The Precession of Simulacra: Morgan, JS, Nick, Pete

Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra" sets up a critical discourse in which the Real no longer exists and has been replaced by a "generation by models of a real without origin or reality". The omnipresence and precession of simulacra, simulation (as contrasted with representation) with no grounding in the real, implies a world with unintuitive dynamics that Baudrillard goes on to explain using a handful of real-world examples: Watergate, religion, ethnology, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Space Race... He leverages these established dynamics to explore a number of concepts from (the "murderous") science to McLuhan's media itself, turning popular and traditional rational analysis on its head and imparting a sense of despair in the face of the incomprehensible, contradictory multiplicity 'of it all'.

First thing's first: what's simulacra and how can there be simulation with no underlying reality? Some of us elected to push down right into the discourse, another failed to pop it out exclaiming, "the whole thing is ridiculous". Understanding the basic concept certainly constituted the majority of our discussion. We found ourselves employing Baudrillard's Mobius strip metaphor, watching videos of morphing GL textures, and imagining trippy paintings; turtles all the way down. We concluded that while Baudrillard's poetical prose was confusing, the images and aesthetics he conjures ("...a whole panoply of gadgets magnetizes the crowd in directed flows...", or "...produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere") help grease the concepts. We remained still confused, however, about what he meant by "phases of the image", though his phases helped ground the notion of extra-reality in a more concrete conceptual framework. Watergate was lost on the Canadians, so the American had to explain how the Left uses Watergate to signify the inherent evil of the Right; but, coming from a Left ourselves, it was shocking to read how, given this framework of understanding, the Left sabotages itself even in its moments of righteous glory. The Watergate example helped us to comprehend the notion of artifical counterpoint to establish the artificial real; the anti to "rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitamacy" of the real (though, not really). From politics we moved to Capital, seeing how Baudrillard enables his theory with Marx's Fetishism of Commodities. While on the topic of context and inter-text relations, we found that the framework embeds into and extends McLuhan's ideas nicely and we were left asking, 'is media, the extension of the senses responsible for all of this?' And, in all honesty, we just couldn't make sense of the last section. The satellite and nuclear metaphors were mostly impenetrable, and the concept of a, for instance, war's end contained in and occurring before the event (the war) itself occurs was comprehendible but outlandish. Finally, still disoriented by the very idea of the precession of simulacra, we formulated the metaphor of a chaotic system, given real initial conditions and left to spiral and fractal into chaotic catharsis.

What are we to do with this "no longer [even] ambiguous" situation? Baudrillard is denying the possibility of the real, yet he is implicitly claiming a God's eye view. How can he, like a scientist, study (the ethnology of) our social world without some degree of corruption (surfacing of the real; an island onto which to crawl from the sea) in his perfectly chaotic, double-abstracted system? Is the loss of the real good or bad, how can we have an opinion, and on what ground is Baudrillard standing?