Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulations

Political incantation

the Watergate scandal - compared with Disneyland;

Creu Andra cs.

Fermeanu, M. A.,
American Studies, II

-presented as a political simulation, a trap;

-the simulation of a scandal: a means of regenerating the political

morality;

Capital has never been linked by a contract to society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a
challenge to society and should be responded to as such. (p. 177)

Moebius: spiraling negativity

the Moebius strip = a surface with only one side and only one boundary component;
the concept of manipulation is highlighted and defined as a floating causality where positivity and

negativity engender and overlap with one another (p. 177)

political reality can be saved only through the simulation of a conventional field in which each step is already

known, it is anticipated;
the logic of simulation has nothing in common with the logic of facts and theorder of reason;
the metaphor of the Moebius strip reflects the reversible continuity of hypotheses that may be simultaneously
true (see Berlinguers declaration and its interpretations, p. 178); thus, the secret of a discourse does not consist

only of its ambiguity, but also of an evasive reference to the position of power;
the Moebius strip refers to the political space, too, a space where there is no opposition, but only an exchange

of signifiers and scenarios;

a question of proving existence by absence, by denial: the real by the imaginary, the truth by scandal, the law
by transgression, the work by strike;

Strategy of the real

a parallel between the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real and the impossibility of

staging an illusion;
simulation is more dangerous than transgression and violence (they only contest the distribution of the real)
it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more

than a simulation;
there is no objective difference between a fake and a real theft or hold up;
isolating the process of simulation or the process of the real is not possible;
the only weapon of power again becoming a simulation is reinjecting realness and referentiality (p. 182);
todays obsession with the survival of power becomes greater the more it disappears; the result of some

societies melancholy for power was fascism;

work became a need; there is no ideology beyond it, only a scenario
power is defined by ideological discourses, representing the truth and countering the mortal blows of
simulation (p. 185);