Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness.
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Thus, 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 or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littre). But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: “Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. One implies a presence, the other an absence. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t. The divine irreference of images To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself…. Of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials-worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models-and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept no more imaginary coextensivity….
This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer’s mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation…. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction’s charm. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory-precession of simulacra-it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance.
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Ecclesiastes If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts-the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulations The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
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