Andrew Murphie's Library tagged modeling → View Popular

A
copy is made in order to stand in for its model. A simulacrum has a different agenda, it enters
different circuits.
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.
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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.
- This mode of simulation goes by the name of "reality."
- 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.