Economy and Society

ISSN: 0308-5147 (Print) 1469-5766 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/reso20

To play with phantoms : Jean Baudrillard and the

evil demon of the simulacrum

William Merrin

To cite this article: William Merrin (2001) To play with phantoms : Jean Baudrillard
and the evil demon of the simulacrum, Economy and Society, 30:1, 85-111, DOI:
10.1080/03085140020019106

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140020019106

Published online: 07 Dec 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1091

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=reso20
Economy and Society Volume 30 Number 1 February 2001: 85–111

To play with phantoms:

Jean Baudrillard and the
evil demon of the
simulacrum

William Merrin

Abstract

It is only by historically contextualizing Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum that

we can understand its form and effects – its historical efficacy, its nihilistic unground-
ing of certain epistemological foundations, its subsequent demonization in the West,
and the latter’s attempt to domesticate its power. Baudrillard opposes the contem-
porary simulacrum with the Durkheimian symbolic but, as a privileged critical site
functioning as the ‘real’, this only repeats the Western domestication. Ultimately,
however, the diabolical power of the simulacrum is too great for the symbolic, and its
success today overwhelms Baudrillard himself. The pact with its demon is a danger-
ous one.

Keywords: Baudrillard; simulacrum; simulation; symbolic; image; demon; reality;

hyperreality.

They that make them are like unto them: so is everyone who trusteth in them.
(Psalms, 115: 4–8 on idols, in Barasch 1992: 20)
‘Nihilism’, Jean Baudrillard writes, ‘no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian,
Spenglerian fuliginous colours of the end of the century.’ Today its locus is not
the Nietzschean death of God but the ‘system’. It is not an event of which news
is just beginning to reach us, but an event which has already occurred – it is the

William Merrin, School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Calverley Street,
Leeds, LS1 3HE, UK. Tel: 0113 283 2600 (ext 5882). E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140020019106
86 Economy and Society

seamless passage into a state of ‘hyperreality’. ‘The universe and all of us’,
Baudrillard says, ‘have entered live into simulation’ (Baudrillard 1994b: 159).
This claim that we have entered an era of ‘simulation’ is one of the most famous
and controversial ideas of Baudrillard’s career. His concept of the ‘simulacrum’
has subsequently attracted much critical and popular attention, becoming a widely
used concept, popularly accepted by many academics and students as an invalu-
able tool of cultural and media analysis; a catch-all term with cutting-edge kudos
to be applied to all manifestations of our image-society, as well as a fashionable
trope for broadsheet ‘media’ and ‘culture’ section journalism. For many others,
however, the simulacrum and its apparent progenitor have come to represent all
that is odious in contemporary theory. For that movement’s critics, it has appro-
priately become the iconic postmodern concept, and, as such, the focal point for
those for whom the latter’s mystiŽ cations and pseudo-intellectual pretensions are
seen as intellectually and ethically dangerous. For many of its critics the concept
of the simulacrum is unacceptable, and even to raise the subject is sufficient to dis-
qualify one’s interests as undeserving of serious attention, hence the common
response of those defenders of the real is to deny the existence of the simulacrum
and its challenge to reality. The simulacrum, however, is an older, more powerful,
and more fundamental phenomenon than this critique suggests, and such a denial
runs counter to the experience and opinion of our entire Western civilization,
which has recognized and opposed its power from the beginning.
Despite, however, all the attention the simulacrum has attracted, whether
positive or negative, the concept itself and its history remain little understood.
Debate upon it has usually followed its speciŽ c use by Baudrillard, although the
concept and its history were largely neglected by the early, sympathetic critical
literature, while the more hostile critical literature, motivated more by the desire
to reject than explain the category, similarly treated it peremptorily. With a few
notable exceptions – such as Mike Gane’s pioneering work (1991a, 1991b) –
problems of interpreting both Baudrillard’s meaning and critical project led,
therefore, to superŽ cial, inaccurate, and misdirected critiques of his work
gaining widespread academic and popular currency in the 1980s–90s, a situation
which has still not entirely been reversed. Thus, while the work of Gary
Genosko (1994, 1999), Charles Levin (1996), Nicholas Zurbrugg (1997), Rex
Butler (1999), Victoria Grace (2000), and Mike Gane (2000) have all recently
added considerably to our understanding of Baudrillard,1 their contributions
still appear to have bypassed many in the academic community for whom
Baudrillard remains stuck in those heady days of 1989 when Douglas Kellner
exposed the bankruptcy of his pretensions (Kellner 1989) and Marxism Today
identiŽ ed him for posterity as ‘the high priest of postmodernism’ (Baudrillard
1989). The critical literature on Baudrillard, however, has moved on and it is
time to similarly advance our understanding of the simulacrum. Although many
texts on Baudrillard have usefully discussed this concept, several errors or omis-
sions reappear in various forms in the critical literature.2
First, there is a popular assumption that the simulacrum is a purely ‘post-
modern’ phenomenon, referring only to a contemporary phase of society: the
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 87

‘society of the simulacrum’ (Best, in Kellner 1994: 42), an interpretation failing

to recognize that the simulacrum is an historical phenomenon predating our
society. Second, the concept of the simulacrum has been variously misinter-
preted as an idealist or sceptical denial of physical reality; as a belief in a Ž ctive
reality, or artiŽ cial ‘unreality’, or even as a mass media ‘illusion’ happening only
on our TV screens, a view found in the work of Douglas Kellner and Christo-
pher Norris (see Kellner 1987, 1988, 1989, 1994: 1–23; Kellner and Best 1991:
111–45; Norris 1990: 164–93, 1992) – hence Kellner’s interpretation of the sim-
ulacrum as a form of ‘semiological idealism’ and a denial ‘that reality exists’
(Kellner and Best 1991: 139) and Norris’s famous discussion of Baudrillard’s
Gulf War essays, which he interpreted as a claim that ours is a media-produced
world of ‘Ž ctive or illusory appearances’ in which, in a postmodern variant on
‘Berkeleian transcendental idealism’, only TV images exist (1992: 11–31, 192–6;
see Merrin 1994). Both, therefore, approach Baudrillard from a simplistic
Marxist materialism, philosophically ignorant of the concept of the simulacrum,
which equates ‘reality’ with physical matter and consequently any questioning
of this with idealism. In this reductive reading Baudrillard is easily understood
by Marxism as committing the common sin of idealism and thus his mystiŽ ca-
tions are vigorously contested.
Third, even when accounts of Baudrillard’s work avoid such obvious errors,
the concept of the simulacrum is inadequately contextualized. It is usually
approached through Baudrillard’s essays ‘The order of simulacra’ (1993b:
50–86) and ‘Precession of the simulacra’ (1994b: 1–42), leading onto a dis-
cussion of contemporary simulation and the media (see, for example, Chen
1987: 72–7; Gane 1991a: 92–103; Kellner 1989: 60–92, 1994: 8–10; Levin 1996:
95–7, 190–1, 279–81; Sandywell 1995: 131–3, and essays by Tseelon
(Kellner1994: 120–4), Schoonmaker (Kellner 1994: 169–71), and Luke
(Kellner 1994: 212–15)). Although many of these discussions are important and
wider links with other Ž gures are often drawn,3 it is noticeable that the simu-
lacrum is rarely contextualized either within the development of Baudrillard’s
thought or within the history of the concept itself. The focus, for example, upon
certain, ‘classic’ essays in the expanding academic literature on Baudrillard (and
in the student textbook market) has led to the neglect of other important, and
even foundational, early discussions of the real and simulation in his work:
especially those in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Bau-
drillard 1981{1972}) and The Consumer Society (1998a{1970}). Similarly, the
broad acceptance of a range of relevant in uences and of agreed avenues of
intellectual descent for Baudrillard’s work has served to establish a framework
of interpretation which unintentionally Ž xes his position and limits the wider
historical and philosophical contextualization his ideas and concepts require.
The simulacrum, for example, belongs to an earlier, longer, and more diverse
tradition than most commentators either acknowledge or are willing to work
through and thus any detailed critical analysis of the concept must involve a
more wide-ranging overview and imagination.
Fourth, and following from the last omission, the nature of the simulacrum
88 Economy and Society

itself is usually overlooked. The simulacrum is not a new idea but an ancient
concept, hidden within the theological, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions of
every culture, centring upon the image and its efficacy. The image has always
been conceived of as powerful, as possessing a remarkable hold over the hearts
and minds of humanity – as having the capacity to assume for us the force of
that which it represents, threatening in the process the very distinction of orig-
inal and image. In the West this power has long been recognized as a threat to
the real, as being truly demonic, and accordingly every effort has been made to
limit its efficacy, to banish its ‘evil demon’, and to domesticate it as a ‘good’,
re ective image. The image is not so easily reduced, however, as it retains a
threat – a nihilistic power to unground all foundations for truth and falsity and
to overturn the ontological and epistemological traditions upon which the
West’s history has been built.
The nihilism Baudrillard describes, therefore, is not his, as critics such as
Kellner erroneously claim (1989: 117–21; 1994: 11–12; Kellner and Best 1991:
126–8), but rather that of the image itself and its simulacral operation. Far from
endorsing this state of affairs Baudrillard has consistently attempted to discover
and formulate a position from which it is possible to oppose the simulacrum, a
position he Ž rst discovers in a conception of the symbolic drawn from
Durkheimian social anthropology (see Merrin 1999b), and which he later devel-
ops though various related forms such as ‘seduction’, ‘fatality’, and, more
recently, ‘radical illusion’. To date his critics have paid too little attention to this
critical position, focusing instead upon his discussion of simulacra, leading them
to identify Baudrillard with his descriptive analysis of our contemporary society,
to deny the existence of these simulacra, and to oppose Baudrillard accordingly
with an appeal to the real. Without, therefore, understanding either the simu-
lacrum and its processes or the critical position Baudrillard raises against them
not only is our knowledge and appreciation of his work limited, but the possi-
bility of developing an effective critique of it is also threatened.
It is the aim of this paper to develop such a critique. This cannot, however,
proceed upon an appeal to the real against his advocacy of simulacra as this mis-
represents his position and project. It must begin instead from the basis of his
opposition to simulacra from the critical standpoint of the symbolic, and so can
advance only when we have understood precisely what he means by the simu-
lacrum and how he sees it as operating today. This, therefore, is where the paper
will begin, in setting out Baudrillard’s early development of the concept of the
simulacrum before contextualizing this within its wider history and moving on
to consider the validity of his symbolic opposition to its power. I want to argue
that opposing Baudrillard with the real is ineffective as he takes the real as the
basis for his own critical project, his ‘symbolic’ functioning in precisely this way
for him. Instead, we must oppose Baudrillard with the simulacrum – with the
ungrounding of all foundational critique and with its success in the contempor-
ary era which ultimately also absorbs and negates his own challenge. This,
however, is a strategy Baudrillard would approve of. In Symbolic Exchange and
Death he writes that, ‘we must . . . turn Mauss against Mauss, Saussure against
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 89

Saussure, and Freud against Freud’ (1993b: 1); we must push things to the limit
where ‘they collapse and are inverted’ (1993b: 4). So too we must now turn
Baudrillard against Baudrillard.

‘So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real’

The simulacrum receives its classic statement by Baudrillard in Symbolic

Exchange and Death but its main themes are already apparent in his earlier work.
His Ž rst book, The System of Objects (1996a{1968}), follows Barthes’ The Fashion
System (1990b{1967}) in seeing a transformation of the object into a sign for con-
sumption: ‘in short a simulacrum of the real object’ (Barthes 1990b: xii). Unlike
in Barthes, however, the semiotic originates in the transformation of a
Durkheimian relationship with ‘traditional symbolic objects’ into a sign of the
lost relation (1996a: 200). Although the symbolic is not explored in detail, its
fundamental opposition to the semiotic is already in place, as is the dynamic of
the latter’s origin in its destruction, themes which reappear in The Consumer
Society (Baudrillard 1998a), particularly in Baudrillard’s discussion of electronic
media which, he says, translate the symbolic – ‘the lived, eventual character of
the world’ – into signs (1998a: 122–3). So we live, Baudrillard argues, ‘in the
denial of the real’, consuming reality as a sign (1998a: 34), with history and
events no longer produced from ‘shifting, contradictory, real experience’ but
‘produced as artifacts’ (1998a: 125). Here, in ‘a vast process of simulation’ com-
bining coded signiŽ catory elements, a ‘neo-reality’ is produced, which ‘assumes
the force of reality’, as reality is abolished ‘in favour of this neo-reality of the
model’ (1998a: 126). Baudrillard is clear: this is not a purely media or an unreal
process, but one with ‘material force’ occurring ‘over the whole span of daily
life’ (1998a: 126).4
In these early texts, therefore, Baudrillard advances a simple critique of the
transformation of the lived, symbolic reality into signs which are combined to
create a culturally constructed ‘neo-reality’ in a process of ‘simulation’ in which
the real is eclipsed by this new image, this ‘simulacrum’. This synonymity of the
symbolic and the real is reconsidered in For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign. Here Baudrillard not only systematically formulates the symbolic/semi-
otic distinction (see Gane 1991b: 73–93), developing a poststructuralist critique
of the latter and its ‘generalised political economy’ of commodity and sign, but
he also develops an important critique of the ‘real’, as a semiotic category (1981:
143–63) – a critique that has, to date, gone almost unnoticed in the critical litera-
ture. He begins by comparing the commodity and sign, arguing that the struc-
ture of each establishes a relation between a dominant ‘form’ (exchange value and
signiŽ er, respectively) and its ‘content’ (use value/needs and the signiŽ ed/refer-
ent). The latter serves, he says, as an ‘effect of concrete reality and objective
purpose’ (1981: 148), grounding the form and acting as absolute guarantor for it;
so the commodity seems to fulŽ l human needs, whilst the sign seems to refer to
‘a fragment of objective reality’ (1981: 150).
90 Economy and Society

The sign’s arbitrariness lies, therefore, in the relationship between the form
(the signiŽ er) and its content (the signiŽ ed as the content of thought and the
referent as the content of perception) (1981: 151), and so the referent – ‘reality’
– is not an external reality, but is a product of the sign and its reduction of that
experiential relationship. It is ‘the simulacrum of the symbolic’ (1981: 162) – the
‘phantasm’ of the meaning it abstracts and reduces to semiotic difference (1981:
149):
the referent does not constitute an autonomous concrete reality; it is only an
extrapolation of the excision established by the logic of the sign onto the world
of things (onto the phenomenological world of perception). It is the world
such as it is seen and interpreted through the sign – that is, virtually excised
and excisable at pleasure. The ‘real’ table does not exist. If it can be registered
in its identity (if it exists), this is because it has already been designated,
abstracted and rationalised by the separation which establishes it in this
equivalence to itself.
(Baudrillard 1981: 155)
The ‘world’ the sign ‘evokes’ is only, therefore, ‘the effect of the sign’ (1981:
152): the ‘real’ is only a ‘reality-effect’ and cannot be made an ideal alternative
to the sign (1981: 160). The only hope for a disruption of the sign lies in that
which is external to it, which ‘it expels and annihilates in its very institution’ –
the symbolic (1981: 160). Only this resists the reduction and assimilation of the
sign. As ‘a radical rupture of the Ž elds of value’ (1981: 123–9), while remaining
itself unsigniŽ able (1981: 161), without even a ‘position of latent value’ (1981:
162), and as that which ‘tears all signiŽ ers and signiŽ eds to pieces’ (1981: 162),
it is Baudrillard’s Durkheimian hope against the simulacrum. The problems of
this will, I hope, be made clear later.
Having established the symbolic as the lived (if unsigniŽ able) reality and the
source of critical opposition to the semiotic which transforms and replaces this
realm to produce from its elements a simulated reality-effect that eclipses the
real, Baudrillard now seeks to escalate this picture dramatically. In The Mirror
of Production (Baudrillard 1975{1973}) even the semiotic referent is lost as the
acceleration of semiological processes absorbs it, ‘to the sole proŽ t of the play of
signiŽ ers’ (1975: 127). This ‘structural revolution in value’, with which he opens
Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard 1993b{1976}), inaugurates, he argues,
the current era of ‘simulation’. Here, in a well-known historical sketch echoing
Foucault’s The Order of Things (Foucault 1970{1966}), Baudrillard traces the
changing reference of the sign since its emancipation from the symbolic Feudal
world in the Renaissance with the counterfeit sign (1993b: 50–3), through the
industrial commodity (1993b: 55–7), to the reproduction of forms ‘conceived
according to their reproducibility’ from their model (1993b: 56). In this present
phase ‘signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real’, their
combination resulting in ‘a total relativity, general commutation and simulation’
(1993b: 7). Baudrillard has since added a fourth, ‘fractal’, order of simulacra
(1992: 15–16; 1993c: 5–6) in which ‘there is no longer a referent at all’ as value
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 91

‘radiates in all directions’ (1992: 15), but, despite this escalation, the real remains
here, as in the third order, the product of a semiurgical manipulation. It is a real,
however, unsupported even by the referential guarantee whose absorption ends,
Baudrillard says, the Western ‘wager of representation’ (itself ‘a gigantic simu-
lation model of meaning’ (1981: 161)) – the belief that a sign can refer to and
exchange against a guaranteed meaning (1994b: 5). For Nietzsche the murder of
our transcendent guarantor of meaning, value, and signiŽ cance cut us adrift in
a cold, empty, nihilistic universe. So too, therefore, does the murder of our own
‘divine referential’ cut signiŽ catory value adrift in a ‘weightless’, cold universe
of simulacra (1994b: 5).
In Baudrillard’s early work up to 1976, therefore, he develops a semiotic con-
ception of the ‘simulacrum’ and of ‘simulation’, as the process of transforming
the lived symbolic into its semiotic image whose reality-effect eclipses the
former. He also develops alongside this a critique of the sign’s reference, tracing
a historical path from the Renaissance to the contemporary era to show how the
latter is marked by signs whose self-referential and self-supporting and repro-
ducing relationships come to constitute this experiential real for us today. While
these much-quoted ideas constitute one of the most important and in uential
contributions to contemporary social theory there are serious tensions in this
picture which need to be addressed. First, we can see that the historical schema
of Symbolic Exchange and Death suggests an abrupt division between symbolic
and semiotic orders which is historically and philosophically suspect, encourag-
ing claims of a ‘nostalgia’ in Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange (Kellner
1989: 42–5), and, second, it is apparent that Baudrillard seems to believe that
simulacra originate with the Renaissance, contradicting other comments by him,
not least his common references to the Christian use of idols and the simulation
of divinity (see, for example, 1994b: 4–5). In fact, the simulacrum has been
recognized for thousands of years and, although the use of the concept has devel-
oped historically, the force it names is consistent. We need, therefore, to under-
stand something of this history if we are to evaluate Baudrillard’s simulacrum
and the critique he raises against it. Although it can be sketched only brie y
here, we can at least identify a historical awareness of the power of images and
a consistent Western response to their threat – a demonization and a domesti-
cation of their power.

‘Those things not of God’

Those things which are not of God, must be of his rival.

(Tertullian on the ‘idolatry’ of women’s cosmetics – Freedberg 1989: 397)
The history of the simulacrum is the history of the image and its reception.
Reading the literature it becomes obvious that a different attitude to images
exists in primitive, traditional, and many non-Western societies than in the West.
Here images and imitation are commonly seen as efficacious: they are not inert
but powerful forms which, as Frazer notes, can affect the real from afar
92 Economy and Society

(1995{1890}: 11). As Taussig points out, however, the image here does not affect
the real ‘sympathetically’, as Frazer believed, but ‘shares in or acquires the prop-
erties of the represented’ (1993: 47–8), becoming the real, ‘however temporarily
or  eetingly’ (Freedberg 1989: 277). Here mimesis transforms the image or imi-
tation into the original, erasing the distinction in that moment. The rejection of
this power of transformation stands at the heart of the Western tradition. As
Bataille argues (1992), the Judaeo-Christian separation of sacred and profane
was decisive in Western history as thereafter the material world became the
desacralized, deŽ cient reality and image of the puriŽ ed, transcendent ‘true’
reality from which it originates. This image, therefore, is now powerless, no
longer able to become the real, but reduced instead to its re ection and media-
tion. This is a domestication of the image as a guaranteed, powerless re ection
of an original which recurs throughout the Western tradition, being clearly seen
in its dominant epistemologies.
In Plato, Deleuze argues (1983), this Ž xed distinction of original and partici-
pative copy is the basis for all truth claims, his whole philosophy being devoted
to combating the threat of the image to the real. As an image of the true world
of forms this material world deceives us as to the status of our knowledge and
corrupts us physically, Plato argues in The Republic (1955) – appearing to us as
the true world it prevents our ascension to the intelligible realm. Human-made
images compound this deception as images of an image standing ‘at third remove
from the throne of truth’ (1955: 425), possessing, therefore, a ‘terrible power to
corrupt even the best of characters’ (1955: 436). In the Sophist, Plato moderates
this condemnation, praising the ‘eikastic’ image – the participative copy of the
form – and reserving his hostility for the ‘phantastic’ – an image which is only
a ‘simulacrum’, an ‘appearance’ or ‘apparition’, of the form (1986: 26–7, 66–8).5
There is a hierarchy here, Deleuze says, running from the original model, to the
‘good’ copy, down to the phantastic – the last of which seems only to resemble,
possessing ‘an effect of resemblance’ (1983: 49), refusing a secondary status to
simulate the effect of the real. In assuming its position, therefore, the simu-
lacrum ‘contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both
model and reproduction’ (1983: 53), removing the very possibility of distinction
between truth and falsity. As Deleuze argues, the simulacrum is not a mere imi-
tation but ‘the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is
challenged or overturned’ (1994: 69). Given its threat to the real (and thus also
to morality), the simulacrum for Plato, Deleuze says, is ‘demonic’ (1983: 49,
1994: 127). It is this evil demon of appearances, he concludes, that Plato con-
spires to banish, his whole project aiming at ‘repressing the simulacra, of keeping
them chained in the depths’ (1983: 48), to prevent their ‘universal ungrounding’
of the very conditions of truth, and certainty (1994: 67).
The Platonic debate on the simulacrum is paralleled in the earlier Judaic, and
later Judaeo-Christian traditions, where an identical issue and resolution is
found (see Barasch 1992; Freedberg 1989; Ries 1987). Judaism had similarly sep-
arated the sacred and profane, establishing the material world as an image and
good, re ective copy of the divine, thus God made the earth ‘and saw that it was
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 93

good’ (Genesis 1: 26–7). Again, however, as an image, this world has the power to
eclipse the divine, captivating men’s minds and tempting their bodies. The sus-
picion of the image extends in aniconic Judaism to all ‘graven images’ (Exodus
20: 4) and images of the divine in particular (see Barasch 1992: 13–22). Such
‘eidolon’ (translated as ‘idol’, or ‘simulacrum’)6 contained, they recognized, the
power to replace the divine for worshippers: an act which could only be evil –
the result of a demonic possession of the images (Deuteronomy 32: 17); a demonic
attribution surviving in the Greek Apocrypha and the New Testament (1
Corinthians 10: 14, 10: 20; Revelations 9: 20), and becoming a major theme in
early Greek and Latin Christian thought (see Barasch 1992; Ries 1987). The
question of the image’s status as a good copy or evil simulacrum – as mediating
or eclipsing the divine – lay at the heart of the periodic iconoclastic crises which
beset Christianity (Candea 1987a, 1987b; Freedberg 1989: 378–428), and,
although the Second Council of Nicea in 787 accepted the image as an object of
mediated, ‘relative veneration’, a suspicion of images, and of their hold over the
masses, remained.
This demonization of the efficacious image and its domestication as a power-
less copy by the establishment of an absolute referential ground for truth and
certainty constitutes, therefore, a dual response by the West to the problem of
the image. It is a response, however, which, as Deleuze says, can only banish but
never destroy its simulacral power. The immoral image threatens at all times to
overturn its position and unground all foundations: all attempts to exorcise its
evil demon fail. Hence the Cartesian cogito, helpless before the ‘evil demon’
(Descartes 1968: 100) who surrounds its senses with simulacral images (images
whose resemblance to any external original is unproven and which are thus are
not even ‘images’ (1968: 118)), requires a God to ground the apparitions pro-
duced by this demonic, simulacral deity – God’s ‘marvelous twin’ (Foucault
1998: xxiii) – to leave true, re ective images in their place. This God, however,
is itself only proven by the cogito,7 which becomes, therefore, ‘that being upon
which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its being and its truth’
(Heidegger 1977: 128). As this ground is itself ungrounded, however, this subiec-
tum is once more delivered back to the evil demon of images.
Empiricism’s similar attempt to found an absolute, objective truth – a truth
in experience; in the subject’s sensations, their external correspondence, and
repeated observed occurrence – also had to overcome the problem of the
simulacrum. It is no coincidence that, when, in his Novum Organum, Bacon
spells out his hopes of an inductive training to ‘open and establish a new course
for the mind from the Ž rst and actual perceptions of the senses themselves’
(1952: 105), it is the ‘idols’ again – here, the ideas to which men bow down –
which turn us from truth (see 1952: 109–16). The ideas we derive from experi-
ence prevent empirical certainty, Ž rst, because of the power of the mind and its
images to overshadow and depart from sensation,8 but also because these ideas
are all we know: as Berkeley’s critique of Locke makes clear, their reference –
material reality – is not experienced, and only a God can exorcise the simulacral
images and guarantee their truth. Hume, in his A Treatise of Human Nature
94 Economy and Society

(1969), saw no such guarantor and his entire empiricism can be read, not as a
scepticism, but, more precisely, as a sensitivity to the problem of simulacra – a
sensitivity to the ungrounded, resemblant, ‘impressions’ whose cause (1969:
132) and ‘original’ (1969: 242) remain both unknown and unprovable, and whose
reality-effect is even ultimately eclipsed as they pass away to leave only copies
in the memory which simulate the force of the originals (1969: 155, 157, 168–9)
– a simulation, note, that even Hume later found necessary to refuse (1966: 17).
Thus, from the heart of empiricism, Hume exposes its collapse under simulacra.
At the close of Book One of his treatise Hume realizes he is left without rational
foundations for certainty, though fortunately, he says, those clouds which reason
cannot dispel are pushed away by ‘nature’ and ‘the lively impression of my
senses’. As he relaxes, plays backgammon, dines, and converses for a few hours
he Ž nds his sceptical musings become ‘cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous’ (1969:
316). ‘Tir’d with amusement and company’, scepticism is banished, he says
(1969: 317–18), though it is banished by the very impressions whose efficacy
produces the reality Hume is happy to slip back into. Thus the victory of simu-
lacra is not the end of his philosophy but its conŽ rmation.
Here, as Nietzsche says (1968b: 40–1), we reach the end of the ‘history of an
error’ – the error by which the material world was reduced to an ‘apparent’,
imagic re ection of an immaterial ‘real world’. This ‘myth’, at last exposed as
unattainable by empiricism, is an idea we should abolish, he says. However, once
we do, ‘what world is left?’, for ‘with the real world we have abolished the appar-
ent world’ (1968b: 41) – both original and image give way to a purely simulacral
realm of appearances, and truth and falsity lose their absolute, transcendent
guarantor. This ‘twilight of the idols’ – of ‘the old truth’ (1979: 116) – is accom-
plished by idols: it is the dawn of simulacra.9
If, therefore, we can trace the question of the simulacrum through debates in
anthropology, theology, and philosophy to reveal, if only brie y and in bare
outline, the signiŽ cance of the problem it names for the entire Western world-
view, it is a problem that reappears in many of its disciplines and debates. In par-
ticular, the issue of the image, its efficacy and its reference, is central to much
social and cultural and media theory. One of Baudrillard’s most important con-
tributions to the concept and its history, therefore, is to highlight the social oper-
ation of these processes. Thus his sketch of the history of simulacra succeeds in
seeing the development of the contemporary world, not as a series of socio-
economic formations (deŽ nable as ‘Renaissance’, ‘Modern’ and ‘Postmodern’),
but as a succession of eras deŽ nable in terms of their dominant simulacral pro-
ductions and their epistemological effects – in terms of the signs and sign-
objects which characterize each era. As he says in Symbolic Exchange and Death,
each era is ‘a particular phase in the order of signs . . . basically only one episode
in the line of simulacra’ (Baudrillard 1993c: 55).
The productions which span these eras – productions such as the book, the
commodity, the photograph, and the Ž lm – can all be understood as simulacral,
each being characterized by an identical mechanical reproducibility as a copy
without an original, by an imagic existence, and by a consequent power – an
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 95

epistemological effect upon their user. In viewing these media in this light the
in uence of Benjamin and McLuhan upon Baudrillard is readily apparent, but,
rather than simply co-opting their arguments, he draws them together to re-
orient them around the historical question of the simulacrum which manifests
itself in their work. Hence McLuhan’s discussion of the effects upon us of our
own technological ‘extended images’ (McLuhan 1994: 41) is a discussion of the
simulacral power of those images to impose themselves upon us and remake us
in their image. Typographic man, for example, is a product of the book
(McLuhan 1962).
Marx’s fetishized commodity is similarly simulacral, not only in its serial pro-
duction but more obviously in its imagic power. As Baudrillard points out (1981:
88), the term ‘fetishism’ even originates in Christian anthropology to explain the
pagan worship of images and their hold over their worshippers: Ž rst appearing
in Charles de Brosses’s 1760 description of idolatry, ‘fetishism’ has etymologi-
cal implications of ‘witchcraft’ and diabolical ‘bewitchment’ (Ries 1987: 80).
The imagic commodity, therefore, like the idol, is characterized as demonic, as
possessing a living demonic force. Marx explicitly describes this evil spirit and
the moment of its birth – as the object ‘steps forth as a commodity’, he says, it
begins to form ‘grotesque ideas’ in ‘its wooden brain’ (Marx 1954: 76). The com-
modity, he adds, is ‘phantasmagoric’: literally a spirit in the marketplace. It is
both ‘phantasma’ and ‘phantom’, ‘appearance’ and ‘apparition’: a fusion of
ghostly and imagic life whose efficacious and uncanny independence, whose
eclipse of the lives and imaginations of the proletariat, and whose ‘mystiŽ cation’
of the real can, as in Platonism and Christianity, only be diabolical.
Marx too, therefore, demonizes the image. Its imagic life is not unreal,
however, but is, Marx recognizes, like the religious phantoms of the mind, truly
simulacral: it produces an inverted, ‘mystiŽ ed’ consciousness, but as the
product of an actually ‘inverted world’ (1975: 244). Thus its inversion is
efficacious and actual even if Marx clings to the fact of its inverted status and
the hope of its eventual correction. Recognition of this imagic inversion of the
real and of consciousness by the fetish commodity and, later, by the mass media
and their own imagic productions comes to the fore in twentieth-century
Marxist thought – most notably in Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘phantas-
magoria’ of urban life in nineteenth-century Paris (Benjamin 1997b, 1999),
Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the ‘culture industry’ (today, ‘real life is
becoming indistinguishable from the movies’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997:
126)), and Debord’s description of the processes of the ‘spectacle’, which
replaces ‘the tangible world’ with a selection of images which ‘impose them-
selves as the tangible par excellence’ (1983: para. 36). Despite the prescience of
their social analysis, these formulations, however, only repeat the Western
response to the image in their political hopes of demystiŽ cation and their
defence of the real. The power of the simulacrum, however, is not so easily dis-
pelled, as Debord was forced to concede in his reformulation of the ‘integrated
spectacle’ in 1988 (Debord 1990: 8–9).10
The question of the simulacrum is clearly found, therefore, at the heart of the
96 Economy and Society

debates which emerge in the twentieth century around the issue of technologi-
cal reproduction. Although unnamed, it is the simulacrum’s power and its prob-
lematization of knowledge and experience which is central. In Benjamin and in
Boorstin (both explicit reference points for Baudrillard), for example, we Ž nd an
acute awareness of the effect on the human sensorium of our own technological
productions. In Benjamin’s ‘artwork’ essay (1973: 211–44) the effects of the
mechanically reproduced simulacra of photography11 and Ž lm upon the auratic
relationship and experience are famously traced (and Benjamin is clear, it is
always the experience – of others, of the world, of art, etc. – that is depreciated
by this reproduction (see Leslie 2000)), while Boorstin’s prescient but neglected
1961 book The Image (Boorstin 1992) repeats many of these points in his dis-
cussion of the twentieth century’s ‘graphic revolution’ in images. Their mass
production and proliferation have created a world, he says, ‘where fantasy is
more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original’ (1992:
37), resulting in ‘a reshaping of our very concept of truth’ (1992: 205), produc-
ing ‘new categories of experience . . . no longer classiŽ able by the old common
sense tests of true or false’ (1992: 211). Although Boorstin’s agenda is con-
servative as, like Marxism, he hopes for a rediscovery of a real, the simulacral
processes his work describes are, however, unlikely to oblige: already the Grand
Canyon, for example, has become ‘a disappointing reproduction of the
Kodachrome original’ (1992: 14).
As has been widely noted (Kellner 1989: 1–6; Gane 1991b: 15–45), Bau-
drillard enters these debates, therefore, as part of the French, post-war, intel-
lectual response to the changing social, cultural, and media landscape, following
the work of Ellul, Aron, Touraine, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Debord, Barthes, and
Boorstin and McLuhan (among others). While this background is necessary to
understand Baudrillard’s work, it is not sufficient, as (as I have attempted to
show) his work draws upon a much longer heritage and the philosophical ques-
tions central to this. His claims, therefore, must be contextualized within these
traditions as both their heir and extension. Although Baudrillard produces a
semiotic interpretation of the contemporary simulacrum as a reproduction of
the real, ‘substituting signs of the real for the real’ (1994b: 2), his use of the
concept connects these contemporary processes with historical debates upon
images, their efficacy and their threatened dominance. He employs the theo-
logical and philosophical concept of the simulacrum, therefore, to illuminate the
contemporary processes of the image and their impact upon questions of truth,
certainty, and reality, recognizing that the same processes that have long been
recognized in the West as surrounding the image must reappear in a society
devoted to the production of the imagic. Thus, rather than offering a simple
‘postmodern’ perspective or view of ‘postmodernity’, we can see that Bau-
drillard’s work and his view of our age is drawn instead from a deeper well, one
that we cannot so easily dismiss.
If we are now able to locate Baudrillard’s work and its in uences more effec-
tively and recognize the relevance, importance, and, ironically, the reality of the
concept of the simulacrum, it must not be forgotten that it is still Baudrillard’s
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 97

aim to oppose its contemporary manifestation and the semiotic processes it rep-
resents. As I have argued, he Ž nds a basis for his critical position in the concept
of ‘symbolic’, but this attempt to discover and establish a critical foundation
against the simulacrum becomes problematic for several reasons. First, his
absolute distinction of symbolic and semiotic ties him to a simplistic opposition
to the realm of appearances. This is complicated by the use of simulation in the
primitive festivals and rituals described by the Durkheimian tradition to open
the experience of the sacred. So Durkheim describes mimesis as a means of
‘generation’ in totemic rites as the imitation of the totemic being’s reproduction
cycle not only ensures its reproduction but is its effective reproduction, the
whole rite also serving as a means of group communion and the basis for the
experience of the sacred (Durkheim 1995: 335–6). Similarly, Caillois describes
the simulation in the festival of the ancestor-gods and their act of founding the
world as actually constituting the original act of foundation, giving access to its
restorative and regenerative energies and producing that communal experience
that Baudrillard understands as a symbolic relationship (Caillois 1980: 97–127).
How then can a ‘good’ symbolic simulation be separated from a ‘bad’ semiotic
one?
Second, we can see that the symbolic seems to serve the role in Baudrillard’s
work of the ‘real’ he had earlier rejected as a referential category. Despite claim-
ing in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign that the symbolic could
not be named or privileged, it nevertheless has an explicit formulation in Bau-
drillard in its acknowledged Durkheimian lineage: it operates as what we would
understand as the real (as a relational, immediately actualized realm of experi-
ence and meaning – a reality transformed into signs of itself by the semiotic),
and it is obviously privileged by Baudrillard as the basis of his critique of the
contemporary West. Finally, Baudrillard perhaps also does the simulacrum an
injustice in underestimating its power and overestimating the ability of the sym-
bolic to serve as the means for the exorcism of its demon. It becomes apparent,
therefore, that Baudrillard’s opposition to the simulacrum merely repeats the
Western response in the domestication of the simulacrum before a guaranteed
real (the symbolic and symbolic exchange) and in its demonization as the cause
of all ills today. All these issues obviously occurred to Baudrillard, who accord-
ingly began to rethink his position after 1976.

The enchanted versus the disenchanted simulacrum

As Levin argues (1996: 128–39), between Symbolic Exchange and Death in 1976
and Seduction in 1979 (Baudrillard 1990a), ‘the signiŽ cance of the sign suddenly
reverses in Baudrillard’s thought’ (1996: 128). Whereas in his earliest work the
sign was the site of the destruction of symbolic meaning, it now becomes ‘the
best available medium for the irruption of the symbolic in the smooth function-
ing of the “cool” universe of tertiary simulation’ (1996: 128). From Forget
Foucault (Baudrillard 1987a), therefore, Baudrillard’s key opposition is between
98 Economy and Society

‘seduction’ and ‘production’. The latter term, meaning ‘to render visible, to
cause to appear and be made to appear: pro-ducere’ (1987a: 21), designates the
processes of our semiotic order, devoted to the forced materialization of the signs
of the real, against which Baudrillard describes the order of seduction which
involves ‘a mastering of the realm of appearances’ (1988: 62) in a game of signs
creating a symbolic relationship – to other participants or witnesses, to the order
of appearances, or to the world itself.
In this development of the symbolic–semiotic opposition the realm of signs is
no longer antithetical to symbolic relations but, as the Durkheimian tradition
suggested, is instrumental in their actualization. This ‘charmed universe’ of
seduction (1990a: 143–4) is the product of an ‘enchanted simulation’ turning the
‘evil forces’ of appearances against the order of truth (1988: 75) – as trompe l’oeil,
for example, exposes the Renaissance perspectival simulation (1990a: 60–6). In
contrast, the order of truth is ruled by the ‘disenchanted’ simulacrum which has
been all too successful in assuming the position of the real, eclipsing it today by
its excess of truth, by its minute ‘hyperrealization’ of the real.12 This hyperreal-
ity is, therefore, not unreal but quite the opposite: as an excessive semio-
realization of the real it is ‘more real than the real’ (1990c: 11). The ‘evil demon’
returns in the diabolical conformity of this hyperreality (1987b: 13), in the dis-
enchantment of this hyperŽ delity which, Baudrillard says, is the deŽ ning aspect
of our culture (1987b: 14).
The disenchantment of these simulacra is due to their abolition of symbolic
relations and their destruction of the charmed universe. Pornography is
exemplary here, Baudrillard says (1990a: 28–36), as its phantasy is not sexuality
but reality: its ‘forcing of signs’ (1990a: 28) giving a hypervisible, gynaecologi-
cal, ‘instantaneous exacerbated representation’ (1990a: 29), beyond all possible
actual sexual experience.13 This is ‘obscenity’, Baudrillard says, the obscene
lying today in that which is over-exposed, over-represented, and over-signiŽ ed,
in the ‘all-too-visible’ (1988: 22), ‘the absolute proximity of the thing seen’, in
a ‘hypervision in close-up’ without any distance (1990c: 59–60). In this ‘ver-
tiginous phantasy of exactitude’ (1990a: 30), everything must now ‘pass over
into the absolute evidence of the real’ (1990a: 29). All seduction is hunted down
by visibility – by an ‘orgy of realism’ which summons sexuality before ‘the juris-
diction of signs’. This, Baudrillard claims, is the ‘devastation of the real’ (1990a:
31–2).
The ‘obscene’ results, therefore, in the loss of the symbolic ‘scene’ – the
dramaturgical, Maussian reciprocal relationship. For even our relationship with
the world is reciprocal, Baudrillard suggests, as looking involves ‘a kind of oscil-
lation’ of presence and absence, as the object ‘covers and uncovers itself ’ (1988:
32). In the obscene there is no such reciprocity, but only the unilateral relation-
ship to a transparent, hypervisible image; a ‘pure and simple exhibition’ in which
everything is immediately given and completed for you; where meaning is absol-
utely signiŽ ed rather than reciprocally actualized, and where everything is
resolved into a single ‘hyperreal’ dimension (1993b: 72). Here, Baudrillard says,
‘we have nothing to add, that is to say, nothing to give in exchange’ (1990a: 30).
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 99

With no possibility of projecting into, or investing in, our images, with all dis-
tance abolished, all illusion or charm exterminated in hyperreality, and with the
real disenchanted in hypervisibility and dissected like a corpse, our only option,
like the visitors to the Beauborg exhibition of hyperreal sculpture, ‘approaching
and sniffing this cadaver-like hypersimilitude’, is to stare, ‘fascinated and . . .
dumbfounded’ at the obviousness and banality of the real (1983a: 43). All we can
do, Baudrillard says, is ‘verify to the point of vertigo the useless objectivity of
things’ (1983a: 43).
This emphasis upon a symbolic exchange – a dual, reciprocal relationship –
with the world is obviously derived from the Durkheimian tradition, but it also
suggests other in uences upon Baudrillard – most notably Heidegger and Ben-
jamin and their discussion of technology. For Heidegger, the contemporary
mode of appearance of Being is no longer one of presencing to and from uncon-
cealment (echoed in Baudrillard’s comments on ‘oscillation’ above), but is
instead a product of the subject’s representation, allowing the development of
science and a technological domination of Being (see 1977: 3–35), a domination
abolishing all distance, yet bringing no ‘nearness’ (1971: 165).14 Similarly, for
Benjamin, technology ends distance, bringing things closer (1973: 217), abolish-
ing distance, reciprocity, the weave of space and time, the uniqueness, duration
and history of the ‘auratic’ relationship, to penetrate like a ‘surgeon’ (1973:
226–7) into the viscera of the real itself. Compare, therefore, the aura with the
symbolic – both are reciprocal (the auratic gaze is returned (1997b: 147–8)) and
experiential: as Benjamin makes clear in his description of ‘resting on a
summer’s noon’, the aura of the mountains is breathed (1997a: 250). Both too are
destroyed by the movement of our culture in which the contrary processes of
technology to ‘possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather
a copy, becomes more imperative’ (1997a: 250).
For Baudrillard, this obscenity marks our whole society. ‘Ours is a porno-
graphic culture par excellence’ he says (1990a: 34), devoted to the hypervisibil-
ity of the world. This description of a world intent on the technological
semio-realization of the real in its obscenity becomes a dominant theme in his
works of the 1980s–90s (see, for example, 1988, 1990b, 1992, 1993c). In The
Perfect Crime (1996b{1995}), in his essays and interviews in the collection Jean
Baudrillard: Art and Artefact (Zurbrugg 1997), and in his interviews with
Phillipe Petit, in Paroxysm (1998b{1997}), this reaches new heights. Here he
argues that the drive for a perfect illusion of reality produces instead a ‘disen-
chanted illusion’ which, not only exterminates the real in its hyperreality, but,
more importantly, also exterminates ‘the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the
world’ (1996b: 1–7). Again, the oppositional realms of seduction and produc-
tion reappear, with our contemporary technologies following the order of pro-
duction in aiming at a ‘generalised virtuality which puts an end to the real by its
promotion of every single instant’ (1996b: 29). Our high-deŽ nition technologies
aim at capturing the instant in its hyperŽ delity, in its real-time appearance,
immediately materializing the real and abolishing it in its hyperrealization
(1996b: 25–34). We aim, therefore, for a ‘saturation by absolute reality’ (1996b:
100 Economy and Society

62), and our success at this is unparalleled: today, Baudrillard says, ‘the world
has become real beyond our wildest expectations’ (1996b: 64).
The simulacrum, therefore, remains central to Baudrillard’s work but retains
a dual aspect, possessing both a disenchanted form intent on ‘the perfection of
the reproduction . . . the extermination of the real by its double’ (Zurbrugg
1997: 9) and an enchanted form whose evil spirit can be marshalled against its
own diabolical twin. Baudrillard has described this as the ‘evil spirit of
incredulity’ which defeats ‘the evil spirit of simulation’ (1994b: 107), as, para-
doxically, the simulacrum becomes vulnerable in its very success; its hyperreal-
ity making us sensitive to something else – ‘a hidden truth, a secret dimension
of everything’ – lost in hyper-Ž delity (1994b: 107). This suspicion of perfect
realism is not new, especially in photography. Kafka, for example, wrote of
photography that ‘it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the out-
lines of things like a play of light and shade’ (Sontag 1977: 206), preŽ guring
Kracauer’s critique of the photograph as annihilating the person in their rep-
resentation (1955: 57), burying their history ‘as if under a layer of snow’ (1955:
51). Barthes, however, provides the best example here of the failure of visual
realism, as it is in the photo of his mother as a child, rather than in her later,
perfect likeness, that he rediscovers ‘the splendour of her truth’ (1993: 103).
Something is lost, therefore, in the accretion of the real. In his earlier work
Baudrillard sees this as a consequence of truth itself which, when raised to a
certain level, becomes banal. At such a level of obviousness no relationship is
possible: there is no passion, no investment or belief – everything is hyperreal-
ized before us and our only response is stupeŽ ed acceptance. It is the very level
of truth, therefore, that destroys ‘the ring of truth’ (1990b: 118). Quoting
Nietzsche, Baudrillard says ‘we do not believe truth remains true once the veil
has been lifted’ (1990a: 59), and so, stripped naked, without the play of veils,
with everything once secret now exposed, truth loses its appeal: as Barthes says
of striptease, ‘woman is desexualised at the very moment when she is stripped
naked’ (Barthes 1973: 91). Here, for Baudrillard, the ‘hot’ symbolic scene is
replaced by a ‘cold’ abject obscenity and the ‘nihilistic passion’ of a cold ‘fasci-
nation’ (1994b: 160) as we face the real not as something living, but as something
‘dead’ (1990c: 51). Again, Barthes is illustrative: describing, in A Lover’s Dis-
course (1990a), the act of ‘scrutinising’ his sleeping lover’s body and his absorp-
tion in the Ž ne biological detail, he realizes suddenly that he is ‘in the process of
fetishising a corpse’. His fascination was, he says, ‘only the extreme of detach-
ment’ (1990a: 72), a detachment broken only by his lover’s stirring (Barthes
1990a: 71–2). So we too coldly fetishize the hyperreal corpse of the real, and only
the stirring of that corpse could ever return us to the symbolic relationship.
In his more recent work Baudrillard develops his claims regarding the possi-
bility of reversing this movement towards absolute reality, trying all the time to
Ž nd those symbolic elements which resist this movement. In The Perfect Crime,
for example, radical physics becomes one important example of this opposition,
as modern science reveals, Baudrillard argues, how the microscopic world
eschews the ‘reality principle’ to restore in the process ‘the radical illusion of the
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 101

world’, that form of existence which precedes for him the production of the real
and its passage into the hyperreal, and whose play of appearances constitutes a
charmed mode of relations (1996b: 51–9). As such, this ‘radical illusion’ consti-
tutes a metaphysical reformulation of the enchanted simulacrum described in
Seduction, and an extension of his claim there that this latter force can be used
against its disenchanted twin.
Hence Baudrillard now argues that there is ‘an authentic form of simulation
as well as an inauthentic form of simulation. This may seem paradoxical, but it’s
true’ (Zurbrugg 1997: 11). His examples again include trompe l’oeil (1997: 9),
but also Warhol’s soup cans which, as simulacra, ‘attacked the concept of origi-
nality in an original way’ (1997: 11). In contrast, Warhol’s 1986 attempt to repro-
duce this effect failed to offer any challenge: ‘I believe in the evil genius of
simulation’, Baudrillard concludes, ‘but I don’t believe in its ghost’ (Zurbrugg
1997: 11). The enchanted simulation has a charmed life, therefore, that acts
against the drive to simulacral hyperreality. This life is also discoverable for Bau-
drillard in objects themselves: not only in the object of analysis and its ‘evil genie’
which reverses the subject’s analysis and its drive for reality (see 1990c: 71–110),
but also in those demonic forms with which we surround ourselves. Here Bau-
drillard turns to the ‘absolute commodity’ theorized by Baudelaire – the artwork
which raises itself to the level of the commodity and beyond ‘to deconstruct its
own traditional aura and power of illusion in order to shine resplendent in the
pure obscenity of the commodity’ (1990c: 118). This is a ‘monstrously foreign’
pure object, though one possessing, not a ‘disquieting strangeness’, but instead
a new form of seduction (1990c: 118). ‘The object as strange attractor’ reappears
often in Baudrillard’s subsequent work (see 1993c: 172–4) as he discovers in this
man-made simulacrum a counterforce to the loss of illusion in the world. So the
world may have ‘swallowed its double’ (in the perfect reproduction of the real
which leaves no difference) but ‘the irony of this double’ – the double whose
very resemblance is always diabolical – ‘breaks through at each moment, in each
fragment of our signs, our objects, our images, our models’ (Zurbrugg 1997: 13).
The simulacrum reverses itself to appear as a pure, seductive object (1997: 14).
Hence Baudrillard’s interest in photography in which the subject stands apart
from the mode of appearance of the object, who is willingly captured to appear
as a strange attractor, revealed in its radical alterity, its unambiguous ‘otherness’
(see Zurbrugg 1997: 28–31). Thus, despite Baudrillard’s self-confessed ‘critical
account of technology’ (1997: 38), he now also sees it as containing the possi-
bility of a reversal, ‘as an instrument of magic or illusion – an illusion of the
world, but also a positive kind of illusion or play of illusion’ (1997: 38). Against
the technological will to realize the world, another spirit may work to the oppo-
site effect; another demon may allow it to operate as ‘a kind of radical illusion’
(1997: 40). For Benjamin and Barthes too, technology can have a positive func-
tion, each emphasizing photography’s magical power. Although Baudrillard is
wary of photographing the subject (1997: 29), it is here that the former both dis-
cover this spirit and its magic. As Benjamin writes so beautifully of Hill’s photo-
graph of a Newhaven Ž shwife, ‘her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive
102 Economy and Society

modesty’, ‘there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photog-
rapher’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that Ž lls you with an unruly
desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there’ (1997a:
242–3). Like Barthes’ winter garden photograph it achieves ‘the impossible
science of the unique being’ (Barthes 1993: 71).

To play with phantoms. . . .

The reversal in Baudrillard’s attitude to the sign after Symbolic Exchange and
Death allows him to make his peace with the evil demon of appearances. While
this leads to a more sophisticated conception of the symbolic, allowing him to
move away from a simplistic opposition to images and to explore their efficacy
and attraction, this reversal is problematic, with serious implications for his criti-
cal position. Despite the re-conceptualization of the terms of this critique – now,
in the seduction–production distinction, opposing enchanted and disenchanted
simulacra – behind these, the same symbolic–semiotic distinction is retained. If,
therefore, the symbolic (in all its forms) is retained as the privileged site of
critique, then it still implicitly functions in Baudrillard’s work as, in one sense,
a ‘true’ realm of experience, and relations serving as a guaranteed ‘real’ raised
against the disenchanted simulacrum. Baudrillard’s defence of radical illusion
and apparent opposition to the semiotic processes of the real then become decep-
tive, as he himself can be seen as offering a defence of the real.15
A further problem is apparent in Baudrillard’s new conception of the sym-
bolic. If its order is the result of a simulacral play of appearances, then what
critical force can it have against simulacra? Baudrillard’s attempt to distinguish
an enchanted and disenchanted form may, however, have some efficacy. Just as
Caillois saw the radical form and power of simulation as being repressed and
eliminated in modern societies which can no longer tolerate its threat to the
profane world except in a ‘sublimated form, serving merely as an escape from
boredom or work and entailing neither madness nor delirium’ (Caillois 1961:
97), so too Baudrillard sees a transformation – a disenchantment – of the power
of simulation. Predating his later exploration of this theme in Seduction, this
idea is found in his early discussion of the ‘double’ in Symbolic Exchange and
Death (1993b: 140–4; see also Gane 2000: 36–7). He describes here a genealogy
of the double, moving from the symbolic, tribal society in which ‘the primitive
has a non-alienated duel relation with his double’ (1993b: 141), in which the
double – the shadow, the Gods and spirits – is ‘a partner with whom the primi-
tive has a personal and concrete relationship’ (1993b: 141), living a symbolic
relationship of trade and exchange, to the alienation of this double in Western
societies as the subject is internally split into body and soul or consciousness
(1993b: 142). This separated double comes to haunt the modern subject,
Baudrillard says, just as Peter Schlemihl’s double haunts him in The Student of
Prague, that Ž lm that seems to also haunt Baudrillard’s own work (see 1998a:
187–93).
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 103

In The Consumer Society Baudrillard radicalizes even this alienated Ž gure to

argue that we are beyond this era of alienation and its split of subjectivity, and
all ontological divisions of Being and appearance or image and reality with the
‘process of absorption of signs, and absorption by signs’ (1998a: 191): an early
description of his claim of a passage from the real to hyperreal with the fusion
of real and the imaginary – its double – in a controlled, produced, hyperrealiza-
tion (see Gane 2000: 40–1). This passage is here explicitly described in terms of
disenchantment, as we pass from ‘Being and its spectre’ into ‘a spectrum of signs
of objects’, from the black magic of the devil and the maleŽ cent double, to a
‘white magic’: ‘the prophylactic whiteness of a saturated society, a society with
no history and no dizzying heights, a society with no other myth than itself ’
(1998a: 196). Here then we discover the same process of loss that Caillois
describes, the reduction of a power of simulation and doubling and its mode of
relations and its contemporary replacement with a process of control and dis-
suasion, of precisely those forces of the symbolic that it destroys.
The problem remains, however, of the appeal to an authentic mode of simu-
lation and its relationships (that of the double in primitive societies), against an
‘alienated’ mode. While Baudrillard’s position allows a critique of the latter, it is
not entirely clear how valid this distinction is, as both modes are modes of
simulation and so the question of whether one can defend simulacra against
simulacra comes to the fore. Either way, once Baudrillard admits the role of
simulation in the symbolic, the distinction of the latter – its speciŽ c character,
origins, operation, and critical position – are lost. The simulacrum, therefore,
absorbs the symbolic. Or perhaps the symbolic was only ever a simulacrum? The
Durkheimian tradition’s emphasis upon simulation as a means of producing the
symbolic communication Baudrillard appeals to leaves us with the suspicion that
it was always simulacral – efficacious, certainly, in producing a real transporta-
tion and transformation (Durkheim 1915: 213), yet still simulacral, and as such
providing no basis for a critique of simulacra. Even Mauss’s gift relationship was
a picture drawn from the Ž eldwork of others and their own representation of the
societies they studied: an image of the real, which Baudrillard took for a model
and foundation. As Lyotard says, ‘this society of the gift and countergift plays,
in Baudrillard’s thought, the role of a reference (lost, of course), of an alibi
(which cannot be found), in his critique of capital’ (Lyotard 1993: 106). This
reference, he says, was only ever a Western racist ideal of a ‘good savage’ (1993:
106) – a ‘good savage’, clearly, who might oppose the ‘evil’ simulacrum. If the
symbolic is thereby revealed to be a simulacral image and foundation, upon what
basis can its critique of simulacra proceed?
Baudrillard’s ‘nostalgia’, therefore, lies not in his idealization of a mode of
relations, but rather in his desire for a critical foundation against the simula-
crum, a nostalgia, we might add, that is shared by many of his critics. It is here
then that his work is vulnerable, not to a critique based on the real (as this is
what he defends), but instead to one based on the simulacrum. Rather than the
symbolic functioning as a critical foundation against the simulacrum, the latter
reverses this relationship to expose the symbolic as a consciously constructed
104 Economy and Society

ground, following a speciŽ c intellectual heritage containing its own critical,

philosophical project. The simulacrum, therefore, is an efficacious force,
‘ungrounding’ all attempts to domesticate it, installing itself within the heart
of every critique, of every merely simulacral foundation – including Bau-
drillard’s own. As Deleuze says (quoting Nietzsche), ‘Behind every cave . . .
there is, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave’ – there is another world
beneath every foundation (1983: 53). Baudrillard does, however, increasingly
come to recognize the problems of discovering an external realm to the processes
of a system that is irreversible, which absorbs all negativities raised against it
(1998b: 23), and which operates by the simulacrum. His response to this moves
away from the hopes, in texts such as For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign, for an active resistance to the sign from the position of the symbolic
(‘signs must burn’ (1981: 163)) towards new strategies – particularly in philo-
sophical methodology – which come to the fore in his writing. If his critical
content is compromised, therefore, then he reasserts the value of the symbolic
in the form of his work: in his theoretical practice and method of analysis.
Baudrillard rejects (of necessity, given his characterization of a world of
simulacra) any simplistic empirical methodology. How then can he proceed? In
answer, in opposition to empiricism: his aim is not for theory to be true, pas-
sively to re ect the real (as then it is no longer needed, being reduced to obvi-
ousness, and uselessness); rather theory should not be true (1993a: 56), but
should provoke an agonistic opposition, defying the world to escalate to its own
position (1988: 100, 1993a: 122–3). Theory, therefore, is a Maussian ‘gift’: a sym-
bolic challenge to the real in which the ‘truth’ and ‘proof ’ of a theory is, para-
doxically, its end. ‘So you may posit the idea of the simulacrum, and yet, secretly,
not believe in it, hoping the real will avenge itself ’ (1994c: 4).16 As he explains
in ‘Radical thought’ (1994c; see also 1996b: 94–105), the simulacrum is ‘a con-
ceptual weapon against reality’ (1994c: 4). Reality, however, gets its revenge on
those who challenge it, ‘by paradoxically proving that they are right’ (1994c: 4),
returning its own countergift to render the challenge true and thus over. For,
Baudrillard says, ‘when reality merges completely with the idea, it’s the end. The
game is over’ (1993a: 205). This is Baudrillard’s situation, the gift has been
returned: ‘simulacra have become reality’ (1994c: 4). He recalls asking a Japan-
ese interviewer why he no longer heard about his work in Japan:

and he told me, ‘But it is very simple, very simple you know. Simulation and
the simulacrum have been realised. You were quite right: the world has
become yours . . . and so we no longer have any need of you. You have dis-
appeared’.
(Baudrillard 1996c: 7)

The gift and countergift of theory and the world continue, therefore, in a
spiralling potlatch. But, if the simulacrum was only a symbolic challenge, then
it was also a simulacrum of a theory, one which exerted its simulacral power to
become the real. Or, more subtly, Baudrillard says, the world itself simulated the
theory (1996b: 101), to divert and disarm it (1988: 100). This double spiral of
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 105

symbolic and simulacrum cannot be disentangled: as Baudrillard admits, ‘theory

is . . . both simulation and challenge’ (1993a: 126).
This, as Butler argues so well, is Baudrillard’s theoretical strategy of doubling
the world (Butler 1999: 119–59). Theory here is a representation pushing the
internal logic of the system or world to the limit and to the point of reversal by
reduplicating it. Yet the representation produced does not exist before its pro-
duction: only after it does the world come to resemble its representation. ‘This
is what writing or theory doubling the world means. It only repeats the world and
the world does not exist before this repetition’ (1999: 122). Here Baudrillard’s
descriptive strategy is not to defend a real but simply to follow the logic of the
processes he analyses. He has no doctrines to defend, he says, ‘I have one strat-
egy, that’s all’ (1993a: 82). This is the strategy of ‘theoretical violence – specu-
lation to the death, whose only method is the radicalisation of hypotheses’
(1993b: 5), a process of simulation and challenge in producing a representation
that does not resemble, but that comes to resemble and that is simulacral in its
efficacy. And yet it is this deŽ ning efficacy that is its danger, a point that Butler
fails to take into account as the double of the world starts to become true and
the simulator begins to be absorbed by his simulation.
The power of the simulacrum, therefore, may prove to be greater than Bau-
drillard realized. On a personal level this is certainly the case. In a candid 1984–5
interview he reveals that his courtship of its demon became an unlivable experi-
ence: ‘I stopped working on simulation. I felt I was going totally nuts’ (1993a:
105). The simulacrum, however, could not be so easily disposed of. Despite his
desire to ‘cast off this yoke of simulacres and simulation’ (1993a: 184), the
‘simulacrum’ has thrived, becoming an idea popularly and irrevocably identiŽ ed
with Baudrillard. It has, appropriately, exerted its simulacral power to appear in
the popular imagination as the real philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, eclipsing his
critique, and all other aspects of his work and career. Journalistic commentary
and student texts are typical here in identifying the simulacrum as Baudrillard’s
sole approved project. Thus the problem of Ž nding Baudrillard’s  at is turned
into an obvious and banal hook by one interviewer, who takes the opportunity
to enquire whether ‘Baudrillard himself . . . might be a simulacrum’: Does he
really exist? (Leith 1998: 14).
More importantly for Baudrillard, however, is the simulacral efficacy of
doubling – the theoretical strategy of employing simulation which, quite nat-
urally, has a simulacral effect. The theory of simulation Baudrillard did not
believe in has now been realized: as the Japanese interviewer makes clear, the sim-
ulacrum has become reality. Volatized in, and as, the real, its victory is the
concept’s defeat: once it is ‘true’, the simulacrum becomes a commonplace,
robbed of its capacity to arouse the world’s denial and thus its critical force: if
there is nothing beyond the simulacrum then it is not even open to question but
is simply ‘our absolute banality, our everyday obscenity’ (Zurbrugg 1997: 11).
Hence Baudrillard’s emphasis upon the theoretical challenge of the simulacrum.
Once realized, unless – as Baudrillard hopes – it can itself be reversed against
simulation, then this critical function is lost. Opposing Baudrillard with the sim-
ulacrum – with its success – is, therefore, the most effective means of critique.
106 Economy and Society

For his work is not wrong, but too true: the simulacrum has become reality and
this is his end; the game is over. It is, therefore, in the hyperdefence of Baudrillard
that we Ž nd a means of leaving him behind. With his success, Baudrillard dis-
appears. If we want him to survive, we must condemn him as a nihilistic propo-
nent of the simulacrum and oppose him with an outraged, vituperic, moral
appeal to reality, as Kellner and Norris do; thereby restoring his work to life. For,
if it is only in its contradiction that it can live as a provocation and diabolical
challenge, then once it is true this ends. Kellner and Norris, therefore, may yet
prove to be Baudrillard’s greatest defenders.
Baudrillard, of all people, should have anticipated his disappearance, for the
simulacrum’s demonic power rests also in its attraction for, and hold over,
humanity. Aristotle, for example, recognized this, writing of this instinctive pleas-
ure of imitation in man, ‘the most imitative of living creatures’ (1997: 5), while
Nietzsche also speaks of ‘the delight in simulation’ and of its effects in ‘explod-
ing as a power that pushes aside one’s so-called “character”,  ooding it and at
times extinguishing it’ (1974: para. 361). One courts this demon, therefore, at
one’s own risk, as it captivates and overwhelms our personality. As the author of
the Psalms cautioned the makers and worshippers of idols, ‘they that make them
are like unto them: so is everyone who trusteth in them’ (Barasch 1992: 20).
The efficacy of simulation and the danger of disappearance are key themes in
Roger Caillois’ in uential essay on animal mimicry and the mimetic instinct –
no less powerful in insects than in man (Caillois 1984). The instinct of mimesis
parallels primitive magic, Caillois says, though it is a mimetic spell which is too
strong for those who cast it. For the insects it is a spell which has ‘caught the
sorcerer in his own trap’ (1984: 27) – Phylia, for example, ‘browse among them-
selves, taking each other for real leaves’ (1984: 25). So, Caillois argues, simulation
absorbs the simulator, leading to their mimetic ‘assimilation to the surround-
ings’ with a consequent ‘psychasthenic’ loss of distinction, personality, and also,
in a thanatophilic movement, the loss of the signs of life itself (1984: 28, 30).
Simulation, therefore, Ž nally overwhelms the simulator: as Caillois warns in the
epigram which opens his article, ‘Take care: when you play with phantoms, you
may become one’ (1984: 17). So Baudrillard’s game has the same result. If the
simulacrum has been realized; if simulation is now our everyday banality, then
Baudrillard is condemned to a lifeless disappearance as a sorcerer trapped by his
own magical invocation, absorbed by his own simulation. Baudrillard may not
believe in the ghost of the simulacrum, but he himself becomes this very ghost.
His game with phantoms ends, as Caillois knew it would, with his own phan-
tasmatic transformation, with his apparitional disappearance. But this is only
Ž tting, for in the pact with the devil it is always your soul that is the stake.

Notes

1 Despite this growing literature on Baudrillard, his use of the simulacrum remains
inadequately contextualized within the history of this concept and of the epistemologi-
cal issues it raises.
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 107

2 Much of the sympathetic critical literature on Baudrillard has been forced to devote
considerable time and energy to challenging erroneous interpretations of his work: Mike
Gane has borne the brunt of this in opposing the  awed readings, for example, of Kellner
and Callinicos (Gane 1991a, 1991b) and Sokal and Bricmont (Gane 2000: 46–56) and
correcting popular misconceptions surrounding Baudrillard’s work (see Baudrillard
1993a: 1–16, 1993b: viii–xiii). Errors surrounding the interpretation of the simulacrum,
however, seem more pervasive, hence recent works by both Butler and Grace feel the need
to clear the ground of these before proceeding upon their own discussion of simulation
(Butler 1999: 23–6; Grace 2000: 105–8). It is noticeable that the errors they identify in
the popular and critical literature parallel those that I identify here.
3 To give a few examples, links are drawn with Foucault (Kellner 1989: 78; Levin 1996:
96), Marx and Debord (Best, in Kellner 1994: 41–67), Kracauer and Benjamin (Der
Derian, in Kellner 1994: 198–9), Plato and Nietzsche (Pefanis 1991: 59–61; but see also
Genosko 1994: 29), and, independently, Plato (Butler, in Zurbrugg 1997: 51–63) and
Nietzsche (Gane 2000: 12–16, 26, 34). Discussion of these in uences, however, is usually
brief and the Baudrillard literature would beneŽ t from a more detailed evaluation of his
relationship to these – and other – key Ž gures, following Genosko’s lead in his explo-
ration of the Baudrillard–McLuhan relationship (Genosko 1999).
4 For a discussion of the interpenetration of the simulacrum and everyday life and its
relationship to the media, see the analysis of Princess Diana’s death (Merrin 1999a).
5 There is also an important etymological link between appearance and apparition –
between phantasma and phantom. As Barasch points out (1992: 26–8), the Greeks had
long associated images and ghosts, employing the term ‘eidolon’ for both.
6 Ries explains the etymology of these key terms (Ries 1987: 73). The Greek ‘eidolon’
(formed from ‘eidos’ – ‘shape’, ‘aspect’) came to mean, he says, ‘phantom, undetermined
form, image re ected in a mirror or water’, or even an image formed in the human mind.
The word gained its Ž rst biblical use in the Septuagint, the Greek translation from the
Hebrew Bible. Employing eidolon more generally to refer to images of all kinds, this text
uses eidolon seventy times to translate sixteen different Hebrew words (the Hebrew Bible
itself had used thirty different nouns to discuss idols). The Latin Vulgate uses ‘idol’ one
hundred and twelve times and ‘simulacrum’ thirty-two times to translate Ž fteen Hebrew
words. The Greek New Testament uses eidolon in the same contexts which the Vulgate
again translates as either idol or simulacrum. Eidolon and its Latin counterparts, idol and
simulacrum, all refer, therefore, to images, and speciŽ cally to religious images or statues
which are venerated as divine. While the simulacrum, therefore, has a different meaning
in Christianity from in Platonism, in each case it refers to images whose power threatens
the original and this is the general sense in which I employ the term here.
7 Actually Descartes founds certainty on a circular argument. Certainty depends upon
the possession of ‘clear and distinct perceptions’ (1968: 113–15), which are themselves
certain because they ‘must necessarily have God as {their} author’ (1968: 141), however,
proof of this God’s existence is dependent upon the subject’s ‘clear and distinct percep-
tion’ of God (1968: 124, 132, 144). Hence the certainty of the cogito is dependent on a
God, which is itself only proven by the cogito using the means of certainty that God
provides.
8 See, for example, Deleuze’s discussion (1990: 266–79) of Lucretius’s On the Nature
of the Universe (Gaskin 1995: 81–304) – an Epicurean atomist text that, rediscovered in
the Renaissance, aided the nascent empiricism. Lucretius argues here that all material
objects emit ‘simulacra’ (‘eidola’) which, ‘like Ž lms stripped from the outermost body of
things,  y forward and backward through the air’ (1995: 193). While Lucretius sees these
simulacra as trustworthy (although, in fact, they are all that we know), Deleuze identi-
Ž es several forms of simulacra in Lucretius – ‘phantasms’ – which develop beyond their
original, such as images in the mind of man (see Gaskin 1995: 211–12).
9 Nietzsche’s epistemology is obviously more complex than this, but the simulacral
world which cannot be claimed as real or apparent is central to his philosophy. Rejecting
‘truth’ as an imposed conceptualization of the world, along with the concepts of ‘objects’,
108 Economy and Society

‘unities’, and ‘being’ (1994: para. 11, 1968a: para. 635, 1968b: 38), ‘substance’ and
‘materiality’ (1968a: para. 552d), and the ‘subject’ (1968a: paras 481, 485), Nietzsche
nevertheless Ž nds a basis for ‘truth’ in the ‘will to power’ (1968a: para, 552), a force and
process encompassing ourselves and the world (1968a: para. 1067). This is a simulacral
assumption of truth, however, without any guarantee but its own effect. The question of
the simulacrum in Nietzsche has attracted much attention in France; a debate begun by
Pierre Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche’s discussion of the production of consciousness
and its effects out of the corporeal impulses of the body (Klossowski 1997). Known before
Baudrillard as the theorist of the simulacrum (see Genosko 1994: 30), Klossowski’s subse-
quent development of the concept through both philosophical and literary texts was
in uential upon Foucault (1998{1964}), Deleuze (1983{1967}, 1994{1968}), Lyotard
(1993{1974}), and, in bringing the concept into the centre of intellectual life, implicitly
Baudrillard too. While we cannot follow these debates in detail here, their existence is
signiŽ cant.
10 Bracken points out that the later Debord even positively employs Baudrillard’s
concept of simulation, writing in 1993 that ‘everywhere excess simulation has exploded
like Chernobyl’ (Bracken 1997: 227–8).
11 The question of the photograph as simulacrum – the question of its relationship to
its referent – has remained central to photography. Krauss (1984) addresses the simu-
lacrum explicitly, but it appears implicitly in Sontag (1977) and Barthes (1993), and in a
new form in the recent discussion of digital photography and computer-generated images
(see Lister 1997). This is obviously a very rich vein that cannot be explored in detail here.
12 The term ‘hyperrealism’ is derived by Baudrillard from the European name for the
‘photorealist’ or ‘superrealist’ American movement in art and sculpture from the mid-
1960s which attempted to photographically reproduce the real (see Battcock 1975).
13 Barthes similarly describes the pornographic image. It has no punctum, he says, and
so there is no reciprocity to draw in our participation and involvement. It is Ž lled for us
with one complete image: ‘like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece
of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex’ (Barthes
1993: 41).
14 In an interview Baudrillard directly addresses the question of his relationship to
Heidegger (Baudrillard 1995: 82–3, 85–6). He admits a Heideggerian in uence but says
he is now drawn more towards the possibility of discovering a force in technology that
might work against this realization of the world (and thus of Being). Nevertheless
important affinities remain which would beneŽ t from further study.
15 This claim that Baudrillard offers a ‘defence of the real’ has also recently been
advanced by Rex Butler (Zurbrugg 1997: 51–63; Butler 1999). He argues that Baudrillard
does not defend the end of the real as we understand it, but rather defends the real against
all attempts to turn it into a simulacrum by thinking the real as ‘the unsurpassable limit
to all systems’, his own included (Zurbrugg 1997: 53–4). While Butler’s points are
important, he misses, I believe, the crucial role the symbolic plays in Baudrillard’s work
as the real. While Baudrillard does oppose the ‘real’ as a semiotic construction and effect
outside which ‘we can say nothing’ (1981: 161), and also describes it as the limit point of
theory (1993a: 1222), as I have argued, however, he also names and systematically formu-
lates precisely that external realm as ‘the symbolic’ and it operates in his work as that
experiential real that he claims is unrepresentable. Although Butler’s discussion of
‘seduction’ is strong, especially in picking up upon its affinities with simulation, he fails
to recognize the position of the symbolic in Baudrillard’s work: its character, its deriva-
tion, its status as a prior mode of relations to the semiotic, its continuing in uence in the
concept of ‘seduction’, and its role as a critical foundation and effective reality against
the semiotic. For example, Butler devotes much time to the question of the ‘masses’ and
the ‘social’ in Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983b) and to the
‘reality’ of these phenomena (see Zurbrugg 1997: 55–63; Butler 1999: 58–63, 130–7), but
he ignores both Baudrillard’s claims that the whole system arises only on the ruins of a
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 109

‘symbolic’ mode of society and relations (1983b: 65) and the role of this symbolic as a real
mode of relations and critical foundation against the later developments that merely
simulate it through the production of ‘social relations’ (1983b: 75). Also, in viewing
seduction purely as a problem of representation (1999: 72, 119), Butler misses the massive
Durkheimian in uence upon this concept – the debt to Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, and
Caillois in the text and in the spirit and tone of its arguments, and thus misses also the
theoretical continuity in Baudrillard’s work and the continuity of the symbolic in all its
forms as a critical ‘reality’ for him.
16 This method also owes something to McLuhan, whose ideas are not intended to be
true but are ‘probes’, to prick us into rethinking an environment which, through
numbness and familiarity, is invisible to us (see McLuhan and Zingrone 1995: 236).

References

Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1997) —— (1990a) Seduction, London:

Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso. Macmillan.
Aristotle (1997) Poetics, London: Dover —— (1990b) Cool Memories, London:
Thrift Editions. Verso.
Bacon, F. (1952) Great Books of the —— (1990c) Fatal Strategies, London:
Western World, Vol. 30, Francis Bacon, Pluto Press.
London: University of Chicago Press. —— (1992) ‘Transpolitics, transsexuality,
Barasch, M. (1992) Icon, London: New transaesthetics’, in W. Stearns and W.
York University Press. Chaloupka (eds) Jean Baudrillard: The
Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies, London: Disappearance of Art and Politics, London:
Paladin. Macmillan, pp. 9–26.
—— (1990a) A Lover’s Discourse: —— (1993a) Baudrillard Live: Selected
Fragments, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Interviews, London: Routledge.
—— (1990b) The Fashion System, —— (1993b) Symbolic Exchange and
Los Angeles: University of California Death, London: Sage
Press. —— (1993c) The Transparency of Evil,
—— (1993) Camera Lucida, London: London: Verso.
Vintage. —— (1994a) The Illusion of the End,
Bataille, G. (1992) Theory of Religion, Cambridge: Polity Press.
New York: Zone Books. —— (1994b) Simulacra and Simulation
Battcock, G. (1975) Superrealism: A Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. —— (1994c) ‘Radical thought’
Dutton. (translation of La Pensee Radicale)
Baudrillard, J. (1975) The Mirror of http: //www.ctheory.com/a25-
Production, St Louis: Telos. radical_thought.html (contacted June
—— (1981) For a Critique of the Political 1997).
Economy of the Sign, St Louis: Telos. —— (1995) ‘Symbolic exchange: taking
—— (1983a) ‘What are you doing after theory seriously: an interview with Jean
the orgy?’, Artforum October: 42–6. Baudrillard’ (with R. Boyne and S. Lash)
—— (1983b) In the Shadow of the Silent Theory, Culture and Society 12(4): 79–95.
Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e). —— (1996a) The System of Objects,
—— (1987a) Forget Foucault, New York: London: Verso.
Semiotext(e). —— (1996b) The Perfect Crime, London:
—— (1987b) The Evil Demon of Images, Verso.
Sydney: Power Institute. —— (1996c) ‘Vivisecting the 90’s: an
—— (1988) The Ecstasy of interview with Jean Baudrillard’
Communication , New York: Semiotext(e). (interview with Caroline Bayard and
—— (1989) ‘Politics of seduction’, Graham Knight) http:
Marxism Today January: 54–5. //www.ctheory.com/a24-
110 Economy and Society

vivesecting_90’s.html (interview for Forms of Religious Life, New York: The

Research in Semiotic Inquiry/Recherches FreePress.
semiotiques 16(1–2), contacted June 1997). Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things,
—— (1998a) The Consumer Society, London: Routledge.
London: Sage. —— (1998) ‘The prose of Actaeon’, in P.
—— (1998b) Paroxysm, London: Verso. Klossowski The Baphomet, New York:
Benjamin, W. (1973) Illuminations, Marsilio, pp. xxi–xxxviii.
London: Fontana. Frazer, J. G. (1995) The Golden Bough,
—— (1997a) One Way Street and Other London: Macmillan.
Writings, London: Verso. Freedberg, D. (1989) The Power of
—— (1997b) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Images, London: University of Chicago
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Press.
London: Verso. Gane, M. (1991a) Baudrillard’s Bestiary:
—— (1999) The Arcades Project, London: Baudrillard and Culture, London:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Routledge.
Press. —— (1991b) Baudrillard: Critical and
Boorstin, D. J. (1992) The Image, New Fatal Theory, London: Routledge.
York: Vintage. —— (2000) Jean Baudrillard: In Radical
Bracken, L. (1997) Guy Debord: Uncertainty, London: Pluto Press.
Revolutionary, Venice, CA: Feral Gaskin, J. (ed.) (1995) The Epicurean
House. Philosophers, London: Everyman.
Butler, R. (1999) Jean Baudrillard: The Genosko, G. (1994) Baudrillard and
Defence of the Real, London: Sage. Signs: SigniŽ cation Ablaze, London:
Caillois, R. (1961) Man, Play and Routledge.
Games, London: Thames & Hudson. —— (1999) McLuhan and Baudrillard:
—— (1980) Man and the Sacred, The Masters of Implosion, London:
Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Routledge.
—— (1984) ‘Mimicry and legendary Grace, V. (2000) Baudrillard’s Challenge:
psychasthenia’, October 31: 1–32. A Feminist Reading, London: Routledge.
Candea, V. (1987a) ‘Iconoclasm’, in M. Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language
Eliade (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Religion, Thought, London: Harper & Row.
Vol. 7, London: Collier Macmillan, pp. —— (1977) The Question Concerning
1–2. Technology and Other Essays, London:
—— (1987b) ‘Icons’, in M. Eliade (ed.) Harper & Row.
The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 7, Hume, D. (1966) Enquiries Concerning the
London: Collier Macmillan, pp. 67–70. Human Understanding and Concerning the
Chen, K. H. (1987) ‘The masses and the Principles of Morals, London: Oxford
media: Baudrillard’s implosive University Press.
postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and —— (1969) A Treatise of Human Nature,
Society 4(1): 71–88. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Debord, G. (1983) Society of the Kellner, D. (1987) ‘Baudrillard, semiurgy,
Spectacle, Detroit: Black & Red. and death’, Theory, Culture and Society 4:
—— (1990) Comments on the Society of 125–46.
the Spectacle, London: Verso. —— (1988) ‘Postmodernism as social
Deleuze, G. (1983) ‘Plato and the theory’, Theory, Culture and Society 5:
simulacrum’, October 27: 45–56. 239–69.
—— (1990) The Logic of Sense, New —— (1989) Jean Baudrillard: From
York: Columbia University Press. Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond,
—— (1994) Difference and Repetition, Cambridge: Polity Press.
London: The Athlone Press. —— (ed.) (1994) Baudrillard: A Critical
Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
and the Meditations, Harmondsworth: —— and Best, S. (eds) (1991) Postmodern
Penguin. Theory: Critical Interrogations, London:
Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Macmillan.
 William Merrin: To play with phantoms 111

Klossowski, P. (1997) Nietzsche and the —— (1999b) ‘Television is killing the art
Vicious Circle, London: The Athlone of symbolic exchange: Baudrillard’s
Press. theory of communication’, Theory,
Kracauer, S. (1995) The Mass Ornament: Culture and Society 16(3).
Weimar Essays, London: Harvard Nietzsche, F. (1968a) The Will to Power,
University Press. New York: Vintage.
Krauss, R. (1984) ‘A note on —— (1968b) Twilight of the Idols/The
photography and the simulacral’, October Antichrist, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
31: 49–68. —— (1974) The Gay Science, New York:
Leith, W. (1998) ‘I’m not a real Vintage.
photographer . . .’, The Observer, Life 15 —— (1979) Ecce Homo, Harmondsworth:
February: 12–17. Penguin.
Leslie, E. (2000) Walter Benjamin: —— (1994) Human, All Too Human,
Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Press. Norris, C. (1990) What’s Wrong With
Levin, C. (1996) Jean Baudrillard: A Postmodernism, London: Harvester
Study in Cultural Metaphysics, London: Wheatsheaf.
Prentice Hall. —— (1992) Uncritical Theory:
Lister, M. (1997) ‘Photography in the Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf
age of electronic imaging’, in L. Wells War, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
(ed.) Photography: A Critical Introduction, Pefanis, J. (1991) Heterology and the
London: Routledge, pp. 249–91. Postmodern, London: Duke University
Lyotard, J. F. (1993) Libidinal Economy, Press.
London: The Athlone Press. Plato (1955) The Republic,
McLuhan, E. and Zingrone, F. (eds) Harmondsworth: Penguin.
(1995) Essential McLuhan, London: —— (1986) Sophist, London: University
Routledge. of Chicago Press.
McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Ries, J. (1987) ‘Idolatry’, in M. Eliade
Galaxy, London: University of Toronto (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 7,
Press. London: Collier Macmillan, pp. 72–82.
—— (1994) Understanding Media, Sandywell, B. (1995) ‘Forget
Massachusetts: MIT Press. Baudrillard?’, Theory, Culture and Society
Marx, K. (1954) Capital, Vol. 1, London: 12(4): 125–52.
Lawrence & Wishart. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography,
—— (1975) Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Harmondsworth: Penguin. Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity,
Merrin, W. (1994) ‘Uncritical criticism: London: Routledge.
Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War’, Zurbrugg, N. (ed.) (1997) Jean
Economy and Society 23(4): 433–58. Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, London:
—— (1999a) ‘Crash, bang whallop, what Sage.
a picture! The death of Diana and the
media’, Mortality 4(1): 41–62.