The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated dif- ferences generated by “the code,” the “structural law of value,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life. The third order – somewhat harkening back to the first order – speaks again of “the real,” now become hy- perreal, more real than real, the simulated real. Baudrillard here speaks with Nietzsche – the image masks the absence of a profound reality. Baudrillard sees the genetic code and the digital code as being the most accomplished manifestations of the third order of simulacra. In the pre-digital consumer society, cultural citizens were locked into a sys- tem of the smallest discrete identities and differences that resembles the later logic of informatic programming. Digitalization is a universal media of equivalence that extends previous similar media such as money. Not only does so-called reality disappear behind the signs of reality, but the entire system of simulation dedicates itself to the generation of “reality effects” or the minute reduplication of the real.
Baudrillard came from a Marxist background and worked through the discourses of political economy and critical social theory. Although his idea has not succeeded in persuading Marxists to pay attention to it, Baudrillard’s argument is that contemporary society or postmodern capitalism should be understood not as a supervening “mode of production” but rather as a total cultural system of coded signs that refer to other coded signs, a world of virtuality where all experiences are possible (virtual in both meanings of that word) due to the universal combinatorics of software code. Anything that can poten- tially happen can be programmed into being. Codes, models, cybernetic feedback loops, statistical prediction, and algorithms now organize everything of what was previously called social life or existence.
The best book that has been published on Baudrillard is the relatively brief Jean Baudrillard: The Defense of the Real by Rex Butler. The question that Butler makes central to his book – and which he sees as being Baudrillard’s essential problematic or query – is how can the commentator who wants to speak of simulation or challenge simulation es- tablish an “outside” position with respect to simulation when everything is indeed sim- ulation, including the discourse of the analyst himself? The study by the Australian art historian treats Baudrillard’s thinking systematically and delineates the hidden entan- glement between seduction (the challenge to the simulacra or the possibility of reversal of the system, the possibility of the emergence of “a new real”) and simulation.
Seduction is the difference between the original and the copy which simulation seeks to suppress in its attempt to represent or institute reality-becoming-hyperreality. In the hyperreality of the media culture of images, there is an overflow of images, a universal visibility or generalized pornography where nothing is left hidden. There is no longer any imaginary dimension separate from“the real.” With the unlimited production of images, the world becomes an image. The definition of “the real” in the era of third-order simu- lacra is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. There is a haunting resemblance of the real to itself. How can one speak of “the real” when all is simulation? How can one speak of simulation when there is nothing outside it, no exempted location from which one may observe it, only an “outside” which initially exists on simulation’s own terms?
At the beginning of “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard refers to the fable “On Exactitude in Science” by the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges which speaks of the cartographers of the Empire who “draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly.” There is an intertextual relationship between these lines and the title and narrative of the 2010 novel La Carte et le Territoire by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. The Borges allegory of simulation resonates today only with the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. When the map covers the whole territory, the reality principle vanishes. In the third order of simulacra, the map precedes and engenders the territory. Only vestiges of “the real” persist here and there. Baudrillard writes: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper- real.” The model precedes the territory. The map precedes the real.
The assumption that the widespread creation of models of “reality” is going to leave physical reality as it is – is naïve. Models are not only tools for assisting “the real”; they act upon “the real,” they transform “the real,” they become themselves a major part of “the real.” Welcome to the desert of the real as Baudrillard phrases it, a line which the Wachowski siblings had Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) repeat to Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix, explaining to him what happened to the world at the end of the twentieth century.
Baudrillard’s most famous example of hyperreality and simulation presented in Simulacra and Simulation is what he writes about Disneyland:
“Disneyland exists to hide that it is the “real” country, all “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons exist to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal om- nipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make up believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation… The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up to rejuvenate the fiction of the real.”
Disney exists to save the “reality principle” or the myth of an “authentic real.”