Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulations, the Murder of the Real

 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184, is an impenetrable text which I have spent days pouring over trying to establish for myself the required understanding to begin to speak upon the writing. I have failed in part in this, as deciphering this text in a way where it is usable is taking too long and I will not be able to decipher all of it before the final paper is due. However, from the ideas I was able to comprehend, I have enough to make this post and my final paper. 

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." This is the quote which began this text and is the fundamental truth which i will use in my final paper, but what does it mean? why does this matter to pilgrimage? And why is this post about murder?

Reality is a difficult thing to be a part of. When one seeks the truth of some part of their life, they often find more questions than true answers. Papers spiral, ideas fall apart, conclusions grow shaky, and the way that everyone engages the conversation splits the idea into so many different interpretations that the origin may be lost. One's personal truth, your observed reality and interpretation of it is not some true objective, defining observation. It is instead, your reality. Your interpretation is the how the world works in your eyes, and when you try to get around that, to peer past your constructed simulacra, you find yourself face to face with the emptiness of the answers it shrouded, and only one conclusion can be found.

In pilgrimage, we seek an escape. From something, someone, some sin, some situation, some truth, or even a lie. Pilgrimage takes the pilgrim away and promotes inspection and introspection, letting them ask questions which they could not or would not in the previous situation. This time spent in reflection may look at the simulacrum that was the life of the pilgrim and allow for the repealing of the veil of the simulacrum. This loss of the veil, akin to or maybe even in full definition of "shrugging off the marketplace", lets the pilgrim understand a vital truth, that no one truly has the answers. The world is defined not solely by the nature of being, it is instead mixed together with the perceptions made by the self and the society in which that self was formed. The pilgrim, then absent from their own understanding, finds that their understanding is the one that matters. By accepting their truth and their understanding of it they can slip into a new and better understood simulacrum which they can trust in as their reality.

There then comes a morbid idea which Baudrillard speaks of with in his contemplations, and that is how the simulacrum, the simulation, can be taken from people. The capacity of images created by people in the their simulacra of the world can be used to attack those of others. This "murderous capacity of images" is their ability to hurt the "real" simulacra of other people. Attacking their understanding, their beliefs, and taking reality and forcing it to be an acknowledged simulacrum.  By attacking the real, murdering the comfort and psychological being of others, there is great power in images of the self or images meant to convey some definition upon reality along Baudrillard's lines of "1 It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2 It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3 It masks the absence of a basic reality. And 4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.". As a pilgrim, one must be careful to keep their lives and simulacra carefully guarded against those who would seek to use their images to push away what makes the pilgrim themselves and supplant it with their own ideas. Those ideas should be considered, integrated, but not used as the sole replacement as they can be marketed to the pilgrim.