The imaginary was a pretext of the real in a world dominated by the reality principle.
Today, it is the real which has become the pretext of the model in a world governed
by the principle of simulation. And, paradoxically, it is the real which has become our
true utopia—but a utopia that is no longer a possibility, a utopia we can do no more
than dream about, like a lost object.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Science Fiction
In his short story "On Exactitude in Science", Jorge Luis Borges speaks of an empire that reaches such level of cartographical perfection that, infatuated with this art, erects “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” However, later generations understood the uselessness of such a map, which instead of representing the territory overlaps with it, suffocating it, challenging its “reality,” and ended up leaving it to the elements where now, in the deserts of the west, remain its ruins.
Jean Baudrillard took Borges’ metaphor to illustrate his theory of simulation and simulacra, in which reality, as it is invaded by an increasingly complex succession of representations, ends up losing its quality of territory—of a referential entity—and is transformed into a hyperreality that ceases to take place and originate in reality itself; what Umberto Eco called “an authentic fake.” One of the circumstances Baudrillard used to demonstrate his theory was the First Gulf War which, he claimed, had not taken place in reality but entirely in a media hyperreality or, in other words, that the image of war, its representation, had preceded the real war. Henceforth, said Baudrillard,
it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory and if one must return to [Borges’] fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.1
At this point it’s not a matter of Life imitating art more than Art imitating life, as Oscar Wilde would have it—the real has already lost its referential capacity—but of reality being constantly surpassed and overwhelmed by its representations. If the real has become our utopia, as is clear from Howard Beale’s jeremiads (9.3), it is because real reality, the territory, has been abandoned for the simulacrum of the media and we now inhabit in what Baudrillard called the “desert of the real” (an expression that reappears, not coincidentally, in The Matrix), a social order in which the map, the model and all sorts of second-hand realities have become detached from any relationship with their originary substrate. As art surpasses life, the distance that separates them gets reduced to a ledge, a narrow threshold from which we look at the world from its map.
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation, 1. ↩︎
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