Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles
and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the
orders of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a
question of false representation of reality (ideology), but of
concealing the fact that the real is no longer real and the
means of saving the reality principle (Baudrillard, 1983: 25).
Therefore, Baudrillard argues, most of the world is now an artificial hyperreal
construction, an ‘irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace
without atmosphere’ (Baudrillard, 1983: 23). Consequently, what we
understand as reality only exists in remote and degraded pockets.
In this light, SF writer Philip K. Dick, with ‘paranoid visions’ about the
potential danger of technology in the future, offers up pessimistic
technological labyrinths in which we cannot exit the simulation of reality.
Total Recall4 is based upon this fear of the incapacity to discern reality when
technological reproductions (implanted memories) become as real as the
reality we have known. The use and resultant danger of virtual and digital
technology to manipulate our life, choices and identities is also shared by
Zizek, who suggests that it is the awareness of living in an insulated artificial
universe that generates the notion that some ominous agent is constantly
threatening us with ‘total destruction’ (Zizek, 1999: 5).
Baudrillard also observes further (dangerous) implications for the
individual in the Simulacrum of reality as it implies a strategy of
disappearance. The ‘desert of the real’ is created from the indifferentiation
of the map and the territory, the virtuality and the ‘real reality’ (Baudrillard,
1983: 1-5). Baudrillard draws upon the fable of Borges’ ‘The Rigour of the
Science’ (1960: 103) to illustrate what represents, for him, the world of
simulation, affirming that we now live within the map, not in the territory.
We live in a world of reproductions of The Matrix, not in ‘the desert of the
real’ that conforms to reality. One of the dangers produced by the fascination
for the representations, for the creations of simulations that replace reality,
is what Baudrillard names ‘narcissistic refraction’ (Baudrillard, 1988b: 34).
Narcissus failed to recognize his own reflection in the water as he could not
4 Based on Dick’s short story ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (1966).
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