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Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty
Mike Gane provides an introduction to recent developments in French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s thinking. This volume reflects Baudrillard’s new concern with radical uncertainty and the way in which he has reconfigured his earlier thinking in the light of more recent ideas and theories.The author disputes the notion that Baudrillard has now become an increasingly extreme theorist, remote from the realities of the world - and argues instead that new developments in Baudrillard’s work are a more appropriate reflection on a world of extremes. This book explicitly challenges the conservative response to Baudrillard’s work, and underlines the significance of what Baudrillard himself terms the ‘fourth order of simulation’, in a major contribution to new debates on the significance of recent developments in Western culture and society.
160 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1999
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December 29, 2024
Don’t Forget Baudrillard
As the author points out, Baudrillard has altered our understanding of the consumer society as well as the information age and in so doing has identified a shift in the cultural paradigm otherwise unnoticed. For example, we have reached a point where editing is done, and where community standards are set, by computer algorithms, not human beings. Baudrillard stopped engaging as critic of modernity and became the first thinker to see the evolution of modernity into postmodernity though he himself was not a ‘postmodernist’, he was an analyst of the postmodern condition which is characterized primarily by uncertainty. Baudrillard suggested that the modernity grew from the destruction of paradigm belief systems dominating earlier periods and that postmodernity grew from the destruction of meaning itself in the twentieth-century. He identified the following steps (not to be confused with the 4th order simulation):
1. The reification (mistaking an abstract human construct such as an economic system for a concrete reality welded to nature) with the reification comes alienation. Same finding of Critical Theory.
2. Consumption for use over taking production.
3. Consumption for the purpose of display and differentiation in setting oneself apart from others with signs and symbol overtaking consumption for use.
4. The increasing dominance of the information and technology driven culture.
To express his radical theory, Baudrillard goes beyond the mere academic application of known logical principles. He can thus ask, is existence itself becoming a vast simulation? Not only is reality at its most basic, fundamental and quantum level only understandable through simulations, models, abstractions and analogies, but so is our social reality. Our social, economic and political reality outstrips our attempts to understand it with anything more than inaccurate and dubious simulation models. In this sense, fundamental material reality is better understood (with mathematical models which are still simulations) then is the everyday reality of our daily lives. We take existence to be the source of certainty but it is really the greatest source of radical uncertainty.
Here is a brief summary of the four orders of simulation as applied to historical periods. We escape alienation by entering simulation thus making revolution impossible. We pass from the age of alienated modern person to the age of the simulated postmodern person.
1. From the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. This is the time of the lone ‘original’ and the careful forgeries.
2. The industrial age. This is the time of mass production; the true original is no longer available or important.
3. The information and communication revolution with the dominance of mass media and literal simulation models to ironically represent reality more realistically. This where we enter into the ecstasy of communication and the euphoria of information and create the democracy of artificial signs.
4. The trans-age. Transnational, transsexual, transvaluation etc. This is what Baudrillard called the fractal stage, or the age of pure simulacrum where the simulation becomes reality or reality becomes virtual so to speak. There are no longer any identifiable underlying states of reality. The simulation itself is now reality and there is a decided undecidability to all events.
To make this idea concrete (ha ha), I came up with my own trivial example:
0. Concrete Reality: The person standing on the sidewalk.
1. Representation: A photo of the person standing on the sidewalk.
2. Simulation: An enhanced photoshop image made from the photo of the person standing on the sidewalk.
3. Virtual Simulation: A bitmoji image of the person standing on the sidewalk created from the photoshop image.
4. Virtual Reality (Simulacrum) : A Pokémon standing on the sidewalk. A Pokémon is a virtual being with no underlying concrete reality. The simulation, the Pokémon is a new reality. Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game.
Baudrillard tells us Stage 4 is where simulation ends because a simulation cannot simulated, only the real can be simulated. However, I find it interesting to muse over the idea of the simulation as the new real being simulated. This where the meaning of real or reality itself becomes destabilized, or where the real drops out of reality. I imagine this coming with full body immersion gaming and entertainment technology. At this point, social knowledge will breakdown and there will no longer be any point of reference.
The fourth order is unlike the first three orders of simulation where it can be plausibly shown that there is still an underlying concrete reality under the simulations, the person standing on the sidewalk. Pokémon are virtual creatures that a human player can interact with (capture, battle, train) as they appear in the player's material world. This is the apocalypse of simulation where the critical distance between the real and simulation has vanished.
In the fourth order shown above, the result is pure simulacrum with no underlying reality unlike the first three steps that can be related back to the original concrete reality. As this happens, the events of the world and history itself is experienced only second hand or only through simulation. Very little of what we think we know or take to be real is authentically experienced in its raw reality. Rather, we experience the representation, the sign, the symbol, the simulation through our information and simulation networks, but this is what we take to be real. Most of what we now take to be real experience is just the media packaged simulation of the real experience. This is why Baudrillard could claim in three separate essays that the Gulf War will not happen, the Gulf War is not happening and The Gulf War did not happen. By this he meant that the media mediated events seen through news outlets was not the real experience of the Gulf War. Only those in the war zone could experience the Gulf War but each of them could only experience a fragment of the real event. No person or participant in the Gulf War or remoted viewer of the Gulf war could have a full experience of the real, actual and total event though each person will convince themselves that they have had this actual, real, and total experience - either thorough direct participation or through media feeds. In other words, the real Gulf War was and is beyond the experience of any person who was there or what media outlets can broadcast. By this, Baudrillard did not mean to minimize the catastrophe of the real; the real suffering, agony and atrocity of the war which is not any less real by it being a simulacrum to participants and observers.
In our own daily reality, an example of third order simulation is the interactive mapping software used for driving directions. We are faced with a screen vision of the world or double reduction in that what is on the screen, the simulated street, is more real than the street outside the car window. What is going on in the simulation, the mapping software, is more important than the reality of the pavement upon which we drive when we need turn-by-turn instructions. Upon arrival, we return to the real world. Thus, I think we can say that we move in and out of various orders of simulation and reality. While we are driving in this manner, under the hegemony of the screen, the real is only a referent for the simulation. But this is my own opinion, for Baudrillard, it is more accurate to say that each level or order in the simulation abolishes the previous. But in this he has in mind the societal, not individual experience.
The three linked ideas in Baudrillard’s thought can be summarized as follows:
1. The is no universal construction of reality. Each culture relates to its own narrative version of reality. This is necessary protection from the ‘hell of the real’.
2. Western culture intensified the experience of reality and produced hyperreality (the inability to distinguish the difference between the real and the simulation of the real). This is also the obliteration of the dichotomous demarcation of such subject-object, real-fake, true-false.
3. The real and virtual merge so that fictional order and factual order become simply two different types of illusion.
As the author points out, Baudrillard has altered our understanding of the consumer society as well as the information age and in so doing has identified a shift in the cultural paradigm otherwise unnoticed. For example, we have reached a point where editing is done, and where community standards are set, by computer algorithms, not human beings. Baudrillard stopped engaging as critic of modernity and became the first thinker to see the evolution of modernity into postmodernity though he himself was not a ‘postmodernist’, he was an analyst of the postmodern condition which is characterized primarily by uncertainty. Baudrillard suggested that the modernity grew from the destruction of paradigm belief systems dominating earlier periods and that postmodernity grew from the destruction of meaning itself in the twentieth-century. He identified the following steps (not to be confused with the 4th order simulation):
1. The reification (mistaking an abstract human construct such as an economic system for a concrete reality welded to nature) with the reification comes alienation. Same finding of Critical Theory.
2. Consumption for use over taking production.
3. Consumption for the purpose of display and differentiation in setting oneself apart from others with signs and symbol overtaking consumption for use.
4. The increasing dominance of the information and technology driven culture.
To express his radical theory, Baudrillard goes beyond the mere academic application of known logical principles. He can thus ask, is existence itself becoming a vast simulation? Not only is reality at its most basic, fundamental and quantum level only understandable through simulations, models, abstractions and analogies, but so is our social reality. Our social, economic and political reality outstrips our attempts to understand it with anything more than inaccurate and dubious simulation models. In this sense, fundamental material reality is better understood (with mathematical models which are still simulations) then is the everyday reality of our daily lives. We take existence to be the source of certainty but it is really the greatest source of radical uncertainty.
Here is a brief summary of the four orders of simulation as applied to historical periods. We escape alienation by entering simulation thus making revolution impossible. We pass from the age of alienated modern person to the age of the simulated postmodern person.
1. From the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. This is the time of the lone ‘original’ and the careful forgeries.
2. The industrial age. This is the time of mass production; the true original is no longer available or important.
3. The information and communication revolution with the dominance of mass media and literal simulation models to ironically represent reality more realistically. This where we enter into the ecstasy of communication and the euphoria of information and create the democracy of artificial signs.
4. The trans-age. Transnational, transsexual, transvaluation etc. This is what Baudrillard called the fractal stage, or the age of pure simulacrum where the simulation becomes reality or reality becomes virtual so to speak. There are no longer any identifiable underlying states of reality. The simulation itself is now reality and there is a decided undecidability to all events.
To make this idea concrete (ha ha), I came up with my own trivial example:
0. Concrete Reality: The person standing on the sidewalk.
1. Representation: A photo of the person standing on the sidewalk.
2. Simulation: An enhanced photoshop image made from the photo of the person standing on the sidewalk.
3. Virtual Simulation: A bitmoji image of the person standing on the sidewalk created from the photoshop image.
4. Virtual Reality (Simulacrum) : A Pokémon standing on the sidewalk. A Pokémon is a virtual being with no underlying concrete reality. The simulation, the Pokémon is a new reality. Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game.
Baudrillard tells us Stage 4 is where simulation ends because a simulation cannot simulated, only the real can be simulated. However, I find it interesting to muse over the idea of the simulation as the new real being simulated. This where the meaning of real or reality itself becomes destabilized, or where the real drops out of reality. I imagine this coming with full body immersion gaming and entertainment technology. At this point, social knowledge will breakdown and there will no longer be any point of reference.
The fourth order is unlike the first three orders of simulation where it can be plausibly shown that there is still an underlying concrete reality under the simulations, the person standing on the sidewalk. Pokémon are virtual creatures that a human player can interact with (capture, battle, train) as they appear in the player's material world. This is the apocalypse of simulation where the critical distance between the real and simulation has vanished.
In the fourth order shown above, the result is pure simulacrum with no underlying reality unlike the first three steps that can be related back to the original concrete reality. As this happens, the events of the world and history itself is experienced only second hand or only through simulation. Very little of what we think we know or take to be real is authentically experienced in its raw reality. Rather, we experience the representation, the sign, the symbol, the simulation through our information and simulation networks, but this is what we take to be real. Most of what we now take to be real experience is just the media packaged simulation of the real experience. This is why Baudrillard could claim in three separate essays that the Gulf War will not happen, the Gulf War is not happening and The Gulf War did not happen. By this he meant that the media mediated events seen through news outlets was not the real experience of the Gulf War. Only those in the war zone could experience the Gulf War but each of them could only experience a fragment of the real event. No person or participant in the Gulf War or remoted viewer of the Gulf war could have a full experience of the real, actual and total event though each person will convince themselves that they have had this actual, real, and total experience - either thorough direct participation or through media feeds. In other words, the real Gulf War was and is beyond the experience of any person who was there or what media outlets can broadcast. By this, Baudrillard did not mean to minimize the catastrophe of the real; the real suffering, agony and atrocity of the war which is not any less real by it being a simulacrum to participants and observers.
In our own daily reality, an example of third order simulation is the interactive mapping software used for driving directions. We are faced with a screen vision of the world or double reduction in that what is on the screen, the simulated street, is more real than the street outside the car window. What is going on in the simulation, the mapping software, is more important than the reality of the pavement upon which we drive when we need turn-by-turn instructions. Upon arrival, we return to the real world. Thus, I think we can say that we move in and out of various orders of simulation and reality. While we are driving in this manner, under the hegemony of the screen, the real is only a referent for the simulation. But this is my own opinion, for Baudrillard, it is more accurate to say that each level or order in the simulation abolishes the previous. But in this he has in mind the societal, not individual experience.
The three linked ideas in Baudrillard’s thought can be summarized as follows:
1. The is no universal construction of reality. Each culture relates to its own narrative version of reality. This is necessary protection from the ‘hell of the real’.
2. Western culture intensified the experience of reality and produced hyperreality (the inability to distinguish the difference between the real and the simulation of the real). This is also the obliteration of the dichotomous demarcation of such subject-object, real-fake, true-false.
3. The real and virtual merge so that fictional order and factual order become simply two different types of illusion.
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