Partial Glimpses of the Infinite: Borges and the Simulacrum

Abstract

face that is gazed on as it gazes ... -Borges, Mirrors When the real is no longer what is used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. -Baudrillard, Simulations We have become simulacra. -Deleuze, Logic of Sense I EAN Baudrillard begins Simulations with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none. simulacrum is true (1). This quotation, itself a simulacrum of the original Ecclesiastes (it turns out that Baudrillard's quotation does not appear in the Biblical text), sets the tone for the well-known discussion of simulation that follows. first paragraph of this seminal work, however, is given over to a brief analysis of Jorge Luis Borges' short text Del rigor en la ciencia (El hacedor), a of a map being drawn to fit exactly-and thus replace-the terrain and territory it depicts: the story is about how the Real is displaced by its representation. (In fact Borges' story itself is a kind of simulacrum being as it is a translation-or transcription, the word is crucial for Borges-of a portion of J.A. Suarez Miranda's 1658 Viajes de varones prudentes: part of the effect of Borges' writing is to call into question the very nature of origins, of originality.) Despite its complexity, Borges' tale of the simulacrum of the territory is figured by Baudrillard as having nothing but the discrete charm of second-order (1), by which he means that Borges' depiction of the simulacrum is of a primitive sort, merely that of the map, the double, the mirror of the concept (1).1 second order of simulacra, according to Baudrillard's own taxonomy (which details four orders), merely and perverts a basic (11) and does not, like the fourth order simulacrum which destroys all of (4), threaten the basic ontology of the universe or, more precisely, our experience of the universe. fourth order of simulacra substitutes signs of the real for the real itself' (4) and problematizes any discussion of truth, falsity, appearance, and the Real. Although the argument of Simulations is well known, it may do to reproduce Baudrillard's classification of what he calls the phases of the image (11) as it progresses to the phase of simulation. His purpose is to demonstrate the distinction between representation and simulation, suggesting that representation still participates in the metaphysics of presence: Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulation. This would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a basic reality it masks and perverts a basic reality it masks the absence of a basic reality it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (11) Baudrillard's analysis of the simulacrum is intended to demonstrate that the simulacrum ultimately confuses the distinction between the real and its illusion, its representation. Simulations thus ultimately becomes a touchstone of postmodern theory offering as it does the idea that ontological confusion is the norm in an historical period that no longer is able to maintain the distinction between the Real and its representation, between the original and its copy, between the metaphysical and the physical. Baudrillard's use of Borges in Simulations, especially his idea that Borges' work operates within the second-order of the simulacrum, suggests that Borges' explorations of the simulacrum, the double, the mirror, and the abysmal nature of language, are still articulated by a metaphysical apprehension of the world, that underlying his endless textual and verbal abysms is a recourse to a grounding belief in an original and originating system that gives some order to experience. …