I have never read Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in its entirety, but what I have read has really resonated with me, so I figured since it is the summer and I have a bit of a lighter schedule, I will read the whole thing now. When I first picked it up it started to resonate with me again immediately. One quote in particular seemed very parallel to a paper I recently wrote for a seminar called “Composing from 1978 – 2008” with Professor Seth Brodsky.

 “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.” - Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

By ‘reference’ Baudrillard seems to mean external reference, thus he is saying the folly of meaning in western thought, is that meaning relies on a giant strange loop. Maybe though, we can accept this as not being so much a folly, as a reality, (if perhaps a bit sadder of a reality than the Disney movies we were raised on led us to hope for).

We need not take Baudrillard at face value though. It is possible that our images of meaning – our simulacra – are in some way distillations of a truth. Though any distillation is a lie by omission, simulacra being distillations does not negate the possibility that they point towards a truth. What it really comes down to, I suppose, is whether or not there is a meaning somewhere to be distilled. In this way Baudrillard’s discussion does not seem very different than the discussion I embarked on in my paper. We see that things as we know them – images, words, stories, musics – gain their meaning through reference to other meaning, and for this whole system to work there must be some meaning in the system somewhere to which everything – all the simulacra – are in some way linked. For Western civilization this something, the “guarantee on exchanges”, (as if finding meaning is a corporate game), is God – the being from which truth emanates. Alternatively, when viewed from a less Christianity centered perspective, it is sometimes referred to as nature. As I put it in my paper, perhaps our inability to see God or nature “is our curse of living in a postlapsarian age, or perhaps if we are not going to be so optimistic, we can consider the possibility that there is no nature. As Berio put it when similarly discussing the evolution of music through the lens of transcriptions, “I do not believe that Adam, in that famous garden, ever received the divine gift of a universal musical grammar, eventually doomed to destruction in the Tower of Babel.” (Luciano Berio, Remembering The Future pg 60) Without a nature to return to, we see that beauty is the thing that is always at least once removed. We might understand beauty as always no more than the hint of beauty.” (Here I am using beauty, truth, and meaning interchangeably).  As such, we see that beauty hints at beauty hints at beauty in a giant self referential loop – to Hofstadter a giant strange loop, and to Baudrillard a giant Simulacrum.

Even if there is no truth however, art – as do quotes, stories, and idols – obscures this fact, and that’s why I like it so much. From the giant strange loop of art a phantom truth can emerge, even if it is all a gigantic simulacrum. I guess the difference between art and idols, is that I believe in art.