At p.4 Baudrillard writes that unmasking the simulacrum 'God' reveals that 'deep down God never existed, that only the simulation ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum,' which would certainly seem to imply that simulacra were always simulacra, never 'images,' i.e. that they never concealed anything substantive. But when Baudrillard writes things like 'When the real is no longer what it //was//' (p.6, emphasis mine), or that a simulation 'renders' something artificial, or that the importation of a mummy into the 'era of simulation' putrefies what the symbolic order had preserved, it now seems as though some quondam 'reality' is being corroded by simulation, i.e. that there //used// to be images, used to be something substantive that was concealed, but that simulation compromises them. Are these allusions to bygone 'realities' merely figures of speech? Is reality always to be read with scare-quotes around it, as a simulacral strategy deployed against simulation?
One way of thinking of this is along the (familiar) lines of an 'ontological' vs. an 'epistemological' break: we used to have substance behind images, but no longer do in this era (ontological), vs. we never had substance behind images, but before now didn't know it, and could behave as if we did (epistemological). On the epistemological reading, simulation 'corrodes' the real not in the sense that it neutralizes something that was 'really' there but rather that we can no longer 'take' it as real, consistently and innocently and without any kind of simulacral interference. So the duplicate cave 'corrodes' the reality of the original cave, and renders it artificial, only to the extent to which we can no longer take for granted its 'originality,' 'authenticity,' and 'reality.' I'm comfortable with epistemological break readings of things (more comfortable than Jameson, anyway), but Derrida and Althusser seemed more consistent in their language - with Baudrillard there are the smallest moments of doubt, where I'm prepared to give at least a partly ontological reading: even a statement as definitive as 'it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum' (p.27) can be read ontologically (i.e. the truth has been corroded irreversibly).
Any thoughts? I get the sense that I'm just forgetting major passages that resolve this problem, and that it would be enough to be pointed to a page.
--Guattari Hero
I also had trouble placing Baudrillard on one side of the epistemological/ontological break discussion. Ontologically, i think Baudrillard is consistently nihilistic: not only is there nothing to which our simulacra/images refer to today, but there never was, and simulacra only make this apparent, hence the epistemological rupture. I think one of the sources of this difficulty could be that, in althusser-speak, imaginary relations are themselves endowed with material existence, and with the end of the Real as a referent for these imaginary relations, all that is left is the material life of these 'imaginary' epistemological systems.
Similarly, I'm suspicious of the ontological overtones of 'death of...' rhetoric when speaking of epistemological breaks. It seems applicable when speaking of the 'material life' of epistemologies - death of power, death of law - but I think it's unnecessarily misleading when he uses the same language to speak of the end of a system of belief.
Here's the Colbert Press Correspondents address--worth a watch. I wonder what Baudrillard would say about his opening remarks re "I must be dreaming, somebody pinch me" ...
re your post, a passage on 22 struck me:
"Because in the end, throughout its history, it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power."
Now I'm not sure how much this clears the air, in fact, I think it merely adds more epistemological/ontological ambiguity to the issues you already described. The other important caveat is that I am unsure exactly how Baudrillard frames this claim; it comes after long political theorizations, and as such could be a judgment based on the rules of that milieu, or a broader pan-human judgment.
But he does give an interesting degree of agency to capital in the quoted passage, and leaves open the notion that there once might have been distinctions between true and false, et al, to be shattered in the first place. It strikes me as a more hard-line Jamesonian reading of capital: where Jameson attributed the pm break to transnational capital specifically, Baudrillard finds a break in the very existence of capital. Capital is ancient (insofar as I read it: as private property, the moment when something becomes useful for "equivalence and exchange" instead of its holistic* use), perhaps from the first time a caveman started hoarding mammoth meat. In that sense, identifying capital as a break might be as good as saying that existence was compromised from the beginning, and that there has been a more relevant epistemological shift in recent decades that has exposed this to us.
That reading leaves open the possibility of a pre-capital utopia, however, which is problematic given the lengths he goes to invalidate utopia in principle. If it weren't for that glaring possibility, I'd be inclined to stick to the reading I sketched in the above graf...
*is holistic the right word here? I thought about "natural" or "instead of its original purpose", but those seemed problematic too. In any case, concrete examples are clearest, like hoarding mammoth meat to bargain with as opposed to eating it.