Massumi.

The simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guatarri

1. That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the
real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand
for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. They are to some extent
distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute
binary distinctions.
2. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination. 4 Faced with this
homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape
in fascination.5 For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded
3. Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information
fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized
digitality of the computerized society.7
4. A common definition of the simulacrum is a copy of a copy whose relation to
the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to
be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model. Fredric Jameson cites
the example of photorealism. The painting is a copy not of reality, but of a
photograph, which is already a copy of the original. 9 Deleuze, in his article
"Plato and the Simulacrum," takes a similar definition as his starting point, but
emphasizes its inadequacy. For beyond a certain point, the distinction is no
longer one of degree. The simulacrum is less a copy twice removed than a
phenomenon of a different nature altogether: it undermines the very distinction
between copy and model.10 The terms copy and model bind us to the world of
representation and objective (re)production. A copy, no matter how many times
removed, authentic or fake, is defined by the presence or absence of internal,
essential relations of resemblance to a model. The simulacrum, on the other
hand, bears only an external and deceptive resemblance to a putative model.
The process of its production, its inner dynamism, is entirely different from that
of its supposed model; its resemblance to it is merely a surface effect, an
illusion.11 The production and function of a photograph has no relation to that
of the object photographed; and the photorealist painting in turn envelops an
essential difference. It is that masked difference, not the manifest
resemblance, that produces the effect of uncanniness so often associated with
the simulacrum. A copy is made in order to stand in for its model. A simulacrum
has a different agenda, it enters different circuits. Pop Art is the example
Deleuze uses for simulacra that have successfully broken out of the copy mold: 12
the multiplied, stylized images take on a life of their own. The thrust of the
process is not to become an equivalent of the "model" but to turn against it and
its world in order to open a new space for the simulacrum's own mad
proliferation. The simulacrum affirms its own difference. It is not an implosion,
but a differentiation; it is an index not of absolute proximity, but of galactic
distances.
5. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner shows that the ultimate enemy in this war of
ruse is the so-called "model" itself. The off-world replicants return to earth not
to blend in with the indigenous population, but to find the secret of their built-
 in obsolescence so they can escape their bondage and live full lives, and on
their own terms. Imitation is an indication of a life force propelling the falsifier
toward the unbridled expression of its uniqueness. The dominant replicant
makes a state ment to the man who made his eyes that can be taken as a general
formula for simulation: if only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.
If they find out how to undo their pre-programed deaths, the replicants will not
remain on earth as imitation humans. They will either take over or flee back to
their own vital dimension of interplanetary space to see things no human being
ever has or will. Their imitation is only a way-station en route to an unmasking
and the assumption of difference. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher observe, the
best weapon against the simulacrum is not to unmask it as a false copy, but to
force it to be a true copy, thereby resubmitting it to representation and the
mastery of the model: the corporation that built the rebellious replicants
introduces a new version complete with second-hand human memories.15
6. I said earlier that the simulacrum cannot adequately be discussed in terms of
copy and model, and now I find myself not only talking about a model again,
but claiming that it is in a life and death struggle with the simulacrum. The
reality of the model is a question that needs to be dealt with. Baudrillard
sidesteps the question of whether simulation replaces a real that did indeed
exist, or if simulation is all there has ever been.16 Deleuze and Guattari say yes
to both. The alternative is a false one because simulation is a process that
produces the real, or, more precisely, more real (a more-than-real) on the basis
of the real. "It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is
effectively produced."17 Every simulation takes as its point of departure a
regularized world comprising apparently stable identities or territories. But
these "real" entities are in fact undercover simulacra that have consented to
feign being copies. A silent film by Louis Feuillade illustrates the process.
7. "Simulation," Deleuze and Guattari write, "does not replace reality . . . but rather it
appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on the
new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and production of
the real by a quasi-cause."18 The undivided, abstract flow of wine is the glorified body of
the nation. It arrogates to itself the power of love, victory and rebirth. It
8. ("It carries the real beyond its principle...") Then it folds that ideal dimension
back down onto bodies and things in order to force them to conform to the
distribution of identities it lays out for them. ("...to the point where it is
effectively produced.") It creates the entire network of resemblance and
representation. Both copy and model are the products of the same fabulatory
process, the final goal of which is the recreation of the earth, the creation of a
new territory.
9. So what we are left with is a distinction not primarily between the model and the copy,
or the real and the imaginary, but between two modes of simulation. One, exemplified in
Feuillade's film, is normative, regularizing, and reproductive. It selects only certain
properties of the entities it takes up: hard work, loyalty, good parenting, etc. It creates a
network of surface resemblances. They are surface resemblances because at bottom they
not resemblances at all but standardized actions: what those entities do when called upon
 (the gypsie in this respect is as French as the French). What bodies do depends on where
they land in a abstract grid of miraculated identities that are in practice only a bundle of
normalized and basically reproductive functions. It is not a question of Platonic copies,
but of human replicants. Every society creates a quasi-causal system of this kind. In
capitalist society the ultimate quasi-cause is capital itself,20 which is described by Marx as
a miraculating substance that arrogates all things to itself and presents itself as first and
final cause. This mode of simulation goes by the name of "reality."
10.The other mode of simulation is the one that turns against the entire system of
resemblance and replication. It is also distributive, but the distribution it effects is not
limitative. Rather than selecting only certain properties, it selects them all, it multiplies
potentials: not to be human, but to be human plus. This kind of simulation is called "art."
Art also recreates a territory, but a territory that is not really territorial. It is less like the
earth with its gravitational grid than an interplanetary space, a deterritorialized territory
providing a possibility of movement in all directions. Artists are replicants who have found
the secret of their obsolescence.
11.The only choice is to keep on becoming in an endless relay from one term to the next until
the process either makes a breakthrough or exhausts its potential, spends its fuel, and
the fabulous animal dies. Likening this to interplanatary space can be misleading: there is
nothing farther from free-floating weightlessness than this. There is no such thing as total
indetermination. Every body has its own propulsion, its own life force, its own set of
potentials defining how far it can go. And it moves in a world filled with the obstacles
thrown down by sedimentations of preexisting simulations of the "real" persuasion. There
is no generalized indetermination, but there are localized points of undecidability where
man meets fly.
12. The challenge is to assume this new world of simulation and take it one step
farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the
highest degree by marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the
grid of representation once and for all.
13. All of these statements make sense only if it is assumed that the only conceivable
alternative to representative order is absolute indetermination, whereas indetermination
as he speaks of it is in fact only the flipside of order, as necessary to it as the fake copy is
to the model, and every bit as much a part of its system.
14.He cannot see becoming, of either variety. He cannot see that the simulacrum envelops
a proliferating play of differences and galactic distances. What Deleuze and Guattari offer,
particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard's failing
world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which opens a glimmer of
possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of ourselves becoming realer than
real in a monstrous contagion of our own making.