Lemin Gao

_{Written by: Lemin Gao
Instructor: Yan Li}

Screenshot from thriller American Psycho (Harron, 2000). 

In this dull, grey room, the protagonist Patrick Bateman and his fellow stockbrokers exhibited and commented on their business cards from perspectives such as fonts, colour and thickness. The scene that would have created wonder if found elsewhere became a representation of the film’s rootedness in modernity. The protagonist Patrick from the film American Psycho is a typical Yapis with a prosperous career on Wall Street. He is detached from the lower class, but his repeated emphasis on business card printing and book a premium hotel room still gets him to accommodate this materialistic society. Yet, they also make him angry and drowned in vanity and senselessness. He also has an obsession with killing and raping. Patrick, the evening serial killer, finds his comfort in showing his bloodthirsty character and committing acts of murder.

In the screenshot shown, the protagonist Patrick Bateman is obsessed with the business card not because of whom this card represents but because of their appearance. It seems natural to connect this scene and a famous line from this film, “Inside doesn’t matter”, with Baudrillard and his theory: “The most valuable production is not the production of subjects in the physical form, but the production of symbol systems by the media”. The media is not a representation of reality. In this case, reality produces its replicants under this symbol system manipulated by the media. This implicit ideological control method makes citizens with equal identities hierarchical due to a minor character behind their faces which they play. The objects won, and it seemed that they had conquered us human as subjects, the illusions which should be simulations of reality triumphs over the reality——it’s more real than the actual reality. Consumption is manipulated by symbols, which constitutes the logic of the consumer society that the purpose of symbolic manipulation of consumption lies in the principle of social differentiation. Through the possession and consumption of symbols and things, the individuals will be out of their social status to be different from others. The meaning of symbols and things lies in the social division. In this logic, modern capitalist society can have the opportunity to complete another kind of domination and control: the control and dominance gained through the active and volunteer entry into the consumer society identify the consumption system and the corresponding material system. Thus we can introduce the idea of simulacrum, which has replaced the status of reality in his theory and has been transformed from being only the representation to actual reality. The real world has lost its dominant position and has become a representation of simulacrum. Simulacrum produced “territories” in production, while reality has been “colonised” by a simulacrum.

Firstly, the simulacrum is not an actual entity, and it comes from the thoughts of “there is no reality” and is hyperreal. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho has a piece of monologue saying that: “But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. (…) I simply am not there.” Different from the movie lines, we cannot say that the meaning of subjects (in this situation, the meaning of Patrick Bateman, the person) in reality vanished. Perhaps it originally came from people’s initial pursuit of reality, but it eventually surpassed reality rather than destroys it. Also, hyperreality cannot be considered a mirror image of reality, but a detachment from reality and, as we have already seen, “it generates a disappearance of the real world”.

In American Psycho, the only thing that the general crowd surrounding Patrick could perceive was their colleagues’ ability to book appointments in high-end restaurants and other people’s name cards with Roman-style typography. Also, others addressed Patrick as “Davis”, showing that “who he is” is not crucial in the setting. The crowd was so ignorant about the rest of this world that they know nothing except the surrounding objects and signs ruling this world. Thus, neither the true meaning of a person’s identity nor other people’s actions have any dominance in this world. It’s impossible to drag them out: the women, who represent reality and real people, didn’t stop Patrick from killing the sweet kitty. The ATM’s instructions ( “FEED ME A STRAY CAT”) have triumphed over everything, while we audiences can know that it’s unreal.

The production of reality by itself under symbol systems was mentioned in the second paragraph. An illustration of this production, religious imagery, shows that the single god symbol in monotheism is in jeopardy due to its dispersal into numerous icon or mimetic. In this manner, the real god may be replaced by a series of simulated gods, like the word “God is not dead, he has become hyperreal” goes. The situations of extreme fan culture are equivalent: the fans’ idol was like the god, and they all have various images or philosophies on this idol. They believe that the idol is what they think they are like, and they admire the prototype built in their own minds. The gods are the imposers hidden beneath their same outer form. So what exactly will happen when divinity shows itself through idols or divinity divided into many figurative images? After the visible theology that became an image, can divinity still be the supreme authority? I believe that the former authority shall collapse. However, the act of admiration and belief, no matter whom they target, still exists, confirming that the meaning or value of these “hyperreal” gods surpassed the original god. Those images can attract fans more than the original idol so that the latter has outlived its usefulness. And for the religious part, the believers see the shadow of the god in those dispersed images or icons. 

However, this process does not destroy the god’s position as well as how it’s treated. Thus the meaning of the original god is not entirely damaged by those who ousted the god. I would say, from the example above, that hyper-reality is a sign of domination. It brings shifts in methods of production. In other words, the original remains intact as an essential sign of reference to reality, a wake-up call. However, the dominating power of hyper-reality exists in a way that it may surpass the original reality by rendering it trivial and unavoidably insignificant in the identification and construction of meaning. I believe that Baudrillard would agree that the simulacra are produced and accommodated onto secular experience not only just for its apparent parallel, in a way indistinguishable from the reality given to us, but for its apparent parallel, its reality colonizing potency. The power of symbolic communication in a world sustained in hyper-reality is manifest not only through maintaining a simulation or mirroring representation of the orders of symbol in a real-world but more than that. It exists by blurring the border of what is real from hyper-real to revert our vantage point of reality identification. If simulacra are autonomous and highly capable of effective symbolic production and reproduction, there would be no necessity to say a simulated reality is not the objective reality in assuring the success of symbolic cycling and communication. Domination is where the verity of the real is subordinated to the symbolic production, and the issue of representation is on an equal footing with the presentation.

To explain the blurring of what is true from what is false, real from hyperreal, in which simulating of sickness leads to the dissolution of the medical definition of what is ill and thus illness loses its ontological ground of division from health, Baudrillard gave another example of the blurs between true and false due to simulation, showing the difference between simulating and pretending. When a child doesn’t want to go to school, they may lie on the bed and say they are unwell and pretend to be sick. This is the stage of pretending as the doctors will find the child healthy. Baudrillard quoted Littré to explain the difference: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms.” 

The question here is that whether the reality is dissolved in this situation, which is about determining whether a person showing only symptoms is sick or not. As if symptoms can be produced artificially, doctors should not judge whether a person is ill or not based on their symptoms, as they can all be considered as simulated situations. Thus, Baudrillard believed that “medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat ‘real’ illnesses according to their objective causes”. Another question is whether the person can simulate his illness without being acknowledged about the simulation situation. I believe that this question deals with the same reality-related topics as Thomas Nagel’s bat. The bat’s experience of reality has “a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive”, which can also solve the problem of “what is it like to be a person who is simulating illness”.

However, for Baudrillard, this is a world in which occurred a “dissolution of values, of the real, of ideologies, of ultimate ends”; Not only the world is disappearing, but also the subject “as the agency of will, of freedom, of knowledge, of history”. Also, in an essay that presented a critique for Baudrillard, a plausible response to the question expressed in the title of one of Baudrillard’s last books: “Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?” can be constructed. Because the world has always existed before and forever remains independent of the very posing of the question. In this age, where we can access much information containing various sensory stimuli like TV dramas, movies and online games, we are offered multiple experiences that raise our brain’s excitement threshold. Today, people have become too atomized by interacting with what Baudrillard called the “simulated world”. However, real-life ceases only when people who interacted with the internet has mental health problems. Although the sensory stimuli of war games online are more appealing and attractive than on actual battlefields, it only changes the players’ threshold rather than the meaning of the original wars and battles. A scene of the battlefield in a game constitutes a representation. Therefore, it’s still associated with reality, which connects the signs and the actual subject’s meanings.

In conclusion, the hyper-reality object, which dispelled the subjectivity, does not give up the subject’s value or meaning in reality. It is more likely only a sign of domination and preserves the meaning of reality itself. Moreover, the possibility of liberation that Baudrillard ultimately offered us— the original symbols in exchange for capital symbolism as a resistance-is still not very promising. Like the line presented at the end of the original American Psycho novel by Bret Easton Ellis, “this is not an exit”, which is an open ending, the trend on turning into an age in which the reality has less and less dominance seems non-stoppable. The movie American Psycho itself was also insinuating that those Wall Street tycoons are taking out the interests of the general public. It criticized the common trend of worshipping capital in the era under Reagan’s administration. It’s consistent with Baudrillard’s early thought. The new generation of symbols and objects emerged after the industrial revolution and were produced on a large scale.

[Author’s words and possible improvements]:

Later, starting from another book of his, The Mirror of Production, he began to act against (mainly) Marx’s labour theory of value by stating the significance of symbols. It’s a work representing Baudrillard’s turn of thought from Western Marxism to post-Marxism. So actually, I can discuss more Baudrillard’s criticism of Marx and how it’s related to the theories stated in this essay. For example, the break of production and consumption, or whether he uses a simulation narrative to describe the entire human history or his suggestion about “replacing Marx’s ‘production’ with the word ‘symbol’ as the centre of the society”. However, due to the length of this writing assignment and my limited reading on Marx and his related works, I didn’t go with this approach very far. Also, for the same reason, my explanation of some of the real-life scenarios, such as fan culture and monotheism religious imaginaries, was not very sufficient. (e.g. The example of games does not adequately address the opening statement that we’re in an age with the dissolution of values and of the real, coupled with the disintegration of an agency of free will and history. You may need to investigate the symptoms and the physiology of this mental health problem in a more general picture.)

Reference:

1. Jean, Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 2018.
2. Baudrillard, Jean, et al. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Seagull Books,2016.
3. Nagel, Thomas. What Is It like to Be a Bat? Mortal Questions, pp. 165-180., doi:10.1017/cbo9781107341050.014.
4. Baudrillard, Jean, et al. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Sage, 2017.
5. Instructor’s notes.