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The face that is gazed on as it gazes ...
-Borges, "Mirrors"
When the real is no longer what is used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
-Baudrillard, Simulations
We have become simulacra.
-Deleuze, The Logic of Sense I EAN Baudrillard begins Simulations with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true" (1). This quotation, itself a simulacrum of the original Ecclesiastes (it turns out that Baudrillard's quotation does not appear in the Biblical text), sets the tone for the well-known discussion of simulation that follows. The first paragraph of this seminal work, however, is given over to a brief analysis of Jorge Luis Borges' short text "Del rigor en la ciencia" (El hacedor), a "story" of a map being drawn to fit exactly-and thus replace-the terrain and territory it depicts: the story is about how the Real is displaced by its representation. (In fact Borges' story itself is a kind of simulacrum being as it is a translation-or "transcription," the word is crucial for Borges-of a portion of J.A. Suarez Miranda's 1658 Viajes de varones prudentes: part of the effect of Borges' writing is to call into question the very nature of origins, of "originality.") Despite its complexity, Borges' tale of the simulacrum of the territory is figured by Baudrillard as "having nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra" (1), by which he means that Borges' depiction of the simulacrum is of a primitive sort, merely that of the "map, the double, the mirror of the concept" (1).1 The second order of simulacra, according to Baudrillard's own taxonomy (which details four orders), merely "masks and perverts a basic reality" (11) and does not, like the fourth order simulacrum which destroys "all of metaphysics" (4), threaten the basic ontology of the universe or, more precisely, our experience of the universe. The fourth order of simulacra "substitutes signs of the real for the real itself' (4) and problematizes any discussion of truth, falsity, appearance, and the Real.
Although the argument of Simulations is well known, it may do to reproduce Baudrillard's classification of what he calls the "successive phases of the image" (11) as it progresses...