Scott Durham
The simulacrum was big in the 1980s. A quick sketch reminds us of Baudrillard (1981, 1983) employing the concept to declare the emergence of a "postmodern" society reordered by the mass-mediation of models, codes, and signs, and Jameson (1984, 1991) attributing difficulties for social struggle to the power of "late-capitalism" to neutralize and transform political expressions into mass-market slogans and empty icons. If taken merely as an aesthetic reproduction placed in the realm of pure signs, discussions of the simulacrum today might appear out of place, its faddish appeal as passé as our desire for leg-warmers or the mullet. However, the political and theoretical conditions for which the simulacrum once stood as emblematic-the blurring of distinctions between real and symbolic, high and low culture; the displacement of meta-narratives and universal categories; and the dilemmas of collective agency within social fragmentation-have been far from exhausted. As such, and in the context of more recent scholarship on the politics of aesthetics (Conley, 1997), the practice of philosophy (Deleuze, 1991; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), and the discourses of community (Agamben, 1993; Negri & Hardt, 1994), the simulacrum returns in an immanent philosophy of becoming in Scott Durham's Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism.
Authorized by the theoretical legacy of the simulacrum as "the privileged form through which something like a `postmodern experience' might be imagined," Durham sets out to assess its status as such, and in so doing, to re-examine the possibilities it presents for individual and collective participation in the "image sphere" of contemporary literary and visual culture (p. 3). Re-read as a "stubbornly serial and fragmentary" locus of experience, Durham begins by accusing the simulacrum of "lead[ing] us to doubt our capacity as individual and collective subjects to articulate, in a coherent narrative or representational schema, our shifting relations to these ubiquitous images as we pass from one sphere or cultural subsystem to the next" (p. 3). While "coherence" seems drastically at odds with poststructuralist perspectives on the open, contingent, and indeterminate nature of both the subject and the social, Durham maintains that, in itself, the persistence of a "longing for collective narrative" enables the condition of possibility "to speak of postmodernity in the first place, as at once a condition that we must confront and as a historical event that we are called upon to explain" (pp. 3-4).
With a view to such an explanation, Durham suggests that in postmodern culture, the simulacrum functions as Deleuze's "paradoxical object" par excellence: as an aesthetic form, not only does it pose a narrative problem among representational scenes and experiences, but as an ideologeme, it internally masks the myths in postmodernity of residual and emergent cultural formations (p. 4). Exposing these aesthetic and analytic valences, Durham reveals the nature of images repeated in "the culture of the simulacrum" as oscillating between two poles of a fundamental contradiction: "on the one hand, the claim to have released the virtual potential of a new humanity to freely reinvent itself without reference to any founding essence or transcendental law; and on the other hand, our experience of that virtuality as the emanation of a spectacular world from which we are separated" (p. 5). Reconsidering the emblematic form of the commodified desires of the postmodern spectacle, Durham's main project proposes to turn the simulacrum against itself, to find within the tension internal to its paradox an "aesthetic, political, and ethical potential" (p. 5). Read through key literary texts, paintings, and films, the simulacrum returns in Phantom Communities as the form with which to expose our relation to what remains unthought and unrepresented in contemporary culture, and to challenge the reigning discourses and narratives of postmodernism as a movement to reveal "a phantom collective that haunts us as our immanent potential to become other than ourselves" (p. 6).
Foregrounding a relation to the simulacrum and its experience of repetition "as our own existential possibilities" (p. 5), Durham provides a lucid rehearsal of two prominent versions of this key concept. The most familiar, exemplified by the Pop art of Warhol, is the "copy of a copy." Through Baudrillard and Jameson, Durham recounts the emergence of simulacrum as the ungrounded, serial repetition of the external appearance of a distant model, an image disengaged from the ideal or essence of its original. To this well-received conception, Durham introduces Deleuze and Foucault's use of the "powers of the false" in Nietzsche's conception of the Eternal Return. In highly accessible terms, Durham explains how in this version, focus shifts from the simulacrum's mere divergence from an origin, and is theorized instead as a "practice of simulation" to falsify and malign the truth and legitimacy of the model it repeats in an affirmative movement of becoming (p. 11). Carefully unpacking each interpretation, Durham insists that for the critic as well as the consumer of simulacra, it is not a matter of choosing one (as a category of texts) over the other (as a philosophy of repetition). Rather, he argues that "the simulacrum's `true nature' is inseparable from the potential for variation and displacement that haunts it, and from the effects that we in appropriating and repeating it in our turn are apt to draw from its repetitions in our lives and thought" (p. 15). Placing Deleuze alongside Baudrillard, Durham re-establishes the simulacrum as at once displacing us in an image sphere of tangled narrative, and in its constitutive movement ("the displaced repetition of the figures of the dominant") as an immanent power "to create a new sensibility and form of life no longer legitimated by or grounded in the dominant truths" (p. 20).
With clarity and precision, Durham elaborates his conception of simulation and repetition from the works of Klossowski, Magritte, Warhol, Ballard, Genet, and Ruiz. Theorizing the tension internal to its appearance, Durham traces the simulacrum's generative potential through its emergence, negotiation, and passage between the utopic and dystopic myths in Klossowski, the spectacle and spectator in Ballard, the gap between word and image, unspoken and unrepresented in Magritte, as well as the clash of authority and subversion, truth and fabulation, purity and perversion in Genet. For example, in the tableaux of Klossowski and Magritte, Durham positions the simulacrum as "a product of the reigning narratives of origin and legitimacy which is nonetheless turned against those narratives, in a movement that subverts their demonstrations of resemblance and undoes their effects of truth" (p. 49). He extols Warhol's serial ghosts and the impotent desires of Ballard's fetishists as elements resistant to simulation, "the blurred vestige left in place of the absent original, at once the forgotten presupposition and the unthinkable remainder of a posthumous spectacle withdrawing to an infinite distance from victim and viewer alike" (p. 57). Finally, in Genet's prison novels, Durham argues that the falsifying and truthful narratives of the images of criminals and judges "give expression to a "beyond" that is immanent to the carceral universe itself: to the potential forms of life that are unthinkable and unimaginable within that universe, but which nonetheless flash up in its interstices" (p. 131). In each textual analysis, Durham elucidates the mutual exclusion and reciprocal presupposition of the simulacrum, weaving a relation of difference and equivalence between the elements from which it emerges, in order to release from the simulacrum its immanent power to reterritorialize the humanity haunting the margins of its images.
A wonderfully rich, entertaining, and accessible text, my only concern with Phantom Communities is the faith Durham puts in the writings of Genet. For what begins as a review and rearticulation of the simulacrum at the limits of postmodernism, turns in the final two chapters into an appraisal and joyful designation of Genet-not only as Saint, but as the ultimate arbiter, the playwright and profit of our potential to become other than we have already been. On the one hand, Durham is convincing in his treatment of the power of Genet's literary machine to extract an ethical and political practice from the simulacrum: "to imagine the unactualized relations of power and desire that haunt the spectators and reproducers of such images; to assemble the forms of expression for new modes of subjectivity and forms of life; to trace, in the interstices of the actual world, the potential points of passage to a world that has not yet come into existence" (p. 191). On the other hand, the possibilities for a collective that has yet to come into being seem compromised by the image Durham cites as exemplary of this practice: the transsexual. "A figure who lives at the limit of the difference between the sexes, but also at the borders of the actual and the virtual" (p. 175), Durham finds "the glory of the transsexual" in its effect of passage between opposing realms, a movement of becoming constantly other than itself. While this image powerfully illustrates the model of simulation Durham returns to the simulacrum, he is at pains to identify and multiply additional roles and masks we might traverse in our individual and collective return as other than ourselves.
In this sense, Durham's approach to the simulacrum for an experience of the unimaged, unthought, and yet to come of postmodern culture remains haunted by the difficulties of locating tangible political possibilities for ethical and social transformation. However, as a project to uncover the creative power of the tensions constitutive of the culture of the simulacrum, Phantom Communities may itself be read to possess such a productive opposition. On the one hand, those of us interested in the science fiction of virtual realities presupposed by actual technologies, the celebratory accounts of a community to come with home computing, the alternative representations pitched by video art and the radical potential of each assumed by their marketers and theorists alike, will benefit from Durham's illustration of the extent to which such desires for new articulations and alternative communities remain on the fringes of the thinkable and representable, as so many phantoms rattling around in the recesses of our imagination. On the other hand, while the films, paintings, and literature of French and Anglo-American artists never offer us a direct representation of what that virtual community might look like, we recognize that it is not the role of such works to limit the possible image of a phantom community in any specific moment of its rendering. The question of whether to "celebrate the postmodern culture of the simulacrum as an anticipation of the utopian wish for a purely aesthetic existence . . . or, on the contrary, denounce it as an invitation to nihilism, where a vestigial or posthistorical humanity is condemned as the mere shadow of the superior images it contemplates" (p. 189), explicitly demands that we theorize the interval between these extremes, that we assume a Deleuzian perspective of the simulacrum, asking not what it is, but what it can become, and within the contemporary fantasies outlined above, search not for the trace of any particular map of political transformation, but for the lines of creation on the road to new modes of thought, new images and new cultural connections.
An accessible contribution to Anglo-American French studies, Phantom Communities provides refreshing perspectives on questions of representation, identification, and community extending from the realm of art and literature and into the debates and approaches within sociology, communication, and cultural studies. A theoretically sophisticated treatment of some of the most compelling and complicated ideas from the French philosophy of the past and present, Durham's richly descriptive text will be as valuable to those interested in the Nietzschean cinema of Deleuze and the institutions of Foucault, as it will be for the student of Internet cultures, new image technologies, and intercultural and diasporan cinema. However, the question of whether or not the simulacrum will return with the theoretical cache it once possessed will remain, as so many fashions that haunt our imaginations, a fantasy of what is yet to come at the limits of postmodernity.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. (1993). The coming community. (Michael Hardt, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. (1981). Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilee.
Baudrillard, Jean. (1983). Simulations. (Paul Foss, Paul Patton, & Philip Beitchman, Trans.). New York: Semiotext.
Conley, Tom. (1997). From image to event: Reading Genet through Deleuze. Yale French Studies, 0(91), Genet: In the language of the enemy [Special issue], 49-63.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1991). Difference and repetition. (Paul Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, & Guattari, Felix. (1994). What is philosophy? (Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Jameson, Frederic. (1984). Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146, 53-93.
Jameson, Frederic. (1991). Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Negri, Antonio, & Hardt, Michael. (1994). Labour of Dionysus: A critique of the state form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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