Few ideas from postmodern theory have traveled as far as simulation, and few have been so thoroughly flattened on the way. In its popular form it has become a slogan: nothing is real. The original argument is narrower, stranger and more useful. It is not a claim about whether the world exists. It is a claim about what has happened to the relationship between things and the images of things.
This guide sets out the argument in order, gives the examples that make it persuasive, and then gives the objections, which are also persuasive.
Four stages of the image
The theory is usually introduced through a scheme of four stages. In each, the image stands in a different relation to reality.
- First stage
- The image reflects a basic reality. A portrait resembles its sitter; a map describes a coast. The image may be accurate or inaccurate, but it answers to something outside itself.
- Second stage
- The image masks and distorts a reality. This is the world of propaganda and ideology. There is still a truth behind the picture, and criticism consists in tearing the picture away.
- Third stage
- The image masks the absence of a reality. It pretends to be a copy when there is no longer anything it copies. It plays at being an appearance.
- Fourth stage
- The image bears no relation to any reality. It is its own pure simulacrum, referring only to other images.
The first two stages are familiar. They assume a real thing and ask whether the image does it justice. The break comes at the third. Once an image conceals not a truth but an emptiness, the old critical gesture of unmasking stops working, because there is nothing under the mask.
A simulacrum, in the technical sense, is a copy of this last kind: a copy without an original.
The map that ate the territory
The theory's best-known illustration is a fable. An empire's cartographers, in pursuit of perfect accuracy, draw a map on the same scale as the land itself, so that it covers the territory exactly. In the old telling the map eventually rots, and its tatters are found in the deserts.
The theorists of simulation turned the fable inside out. Today, they said, it is the territory that rots. The map comes first. Models, forecasts, brands, ratings and formats precede the things they supposedly describe, and the things are then produced to match. What survives in shreds at the edge of the map is the real, and the place where those shreds blow about is what one of them called the desert of the real.
The map comes first. The territory is then produced to match it.
It is a rhetorical image, and it should be handled as one. But it names something recognizable: the experience of arriving somewhere and finding that it has been arranged to look like its own photograph.
More real than real
The condition that results is called hyperreality, and the name is exact. The simulation is not a pale copy. It is brighter, cleaner and more consistent than what it replaces, and for that reason it is preferred.
The standard examples are places. The reconstructed heritage village, in which costumed staff perform a past more orderly than any that existed. The show kitchen, never cooked in, against which actual kitchens are judged and found wanting. The themed main street assembled from the average of every remembered main street, with none of the awkwardness of a real one.
Later examples are closer to hand. A profile is an image of a person that the person then has to live up to. A review score stands in for the experience it summarizes, and is consulted in place of having it. A town that survives on visitors learns to resemble its postcards, as described in our essay on post-industrial places, where a single preserved chimney stands for thirty demolished ones.
In each case the question "but what is it really like?" becomes hard to answer, not because the truth is hidden but because the copy is what people now deal with. This is also why simulation appeals to the Gnostic imagination: both tell of a world that is a counterfeit, though only one of them supplies an exit.
What the theory gets wrong
Three objections deserve to be taken seriously.
The first is that the theory overstates. Rent falls due, bodies fail, floods arrive, and none of these is impressed by the precession of models. The real has a way of asserting itself that no simulation softens. A theory written from inside the image economy tends to forget how much of life is still lived outside it.
The second is that the theory is too total to be tested. If every apparent return of reality can be redescribed as one more simulation, then nothing could count as evidence against the claim. A thesis that explains everything in advance has stopped being an observation and become a mood.
The third is moral. "Nothing is real" is an extremely convenient thing to believe if one would prefer not to act. Critics have long suspected that the theory of simulation flatters the detachment of the people who enjoy it. If the war, the famine or the strike is only a spectacle, one is excused from having a position.
Using it without believing it
The sensible course is to treat simulation as a diagnostic rather than a doctrine: a set of questions to put to a particular thing, not a verdict on the world.
- What is this a copy of, and does that original exist, or did it ever?
- Which came first here, the description or the thing described?
- Who benefits if I deal with the image instead of the thing?
- What would it take to check, and why is checking difficult?
Asked of a news cycle, a neighborhood, a political identity or a personal brand, these questions frequently turn something up. They do not show that reality has vanished. They show where, and at whose convenience, it has been made hard to reach. That is a smaller finding than the slogan promised, and a much more usable one.