Episode #124 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is the beginning of a look into what at the time was a new attitude that’s emerging in the post-structuralist world. We’re looking at the book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. I hope you love the show today.

So, for the sake of time at the beginning here, I need to move pretty quickly through several points we’ve already covered on the show without re-explaining them. So, if any of this seems like it needs more explanation, you can always go back and listen to all the episodes we’ve done so far on structuralism and post-structuralism. But, for the sake of right now, we just talked about Foucault’s work, his famous genealogies and archaeologies of the way we’ve looked at madness and criminal punishment and sexuality. And, while there’s a lot of subtext to these works, one of the major points Foucault’s making with these books overall is that terms like sanity versus insanity, heterosexual versus homosexual, a criminal mind versus a mind that’s been properly reformed, these are just three of hundreds of different new ways in our modern world that science categorizes human beings and labels them normal or abnormal in an attempt to classify and understand them and that, just in the relatively short period of recorded history that we have access to, there’s no shortage of examples Foucault can point to of societies that just never used these terms to categorize people. Nobody ever used to classify people in these terms. They had their own terms they used to categorize people. And we can see that those terms had huge effects on the way these groups were treated within those societies.

But, aside from pointing out that our new scientific categories similarly affect the way people are looked at in our modern world, Foucault would just want us to consider for a second, the sciences one day just created these categories that we use to define people. Science did this in an attempt to make sense of and understand the world that we live in. That’s kind of the job of science. But Foucault would say, something we all have to realize is that there’s nothing about these new scientific categories that’s somehow written into the universe. Sane versus insane is not a property of the universe. I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, “And on the first day the Lord created the heavens and earth, and on the second he created the scientific category of sanity and insanity.” No. Sanity and insanity are two terms that we use in a modern, cultural discourse to be able to describe the mental health of people. There have been countless other ways of categorizing mental health in the past based on different criteria, countless other words used, countless other ways it could be done. And, just how these other ways of categorizing people in the past have come and gone, our methods without question will come to pass as well.

Not only, to Foucault, are there no stable identities or categories written into the universe that can be arrived at like sane versus insane but, more generally to the post-structuralists, there is no stable point from which anyone can ever assert that they’ve arrived at the Truth with a capital T, because it would be delusional to think that you somehow have access to it. You know, these Enlightenment thinkers thought, “Okay, well, one thing’s for sure. There certainly is a way that things are. I mean, there’s a reality out there, right? Scientific rationality is the way that we’re going to arrive at that reality.” But a post-structuralist would say, “No, that’s not the case. I mean, of course there’s a way that things are out there. Nobody’s denying that. But all that we as human beings can ever hope to have access to is a set of cultural and scientific constructions that were created in an attempt to understand reality. What you refer to as the truth is really just the current, temporary dominant narratives of your culture’s way of making sense of things, narratives that are constantly being redefined as they interact with other cultural discourses that interpret reality in a different way.” In other words, this is a 20th-century, post-structuralist critique of a hopeful, 17th-century, Enlightenment-era belief about how stable everything is.

Stability was the game in town in the past. And it was being called into question now: the stability of things like words, as we talked about through the work of Derrida; the stability of the Enlightenment-era, top-down idea of the way power works in a society through the work of Foucault; the stability of identity and the terms people need to use to categorize themselves; the stability of any grand narrative that we’ve inherited from the past. See, because, historically, these grand narratives have been the stable foundation thinkers have used to make truth claims. And what this has led to is that, historically, these grand narratives have been the points of unity that ideologies form around, the ideas that groups of people gather around and marginalize others on behalf of. This is why, in the work of the all the postmodernists we’ve talked about so far, the name of the game in this new era has been deconstruction and fragmentation of these old, inherited ideas. Because in the eyes of the post-structuralists, if you can fragment and deconstruct these grand narratives and show them to be not some ultimate theory of reality that’s been arrived at, but instead just one of many incomplete, narrow ways of making sense of things, that at best gives people a story to build their life around and at worst makes other people’s lives in this world miserable, then that may be the first step we have towards not repeating a lot of the same mistakes we’ve made historically.

But what philosophers realized very quickly is that getting away from these grand narratives was not something to just blindly assume was the best way of going about things, because they realized this change is not just going to occur in the academic departments of universities. If we were going to get away from these grand narratives of the past, this was potentially going to have massive effects on the way society functioned overall. Right around the early 1980s, about 40 years ago, there’s this fear among philosophers of what exactly the societal implications of the ideas of postmodernism are going to be.

See, in the past, cultures have always had these grand narratives to rally around. Living in a society that doesn’t have these points of unity to base itself upon, this is really an experiment that’s never been run. And maintaining a society is obviously far from a guarantee. The concerns of several thinkers right around this time in the early 80s was, what does a postmodern, fragmented society really look like? How does it work? How does it remain held together despite the citizens having such different identities, having such different interpretations of the meanings of things? How does society work when you can be living in what’s essentially a different universe than the person sitting next to you on the bus?

There were a lot of different theories. Some thinkers said that we were 50 to 100 years before we’d ever even see the effects of postmodern ideas. Some people thought the effects -- good or bad depending on who you’re reading -- were at least a couple decades away before we’d even see an impact. But there were a few, like the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, that claimed all the way back in the early 1980s that we were already living in a postmodern society in many ways. He makes a case for this, among other things, in his book Simulacra and Simulation, the ideas therein made publicly popular by the movie The Matrix in 1999. Now, it should be said, the movie The Matrix is not a perfect encapsulation of the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard. I mean, it’s not even a decent one. But how could it be? That’s not what they were going for anyway, making a Hollywood movie. Nonetheless, the movie’s something that many people are familiar with, and it provides some good visuals and examples that are going to be useful for talking about this book for the rest of the episode. So I want to start here.

Now, I’m going to assume that pretty much everybody listening to this has seen the movie, so I’m not going to go into a ton of detail. But for the people that haven’t seen it in a while, let me try to give a 30-second version of the movie. So, on planet earth sometime in the future, there’s an apocalyptic event that goes down where the human race goes to war with a race of machines -- artificial intelligence that we created. Now, when this war first began, the machines ran primarily on solar power. So, in a wartime tactic, in an attempt to cut the machines off from their power source, the human race “torched the sky” as they say in the movie. Basically, they destroyed the atmosphere so that no sunlight can get in. Now, unfortunately, the machines did what any rational machine would do in their predicament. They found another power source. Apparently, the human body produces a certain amount of electricity simply by virtue of there being a heart pumping and a nervous system firing. So what the machines started to do is grow human beings to be able to power themselves: human agriculture, vast fields as far as the eye can see, billions of people being grown in these little pods filled with some sort of amniotic fluid.

Now, if you’re the machines and you’re using these pods just to harvest electricity, you don’t really want a human being inside of the pods splish-splashing around in their amniotic fluid. It would be distracting, right? So every one of these people that’s in one of these pods is jacked into a simulated reality called the Matrix where they live out their simulated lives in a very similar world to ours at the beginning of the 21st century. They go to work. They fall in love. They pay their taxes. The overwhelming majority of them go their entire lives never knowing that the whole thing has been a simulation.

Now, just real quick. You can imagine, once you’re inside this simulation, the exact purpose of your life is not going to be something that’s immediately evident to you. You can imagine, once you’re in there, coming to believe in any number of stories that give you answers about what your purpose is. Let’s think about a few options for sake of the rest of the episode. You could find some sort of spiritual purpose: you could be a devout follower of Hinduism, a Christian. You could find some sort of political purpose: you could be a, you know, a staunch democrat that reads six newspapers a day and drinks decaf coffee so you don’t get too riled up about politics. You could be a hardcore conspiracy theorist, spending every day of your life working hard to expose the truth about what’s really going on out there.

Picture somebody else living in this simulation. Picture someone who maybe isn’t entirely convinced by any of these stories. You can imagine spending your entire life immersed in this simulation, stuck in this up-work-home-TV-bed lifestyle, wondering what the purpose of your life is, only to get to the end of your life to be sadly disappointed because, in a twisted way, the entire purpose of your life the whole time was really just to persist on living for another day to keep your heart beating so that you can continue to assist the agenda of this race of machines that exist at another level of reality that you don’t even realize is there. This metaphor will become important for our episode here today.

So, how much of this is Jean Baudrillard, and how much of this is a Hollywood sci-fi movie? Well, Baudrillard does not say that the purpose of your life is to serve as a power source for a race of machines. And with the title of his book Simulacra and Simulation he’s not implying that you’re living in some sort of elaborate computer simulation. What he’d probably want us to do in our modern time is to think about the word simulation a little more open-mindedly than that. What is a simulation? Baudrillard might give a definition along the lines of, “A simulation is an imitation of how a real-world process or system operates over time.” What if in the same way a person is jacked into the Matrix, living their life in a world that prevents them from ever seeing the real world as it truly exists, what if in our societies today -- our postmodern, fragmented, advanced-capitalist, media-driven societies -- what if we similarly live every day in a world that we accept to be reality that prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is? What if our simulation isn’t housed in computer hardware? What if it’s all around us?

Remember, a simulation is the imitation of a real-world process or system over time. What if in this postmodern society practically everything about the way that people see their lives is seen through the lens of a complex network of signs and symbols, given to them by media and the people around them, and that for the last several hundred years these signs and symbols, that were originally used to directly represent something in the real world, have slowly evolved from representing reality, to then a media created copy of reality, to then representing a copy of a copy of reality, a copy of that copy, all the way to the point where these signs and symbols no longer resemble anything about reality? And, more importantly to Baudrillard, similar to the way we would think of somebody in a computer simulation, that nothing about our lives within our simulation has any relevance to reality as it actually exists anymore. The only thing the vast majority of people will ever know or care about is the simulation.

Now, I get that this is a lot, and it’s going to take some clarifications and examples. But, remember, what we’re also talking about in this episode are some of the theories of the early 80s of what a society’s going to look like post postmodernism. How does a society respond to the systematic fragmentation of Enlightenment-era takes on truth, knowledge, power, meaning, and even self-identity? So maybe the best place to start talking about all of this is to talk about identity in this postmodern society and the changes Baudrillard’s seen take place in the West in recent years.

Like we’ve already talked about, when it comes to identity, as the years go on and post-structuralist thought continues to deconstruct and fragment these grand narratives that people all throughout history have used as labels to define their identity -- I mean, just to stay with our examples as before, things like “I’m a Christian,” “I’m a democrat,” “I am a #woke conspiracy theorist” -- the more these sets of ideas are fragmented, the less they can be used as archetypes for people to attach their identity to. And what this creates in a postmodern society is a crisis of identity for the individual. Because if we can no longer turn to these grand narratives to provide us with our entire identity and this Enlightenment-era idea that that identity is stable and unchanging, how does the individual express who they are? What new identity markers emerge in a postmodern world?

Well, to Baudrillard, specifically in these postmodern, advanced-capitalist societies during the time he’s doing his work, the rational end to this crisis of identity -- what Baudrillard would expect to see if he was looking for a response to this identity vacuum that’s created -- is a substantial increase in consumerism, mass consumerism. Buying stuff becomes one of the only reliable ways people have to express who they are. You are what you buy in this advanced-capitalist, postmodern world from the sports logo on the front of your clothes to that car you drive to the pineapple-shaped plate that you put decorative holiday cookies on. I mean, even your shampoo says something about who you are and what your values are along with everything else you own. Think of everything that you buy as a sign. Remember, a sign is something like a word. It’s usually a visual image of some sort that acts as a stand-in for the concept of something else. The letters C-O-W act as a stand-in for the concept of a cow. The visual image of orange cones, big equipment, people in hard hats acts as a stand in for the concept that there’s some serious construction going on in the area.

Well, if you think about it, how are the things we buy and put on display in our lives any less of a sign or symbol? For example, your shoes. Your shoes are a visual image that act as a stand-in for any number of concepts about your personality from the fact you collect basketball shoes to the fact that you’re a business professional in this particular moment to the fact that you’re the type of person that stays up on the most recent fashion trends. But the thing is, this isn’t just the case with your shoes. This is the case with everything you buy. Your entire consumer life, in a sense, is an elaborate collection of signs and symbols curated by you that depicts the kind of person you want people to think you are. So, in this postmodern world that we’re in, you want to know who somebody is? Look at the story they’re telling through this outwardly projected collection of signs.

Now, a couple of really important things to clarify here. There’s nothing about postmodernism that necessarily leads to mass consumerism. Nobody’s saying that. Postmodernism’s only referencing this fragmentation of old narratives, identity among them. And this is just one way that an advanced capitalist society may respond to that fragmentation of identity. Another thing that needs to be clarified -- some of you out there might be saying, “Okay. Touché, Baudrillard. You’ve pointed out that people buy things and that what they buy says something about their values. Nice. Uh, but have you ever considered the fact that what people buy doesn’t even come close to saying everything there is about who they are? I mean, so much about my worldview, my thoughts on things, the things I think are worth doing in life -- this stuff is impossible to express by just buying something. Buying things may be an expression of identity in a type of postmodern society, but the identity of an American is clearly more than just what they buy, right?”

Baudrillard would say, yes, it is. But let me ask you a couple questions about that. Where did you get that way of looking at the world that you’re talking about? Where’d the rest of your identity come from? What sources can you really cite that have shown you the way the world is and how you fit into it? Now, while you’re working on that answer, another set of questions for you. If the stuff you buy is an elaborate collection of signs and symbols that depict your personality and values, who decided what any of those signs and symbols meant in the first place? What I mean is, if the things that you buy are tools to express who you are, who created the tools? Who decided that black, leather, shiny shoes are symbolic of you being a professional and driving around in a muddy, topless Jeep is symbolic of something completely different, and countless other examples?

Baudrillard would say the answer to both these lines of questioning is the same. We get both of these things from the media. Baudrillard would say that we live in a fragmented, disconnected society that, in order to compensate for that fragmentation, has become absolutely obsessed with mass consumerism and visual images, the citizens of this society spoon-fed that constant stream of visual images through the television in the 1980s, but the modern day equivalent would of course be cell phones and computers. These visual images fuel that mass consumerism because people look to what’s on their screens to determine not only the next thing they’re going to buy but also, once they buy it, what that thing they bought is going to say about them to the people around them. This is accomplished through a bombardment of commercials that show you visual images of the type of person you’re going to be once you buy a product: TV shows, movies, or videos that present visual images of characters that people in turn model themselves and their lives after. To Baudrillard, in this new world we live in that’s dominated by media, we understand our reality only in terms of how it compares to what’s playing out on the screens in our lives.

Consider the fact that oftentimes our entire social experience is mediated by things that we’ve seen on the TV. Consider the fact that we live in a time where it’s not even weird to hear people talk about their lives in terms of how it compares to something on the TV, to talk about their love life in terms of, you know, “I’ll know that I’ve found the right person when I’m around them and we’re acting like Cory and Topanga act on that TV show,” to talk about major events in their life in relation to a screen, “Ah, my wedding day. It’s going to be spectacular. It’s going to feel just like the wedding scene out of this movie.” People even form their expectations of what things are going to be like in general from stuff on TV. You know, “You see this stuff on TV. You come to expect it’s going to be a certain way. But then you actually experience it, and it’s just nothing like that.” People say things like this all the time.

Disneyland is a perfect example, to Baudrillard, of how we take things that at one point only exist as a fantasy world on the TV screen, but then people use what’s on the TV screen as building blocks for constructing the actual world that we have to live in. Now, in the case of Disneyland this whole process may seem entirely harmless. I mean, Toontown U.S.A. is a fictitious place, created by the media, yes. Who really cares if someone makes a theme park in Southern California, bringing a fantasy world to life for mostly children? The question Baudrillard would want to ask is, what happens when this same process of building our world out of materials gathered from media depictions of it happens in different areas? What happens when it dictates who people are, their relationships, what people buy, the way people think of themselves? Is it crazy to think that the media gives us the building blocks we use to create the way we see everything?

Well, what are these building blocks really? You know, there’s the old saying, “Life imitates art, and art imitates life.” Well, these visual images that we’re bombarded with -- the commercials, movies, TV shows; the art, I guess -- are oftentimes imitations of things that go on in real life, which makes them, by definition, imitations of real-world processes or systems. People then look to these shows for cues on how to act, what to buy, what their lives should be like, and then imitate these imitations of real-world processes or systems. But then, inevitably, art does an imitation of that. And then life does an imitation of that. And this process goes on long enough that it’s no wonder why Baudrillard thinks most people have become completely and utterly disconnected from anything real. The only thing they have access to is a copy of a copy of a copy of something delivered from an extremely narrow perspective in the first place. And these media-generated copies, these visual images, are trusted by people in our society so much that they often become the foundation of the entirety of someone’s worldview and values.

The best example I can give to illustrate this point lies in a series of articles Baudrillard wrote in the early 90s when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the first Gulf War, Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Baudrillard writes three articles -- one before, one during, and one after the war -- titled respectively “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” “The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place,” and “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” And what he means by the titles is not that there wasn’t a conflict in the Middle East in the early 90s. What he means is that for the rest of the world, for anyone in the hundreds of countries around the world that are not actively witnessing and participating in the war, the full extent of the reality of the war is essentially not even taking place to them.

See, at basically any other point in human history, if there was a war taking place in your experience of reality that was because it was on your front doorstep. You were either fighting it in, people you knew were being raped or killed as a result of it. You may be just one person, and your experience of the war may only be from that individual, narrow perspective. But at least your experience of the war was a small piece of the actual war. Whereas, in the case of the Gulf War, to Baudrillard, so many people around the world will never have to experience the reality of that war. All they’ll ever experience is a collection of visual images and sound bites on their TV, given to them by the news, that are passed off as a depiction of what’s going on on the other side of the planet. That if we were really to talk about the reality of what the Gulf War was -- I mean, what are we talking about there? Millions of lives effected. Decades of geo-political lead up. Hundreds of battles, every one of them a tragedy. Acts of kindness, acts of humanity, acts of hatred and the darkness that human beings are capable of. We’re talking about a collision point of thousands of different story lines that, when looked at exhaustively, embody all sides of the story. But the average person in one of these media-driven societies can just pop on the news and, through a series of flashing visual images and sound bites, they’re going to get caught up on what’s going on in the world today.

These news stations claim to offer us unbiased coverage. Well, coverage of what? What exactly are you covering? The entire war, or an incredibly narrow, cursory overview of a couple of general things that happened? What does the viewer of the news have access to? A window into the reality of the situation, or a window into one of thousands of narrow, competing discourses about a piece of what’s going on, all the while never having to face the ever present brutality of being engaged in a conflict like this because the viewer’s experience of the war is reduced to what’s essentially a video game on their TV screen? Even the deaths of thousands can be reduced to just signs and symbols. This is an example of how the simulation that we’re in disconnects us from reality. This is a complex network of signs and symbols given to us by the media. What it depicts is an imitation of real-world processes and events, not reality itself.

Something that’s probably important to say here is that Baudrillard is not saying that you’re a bad person if you watch the news and like to stay informed on recent events. No, on the contrary, like we talked about earlier in the episode, there is nothing about your experience of the world in this postmodern, media-driven simulation that’s even relevant to reality anymore. I mean, what is more relevant to your life within the simulation? Is it the full extent of the reality of what’s going on in the world, or is it the simulated reality that the media reports that not only lets you have conversations with people around you about what’s going on but it also allows you to continue living your life, seemingly well-informed, with a worldview that helps you understand things? Compare this for a second to the example of The Matrix. What is more relevant to the lives of the people in that simulated world? A story about a war going on between machines and humans at the level of reality, or a story they can use to understand things within the Matrix so that they can keep living their life?

Here's another example people use when they’re talking about Baudrillard. Imagine two people in some sort of online dating situation where they’ve only communicated thus far through instant messaging. Let’s call them John and Suzy. Now, Suzy, after talking for a while, asks John to send her a picture of himself so she can see who she’s talking to. But John is 50 years old, and he knows that Suzy is 25 years old. John is self-conscious about the fact that he’s so much older than her. He really wants to keep talking to her. So he sends her a picture of himself from back when he was 25. Suzy gets the picture and then continues talking to John. Now, it’s from this point forward that Suzy begins to live in what’s essentially an entirely new, simulated reality. John has given Suzy a piece of media that informs her understanding of the world, a picture. And that piece of media is not an accurate representation of reality because it’s 25 years old. But, from Suzy’s point of view, she lives every day of her life after the fact, talking to John, believing that she’s speaking to a 25-year-old person. Just as most people today live every day of their lives believing that the media they consume is them interfacing with reality.

This is one of the primary points Baudrillard’s making here. In our societies, we no longer make distinctions between representations of reality and reality itself. The representations become the real, and then the media creates representations of those representations. And, once again, the whole process continues. Now, just to further this example, you can imagine if Suzy had no intention of ever meeting John and John had no intention of ever meeting Suzy, Suzy could go the rest of her life never questioning this media depiction of reality, and she would just never know that she hadn’t actually been talking to someone her age. Whereas, if she got suspicious and did some investigating -- maybe check the metadata of the picture, hire a private investigator -- Suzy would rightfully at that point feel betrayed, taken advantage of. She might feel like every day that she had been talking to John up until that point was a lie. So, in other words -- and here’s the point -- you can imagine how, on the other side of that investigation, Suzy might only feel worse for having done it.

Well, so too for people that are immersed in our media simulation. And this is actually a theme that’s explored in the movie The Matrix. There’s a character that sees the real world, understands that the Matrix is a simulation, and at that point wants nothing more than to go back into the simulation without any knowledge of what he’s learned on the outside. This is the reality of the condition of people living in this particular postmodern world. To Jean Baudrillard, when left with the choice between the simulated world and the real world, the vast majority of people are going to choose the simulation. We are not helpless victims in this world where the media feeds us disinformation. Many times, we’re active participants in it. Most people have no desire whatsoever for the deeper, more nuanced complexities of the world. Most people want to be given their daily dose of the simulation and then continue with their lives, believing in a rigid, oversimplified worldview, comfortably distracted from the reality of things.

Consider for a second just how much information the media makes available to us. Consider the sheer numbers of just how many possible worldviews you could subscribe to, given the access to information we have. Within our simulation you can be a Christian, a democrat, a hardcore conspiracy theorist, and all of those positions are completely justifiable because we live in a world where at any instant you can go to google.com, type in any statement you want to believe about the way the world is, and then be flooded with media making the case for you being right, media that you can then use as the reputable evidence proving that you’re right and that everyone that fundamentally disagrees with you is a victim of fake news.

This is a hallmark of this particular postmodern society that Baudrillard would have seen coming a mile away. When people can have no confidence in any sort of master narrative that explains the way that things are and when you have unlimited access to media that’ll justify any worldview you can imagine, in that world all you can ever have are the visual images and sound bites delivered to you by a TV screen, programming into you metanarratives that you scream at people about by the water cooler. See, in the same way a lack of grand narratives creates a crisis of identity for people, this lack of grand narratives has also created a crisis of meaning. I mean, it used to be the case that to have completely different views of reality we needed to be geographically distant from each other. But, now that there is no master narrative practically everyone subscribes to and we get our understanding of the world through whatever media we happen to consume -- once again, in this particular postmodern world that’s emerged, you can be sitting next to someone on the bus that’s essentially living in a completely different world than you because they frame everything that happens to them in terms of how it relates to a different set of media-generated narratives.

This is why, to Jean Baudrillard, the ultimate metaphor for this particular postmodern society is the freeway. Because when you look at a freeway, what do you see? You see tons of people, all isolated in their cars, speeding in all different directions, going places. But nobody knows where anybody’s going. Nobody knows who anybody is, what they value. They’re just in your life one second and then gone the next, never to be seen again. This is what the lives of so many people come down to: alone in a simulation, working at a job to make money to buy things to express who they are based on the rules the media has set out for them; conditioned by and willfully complicit in a system that feeds them their worldview every day, destined to a life of having conversations about surface-level politics or economics while watching the world pass them by on a TV screen.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.