Politea

The simulacrum has long been of interest to philosophers. Although I stumbled upon this concept myself, it has a long and distinguished lineage, including Plato, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, of which I am only the latest.

Last but not least, indeed, the concept comes full circle. For the simulacrum is the model of history itself (and a properly non-linear one). It is fitting that the concept the philosopher’s who launched it, hacked it, and later during WWII were despondent about it (Baudrillard lamented the end of history), now rises anew: for with the singularity, history can be reborn.

Nietzsche himself represents philosophy coming full circle since Plato; he is a dialectical antithesis, taking up the reigns of the arguments of Glaucon and Callicles in Plato’s Republic, playing chaos to Plato’s order. Indeed, he represents the decay, or break down of philosophy, a sign that it is completing a lifecycle (and ready to be born anew.

Wikipedia sums up the lineage of our discussion on this philosophical topic, the simulacrum. This will be useful to you integral theorists who are trying to grasp how the simulacrum fits into all this:

In his Sophist, Plato speaks of two kinds of image-making. The first, faithful reproduction, attempted to copy precisely the original. The second distorted intentionally in order to make the copy appear correct to viewers. He gives an example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on top than bottom so that viewers from the ground would see it correctly. If they could view it in scale, they would realize it was malformed. This example from visual arts serves as a metaphor for philosophical arts and the tendency of some philosophers to distort truth in such a way that it appeared accurate unless viewed from the proper angle.

Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum in The Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.

Modern French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two steps of reproduction — faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum) — Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatever.”

Baudrillard uses the concept of god as an example of simulacrum. In Baudrillard’s concept, like Nietzsche’s, simulacra are negatively perceived, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which accepted ideals or “privileged position” could be “challenged and overturned.”

Simulacra are in fact, the model we collectively use for our reality. If we’re revealing the symbol now, that’s pretty apolcalyptic. Cicero uses it as the model for the republic, and after hearing my Cicero professor mention it a number of times in class, I was surprised when he greeted my paper topic with the question, “What is the simulacrum?”

My first piece to answer him, I felt, did not do his question justice. And so, I used the simulacrum to historiography my history of Rome. My reviewers wrote, “Professor Billows thought you were doing something new, using the simulacrum as an analytical tool,” the head of the History Department at Barnard wrote in her revivew, referring to the head of the Ancient Studies Department at Columbia. “He said, ‘there she does something which isn’t just what you’ll find on the better modern literature on the topic.”

For more on the import of this, check out Simulacrum and Singularity, in which it is expounded how we should NOT despair, for these world wars are indeed the dialectical argument of the republic playing itself out, and until we will learn the lesson of the republic (in doing so, we will learn how to bring the wisdom of the last age into the next one), thus launching the next epoch.

Actually, maybe that article relates it to the launch of the next aeon.

Originally posted 2007-09-09 23:39:03. Republished by Old Post Promoter