Simulacra and Simulation

In this section, Baudrillard turns to several topics that were pervasive in the social psyche when the book was published. While holograms and cloning were still new ideas in their scientific infancy, Baudrillard saw them as markers of the hyperreal and the continued destruction of profound reality. All of these topics, for Baudrillard, relate to technology. In Chapter 5, he criticized the military’s use of technology and chemical warfare in the Vietnam War. Baudrillard viewed technology as an expansion of hyperreality—the continued movement away from reality into a synthetic space. Since Hyperreality and the Death of the Real lead to abstraction, Baudrillard saw a technological world as an all-encompassing void, without real meaning.

In Chapter 10, Baudrillard refers to the cloning of a human baby in the United States in the 1970s. Although there is no account of a child being born through this process, concerns about cloning were prevalent during this time. In 1975, the first mammalian embryo was produced through nuclear transfer. For most people in the 1970s, cloning was a theoretical concept; their feelings about cloning were shaped by ethical concerns and what they saw in the media. Critics were concerned about the implications cloning would have for both individuality and religion; many worried that the scientific practice was too close to “playing God.” However, Baudrillard saw cloning as the inevitable outcome of a hyperreality in which everything is copied and reproduced.

With Simulacra and the Loss of Meaning, each copy loses more of the essence of the original. Although a clone is intended to be an exact replica of a person, Baudrillard says it still undergoes a process of degradation: “Everyone can dream […] of a perfect duplication or multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams, and are destroyed” (95). In Baudrillard’s view, hyperrealities are made up of simulacra that are poor representations of their originals. Thus, he argues that clones, which are simulacra, will have no connection to their originals whatsoever.

He believes that technology expands the process of simulation. Baudrillard presents technology as a destructive force that erodes meaning, purpose, and even the body itself. In his review of the novel Crash, Baudrillard shows how even sexuality becomes self-referential through the fetishization of technology and the replacement of meaning with violence.

Thus, he says that while holograms give the sense of a person’s presence, it is a falsity. Clones offer duplicates of people, but they are less than the original. Baudrillard relates the superficiality of technology to The Implosion of Consumer Culture. By immersing people in an artificial world, they become susceptible to the hypercommodification of everything, including meaning itself. They never realize that what they are being offered is a hollow, cheapened version of something that was once full of meaning.