The Murder of the Real

The Spectacle of the Real 10 Years Later, Part 4

Part 4

The History of The Spectacle of the Real

The original posting of The Spectacle of the Real appeared in my old Leading Questions weblog (no longer available) in May of 2013. It was a turning point in my writing and an anchor in my life and work as a thought leader. I felt that it began to lay out the landscape of reality and the denial of reality that I had increasingly encountered in my work.

Early in 2012, I attended a conference on postmodern thought and the church. The presenter, James K. A. Smith, spoke about things that I had observed and thought about since the mid-1980s. I knew little of the Postmodernist intellectual movement that had started in France in the 1970s and sailed over to the US beginning in the 1980s.

The Spectacle of the Real took me six months to research and write. At that point in time, no one outside of some French theorists were distinguishing between spectacles and reality. For decades I had been seeing something that I could not describe. The problem was that my age meant that my generational cohort and my professors had not begun to seriously engage in conversation with post-modern thought. It was a curiosity. No one that I knew then was taking the movement seriously.

The Influence of Jean Baudrillard

It was Jean Baudrillard who initiated my curiosity about postmodernist thought. The first book I acquired, Impossible Exchange, was probably the least accessible of his writing for someone beginning to read his work. I read the first 50 pages five times before I realized that he wasn’t advocating a specific perspective, but describing what he was seeing. It changed how I read books and essays.

Baudrillard in his book of lectures, The Vital Illusion, wrote about The Murder of the Real.

“Murder of the Real:" It sounds like Nietsche proclaiming the death of God. But murder of God was a symbolic one, and it was going to change our destiny. We are still living, metaphysically living off this original crime, as survivors of God. But the Perfect Crime no longer involves God, but reality, and it is not a symbolic murder but an extermination. … Extermination means that nothing is left, no trace, not even a corpse. The corps(e) of the Real - if there is any - has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found. And this because the Real is not just dead (as God is), it has purely and simply disappeared. In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer be posed. …

For reality is a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies no orgin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of the whole constellation.”

He considered the murder of the real as The Perfect Crime, an earlier book of the same title.

As a description of the world, it is a more provocative attempt to capture in words something that is quite obvious to those who are observers of the world of politics and social media, and who wish to make sense of it, rather than simply accept it or discard it.

Where the Real exists, there is accountability, consequences, and choices that carry a genuine price for the opportunity or potential catastrophe. Where Simulation exists, depending on its form, we have a Virtual Reality. In business and science, the use of simulations to learn and replicate reality is valued. To mirror the intricacies of reality as closely as possible is its purpose.

But in the cultural sphere, simulations exist to empty reality of its substance. In The Spectacle of the Real, I wrote about watching the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013. There was a hyperreality of speculation and conjecture by media commentators about the event as it unfolded. Images flowed across the screen, rapidly and repeatedly. The pattern is the same everyday as every minute or so the next “Breaking News” event is presented as essential for our lives.

As this approach to media has expanded, the debate over what is true has grown as debates about what is “misinformation” and “disinformation” demonstrate Baudrillard’s description of The Murder of The Real. It should be clear that within the context of the “desert of the real” as Baudrillard describes, there is no real truth that stands apart as an objective measure of any statement or perspective. This does not actually mean there is nothing that is true, but rather the culture of simulation that has taken hold of modern society has eradicated the ground upon which society can ultimately come to an agreement about anything. In other words, under the current media hegemony, there is only going to be more disagreement, and the question of power will lead to greater expressions of authoritarianism in the future.

The Nature of Simulation

Jean Baudrillard wrote about this culture of simulation and hyperreality in his book, Simulacra and Simulation.

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, of the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory … today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”

Our expressions of art, literature, photography, and film have historically been a reference point for us to establish meaning about people, places, and objects. Our curiosity and wonder when we see a beautiful place in nature are not simulations of the virtual. However, when people visit wilderness areas and treat bison and grizzly bears as pets, we see the effect of the murder of the real by a virtual culture’s simulated reality. We are split between the real and the virtual. People share their vacation pictures with pride and yet view life as consequence-less. As a result, we are confronted by the difference between the material and the immaterial worlds, the real and the hyperreal, and truth as neither, objective or subjective, but individual.

The reality that we engage through direct experience isn’t the totality of reality, but it is real. Yet because of the power of images, it becomes increasingly more difficult to know even who we are as persons. Virtual experience has transformed our perception of relationships, human purpose, and the capacity to distinguish between the real and what is a simulation.

The Necessity of a Spectacle Culture

Spectacle culture, as first described by Guy Debord, exists today as the mainstream culture of commerce, entertainment, education, religion, and politics. Spectacle culture points us away from direct experience to serialized experiences of hyperreality. Imagine how boring a traditional relationship of mutual love, respect, and trust is when all you have experienced is the rapid, accelerating images of social media’s soft pornography. This not only reverses our perspective on relationships, where they are intended to serve our personal interests solely, but reveals the heart of virtual reality. Guy Debord wrote that,

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

The spectacle is the outward expression of the image engine of simulation. Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation,

“By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials … It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.”

In his critique of Michel Foucault’s writings on power, Forget Foucault, Baudrillard describes his work in his manner.

“The very perfection of this analytical chronicle of power is disturbing. Something tells us - but implicitly, as if seen in a reverse shot of this writing too beautiful to be true - that it is possible at last to talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline, even down to their most delicate metamorphoses, it is because at some point all this is here and now over with. And because Foucault can only draw such an admirable picture since he works at the confines of an area … now in the process of collapsing entirely. … But if Foucault spoke so well of power to us - and let us not forget it, in real objective terms which cover manifold diffractions but nonetheless do not question the objective point of view one has about them, and of power which is pulverized but whose reality principle is nonetheless not questioned - only because power is dead? … This may constitute enormous progress over the imaginary order of power which dominates us - but nothing has changed concerning the axiom of power …”

Here we have the death of power, just like the death of God and the murder of the real. This power becomes a simulacrum of real power. Baudrillard goes on to show how the treatment of sex has followed a similar pattern. This long quote points to how.

“… what if he (Foucault) spoke so well of sexuality only because its form, this great production (that too) of our culture, was, like that of power, in the process of disappearing? Sex, like man, or like the category of the social, may only last for a while. And what if sex’s reality effect which is at the horizon of the discourse on sexuality, also started to fade away radically, giving way to other simulacra and dragging down with it the great referents of desire, the body, and the unconscious - the whole recitative which is so powerful today? … In a certain way, psychoanalysis puts an end to the unconscious and desire, just as Marxism put an end to the class struggle, because it hypostatizes them and buries them in their theoretical project. We have reached the metalanguage of desire in a discourse on sex so as to mask an indeterminacy and profound disinvestment - the dominant catchword sexual is not equivalent to an inert sexual milieu. It is the same with sex as with politics: ‘Remember in’68 how many strikes, barricades, speeches and cobblestones it took for people to begin to accept that everything is political. Pornography, as it proliferates and is censured only to come back stronger, will let them see that everything is sexuality.’ (Art Press, issue on pornography-January/February 1976). There is a double absurdity here (everything is political, everything is sexuality), a parallel absurdity in these two catchwords at the very moment when politics collapses and when sex itself becomes involved and disappears as a strong referent in the hyperreality of ‘liberated’ sexuality. “

What I want you to see here is how the culture of simulation empties things like politics which is a subset of governance and citizenship of their reality. The same is true of sexual pornography. In the name of freedom, sex is now emptied of its service to intimacy and commitment in a relationship. Now, it is simply a first-order desire that we claim like animals when they are hungry. Except with sex, we can have it virtually in the quiet of our isolated lives.

The culture of simulation does not simply replace reality with an alternative one. It severs the necessary relationship that each of us have as persons with the natural world. It treats humanity as an empty concept or container waiting to be filled with whatever can be grasped in the moment. The reality that social media has done such a comprehensive job at proving this to be possible gives validation to Baudrillard’s claim that reality is dead.

Reversing the Culture of Simulation

I do not believe that reality is actually dead. Rather, it is ignored as an inconvenient reminder of our humanity. The greater we act as if reality exists, the more reality shows itself.

To embrace reality we need to learn to observe and orient ourselves to the cultural environment that we exist in. If you are hearing hints of John Boyd’s OODA Loop, you would be correct. It is a valuable tool for relating to the culture of simulation that we exist in.

Pause for a moment and reflect on what you see. Do not accept the standard explanation for what is happening. Don’t even accept everything that I say. Test it. Yes, it takes work and discipline. If you want to be free then you have to learn to think for yourself.

All the crises that we face today - Yes, all of them - are representations of what Baudrillard was describing about Foucault’s work. In effect, whatever reality is claimed to be present in these crises hides a tragic truth. When simulations of the kind that we witness are initiated they are of the kind that I first wrote about in in The Spectacle of the Real. I used this quote from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to make a distinction between reality and false reality or hyperreality.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending. "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre'). Therefore, pretending or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces "true" symptoms? (emphasis mine)

Cultural simulations are emptied of substance in order to claim a kind of total liberation from reality. These simulations require constant instigation because, at their core, they are boring and lifeless. The cultural masters of simulation have obliterated time and space from our experience. A 15-second soft porn video dance or a short clip from a provocative podcast triggers the pleasure centers of the brain. We desire more and more. We are not conscious that the simulation actually reveals the absence of that which we desire.

We go to protests thinking that this is changing the world. We watch porn imagining that I am like the person on the screen. What we do not realize is this depiction of reality is a replacement reality of an empty experience.

Three Questions

We need to reverse the polarity of our relationship to what exists through The Spectacle of the Real. Images are representations of aspects of reality. But they are not reality. Just as a map is not the territory. To reverse the conditions that we live in, we need to train ourselves to be skeptical of everything that we see on a screen.

We need to learn to hold three questions before us at all times.

1. What is the larger context of this picture?

   By this I mean, the cultural context, physical context, historical context, community context, and personal context. Seek to gain a big-picture perspective of everything that you encounter on a daily basis. As Ted Lasso suggested, “Be curious, Not judgmental.” Seek to understand different perspectives.

2. Why am I being shown this picture?

   By this I mean, that every picture that shows up on your screen is there for a purpose. There are no accidents. The relation between dissimulation and simulation is alive at that moment. This is true for me, just as it is true for you.

3. Who benefits from this picture being shown?

   By this I mean, as Baudrillard pointed out, “everything is political”. And the means of the political compromising your objectivity is by turning everything into something sexual. It is impossible not to be politically and sexually exploited by The Spectacle of the Real. By emptying them of their real meaning, we are connected to a hollow shell of reality that holds us in suspension believing that meaning can still be found.

The Spectacle of the Real 10 Years Later

• The Spectacle of the Real

• The Power of Images

• Thinking about Images

• Images as the Medium of the Spectacle

• Reality and the Culture of Simulation: Series One

• Leadership and the Culture of Simulation: Series Two