DIALOGUE

Baudrillardwas a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.

A first-order simulation would be where the representation of the real (say, a novel, a painting or a map) is obviously just that: an artificial representation.

A second-order simulation, however, blurs the boundaries between reality and representation. Baudrillard points us towards Borges' fable 'Of Exactitude in Science', where 'the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory' (1983b: 1); in other words, the 'map' and reality can no longer be discerned, so the map has become, in a sense, as real as the real.

But third-order simulation goes beyond these positions; third-order simulation produces a 'hyperreal' or 'the generation by models of a real without origin or reality' (1983b: 2). In a reversal of order, in third-order simulation, the model precedes the real (e.g. the map precedes the territory) - but this doesn't mean that there is a blurring between reality and representation; rather, there is a detachment from both of these, whereby the reversal becomes irrelevant. Baudrillard suggests that hyperreality is produced algorithmically (or via mathematical formulae), like the virtual reality of computer code, that is to say, detached from notions of mimesis and representation and implicated, for example, in the world of mathematical formulae. The important and disturbing point to all this is that the hyperreal doesn't exist in the realm of good and evil, because it is measured as such in terms of its performativity - how well does it work or operate?

It is easy to think about Disneyland as a second-order simulation, where fake castles look more real than the real, because they embody all of our childish and romantic notions of what a castle should ideally look like, and the machinery of representation is so well hidden that reality and representation blur together. But the implications of Disneyland as third-order simulation are much harder to come to grips with. Baudrillard argues that:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland ... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.

Baudrillard's point in Simulations is that society can only function if the subject believes that rationality holds sway, and discipline, childishness, madness and so on are seen to be elsewhere. Or, to put this another way, society needs to believe that the sovereign power of rationality holds sway.

Thus he calls Disneyland 'a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real' (1983b: 25). What he means by this is that Disneyland exists to convince us that rationality is outside the walls of its childish domain, rather than the fact that rationality has been replaced by childishness everywhere.

Baudrillard gives two further examples of this blurring of the boundaries between true and false, with examples of simulation in the army and the church.

In the past, Baudrillard argues, the army would 'unmask' those subjects guilty of simulating an illness or madness, for example, to get out of a particular duty (or to get out of the army altogether); the subjects would then be punished for their misdeeds.

However, in the present, Baudrillard argues that the army now attempts to 'reform' simulators - in other words, treat their 'illnesses' as real and return them eventually to duty.

In this reformation, the reality principle has broken down, because there is no attempt to look beyond the simulated symptoms for a 'true' state of affairs: the symptoms are always already the performative truth of the subject, regardless of whether the person is ill or not.

• Trial by the media (a.k.a. trial in the court of public opinion).
• The embrace of surfaces as reality in pop art and culture.
• Marketing programs masquerading as news shows.
• People misrepresenting themselves on the Internet.
• Photoshopped images
• Augmented reality software for your iPhone
• etc...

• News show says someone is guilty?  We all judge him before the trial even begins.
• Photoshopped images of plasticized people and hyper-real environments?  We get so used to them that we no longer enjoy normal straight photography or even care what the original scene or person looked like.
• News shows degenerate into competing political/ideological camps, where they hype superficial differences to keep us all enthralled and tuned in.  And we can't tear ourselves away from the screens.  What ever happened to journalism?
• More and more people getting their daily truth on the Internet (Google, FaceBook) believing that what they're seeing is a slice of reality when in fact their search results are being tailored to them based on unknown criterion, and their social spaces are being mined and sold to commercial interests.

Philosophical ideals such as 'truth' or 'ethics' are subordinated in the postmodern to performativity: if it works, it is good. Lyotard argued in the 1970s that higher education would come to be dominated by performativity: skills needed to increase the 'performativity of the social system' would be prioritized (1984).

For example, the teaching of computer sciences and genetic engineering would take priority over traditional subjects such as philosophy and the arts.

This would seem to leave us in a frightening abyss, where the hyperreal produces a society of surfaces, performativity and a fragmentation or fracturing of rationality. Such a world has been called by many critics 'the postmodern'.

The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

1. Causing the client  to exhibit a  "manic defense."   The inability to tolerate frustration indicates that a person is "embedded in a highly replicative, enclosed system.  The client's system responds to any interventions as a threat, and resorts to various manic defenses (activating fears and terrors in the client) which act as perturbations to attempt to maintain the pattern and even to entrain the analyst into the pattern.

2. Preventing the pattern from being examined by entraining others to not look or go there.  By entraining the analyst into the pattern as well, it is possible that this will trigger the analyst's issues and weaknesses, tapping into the analyst's "need to defend against important aspects of his psyche."  This will have the effect of "seal[ing] off important" issues, patterns, behaviors that need to be brought into awareness.   Once you get pulled into the "game" it becomes very difficult to bring attention to the game itself.
   
   
3. Causing perturbations to create an entrainment, thus causing others to move, communicate and behave in accordance with the pattern.   This is Projection Identification.   So entrainment with the person's archetypal field takes place through these perturbations.  One person acts or says something which causes an affect in the other person to cause them to think/feel/act in ways which are consistent with that field.  In other words, the system is issuing disturbances and perturbations to get it's environment to vibrate in a pattern so that it can "eat" and so maintain and replicate itself.  By looking at the pattern it is trying to cause to be entrained, we can see the archetypal structure of the pattern.   The field operates to create resonance with its pattern.  Operating below the level of self-conscious awareness, this often can trump personal volition and will.   As the field works to self-replicate and maintain itself, you can find yourself operating in a "functionally closed", "repetitive dance" .

What this means as applied to culture, is that the first task is to discover these cultural archetypal fields from their simulacra (the entraining perturbations)

Joe