A section from Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation for anyone who is interested:
Beyond medicine and the army favored terrains of simulation, the question returns to
religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "I forbade that there be any simulacra in the
temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented." Indeed it can
be. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied
in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a
visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their
power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure
and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today.*3 This is precisely because they predicted this
omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the
conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that
deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God
himself was never anything but his own simulacrum - from this came their urge to
destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or
masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One
can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the
idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence
not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra,
forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must
be exorcised at all costs.
One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images,
were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only
saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God. On the other hand,
one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous,
because, in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images, they were
already enacting his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations
(which, perhaps, they already knew no longer represented anything, that they were purely
a game, but that it was therein the great game lay - knowing also that it is dangerous to
unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
This was the approach of the Jesuits, who founded their politics on the virtual
disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences -
the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which now
only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. Behind the
baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.
This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murderers of he real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine
identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical
power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith
became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of
meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee
this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say
can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes
weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a
simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an
uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
Full text here if you want to know more about our simulated world:
https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/baudrillard-simulacra_and_simulation.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment