RafaelFajardo

Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari

“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. (…)

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. (…)

“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.” (…)

Reality is nothing but a well-tempered harmony of simulation. The world is a complex circuit of interconnected simulations, in which Feuillade’s own film takes its place. (…) 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. (…)

Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence. (…)

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.” “