In 'Simulations', Jean Baudrillard's critique of representation as a force that is accumulating power could be seen as a somewhat mystical personification of a concept, but even if this is the case, I think his is a valuable style of thinking to adopt at times, because it provides a way to image a phenomena that otherwise has no physical body and is perhaps less empirically quantifiable, but is none-the-less perceivable in effect.
What might be seen as more problematic, however, is the way Baudrillard's thinking normalizes a binary relationship between signified and signifier, as though a fixed status to each is natural and departures from such set relationships are some sort of perversion of truth.
He alludes to medical illness to make this point, saying' ...feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he ill or not?' (P )
This analogy points to an idealized 'essence' that the search for is obscured by material deviance from. A 'behind' reality is identified as more important than the material 'true' events. It might be more pragmatic to say that although on one level these two kinds of truths can be dividable into two different categories (-a named cause, and identifiable affects that might or might not have some relationship to the name of the cause one recognises) that can be addressed separately, both might be equally as important as the other, and a clear genesis of cause in illness and symptom (or truth and manifestation) might be simultaneously locatable on both planes of identifiable existence.
Returning to the context of finding a way to respond to the phenomena of mass media that Baudrillard critiques, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘virtual’ might facilitate more creativity in envisaging alternatives to the emergence of the power relationships that he articulates as resulting from (and perhaps perpetuating) the phenomena he calls ‘the Hyperreal’.
Via Simon O’ Sullivan, I understand the virtual as a supplementary concept to understand relationships between representation and experience, that is much like Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ in that it refers more to a representational side of the experience coin, but is not dictated by concept or genesis so much. Against binary thinking, O’Sullivan articulates that within what Baudrillard might consider faithful representation “Difference here is nothing but the ‘negative determined by the concept’”(Art Encounters: Deleuze and Guattari P 102) as opposed to “The virtual on the other hand names a field of difference that is not, and cannot be subsumed by the concept. The virtual ‘designates a pure multiplicity’ which as such ‘radically excludes the identical as a prior condition’(DR 211-12)…whereas the possible names a logic of Being (ontology of stasis), the virtual affirms a logic of becoming (ontology of process).” (Ibid P 103)
The difference might be that while the Hyperreal becomes a sort of a non-objective tyrant, the Virtual exists as a reciprocating and flexible partner (but a self acknowledged arbitrary or possible partner among many possibilities) to the real or the material realm, that can mutate into that realm also. Within a relationship between the real and the imaginary that is seen to be dynamic and transmorphological, there may be room to materialize alternatives to the passive condition that Baudrillard fears that mass media imposes on us.
