Yet, this does not mean that his argument cannot be pushed to its dead end, as what he suggests as a strategic resistance in ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’ and ‘Fatal Strategies’. Take his concept of simulation for example, rendering there should be no reality whatsoever, the survivors’ stories about Titanic would be nothing other than a simulated experience of the real, an experience which is more “real” than the real. By extension, the sinking of the actual Titanic might as well be no more than a simulated event. The 1,500 people that were lost might as well be just a simulated figure unfolding over the myths and stories about the event. In other words, lived experience of historical happenings has no place in Baudrillard’s analysis. Nothing real exists outside the gigantic simulacra. The food shortage in North Korea and the nuclear weapon developed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq are but “sites of the disappearance of meaning and representation, sites which are caught apart from any judgment of reality, thus sites of a fatal strategy of denegation of the real and of the reality principle.”[1] In short, the “real and present facts of experience-inequality, deprivation, urban squalor, unemployment, massive and increasing differentials of wealth and power” make “nonsense of Baudrillard’s sophistical case that nothing exists outside the endless circulation of ungrounded arbitrary signs.”[2] It is unimaginable to render lived experience just as some signs (without knowing exactly what that means) “exchanging in itself and in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”[3] Perhaps except Baudrillard, it would be quite something to hear people saying, “my famine is but a sign of famine, a sign of bread is all I need.”
Moreover, does the technique of simulation employed by present day media necessarily upset the reality principle? One example would be virtual reality games. The selling point of simulated visual and physical experience lies in their characteristic of being comparable to the “real thing”. It is at the same time self-evident that all it is about is an unreal experience, one that is presented as if it is the real one. The fact that it labels itself as “real” as or even more “real” than the real, confirms rather than destabilizes the reality principle. As in the case of Disneyland, the boundary between the real and the unreal is not so much eroded, but rather intensified by technologically advanced tools. There is no reason why simulation and reality should be mutually exclusive and incompatible as Baudrillard argues. Instead, they are reciprocal. After all, people know that they are watching a film, or playing a computer game, or surfing the “Net”, as opposed to their real, factual daily existence such as eating, sleeping, walking, working, playing, daydreaming. To claim that the latter is not reality at all compared to the former is to overlook too carelessly the bodily existence of day to day living. Baudrillard’s argument, however appealing it might be at the first glance to fit into the media-saturated world, fails to explain those lived and real experience happening at each moment outside the realm of the media. This omission is just too important to be ignored in accessing the creditability of Baudrillard’s hypothesis.
[1] Ibid. pp. 194.
[2] Ibid. C. Norris, pp. 147.
[3] Ibid. ‘The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra’, pp. 96.
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