Symsys205 - Greg Wayne

The End of Science Fiction? A Response to Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Science Fiction”

Humans are steadily coercing the natural world into the form of a simulation, reconstituting the natural world as a model of itself.  We are facing the largest mass extinction the world has ever seen: the extinction of reality as we replace it with the artifacts of human cognition.  Baudrillard’s conceptions of science fiction and simulation are made in the shadow of his conception of reality. He writes of the vanishment of reality:

                     Until now, we have always had large reserves of the imaginary, because the coefficient of reality is proportional to the imaginary, which provides the former with its specific gravity. This is also true of geographical and space exploration: when there is no more virgin ground left to the imagination, when the map covers all the territory, something like the reality principle disappears.

Reality is that which is untrammeled in the natural world, that which has not been picked over by the human imagination.

And what then is a “simulation”?  Baudrillard defines “simulation” by an unforgiving shorthand: “[Simulations are] based on information, the model, cybernetic play.  Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.”  Writ larger, simulation is the recreation of an environment as a modeled process, in its most extreme form implementable on a computer.  Characteristically, simulations are finitely describable using some form of language, employing a discrete set of primitives to set the constraints and affordances of the model.  By this measure, chess is a simulation of war.  Written text is a simulation of spoken language.  The Internet is a simulation of the world community.  Plastic plants are a simulation of natural flora.  All this amounts to saying one thing: simulation as opposed to reality is encoded and constrained by arbitrary rules.

From the evolving environment, we extract the principles that describe the environment, and we contribute back to the environment, reshaping it according to our observations.  Baudrillard says that “the real is only a pretext of the model.”   Humans are set apart in that they are designed to manipulate the environment in a feedback loop to facilitate future manipulation and comprehensibility.  We etch our abstractions–induced from the environment–back onto the environment.  This occurs continually and pervasively.  When humans first acknowledged and became conscious of dominance hierarchies, we created outwards signifiers of status.  This is a re-imposition of an abstraction, a model that describes the power relationships among human beings, which we make manifest in our environments.  

Simulations are in the midst of its golden age as people spend more and more of their time engrossed in them.  For example, sites on the Internet now model social communities, and in so doing become the new paradigm for social community.  On thefacebook. com , there is a space to state musical and literary interests, and there is a space to write brief captions about oneself.  The profile is a modeled avatar for the human being in cyberspace.  There is a push-button procedure for declaring friendship and romantic involvement.  This codification of human behavior in turn reflects on the outside world.  A friend, for instance, recently mentioned to me that he and the woman he was dating had progressed to listing each other as significant others on the facebook–which meant to him that they must be “getting serious.”

Baudrillard assumes science fiction (SF) is a kind of extension of reality but not of simulation.  It is “most often, an extravagant projection of, but qualitatively not different from, the real world of production. Extrapolations of mechanics or energy, velocities or powers approaching infinity—SF's fundamental patterns and scenarios are those of mechanics, of metallurgy, and so forth.”  Science fiction channels the concepts of modern industrialization and recombines them to extend their majesty: the car and plane respectively become the flying car and spaceship; the human becomes the invincible android; doors are outmoded by teleporters; factories are replaced by universal matter replicators.

Baudrillard’s question is in the context of a world wher e simulation is ascendant, can there be science fiction?  Simulation and science fiction are both orthogonal extrapolations of reality.  Simulation takes reality as inspiration and amends it according to the desires of the user.  Science fiction takes the limitations of reality as inspiration and removes them to create theretofore impossible worlds.  Baudrillard argues that in creating simulations we have already demolished the mechanical constraints on which science fiction is predicated.  Since simulations or models are unlimited, there is nothing to overwrite in creating fiction.  Baudrillard says, “Models no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any fictional extrapolation.”

However, science fiction continues to exist, and I argue that it gains traction through the trope of the hacker.  Baudrillard is correct in identifying science fiction as a genre that acts to disrupt the constraints of the real; modern science fiction is about the disruption of the constraints of the simulation.  As discussed before, all simulations must codify constraints and affordances.  In modern science fiction’s dystopic view of simulation run amok, these constraints are no longer well tolerated by the users of the simulation.  In The Matrix the physics of the world is constrained by the simulation as are the rules of human conduct–as agents police the Matrix to ensure that everyone continues to behave in accordance with the social order of the United States circa 1999.  Now, the gambit of science fiction is to imagine individuals who feel oppressed by the totalitarian constraints of the simulation.  They “hack” the system in various ways and rewrite the world according to their own demands.  Neo in The Matrix begins as an information hacker using a computer.  In his apotheosis, he becomes a hacker of the simulated environment.  He can fly and move arbitrarily fast.  He can see the informational essence of the simulation and manipulate it as he pleases.

All simulations are marked by one essential constraint.  They are fixed and deterministic.  The hacker becomes the warrior against this determinism, in the process asserting her own free will.  The crux of Minority Report is that in the future the justice systemm hinges on the determinism of the world.  Citizens are captured and incarcerated whenever a collective of seers anticipates that they will commit crimes.  The character portrayed by Tom Cruise is falsely accused by this collective (which in a rare exception has mis-predicted his actions).  His character’s goal is to prove his innocence, bridling against the totalitarian constraints of a pre-determined future.  Similarly, in The Matrix , Neo’s retort to the needling inquisitiveness of Agent Smith (who wants to know why Neo bothers to fight back) is “Because I choose to.”  The exertion of free will becomes the fundamental purpose of his defiance.

Thus, in the same way that classical science fiction is rooted in breaking the mechanical limits of the world, modern science fiction finds it raison d’étre in breaking the constraints of determinism and the arbitrary rules of the simulated world.  The difference is that classical science fiction is responding to the constraints of the present world.  Modern science fiction must first set the precedent of an overarching deterministic simulation to which the hackers/rebels then respond.  If classical science fiction was about wresting control of the environment from nature, and simulation involves a notion of “total control,” the new wave of science fiction aims to wrest power from the information overlords of the system.