Desert of the Real: Jesus, The Matrix, and Hyper-Reality

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Desert of the Real: Jesus, The Matrix, and Hyperreality.

Jean Baudrillard's "Procession of Simulacra" (1984).

Larry and Andy Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999).

Baudrillard compares reality to the map of a great empire's territory. The map of the empire becomes so descriptive that it "ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined" (Baudrillard, 19). The great map, the abstraction, the simulation of the territory, presents the frayed edges as the symbol for the decline of the empire. Compared with the simulation prevalent in the modern world, Baudrillard suggests that the map which was once only a representation of a true substance, has replicated that substance so many times that the simulation has become the substance itself. Today, we cannot use abstraction in the sense that true reality can be separated from a representation of itself. That is to say that you cannot separate the territory from its representation in the map. What then is left for reality and truth? If the simulation, or map, now contains the essence of the territory, than the frayed edges which once symbolized the decline of the empire today represent the outskirts of our current simulation. "It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, The desert of the real itself" (Baudrillard, 20). What is meant by this is that real truth and meaning cannot be found when one only ever encounters simulation. The individual who is aware of the presence of simulation and can separate themselves from it, in a sense becomes free from it. A state of pure reality still exists in relation to the map. It is in the desert of the real that one finds themselves in a position to reject simulation in order to derive at a greater truth.

Simulation makes the human lose all emotional connections with the other, the object. That at it's worst, it turns us into droids, incapable of human emotion..

Written by: Nic Foster. 2005, or thereabout.