9 - An Age of Simulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories

Summary

Hyping ‘the real’

In his essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Jean Baudrillard described the postmodern condition as one in which what was once regarded as ‘reality’, ‘the real’, had been permanently displaced into the virtual, to be constituted now only in the interminable play of signifiers which saturate contemporary experience. The essay deployed as its opening topos the Borgesian motif of a full-scale map laid over and completely coterminous with reality, ‘a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory’. Today, Baudrillard argued,

Simulation is no longer … of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: the hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory … it is the map that engenders the territory.… It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are … our own. The desert of the real itself. (p. 167)

This is not entirely a new note in Western culture. To some extent it reruns, in a more fashionable idiom, that myth of the Fall which, in an earlier dispensation, emerged as T. S. Eliot's ‘dissociation of sensibility’, the mysterious schism between belief and fact which, according to Eliot, set in in the middle of the seventeenth century.