Baudrillard insists that simalcra is disctinctly different from signs. Which is funny, because the entire time I was reading, my mind kept jumping back to Saussure and the signifier and signified. On the precession of simulacra, Baudrillard writes, “No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept” (1733). What is real is made from things that are not real–in other words, from memories, words, icons. Simulacra is a “hyperreal,” as Baudrillard calls it, something that, “since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all” (1733). Okay, now I get how simulacra is different from a sign–signs act as representations for a concept, and can often replace the concept if overused. Baudrillard outlines the phases of the image in terms of becoming a simulacrum: in order, the image “is the reflection of a basic reality, it masks and perverts a basic reality, it masks the absence of a basic reality, [and] it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (1736). With each succeeding step, the image becomes less and less the reality which it is supposed to represent. Baudrillard mentions nostalgia, which is exactly what I thought of when reading the creation of a simulacra: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (1736).
Can nostalgia occur if there was never a past reality? If the image in question is not and never has been concrete? I’m thinking of the concept of God. Baudrillard mentions God a few times in regards to signs and simulacra, but again, the line between them seems blurred. He discusses icons as a method of portraying God and divinity, saying that they are simulacra that are “substituted fro the pure and intelligible Idea of God” (1735). He proposes the idea that there has never been a God, but that the simulacrum of a God has always existed in its place. But how can there be an entity that bears no relation to reality at all when the reality didn’t exist in the first place? I found that I was better able to grasp the concept of God in terms of signs. Later, Baudrillard refers to signs, asking, “What if God himself can be [...] reduced to the signs which attest his existence?” If this is the case, he explains, then religion itself is not real; it is a simulacrum. Elizabeth Johnson wrote a book called She Who Is which focuses on the lack of feminine aspects in theological discourse. She mentions that when people say the word “God,” most automatically think of a patriarch, and rarely do people associate “God” with a woman. “Goddess,” by contrast, is almost a taboo word, and never is it substituted for “God,” even though the spiritual and religious will insist that God is neither male nor female. On the flip side, though, we can’t exculsively refer to God as “she” or “Mother,” because this would also reduce God into a sign, thus creating the same simulacrum.
