Fatal and Banal Reality: Comparative Thoughts on Simulation and Concreteness

In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard (2017) claims that the psychoanalytic distinction between primary and secondary process will eventually collapse under the pressure of deconstructive efforts to break down binary oppositions. His work from this point forward seeks to illuminate the dominance of objects without recourse to object relations theory. The primacy of the sign without the signified becomes central to his understanding of reality's constitution in successive stages of simulation. However, even after Baudrillard's supposed break from psychoanalysis, which produces the concept of simulation, Freud's influence looms large as the Freudian conception of disavowal and fetishism reappears in his reconceptualization of the symbolic. When Baudrillard writes, "As to psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for 'real'—more real than the other—but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious?" (1994, 3), how are we to understand this disavowal—the simultaneous recognition and denial that what is taken as real is reality whether it be organic or inorganic? How should we read Baudrillard's own disavowal of the late Freud's return to fetishism? Simulation might be a way of thinking about the substitutability of fantasy and reality at the level of mass psychology from the perspective of the pervasive tendency to think of meaning only in terms of what is objective. In other words, Baudrillard's conception of simulation demonstrates a logic in which reality can only be thought of in terms of progressive stages of the concretion of unreality. Is Baudrillard the foremost thinker of the concretization of the concept of objective reality? Can we understand his conception of hyperreality and simulation as a world ruled by the disavowal of difference? Does Baudrillard envision reality itself as a fetish, or better yet, is he the fetishist?

Baudrillard's critique of psychoanalysis turns on the all-encompassing role of the unconscious as it subsumes all of social life and posits itself as a master theory of everything within the social. It is the productivity of systems of meaning and their fetish-like effect that Baudrillard critiques. For Baudrillard, primary process has been misconstrued in terms of libido economics and an understanding of libidinal sublimation that is productive. Psychoanalysis, then, in its economic assumptions, prefers the productive end of representation. Psychoanalysis reproduces the symbols it finds repressed in the subject everywhere and becomes simulatory. Rather than investigate what is underneath representation, what is repressed, Baudrillard investigates illusionality as a potential beyond of the economics of representation and the symbolic. Baudrillard investigates the simulated: the complex illusory reality of solipsistic hyperrational society. When asked about his understanding of the symbolic, Baudrillard answered: "I am not interested in the rules of the game of the symbolic. By 'symbolic' I do not mean the Lacanian symbolic but the universe of mental simulation. . . . For me the symbolic order is the register of desire, where ideology is fatal. The Lacanian sign is a chain of representations, but I am interested in another kind of sign, which is elliptical, as in poetry, where the sign is fatal" (2015, 49–50). Summarizing Baudrillard's symbolic, Douglas Kellner writes: "What Baudrillard calls 'the symbolic,' by contrast, puts an end to all disjunctions between life and death, soul and body, humans and nature, the real and the non-real. 'The symbolic' refers to a mode of thought beyond the binary oppositions of the terms of Western metaphysics and rationality, and in symbolic operations these terms lose their distinctiveness and penetrate each other" (1989, 105). The dissolution of these distinctions would commonly be read as deconstructive, but Baudrillard is not a straightforward thinker of difference.

The beyond of Baudrillard's symbolic is a beyond of the processes intrinsic to valuation: "The symbolic is already beyond the psychoanalytic unconscious, beyond libidinal economy, just as it is beyond value and political economy" (Baudrillard 2017, 256). So, then, how is it possible to get beyond representation, value itself, and beyond the unconscious? What is the makeup of the Baudrillard's universe of mental...