The Precession of Simulacra.pdf - kareneliot.de

Jean Baudrillard - Simulations (English Translation)16.08.11 20:28beings who had never known the word of Christ. Thus, at the beginning of colonisation, there was amoment of stupor and amazement before the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel.There were two possible responses: either to admit that this law was not universal, or to exterminate theIndians so as to remove the evidence. In general, it was enough to convert them, or even simply todiscover them, to ensure their slow extermination.Thus it would have been enough to exhume Rameses to ensure his extermination by museumification.For mummies do not decay because of worms: they die from being transplanted from, a prolongedsymbolic order, which is master over death and putrescence, on to an order of history, science andmuseums - our own, which is no longer master over anything, since it only knows how to condemn itspredecessors to death and putrescence and their subsequent resuscitation by science. An irreparableviolence towards all secrets, the violence of a civilisation without secrets. The hatred by an entirecivilisation for its own foundations.And just as with ethnology playing at surrendering its object the better to establish itself in its pure form,so museumification is only one more turn in the spiral of artificiality. Witness the cloister of St-Michelde Cuxa, which is going to be repatriated at great expense from the Cloisters in New York to bereinstalled on "its original site". And everyone is supposed to applaud this restitution (as with the"experimental campaign to win back the sidewalks" on the Champs-Elysees!). However, if theexportation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act, and if the Cloisters of New York are really anartificial mosaic of all cultures (according to a logic of the capitalist centralisation of value), thenreimportation to the original location is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with"reality" by a complete circumvolution.The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment, which at least would havefooled no one. Repatriation is only a supplementary subterfuge, in order to make out as though nothinghad happened and to indulge in a retrospective hallucination.In the same way Americans flatter themselves they brought the number of Indians back to what it wasbefore their conquest. Everything is obliterated only to begin again. They even flatter themselves theywent one better, by surpassing the original figure. This is presented as proof of the superiority ofcivilisation: it produces more Indians than they were capable of themselves. By a sinister mockery, thisoverproduction is yet again a way of destroying them: for Indian culture, like all tribal culture, rests onthe limitation of the group and prohibiting any of its "unrestricted" growth, as can be seen in the case ofIshi. Demographic "promotion", threfore, is just one more step towards symbolic extermination.We too live in a universe everywhere strangely similar to the original - here things are duplicated bytheir own scenario. But this double does not mean, as in folklore, the imminence of death - they arealready purged of death, and are even better than in life; more smiling, more authentic, in light of theirmodel, like the faces in funeral parlors.Hyperreal and ImaginaryDisneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play ofillusions and phantasms: Pirates, the Frontier, Future World, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to bewhat makes the operation successful. But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the socialmicrocosm, the miniaturised and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. Youhttp://www.ee.sun.ac.za/~hgibson/docs/html/Simulacra-and-Simulation.html#c2Seite 8 von 45