Escaping the Simulation
A French philosopher's disturbing description of our dilemma
The Pompidou Center (known as the Beaubourg, after the neighborhood in Paris where it’s located) is a stunningly ugly piece of architecture.
Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation describes it as an ‘incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it… a retotalization in a homogeneous space-time of all the dispersed functions of the body and of social life (work, leisure, media culture.)’
It’s worth a lot to be able to call a thing what it is.1 It seems Baudrillard could do better. But the point he makes is one that is slippery to define yet deeply descriptive of how we live now.
That how is through simulation, in a reality that is a simulacra: a copy for which there is no original. We live by enacting media representations of life. As the Beaubourg aspires to an idea of a cultural space without being a space where culture is created.
Consider the bachelor party. Held in Las Vegas or some other destination understood at once to be both fun and naughty, a group of young men gather to party in celebration of the impending wedding of one of their number. Strippers (and perhaps prostitutes) are procured. A great deal of alcohol and drugs are consumed. The bachelor behaves irresponsibly, behavior his friends encourage him in. It is a ritual whose features are so well understood that to state them seems ridiculous.
The question is where these features come from. Few bachelor partiers have seen one before they participate in their first and, the male friendship groups that get together for these kinds of things being relatively stable, most go to these parties with roughly the same group of people, each member, like a birthday party, or the wedding itself, getting their turn to be the center of the group’s attention.
How then do they all know what it is a bachelor party entails?
Not so easy a question to answer, I hope you now see. Baudrillard answers that it comes from a piece of media that is itself a fabrication, a fantasy created for the purpose of entertainment. We know because we have seen the movie. Whether the original, with Tom Hanks, or the remake, starring Bradley Cooper.
Each bachelor gets to be his own Tom Hanks. Each friend of the bachelor must serve as his own drunken fool. One generation learns from the makers of movies how they are meant to behave on the eve of their wedding, who then uses new movies to teach the next generation.
The oddest thing about bachelor parties is the anxiety its participants feel to ensure that the ritual is performed properly. If crazy things do not happen - a charged confrontation with a police officer, a sex act received in a public place from a strange woman - the event is understood in some way to be a failure. Indeed, a bachelor party can only be truly successful if the bachelor is himself seduced by a beautiful woman, something that few bachelors can achieve (unskilled as most are in attracting beautiful women) without the aid of prostitutes or at least strippers, which as often as not are not beautiful, or even attractive, or at all interested sexually in the young men who come to them filled with shame and lust, compelled to pretend that they are enjoying themselves and required to find within the event some story to tell to prove that the party was successful. That wild things happened. That the girl wanted it and maybe even got it, even when the event itself is often stunningly banal.2
This is the copy for which there is no original.
The ‘incineration’ comes if you try to not have that bachelor party, or to have it in a different way. Perhaps a hike during the day before the drinking starts. The destination chosen a bit more unusual or exotic (Amsterdam, say, or maybe San Jose, Costa Rica.) Experiences that lack even the false authenticity of the simulation, for they have no history as bachelor party experiences. Because to have teeth - to possess a meaning - a ritual must have or be part of a history.
The hike then will cause the bachelor partier to realize only that there is no content to the bachelor party ritual outside of what he’s seen in the movie, which itself has destroyed the communal memory of whatever it was that young men actually did with one another (if anything at all) on the evening before they got married before the movie determined for everyone what it is one does. Leaving the bachelor partier to be confronted by a reality which he must invent. Which, as I think Nietzche argued, is for most a thoroughly depressing, isolating realization.
In short, the lovable Tom Hanks and his hilarious hijinks destroy the possibility of an authentic, grounded tradition of a bachelor party, replacing it with a commodified version, punishing young men to either play their commodified role or pass through this point in their youth with no ritual to play.
Perhaps the bachelor party is an easy target. (It’s also one that I hope well illustrates the point.) But which rituals remain that connect us to an authentic cultural heritage? The wedding itself is also largely understood through the movies (and their spawn, the social media creations that attempt to authenticate the ritual by turning it into an entertainment capable of being consumed by millions of people.) As are all the other rituals of life, from childbirth to death. Each Thanksgiving a political fight between an uncle and a niece. Every Christmas morning a fevered descent to wrapped presents beneath a lit tree.
The pressing problem then is that there seem to be no healthy choices. We are all faced with either a debased and false connection in the simulation or passage through life without ritual commemoration, unmoored and lonely.
It’s of a piece of the thinking of another French writer I greatly admire, the novelist Michel Houellebecq, who extends and refines Baudrillard’s point by placing it inside popular entertainments. (Houellebecq’s books, while not well known in the United States, sell hundreds of thousands of copies in France). An appropriately Houellebecqian protagonist is aware both of the inauthenticity of the simulation and his own inability to escape it, making the choice (as he provides it to the narrator in his latest book, Serotonin) between either joyless sex on sterile vacations with a girlfriend he does not like (and who does not like him, and who cheats on him, even with animals) or suicide, the only mediation the bit of artificial satisfaction to be found in antidepressant pills.
Escape, however, is very much possible. Its method is even stunningly obvious. Which makes it all the stranger that so few seem willing to even consider the method, to say nothing of their willingness to take it.
I’ll take up that escape in a future post.
Stephen West does a terrific job distilling complex thinkers on his podcast Philosophize This. If you are interested in a much better explanation of Baudrillard’s thought than I am capable of, please check it out here: https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/simulacra-and-simulation
A friend of mine who is a very decent person likes to describe a bachelor party he once attended in Las Vegas that ended with two fat strippers unhappily making out with one another in a two bed hotel room for the entertainment of four embarrassed law school students.