The Precession of Simulacra.pdf - kareneliot.de

Jean Baudrillard - Simulations (English Translation)16.08.11 20:28deterrence.Rameses, or Rose-Coloured ResurrectionEthnology almost met a paradoxical death that day in 1971 when the Phillipino government decided toreturn the few dozen Tasaday discovered deep in the jungle, where they had lived for eight centuriesundisturbed by the rest of mankind, to their primitive state, out of reach of colonists, tourists andethnologists. This was at the initiative of the anthropologists themselves, who saw the natives decomposeimmediately on contact, like a mummy in the open air.For ethnology to live, its object must die. But the latter revenges itself by dying for having been"discovered", and defies by its death the science that wants to take hold of it.Doesn't every science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of itsobject in the very process of its apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal this dead object exerts on it?Like Orpheus it always turns around too soon, and its object, like Eurydice, falls back into Hades.It was against this hades of paradox that the ethnologists wanted to protect themselves by cordoning offthe Tasaday with virgin forest. Nobody now will touch it: the vein is closed down, like a mine. Scienceloses a precious capital, but the object will be safe - lost to science, but intact in its "virginity". It isn't aquestion of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself: it is always murderous), but of the simulatedsacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. The Tasaday, frozen in their natural element,provide a perfect alibi, an eternal guarantee. At this point begins a persistent anti-ethnology to whichJaulin, Castaneda and Clastres variously belong. In any case, the logical evolution of a science is todistance itself ever further from its object until it dispenses with it entirely: its autonomy evermorefantastical in reaching its pure form.The Indian thereby driven back into the ghetto, into the glass coffin of virgin forest, becomes thesimulation model for all conceivable Indians before ethnology. The latter thus allows itself the luxury ofbeing incarnate beyond itself, in the "brute" reality of these Indians it has entirely reinvented - Savageswho are indebted to ethnology for still being Savages: what a turn of events, what a triumph for thisscience which seemed dedicated to their destruction!Of course, these particular Savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenised, sterilised, protected to death,they have become referential simulacra, and the science itself a pure simulation. Same thing at Creusotwhere, in the form of an "open" museum exhibition, they have "museumised" on the spot, as historicalwitnesses to their period, entire working class quartiers, living metallurgical zones, a complete cultureincluding men, women and children and their gestures, languages and habits - living beings fossilised asin a snap shot. The museum, instead of being curcumscribed in a geometrical location, is noweverywhere, like a dimension of life itself. Thus ethnology, now freed from its object, will no longer becircumscribed as an objective science but is applied to all living things and becomes invisible, like anomnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum. We are all Tasaday, or Indians who have oncemore become "what they used to be", or at least that which ethnology has made them - simulacra Indianswho proclaim at last the universal truth of ethnology.We all become living specimens under the spectral light of ethnology, or of anti-ethnology which is onlythe pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign of dead differences, and of the resurrection ofdifferences. It is thus extremely naive to look for ethnology among the Savages or in some Third Worlditis here, everywhere, in the metropolis, among the whites, in a world completely catalogued andhttp://www.ee.sun.ac.za/~hgibson/docs/html/Simulacra-and-Simulation.html#c2Seite 6 von 45