Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories for Postmodernity (review)

In Reading Simulacra: Fatal Theories of Postmodernity, M. W. Smith examines one of the central features of postmodern life—the increasingly simulated experience, or simulacrum. The distinctions between reality and simulation, Smith explains, are becoming blurred to the point of indisctinction: "Twentieth-century advancements in technology and information processing have brought about a new social order in which simulations and models interpenetrate our experiences of the world so deeply that the difference between reality and appearance evaporates" (vii). Faced with the immersion of the real into the hyperreal, Smith attempts to develop a "bifocal method" of reading postmodern texts, which he believes is necessary in order to survive the postmodern scene: "Through a bifocal approach that encompasses Baudrillard . . . and Deleuze and Guattari . . . it is possible to 'read' simulacra as 'fatal strategies' that erase differences in the production of desire and in the processing of cultural texts (information, mass media, and advertising) for consumption in late-capitalist consumer culture" (6). To accomplish this, he presents the theories of Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari as "two seemingly polemical methods imbued with Nietzschean philosophy for reading postmodern simulacra (objects, texts, and artifacts of postmodernity)" (8). Baudrillard, Smith suggests, offers a method of reading simulacra as an "implosion" which stresses uncertainty and seduction. According to Baudrillard, all signs "level out in an inexorable sign slide (the implosion of meaning) toward indifference and substitution" (8). Since it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and those models of reality which constitute simulacra, Baudrillard views seduction as a surrendering to the sign. Smith notes that Nietzsche "stresses the affirmation of life (will) against death (simulation), [while] Baudrillard proceeds to connect simulation with seduction. If simulation precedes the real, then humans must learn to live in simulation—we must side with the object" (46). This, according to Smith, is the dark and fatal side of Nietzschean nihilism. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, offer another method of reading simulacra through Nietzschean thought—"the 'rhizomatic' side of affirmation and 'becoming'" (72). While Baudrillard emphasizes "implosion," Deleuze and Guatarri stress "a postmodern strategy of schizophrenic play and experimentation" (8). The "schizoid" subject of Deleuze and Guatarri serves as a "means of rupture" which "does not respect divisions between representation, subjectivity, and being" (6-7). Such a method stresses becoming over being, and serves, according to Smith, as "a positive process of Nietzschean self-invention, connection, and expansion" (8).

In the second half of Reading Simulacra, Smith moves from the theory of Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari to a number of contemporary postmodern texts that "address the (dis)appearance of the 'self' and the 'body' into simulation models, lifestyles images, and media doubles" (11). Focusing on Reese Williams' A Pair of Eyes, Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Don Quixote, Clarence Major's My Amputations, he explores the ways in which these "politically informed texts may be read as fatal sites that are both transformative within, and resistive to, cultural simulacra" (11). Smith views Williams's A Pair of Eyes as a schizophrenic text which, due to its disregard for traditional literary conventions, manages to "dehistoriciz[e] and silenc[e] the speaking sign, driving it finally into the regress of images and detritus of its own simulacrum" (78). Acker, Smith argues, utilizes her punk/feminist aesthetic to "disrupt conventional pathworks of 'desire' in the phallogocentric text" (11). In his discussion of Clarence Major, Smith demonstrates how My Amputations is concerned with the issues of identity and authenticity in a postmodern society: "African American identity is presented as a simulacrum of fractal components that overwhelm the main character . . . in his allegorical quest for identity (where simulacral living might be equated with a metaphoric death)" (103). The final chapters of the book find Smith focusing on Baudrillard's America, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and the O. J. Simpson trial. Baudrillard, Smith illustrates, presents America as the quintessential postmodern object of simulation—a place that "thrives on the obscenity of the image, the hyperreal, the simulation...