Baudrillard, Solomon, Empire

Reading Baudrillard this time, it was striking to me how Baudrillard begins “Simulacra and Simulations” with a description of Borges’ cartography, wherein the detail of the map is thorough enough to cover the space of the territory. The metaphor is prescient for the application of Baudrillard’s theory to expansive gamespaces that would be developed later. Here the simulation is by nature totalizing, and not partial; to see its edges would be to locate the limits of its reproduction of the real. Simulation exceeds and envelopes representation (indeed Baudrillard frequently describes it in terms of circular, recursive imagery: “an uninterrupted circuit,” “exchanging in itself,” a “Moebius strip,” “two ends of a curved mirror”), which maintains an ontological distinction between the sign and the real, however much they are equivalent. Simulation, however, refuses to acknowledge their differences; it denies both. This is the totalizing logic of the simulation.

It is not until later in the essay that Baudrillard approaches to an “outside” to simulation, which is expressed most pointedly through its mourned absence, its historical departure. This, to me, is an interesting break in the Baudrillard’s somewhat exhausting rhetoric. He suggests: “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.” In other words, Baudrillard reasserts the concrete materiality of real bodies and objects, and this is reaffirmed in the essays he wrote just a few years later, collected in the volume The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. There he critiqued the mediated nature of the Gulf War conflict, precisely the disembodied nature of the conflict, at least the way in which it was represented to the public at large.

Elsewhere he refers to a lost reality that, through its felt lack, is overcompensated through the production of industrial materials and “overdose[d]” political ideologies like fascism that assuage people of their “[m]elancholy for societies without power.” Thus the real exists, but only in phantom form. It is remembered as it perhaps never was (nostalgia), and we are numb to or unaware of its continued presence in physical form. It would counter the logic of a totality, of course, if one could truly see outside the simulacra; at the same time, however, the pressure of reality’s absence is still felt on an indeterminate outside, which might account for the increased militancy that is expressed at those margins: political scandal, pathology, nation (Disney), territory, war. These extremities are precisely where the simulation comes under the most pressure, because that is where it threatens to come undone: in these categories which are already unstable, constructed, and yet taken as real or natural.

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As I mentioned above, the cartographic quality of simulacra lends itself readily to videogames, and I wanted to briefly discuss a piece by experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon, who has recently been creating machinima films within the gamespace of the Grand Theft Auto series (I’m writing about these films for another class). This installation, Empire, recreates Warhol’s iconic film within the world of GTA IV’s Liberty City. I believe that when it was on view at the Wexner Center last year, the piece ran uninterrupted for a week (Warhol’s film runs eight and a half hours). To achieve Warhol’s same perspective, Solomon, through his avatar, had to steal a helicopter and then crash into the side of a building. Tellingly, his south-facing skyline is one that does not include the World Trade Center; neither does Warhol’s, since his film was completed in 1964, before the towers’ construction. Throughout the week-long projection, the physics generator within the game begin to loop, indicating a temporal limit to the game’s total (totalizing?) space. And like Baudrillard’s simulacra, the vision of New York presented in Empire is not real, though it still feels like it, particularly for the uncanny sense that “[s]omething has disappeared.” The trace of a real is affecting not despite its departure but precisely because it is phantasmatic.

Phil Solomon, Empire (2008)

Andy Warhol, Empire (1964)