it you know these Enlightenment thinkers thought okay well one thing's for sure there certainly is a way that things are I mean there's a reality out there right scientific rationality is a way that we're going to arrive at that reality but a post-structuralist would say no that's not the case I mean of course there's a way that things are out there nobody's denying that but all that we as human beings can ever hope to have access to is a set of cultural and scientific constructions that were created in an attempt to understand reality what you refer to as the truth is really just the current temporary dominant narratives of your cultures way of making sense of things narratives that are constantly being redefined as they interact with other cultural discourses that interpret reality in a different way in other words this is a 20th century post-structuralist critique of a hopeful 17th century enlightenment era belief about how stable everything is stability was the game in town in the past and it was being called into question now the stability of things like words as we talked about through the work of Derrida the stability of the enlightenment-era top-down idea of how power works in a society through the work of Foucault the stability of identity and the terms people need to use to categorize themselves the stability of any grand narrative that we've inherited from the past see because historically these grand narratives have been the stable foundation thinkers of use to make truth claims and what this has led to is that history these grand narratives have been the points of unity that ideologies form around the ideas that groups that people gather around and marginalize others on behalf of this is why in the work of all the post modernists we've talked about so far the name of the game in this new era has been deconstruction and fragmentation of these old inherited ideas because in the eyes of the post-structuralist if you can fragment and deconstruct these grand narratives and show them to be not some ultimate theory of reality that's been arrived at but instead just one of many incomplete narrow ways of making sense of things that at best gives people a story to build their life around and at worst makes other people's lives in this world miserable then that may be the first step we have towards not repeating a lot of the same mistakes we've made historically but what philosophers realized very quickly is that getting away from these grand narratives was not something to just blindly assume what's the best way of going about things because they realized this change is not just going to occur in the academic departments of universities if we were going to get away from these grand narratives of the past this was potentially gonna have massive effects on the way society functioned over all right around the early 1980s about 40 years ago there's this fear among philosophers of what exactly the societal implications of the ideas of post-modernism are going to be see in the past cultures have always had these grand narratives to rally around living in a society that doesn't have these points of unity to base itself upon this is really an experiment that's never been run and maintaining a society is obviously far from a guarantee the concerns of several thinkers right around this time in the early 80s was what does a postmodern fragmented society really look like how does it work how does it remain held together despite the citizens having such different identities having such different interpretations of the meanings of things how does society work when you can be living in what's essentially a different universe than the person sitting next to you on the bus there were a lot of different theories some thinker said that we were fifty to a hundred years before we'd ever even see the effects of postmodern ideas some people thought the effects good or bad depending on who you're reading we're at least a couple decades away before we'd even see an impact but there were a few like the philosopher Jean Baudrillard that claimed all the way back in the early 1980s that we were already living in a postmodern society in many ways he makes a case for this among other things in his book simulacra and simulation the ideas therein made publicly popular by the movie The Matrix in 1999 now it should be said the movie The Matrix is not a perfect encapsulation of the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard I mean it's not even a decent one but how could it be that's not what they were going for anyway making a Hollywood movie nonetheless the movies something that many people are familiar with and it provides some good visuals and examples that are gonna be useful for talking about this book for the rest of the episode so I want to start here now I'm gonna assume that pretty much everybody listening to this has seen the movie so I'm not gonna go into a ton of detail but for the people that haven't seen it in a while let me try to give a 30-second version of the movie so on planet earth sometime in the future there's an apocalyptic event that goes down where the human race goes to war with a race of machines artificial intelligence that we created now when this war first began the machines ran primarily on solar power so in a wartime tactic in an attempt to cut the machines off from their power source the human race torched the sky as they say in the movie basically they destroyed the atmosphere so that no sunlight can get in now unfortunately the machines did what any rational machine would do in their predicament they found another power source apparently the human body produces a certain amount of electricity simply by virtue of there being a heart pumping and a nervous system firing so what the Machine started to do is grow human beings to be able to power themselves human agriculture vast fields as far as the eye can see billions of people being grown in these little pods filled with some sort of amniotic fluid now if you're the machines and you're using these pods just to harvest electricity you don't really want a human being inside of the pods spliff splashing around in their amniotic fluid it would be distracting right so every one of these people that's in one of these pods is jacked into a simulated reality called the matrix where they live out their simulated lives in a very similar world to ours at the beginning of the 21st century they go to work they fall in love they pay their taxes the overwhelming majority of them go their entire lives never knowing that the whole thing has been a simulation not just real quick you can imagine once you're inside the Simula the exact purpose of your life is not going to be something that's immediately evident to you you can imagine once you're in there coming to believe in any number of stories that give you answers about what your purpose is let's think about a few options for the sake of the rest of the episode you could find some sort of spiritual purpose you could be a devout follower of Hinduism a Christian you could find some sort of political purpose you could be a you know staunch Democrat that reads six newspapers a day and drinks decaf coffee so you don't get too riled up about politics you could be a hardcore conspiracy theorist spending every day of your life working hard to expose the truth about what's really going on out there picture somebody else living in this simulation picture someone who maybe isn't entirely convinced by any of these stories you can imagine spending your entire life immersed in this simulation stuck in this upwork home TV bed lifestyle wondering what the purpose of your life is only to get to the end of your life to be sadly disappointed because in a twisted way the entire purpose of your life the whole time was really just to persist on living for another day to keep your heart beating so that you can continue to assist the agenda of this race of machines that exist at another level of reality that you don't even realize is there this metaphor will become important for our episode here today so how much of this is Jean Baudrillard and how much of this is a Hollywood sci-fi movie but Baudrillard does not say that the purpose of your life is to serve as a power source for a race of machines and but the title of his book simulacra and simulation he's not implying that you're living in some sort of elaborate computer simulation what he'd probably want us to do in our modern time is to think about the word simulation a little more open-minded Lee than that what is a simulation Baudrillard might have a definition along the lines of a simulation is an imitation of how a real-world process or system operates over time what if in the same way a person is jacked into the matrix living their life in a world that prevents them from ever seeing the real world as it truly exists what if in our societies today our postmodern fragmented advanced capitalist media driven societies what if we similarly live every day in a world that we accept to be reality that prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is what if our simulation isn't housed in computer hardware what if it's all around us remember a simulation is the imitation of a real-world processor system over time what if in this postmodern society practically everything about the way that people see their lives is seen through the lens of a complex network of signs and symbols given to them by media and the people around them and that for the last several hundred years these signs and symbols that were originally used to directly represent something in the real world have slowly evolved from representing reality to then a media created copy of reality - then representing a copy of a copy of reality a copy of that copy all the way to the point where these signs and symbols no longer resemble anything about reality and more importantly to baudrillard similar to the way we would think of somebody in a computer simulation that nothing about our lives within our simulation has any relevance to reality as it actually exists anymore the only thing the vast majority of people will ever know or care about is the simulation now I get that this is a lot and it's going to take some clarifications and examples but remember what we're also talking about in this episode are some of the theories from the early 80s of what a society is going to look like post post-modernism how does a society respond to the systematic fragmentation of enlightenment era takes on truth knowledge power meaning and even self identity so maybe the best place to start talking about all this is to talk about identity in this postmodern society and the changes Baudrillard seen take place in the West in recent years like we've already talked about when it comes to identity as the years go on and post-structuralist stock continues to deconstruct and fragment these grand narratives that people all throughout history have used as labels to define their identity I mean just to stay with our examples from before things like I'm a Christian I'm a Democrat I am a hashtag woke conspiracy theorist the more these sets of ideas are fragmented the less they can be used as archetypes for people to attach their identity to and what this creates in a postmodern society is a crisis of identity for the individual because if we can no longer turn to these grand narratives to provide us with our entire identity and this enlightenment-era idea that that identity is stable and unchanging how does the individual express who they are what new identity markers emerge in a postmodern world well to Baudrillard specifically in these postmodern advanced capitalist societies during the time he's doing his work the rationale into this crisis of identity what Baudrillard would expect to see if he was looking for a response to this identity vacuum that's created is a substantial increase in consumerism mass consumerism buying stuff becomes one of the only reliable ways people have to express who they are you are what you buy in this advanced capitalist postmodern world from the sports logo on the front of your clothes to that car you drive to the pineapple shaped plate that you put decorative holiday cookies on I mean even your shampoo says something about who you are and what your values are along with everything else you own think of everything that you buy as a sign remember a sign is something like a word it's it's usually a visual image of some sort that acts as a stand-in for the concept of something else the letter Co W act as a stand-in for the concept of a cow the visual image of orange cones big equipment people in hard hats acts as a stand-in for the concept that there's some serious construction going on in the area well if you think about it how are the things that we buy and put on display in our lives any less of a sign or symbol for example your shoes your shoes are a visible image that act as a stand-in for any number of concepts about your personality from the fact you collect basketball shoes to the fact that you're a business professional in this particular moment to the fact that you're the type of person that stays up on the most recent fashion trends but the thing is this isn't just the case with your shoes this is the case with everything you buy your entire consumer life in a sense is an elaborate collection of signs and symbols curated by you that depicts the kind of person you want people to think you are so in this postmodern world that we're in you want to know who somebody is look at the story they're telling through this outwardly projected collection of science now a couple of really important things to clarify here there's nothing about post-modernism that necessarily leads to mass consumerism nobody's saying that post-modernism is only referencing this fragmentation of old narratives identity among them and this is just one way that an advanced capitalist society may respond that fragmentation of identity another thing that needs to be clarified something out there might be saying okay Touche Baudrillard yeah you've pointed out that people buy things and that what they buy says something about their values nice but have you ever considered the fact that what people buy doesn't even come close to saying everything there is about who they are I mean so much about my worldview my thoughts on things the things I think are worth doing in life this stuff is impossible to express by just buying something buying things may be an expression of identity and a type of postmodern society but the identity of an American is clearly more than just what they buy right baudrillard would say yes it is but let me ask you a couple questions about that where did you get that way of looking at the world that you're talking about where'd the rest of your identity come from what sources can you really cite that have shown you the way the world is and how you fit into it now while you're working on that answer another set of questions for you if the stuff you buy is an elaborate collection of signs and symbols that depict your personality and values who decided what any of those signs and symbols meant in the first place what I mean is if the things that you buy are tools to express who you are who created the tools who decided that black leather shiny shoes are symbolic of you being a professional and driving around in a muddy topless Jeep is symbolic of something completely different and countless other examples baudrillard would say the answer to both these lines of questioning is the same we get both of these things from the media baudrillard would say that we live in a fragmented disconnected society that in order to compensate for that fragmentation has become absolutely obsessed with mass consumerism and visual images the citizens of this society spoon-fed that constant stream of visual images through the television in the 1980s but the modern-day equivalent would of course be cell phones and computers these visual images fuel that mass consumerism because people look to what's on their screens to determine not only the next thing they're going to buy but also once they buy it what that thing they bought is going to say about them to the people around them this is accomplished through a bombardment of commercials that show you visual images the type of person you're gonna be once you buy a product TV shows movies or videos that present visual images of characters that people in turn model themselves and their lives after to Baudrillard in this new world that we live in that's dominated by media we understand our reality only in terms of how it compares to what's playing out on the screens in our lives consider the fact that oftentimes our entire social experience is mediated by things that we've seen on the TV consider the fact that we live in a time where it's not even weird to hear people talk about their lives in terms of how it compares to something on the TV to talk about their love life in terms of you know I'll know that I found the right person when I'm around them and we're acting like Cory and Topanga act on that TV show to talk about major events in their life in relation to a screen oh my wedding day it's it's gonna be spectacular it's gonna feel just like the wedding scene out of this movie people even formed their expectations of what things are gonna be like in general from stuff on TV you know yeah you see this stuff on TV yeah you come to expect it's gonna be a certain way but then you actually experience it and it's just nothing like that people say things like this all the time Disneyland is a perfect example to Baudrillard of how we take things that at one point only exist as a fantasy world on the TV screen but then people use what's on the TV screen as building blocks for constructing the actual world that we have to live in now in the case of Disneyland this whole process may seem entirely harmless I mean toontown USA is a fictitious place created by the media yes who really cares if someone makes a theme park in Southern California bringing a fantasy world to life for mostly children the question Baudrillard would want to ask is what happens when the same process of building our world out of materials gathered from media depictions of it happens in different areas what happens when it dictates who people are their relationships what people by the way people think of themselves is it crazy to think that the media gives us the building blocks we use to create the way we see everything well what are these building blocks really you know there's the old saying life imitates art and art imitates life well these visual images that were bombarded with the commercials movies TV shows the art I guess are oftentimes imitations of things that go on in real life which makes them by definition imitations of real world processes or systems people then look to these shows for cues on how to act what to buy what their lives should be like and then imitate these imitations of real world processes or systems but then inevitably art does an imitation of that and then life does an imitation of that and this process goes on long enough that it's no wonder why Baudrillard thinks most people have become completely and utterly disconnected from anything real the only thing they have access to is a copy of a copy of a copy of something delivered from an extremely narrow perspective in the first place and these media generated copies these visual images are trusted by people in our society so much that they often become the foundation of the entirety of someone's worldview and values the best example I can give to illustrate this point lies in a series of articles baudrillard wrote in the early 90s when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the first Gulf War Desert Shield and Desert Storm baudrillard writes three articles one before wandering and one after the war titled respectively the Gulf War will not take place the Gulf War is not taking place and the Gulf War did not take place and what he means by the titles is not that there wasn't a conflict in the Middle East in the early 90s what he means is that for the rest of the world for anyone in the hundreds of countries around the world that are not actively witnessing and participating in the war the full extent of the reality of the war is essentially not even taking place to them see at basically any other point in human history if there was a war taking place in your experience of reality that was cuz it was on your front doorstep you were either fighting in it people you knew were being raped or killed as a result of it you may be just one person and your experience of the war may only be from that individual narrow perspective but at least your experience of the war was a small piece of the actual war whereas in the case of the Gulf War to baudrillard so many people around the world will never have to experience the reality of that war all they'll ever experience is a collection of visual images and sound bites on their TV given to them by the news that are passed off as a depiction of what's going on the other side of the planet that if we were to really talk about the reality of what the Gulf War was I mean what are we talking about there millions of lives affected decades of geopolitical Leda hundreds of battles every one of them a tragedy acts of kindness acts of humanity acts of hatred and the darkness that human beings are capable of we're talking about a coalition point of thousands of different story lines that when looked at exhaustively embody all sides of the story but the average person in one of these media driven societies can just pop on the news and through a series of flashing visual images and sound bytes they're gonna get caught up on what's going on in the world today these new stations claim to offer us unbiased coverage while coverage of what what exactly are you covering the entire war or an incredibly narrow cursory overview of a couple of general things that happened what does the viewer of the news have access to a window into the reality of the situation or a window into one of thousands of narrow competing discourses about a piece of what's going on all the while never having to face the ever-present brutality of being engaged in a conflict like this because the viewers experience of the war is reduced to what's essentially a video game on their TV screen even the deaths of thousands can be reduced to just signs and symbols this is an example of how the simulation that were in disconnects us from reality this is a complex network of signs and symbols given to us by the media what it depicts is an imitation of real-world processes and events not reality itself something that's probably important to say here is that Baudrillard is not saying that you're a bad person if you watch the news and like to stay informed on recent events no on the contrary like we talked about earlier in the episode there is nothing about your experience of the world in this postmodern media driven simulation that's even relevant to reality anymore I mean what is more relevant to your life within the simulation is it the full extent of the reality of what's going on in the world or is it the simulated reality that the media reports that not only lets you have conversations with people around you about what's going on but it also allows you to continue living your life seemingly well informed with a worldview that helps you understand things this for a second to the example of the matrix what is more relevant to the lives of the people in that simulated world a story about a war going on between machines and humans at the level of reality or a story they can use to understand things within the matrix so that they can keep living their life here's another example people use when they're talking about Baudrillard imagine two people in some sort of online dating situation where they've only communicated thus far through instant messaging let's call them John and Susie now Susie after talking for a while asked John to send her a picture of himself so she can see who she's talking to but John is 50 years old and he knows that Susie is 25 years old John is self-conscious about the fact that he's so much older than her he really wants to keep talking to her so he sends her a picture of himself from back when he was 25 Susie gets the picture and then continues talking to John now it's from this point forward that Susie begins to live and what's essentially an entirely new simulated reality John has given Susie a piece of media that informs her understanding of the world a picture and that piece of media is not an accurate representation of reality because it's 25 years old but from Susie's point of view she lives every day of her life after the fact talking to John believing that she's speaking to a 25 year old person just as most people today live every day of their lives believing that the media they consume is them interfacing with reality this is one of the primary points Baudrillard making here in our societies we no longer make distinctions between representations of reality and reality itself the representations become the real and then the media creates representations of those representations and once again the whole process continues now just to further this example you can imagine if Susie had no intention of ever meeting John and John had no intention of ever meeting Susie Susie could go the rest of her life never questioning this media depiction of reality and she would just never know that she hadn't actually been talking to someone her age whereas if she got suspicious and did some investigating maybe check the metadata of the picture hire a private investigator Susie would rightfully at that point feel betrayed taken advantage of she might feel like every day that she had been talking to John up until that point was a lie so in other words and here's the point you can imagine how on the other side of that investigation Susie might only feel worse for having done it well so - for people that are immersed in our media simulation and this is actually a theme that's explored in the movie The Matrix there's a character that sees the real world understands that The Matrix is a simulation and at that point wants nothing more than to go back into the simulation without any knowledge of what he's learned on the outside this is the reality of the condition of people living in this particular postmodern world - Jean Baudrillard when left with the choice between the simulated world and the real world the vast majority of people are going to choose the simulation we are not helpless victims in this world where the media feeds us disinformation many times were active participants in it most people have no desire whatsoever for the deeper more nuanced complexities of the world most people want to be given their daily dose of the simulation and then continue with their lives believing in a rigid oversimplified worldview comfortably distracted from the reality of things consider for a second just how much information the media makes available to us consider the sheer numbers of just how many possible worldviews you could subscribe to given the access to information we have within our simulation you can be a Christian a Democrat a hardcore conspiracy theorist and all of those positions are completely justifiable because we live in a world where at any instant you can go to google.com type in any statement you want to believe about the way the world is and then be flooded with media making the case for you being right media that you can then use as the reputable evidence proving that you're right and that everyone that fundamentally disagrees with you is a victim of fake news this is a hallmark of this particular postmodern society that Baudrillard would have seen coming a mile away when people can have no confidence and any sort of master narrative that explains the way that things are and when you have unlimited access to media that'll justify any worldview you can imagine in that world all you can ever have are the visible images and sound bytes delivered to you by a TV screen programming into you meta-narratives that you scream at people about by the watercooler see in the same way a lack of grain narratives creates a crisis of identity for people this lack of grand narratives has also created a crisis of meaning I mean it used to be the case that they have completely different views of reality we needed to be geographically distant from each other but now that there is no master narrative practically everyone subscribes to and we get our understanding of the world through whatever media we happen to consume once again in this particular postmodern world that's emerged you can be sitting next to someone on the bus that's essentially living in a completely different world than you because they frame everything that happens to them in terms of how it relates to a different set of media generated narratives this is why to Jean Baudrillard the ultimate metaphor for this particular postmodern society is the freeway because when you look at a freeway what do you see you see tons of people all isolated in their cars speeding in all different directions going places but nobody knows where anybody's going nobody knows who anybody is what they value they're just in your life one second and then gone the next never to be seen again this is what the lives of so many people come down to alone in a simulation working at a job to make money to buy things to express who they are based on the rules the media is set out for them conditioned by and willfully complicit in a system that feeds in their worldview every day destined to a life of having conversations about surface-level politics or economics while watching the world pass them by on a TV screen thank you for listening

Channel: Philosophize This!

Views: 81,847

Rating: 4.9319677 out of 5

Keywords: Simulacra, Baudrillard

Id: RCgoKIT0Ufc

Length: 30min 26sec (1826 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/witshunt]

Baudrillard was pretty spot on in retrospect. like everyone from the Frankfurt school, their theory is more than present now.