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Resemblance
is a beginning masking the advent of whole new vital dimension.

This even applies to mimickry in
nature. An insect that mimics a leaf does so not to meld with the vegetable state of its surrounding
milieu, but to reenter the higher realm of predatory animal warfare on a new footing. Mimickry,
according to Lacan, is camouflage.¹⁴ It constitutes a war zone. There is a power inherent in the
false: the positive power of ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one's life force.

Imitation is an indication of a life force propelling the falsifier
toward the unbridled expression of its uniqueness.

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

Every simulation takes as its point of departure a regularized world
comprising apparently stable identities or territories.

That
is why it is called a quasi-cause. It abstracts from bodies and things a transcendental plane of ideal
identities: a glorious wife, a glorious family, a glorious nation. ("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.

The power of the quasi-cause is essentially distributive.

Reality is nothing
but a well-tempered harmony of simulation

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.

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.

The transporting machine is on the same
plane as the terms it combines. Its operating principle dips into that world's quantum level, into its
pool of virtuality, to create an as yet unseen amalgamation of potentials. It produces a new body or
territory from which there is no turning back. 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.

According to Deleuze, the point at
which simulacrum began to unmask itself was reached in painting with the advent of Pop Art. In
film, it was Italian neo-Realism and the French New Wave.²⁵ Perhaps we are now reaching that point
in popular culture as a whole. Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is reaching a new
transnational level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and territorialities and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far more mobility and combinatory potential than
ever before.²⁶ As always, this deterritorialization is effected only in order to make possible a
reterritorialization on an even grander and more glorious land of worldwide capital reborn. But in
the meantime, a breach has opened. 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.

The work of Baudrillard is one long lament. Both linear and
dialectical causality no longer function, therefore everything is indetermination. The center of
meaning is empty, therefore we are satellites in lost orbit. We can no longer act like legislator-subjects or be passive like slaves, therefore we are sponges. Images are no longer anchored by
representation, therefore they float weightless in hyperspace. Words are no longer univocal,
therefore signifiers slip chaotically over each other. A circuit has been created between the real and
the imaginary, therefore reality has imploded into the undecidable proximity of hyperreality. 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. Baudrillard's framework can only be the result of a nostalgia for the old reality
so intense that it has difformed his vision of everything outside of it.

Against
cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion
of our own making.