The AI Girlfriend/Boyfriend, Nuclear War, and Postmodernism in the 21st Century

Credit: jack h. Postmodern Literature. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/670684569483248717/

The Thomas Theorem:

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct – if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

– W.I. Thomas & Dorothy Swain Thomas

As many kids do, they play with figurines – dolls or action figures. They imagine what it is like to live in a mansion or be a superhero. But even before they know what a mansion or a superhero is, they pick up cues and imagine possibilities between certain narratives and assumptions.They see and hear, and they mimic. Experiences and rationalities are imprinted onto children; they link experiences in the framework of their minds. It can bring to mind association theory and Platonian mimetics (copies of “reality”). Anthropology and semiotics can tell us that humans are beings of symbols and abstraction. Alphabets, pictographs, art, and writing are examples of that. And as kids they pick up certain symbols, abstractions, and rules. They learn to communicate.

Mimesis means an imitation, mimicry, or representation. It harkens back to Platonic idealism or how our perceptions are fake copies of the ideal forms as communicated in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. Similarly, the ubiquitous word “meme” which the biologist Richard Dawkins coined, is based on his theory of memetics, i.e., that all culture and evolution depends on units of information copied, varied, and selected – parallel to Darwinism. The meme is all too prevalent in today’s world.

A copy of a copy of a copy – philosophically, psychologically, and biologically – is that what life and the world really is? Is everything a copy of a copy, transformed, selected, and whatnot?

This distance from the “real” is nothing new. In Hinduism and Buddhism, there is the concept of Maya. Maya can be translated as “illusion” or “magic.” It is a cloud that covers the clarity of “absolute reality.” Whether Platonic, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian (Ignorant Bliss or the Tree of Knowledge), Islamic (Jannah or Dunya) , etc. there is the concept that there is some greater truth. Our world is a mirror reflection.

However, do adults really understand the difference between “real” and “fake”, and is there even such a thing? I am a young child full of energy and dreams, interacting with my environment. But then I fall and become incapacitated. Not all is lost. I find solace in video games, movies, social media, and artificial intelligence. In other words, whatever drives I had, it can be mimicked. There is no “useful fiction” because the line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the psychotropic drug called “Soma” induces feelings of happiness. How is this happiness different from the happiness of, let us say, making money or having a romantic partner? Television, sports, sex dolls, social media, video games – these are “simulations” for the “real thing”. What is the “real thing”? The line between the “real” and the “fake” becomes blurred. Is reading and writing somehow “escapism” from reality? Bullying, currying favour, and ideas of right and wrong. These all become blurred in simulacra and simulations. All that is left are ideas of happiness, copies of such, and discrimination.

In the mid-20th century, the postmodern movement gained traction, emerging from the modernist movement which was itself a response to the changes as a result of the Industrial Revolution, world wars, globalization, and new technologies. Postmodernism includes themes such as relativism, the unreliability of representations, and the fluidity of meaning which penetrated art, culture, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and beyond. It has been criticized as obscurant, pseudointellectual, and even nihilistic. I argue that it is an observant and a participant in the play between the poles of a reflection of “absolute reality” and relativistic games and sports.

“The physical activity that developed into sports had early links with warfare and entertainment.” ^[2]

  It is not nihilistic in terms of Freud’s “death drive” in which people simply wish to destroy and are fixated on mortality. It is nihilistic only in terms of “absolute meaning”. The literati and scientists need not be at odds.

This work itself is mainly a work on Jean Beaudrillard’s work, or rather my own interpretation. I believe he represents an important strain of Postmodernism, even if he eventually distanced himself from the label. The French philosopher and sociologist Jean Beaudrillard (1929 – 2007) addressed the above in Simulacra and Simulation, 1981.^[1] It falls within the sociological sphere of symbolic interactionism. Bear with me.

I know time is short, but before I begin, let’s preface with the definitions. Experience is the primary source. “Simulacra” is the secondary representation, as in a photograph of the Berlin Wall. “Simulation” is to make a copy of the Berlin Wall and act as though it were the original.

Which is “real” and which is “fake”? Baudrillard seems to argue that as original experience is passed into representation and representation is passed into simulation, the simulation bears little to no resemblance to the original. To see the Berlin Wall is subjectively “real”, to have a photograph of it is a little less real. And to walk up to the photograph as it were the Berlin wall is pure “fantasy”.

Towards the East, in Zhuanzi’s foundational Taoist classic, is the story of the “Butterfly Dream”:

Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly…he didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou…

Suddenly he woke up…solid and unmistakable…But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the Butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. ^[2]

How much resemblance is there between the “real” and the “fake”? What are the values of the butterfly and the human?

The crux of my argument is this: people have experiences and drives. Whatever is lacking, they fulfill via simulation. The simulation fills the hole, however “artificial”. The butterfly and the human are driven by drives, except the butterfly has its own rules given at birth while the human develops its own rules. However, these rules are based on the same drives – attraction, repulsion – survival. We both have rules – butterflies and humans alike. You can even call them laws.

In humans, sociality is also crucial, apparently. There is a certain drive. Even those who are antisocial or introverted, like a shy cub, cannot be alone. Even those who are social and extroverted, they see themselves in others. The simulation becomes the reality.

First it was artwork and statues – cave paintings. It was an innate need to depict, reproduce, and communicate. These depictions became objects of worship themselves. The original disappeared. 

Sequentially or simultaneously, it was music and theatre. Then there was writing and literature. The end is the same – the drive to communicate and receive communication.

Now in our days of mass communication, information, and technology, it is even more chaotic. “Reality” is always microseconds or centuries behind, and it is now only more chaotic in terms of meaning. But can it be any less?

Where the tractor simulated and replaced the horse, the television simulated and replaced actual reality. Where CDs and DVDs simulated and replaced live performances, robots and AI can replace the actors. Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, X formerly known as Twitter… Emoticons replaced the physical smile – are they simulations of reality or reality itself? Perhaps both and neither. What does it matter? It fulfills certain human drives for stimulation. It is both stimulation and simulation, or simulated stimulation.

Whence comes the AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Why do you need an actual companion when you have an intelligent “artificial intelligence” that checks all the boxes? You can also play with mannequins. Surely, it is not a sentient being. But where are all the sentient beings? This is a symptom of this alienated society, where the simulation is just “good enough.” Needs are met through simulation, i.e., to reproduce happiness, connection, and meaning via our resourcefulness and technology. Through technology, there is increasing simulacra and simulation, not to mention stimulation.

Lest this writing become an article on media and cultural studies, let us return to postmodernism. Postmodernism is perhaps “out of fashion” but it has relevant lessons for the 21st Century, from politics to how we live our daily lives, and from the past to the future. Like the aphorism that the pen is mightier than the sword, or the “History of Ideas”^[4], the symbol is possibly more powerful than reality, even if it is “merely” a symbol. It is not abiogenesis but replication and transformation. What is the value of a copy? The replication and transformation can be just as real as the original, for better or worse, even if it is not “real”.

Without further ado, let us get into Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, perhaps relevant for our times culturally, politically, and even personally. The above is an extrapolation. The following are highlights from the rest of the work that may elucidate his meanings and bits of my own commentary in parentheses ():

The Precession of Simulacra

Simulation is no longer that of a territory of a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. … It is…the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory…

…It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes…

…simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. … Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms. (1-3)

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra.
It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms:
the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World, etc.

This imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation. But what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt the social microcosm, the religious, miniaturized pleasure of real America, of its constraints and joys. One parks outside and stands in line inside, one is altogether abandoned at the exit. (12)

It is always a question of proving the real through the imaginary…
The proof of theater through antitheater;
the proof of art through antiart;
the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy;
the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc. (19)

(Here anti-art could be a hint at Dadaism. Dadaism is an art movement aimed at “proving the real” through the unreal.)

An example of Dadaism:

Credit: By Alfred Stieglitz – NPR arthistory.about.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74693078

(A drinking fountain depicted as a toilet or urinal. This questions all assumptions. It is grotesque. Why is it grotesque? Maybe it is because it plays on our assumptions.

He then speaks about the nuclear crisis, nuclear proliferation, and the ‘unlikely’ Nuclear World War.)

As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social , economic, and political stakes. For power, it is a question of life and death … Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real … That is why today this “material” production is that of the hyperreal itself … Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself. (22-23)

(Nuclear war is unlikely because we are all playing the same game. When each country cancels out the other, there is “peace”. It is a “stalemate”. But this game must be recreated and persuaded.

Political games are nothing new. Plans are set in motion before moral excuses are fathomed. It is like planning to steal candy from a baby, waiting for the parents to give a lollipop, and when the opportunity presents itself, tell the parents that candy is not healthy and snatching the lollipop. You are the good guy. No one must have nuclear weapons but ourselves. It is in the best interest of everyone. As Marx said, “History repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce.” After each iteration, it is less serious than the original. It becomes normalized. Advance and retreat.

He moves on to television and the “first reality TV show” called “An American Family”, or what the translation names “The Louds.”)

[I]nteresting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren’t there…

….[T]his family was already hyperreal by the very nature of its selection: a typical ideal American family, California home, three garages, five children, assured social and professional status, decorative housewife, upper-middle-class standing. (28)

(It is already there.)

“… YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium, as in the Louds’ operation …YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” (29)

(The participant is further distanced from “reality”. Populism would do well here.)

Everywhere, in no matter what domain-political, biological, psychological, mediatized-in which the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation, and thus into absolute manipulation-not into passivity, but into the indifferentiation of the active and the passive…

The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat [of nuclear war] (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their “strategy” are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.

Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place.

And [there is] the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security.
No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain.

The “space race” played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the space program was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently as a form of “peaceful coexistence.” (31-34)

…[D]espite this deterrence by the orbital power…misfortunes…are even more numerous…subtly, they no longer…have any meaning, they are no longer anything but the duplex effect of simulation at the summit. The best example can only be that of the war in Vietnam. What meaning did this war have… Why did this war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?

Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred.

Something else, then, took place. This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. The nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years, China’s apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strategy of revolution to one of shared forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to political alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking-Washington relations): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled out of Vietnam but won the war…. (36)

Simulation is the master, and we only have a right to the retro, to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials. (39)

(One need not be a political journalist to see parallels today between “the West” and China, Russia, etc.)

History: A Retro Scenario

(Don’t we all love everything retro? Well, maybe not everything.)

Today, the history that is “given back” to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a “historical real” than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fundamentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance , the empty form of representation. (45)

Holocaust

What no one wants to understand is that Holocaust is primarily (and exclusively) an event, or, rather, a televised object ( fundamental rule of McLuhan’s, which must not be forgotten), that is to say, that one attempts to rekindle a cold historical event…

…to rekindle this cold event through a cold medium, television, and for the masses who are themselves cold, who will only have the opportunity for a tactile thrill and a posthumous emotion, a deterrent thrill as well, which will make them spill into forgetting with a kind of good aesthetic conscience of the catastrophe.

…[I]t is well understood that the polls only verify the televisual success of the medium itself. But this confusion will never be lifted. (50-51)

The China Syndrome

He then discusses the example of the film The China Syndrome:

…The China Syndrome is a great example of the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event which, itself, remains improbable and in some sense imaginary…

…nuclear reality arises from the television effect, and that in “reality” Harrisburg [i.e., Three-Mile Island Nuclear Meltdown in US Pennsylvania] arises from the China Syndrome cinema effect…

…There is certainly a chain reaction somewhere, and we will perhaps die of it, but this chain reaction is never that of the nuclear, it is that of simulacra and of the simulation where all the energy of the real is effectively swallowed, no longer in a spectacular nuclear explosion, but in a secret and continuous implosion… 

…What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence? Everyone decries it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra…

…it is because of this that events no longer have meaning… (53-56)

(Everything is sensationalized?)

The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence

(He then speaks of the Beaubourg, referring to the more formally named Centre Pompidou, which has the largest modern art collection in Europe.)

Credit: Familin’ Paris. Le Centre Georges Pompidou (Beaubourg). https://www.familinparis.fr/centre-pompidou-expo/

…What should, then, have been placed in Beaubourg?

Nothing…

…Beaubourg illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself on the alibi of the previous order.

Here, a cadaver all in flux and surface connections gives itself as content a traditional culture of depth. An order of prior simulacra (that of meaning) furnishes the empty substance of a subsequent order, which, itself, no longer even knows the distinction between signifier and signified, nor between form and content.

The question: “What should have been placed in Beaubourg?” is thus absurd… (64)

…It is what one comes to learn in a hypermarket: hyperreality of the commodity-it is what one comes to learn at Beaubourg: the hyperreality of culture… (67)

…People have the desire to take everything, to pillage everything, to swallow everything, to manipulate everything. Seeing, deciphering, learning does not touch them. The only massive affect is that of manipulation … The people come to touch, they look as if they were touching, their gaze is only an aspect of tactile manipulation. It is certainly a question of a tactile universe, no longer a visual or discursive one, and the people are directly implicated in a process: to manipulate/to be manipulated, to ventilate/to be ventilated, to circulate/to make circulate, which is no longer of the order of representation, nor of distance, nor of reflection. It is something that is part of panic, and of a world in panic…

…The same for institutions, the state, power, etc. …What is produced in reality is that the institutions implode of themselves, by dint of ramifications, feedback, overdeveloped control circuits. Power implodes, this is its current mode of disappearance. … The city does not repeat itself any longer according to a schema of reproduction still dependent on the general schema of production. … The city no longer revives…it is remade… (69-71)

The Implosion of Meaning

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Consider three hypotheses….

Either information produces meaning (a neg entropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain…

Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking…

Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them…

…the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. … Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning…

…»You are concerned, you are the event, etc.«

More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience…

(Perhaps this could be called “framing”.)

…Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning…

(One must suspend disbelief.)

…The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. …One both believes and doesn’t. One does not ask oneself, “I know very well, but still.” A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief…

…Circularity of all media effects . Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another …We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us. (79-83)

…But what should be said of mental modeling via psychotropic agents and drugs?… a body consecrated to the implosive metabolism of cerebral, endocrinal flows, a sensory, but not sensible, body because it is connected only to its internal terminals, and not to objects of perception … that is to say to the absolute loss of the image, bodies that cannot be represented, either to others or to themselves… (101-102)

(Media can produce imaginary scenarios just as drugs can.)

Hologram

…It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues – ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double…

(This is to capture the “moment” as it is. Though it is a reflection per se, it is the immediate reflection.)

…Similitude is a dream and must remain one, in order for a modicum of illusion and a stage of the imaginary to exist. One must never pass over to the side of the real, the side of the exact resemblance of the world to itself, of the subject to itself. Because then the image disappears … with the hologram, as with the clone, it is the opposite temptation, and the opposite fascination, of the end of illusion, the stage, the secret through the materialized projection of all available information on the subject, through materialized transparency…

(There is simultaneously an urge to reach “absolute reality”.)

…then with the hologram we are already virtually in another universe: which is nothing but the mirrored equivalent of this one. But which universe is this one?… (105-106)

(Are we the butterfly or Zhuangzi? Are there levels of reality and which level is this one?)

Crash

…From a classical (even cybernetic) perspective, technology is an extension of the body. It is the functional sophistication of a human organism that permits it to be equal to nature and to invest triumphally in nature…

(Technology is an extension of the human.)

…the same functionalist vision of machines and language: they are relays, extensions, media mediators of nature ideally destined to become the organic body of man. In this “rational” perspective the body itself is nothing but a medium. On the other hand…technology is the mortal deconstruction of the body – no longer a functional medium, but the extension of death … the explosive vision of a body delivered to “symbolic wounds,” of a body confused with technology in its violating and violent dimension, in the savage and continual surgery that violence exercises… (111)

(The line between human and technological is blurred.)

The Remainder

…When everything is taken away, nothing is left.

This is false. … It is not that there is no remainder. But this remainder never has an autonomous reality, nor its own place: … It is through the subtraction of the remainder that reality is founded and gathers strength . . . what else?

…one can say the right/the left, the same/the other, the majority/the minority, the crazy/the normal, etc. – but the remainder/[____]? Nothing on the other side of the slash…

…one never knows which is the remainder of the other… (143)

(The hive, as in the Borg of the sci-fi series “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, is the totality. What is beyond is the remainder. Assimilation and “the Other”. But which is the remainder of which?)

…only immigrants, delinquents, women, etc. appear – everything that has not been socialized, “social” cases analogous to pathological cases. Pockets to be reabsorbed, segments that the “social” isolates as it grows. Designated as “residual”…

…destined to find their place in an enlarged sociality. It is for this remainder that the social machine is recharged and finds new energy: But what happens when everything is sponged up, when everything is socialized? Then the machine stops, the dynamic is reversed, and it is the whole social system that becomes residue… (144)

The Spiraling Cadaver

…The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge… (149)

(He refers to the May 1968 Event in France: “unrest began with a series of far-left student occupation protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism and traditional institutions…The student occupations and general strikes across France met with forceful confrontation by university administrators and police…By late May the flow of events had changed. The Grenelle accords, concluded on 27 May between the government, trade unions and employers, won significant wage gains for workers.” ^[5]

In current events, Columbia University’s 2024-2025 crackdown on student protests, its expulsions and suspensions of students of conscience, marks another case of the bankruptcy of the education system – its factories – and its original purpose. The pursuit of knowledge is no longer an end-in-itself, or even advancing society towards greater ends – but about growing capital, and even in this regard it often fails. Columbia must comply or be attacked by threats of divestment and students must be punished. Let’s see if there are any significant gains.)

Value’s Last Tango

Where nothing is in its place, lies disorder

Where in the desired place there is nothing, lies order

-Brecht (155)

(Disorder must be removed. The university is itself a simulacrum and simulation – an empty shell that self-perpetuates its raison d’être of advancing value, but bestowing “nonknowledge” and diplomas, just like “floating Eurodollars”. Education has become beads placed haphazardly without a string or ultimate purpose. Both teachers and students, consumers and investors, engage in this staging. Each must play their role. Then there is order.)

On Nihilism

(When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead”, what he meant was that men are free to choose their own values and meanings.)

…Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it…

(Richard Wagner was a musical composer influenced by the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer and had a temporary relationship with Nietzsche. Oswald Spengler viewed history as deterministic and predicted the “West’s” decline. Beaudrillard’s nihilism veers away from this. It is not necessarily a lack of meanings per se, but the lack of belief and preeminently the acceptance of the artificial. The actor plays the role, knowing the role is artificial, but still playing it. Everything is transparent – “real” and “unreal” – and yet we cannot escape its grip. Perhaps we could speak of structure and agency, but that is for another time.)

…The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation, into the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence…Romanticism is its first great manifestation…Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation…I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances…I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution…is the immense process of the destruction of meaning…The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage…The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float… (159-161)

…to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference … meaning is mortal… (163-164)

(However, as meaning is mortal, I believe that opens a door for newer meanings and situations, however «real» or not.)

The End

References***

^[1] Beaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press 1994. Orig. 1981.

^[2] “History of Sport”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sport

^[3] Zhuangzi. “The Butterfly Dream”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)

^[4] Intellectual History. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_history

^[5] May 68. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68

***Cross-reference as needed

Note: Why didn’t Beaudrillard sue the film producers of “The Matrix” (1999) for using his ideas? Because he said it was too different.