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Baudrillard has become somewhat famous in popular culture through the play on his ideas in the movie The Matrix where an astute viewer can see the image of his face appear as a ghostly haunting throughout the film (he also helped in the writing and production of the film). However, he has been “famous” for some time in contemporary philosophy as one of the pioneers in theorizing about the body and the images. In his book, Impossible Exchange, he proposes a progression of simulation which can be seen in two examples: capital and identity.

The first progression is that from the object to signs. In other words, an object begins with some kind of arbitrary value which is the basis for exchange. Money and capital as we know it did not exist at this level. We can see this in action with historical transactions between two entities: I exchange ten pounds of fertilizer and receive 25 gallons of milk. However, the progression to signs involves a kind of “standardization” in which each objects value is given a relatively static exchange ratio: a gallon of milk will be 4 units of this new sign–be it a dollar or whatever. At this point, the object becomes a commodity that is freely exchangeable in the market; it has become a simulation of the object.

This ability to be exchanged brings about the second progression: fetishism. A fetish is a perversion of the object that further removes it from the “real” object. It becomes a “pure, unrepresentable, unexchangeable object–yet a nondescript one” (Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 129). Here, the object is taken to the point of being a desire for the sake of desire. Zizek sees this best in the example of Caffeine free Diet Coke: it lacks everything that makes “Coke” “Coke” but it is the pure semblance of Coke, “an artificial promise of a substance which never [materializes]” (Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 22). The fetish is not just a simulation of a simulation (what Baudrillard calls a simulacra) but it is also devoid of the “original” object: it is the nothingness itself.

Here we can see the final progression: the spectre (or phantasm). The object now becomes an unrepresented non-being which haunts the “real.” Not only does the object become a simulation, but even its component parts become simulated: Toyota cars are manufactured 60% in the USA. Perhaps the best example of this progression is in the phenomena called “reality TV.” These shows are no more real than “normal TV”: absurd scenarios with unreal events, simulated events, false personas, etc. Here, the actors are not given a particular role but rather play their own made-up role, an idealized, distorted self-image.

A direct corollary can be seen in that of The Matrix where those in the “real world” are projected back into the “virtual” world of the Matrix as imagined bodies. One’s identity in the “real world” is fragmented and distorted as the Matrix is treated as being more real than real, a hyperreality. As the end of The Matrix trilogy shows: there is no real distinction between the “real” world and that of the Matrix because one’s identity is a composite of fragments from many different “worlds” which reach across all the boundaries.

Where does all of this leave identity? A poster put up in Berlin in 1994 poked fun at loyalties to identities: “Your Chris is a Jew. Your car is Japanese. Your pizza is Italian. Your democracy–Greek. Your coffee–Brazilian. Your holiday–Turkish. Your numbers–Arabic. Your letters–Latin. Only your neighbour is a foreigner” (quoted from Zygmunt Bauman, Identity, 27). As the above progression of simulation is explored, it will become more obvious that “‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are not cut in rock, that they are not secured by a lifelong guarantee, that they are eminently negotiable and revocable; and that one’s own decisions, the steps one takes, the way one act–and the determination to stick by all that–are crucial factors of both” (Bauman, 11).

What would a “postmodern” epistemology look like? Some turn towards language because they believe epistemology cannot be “solved” until we can be sure that we’re talking about the same thing. Some reject any attempt at epistemology because it is simply beyond our reach. Nietzsche took up an argument similar to Kierkegaard’s in opposition to Hegel and through him comes the “latest” theories of knowledge.

Truth as Metaphor

Possibly Nietzsche’s greatest contribution to the study of knowledge focused on the language of epistemology. In his essay titled “On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,” Nietzsche describes his position nicely:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (from The Portable Nietzsche, 46-7).

Simulated Truth

The message is clear: truth as a concept derives from the usage of language and is based solely on language. In reality, there is no Absolute Knowledge; there is no access to an undifferentiated knowledge of truth. Because of language, there cannot be knowledge of any kind of “objective” truth. For Nietzsche, truth and knowledge are really just forays into what is now called deconstruction. It’s all about interpretations of interpretations. To borrow Baudrillard, the language of truth is a set of simulacra that create and re-create a false notion of truth that has been accepted as the real thing. In reality, however, this notion of truth is the lack of the real thing. Slavoj Zizek explains how Coke is a great example of this:

We drink Coke — or any drink — for two reasons: for its thirst-quenching or nutritional value, and for its taste. In the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, nutritional value is suspended and the caffeine, as the key ingredient of its taste, is also taken away — all that remains is a pure semblance, an artificial promise of a substance which never materialized. Is it not true that in this sense, in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we almost literally “drink nothing in the guise of something”? (from The Fragile Absolute, 23)

Conclusions

There is no “postmodern epistemology” because it requires us to move beyond the confines of language. 20th century philosophy was obsessed about language until it slowly began to realize it cannot be comprehended. Language, as the vehicle of “truth,” cannot be transcended or reduced in order to provide insight into knowledge and truth. Truth and knowledge are embedded in language, the thing to which we humans are bound and chained. The best description we can have of truth and knowledge can be seen in Deleuze’s work The Logic of Sense. In this work, Deleuze speaks of knowledge as a polymorphic surface on which we oscillate between sense and nonsense, between understanding and non-understanding. There is no “deeper” meaning to language because it is all “surface” level; it would be better to picture it as moving away towards the edges (nonsense) and less as some kind of hidden “deep” structure (yes, Deleuze’s work here is a critique of people such as Noam Chomsky).
This brings the end of this series to an anticlimatic moment. The most recent theories of knowledge only undo the ones before it, bringing us back oddly close to Plato’s position in the Meno: we cannot know truth in its unadulterated form. Truth as a concept is buried in our usage of language and neither it nor we can overcome language. We cannot overcome ourselves.