Empire and Map

[Water Lane Inscription] As mentioned earlier, The Wachowskis [1] , the director of the film "The Matrix" trilogy, was inspired by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, not only in the first film. The song showed Busia's famous book "Simulations and Simulacra", and asked the starring Chino Reeves to read the same book, and even invited Busia himself to participate in the production of the second part. On the contrary, the hot face was put on the cold butt, but the deity refused, believing that the director had misread his book at all. In the end is what a strange book so difficult?

Mimics and Simulacrums, published in 1981, is his further exploration of simulacre (le simulacre) after L'échange symbolique et la mort (L'échange symbolique et la mort). masterpiece. What is an imitation? To understand this concept, we must go back to the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. In a nutshell, Plato believed that everything that can be seen and touched under the sky is not the essence, but only the image of the essence, or a replica. And he distinguishes two kinds of images, namely good images (εἰκών, eikon) and bad images (εἴδωλον, eidolon). A good image faithfully reflects the ontology, but a bad image distorts the ontology and has the ability to mislead or even deceive. In later generations, the so-called mimetics refer specifically to bad images. [2]

At the beginning of the book, Busia borrows a passage from "the most beautiful allegory" (la plus belle allégorie) to explain what a simulacra is, that is, the short story "On the Sophistication of Learning" written by the poet Jorge Luis Borges ( Del rigor en la ciencia). The story tells that the map college of the empire made a perfect map of the empire. Later generations gradually lost their enthusiasm for studying maps, and felt that this behemoth was useless, so they abandoned it like a shovel and left it in the rain and the sun. In the end, only the ruins of the empire map remained in the deserts of the west. But Busia believed that as long as the positions of the empire and the map were reversed, it could be described as a strange phenomenon in the world.

He believes that today, the map is no longer a faithful replica of the empire, it is mainly anti-customer, the map continues to create and expand itself, and eventually replace the empire. The simulacrum (la simulation) became a force that constantly morphed into a mimetic, which Busia called "hyperréel." [3] In the end, everyone forgot the truth, and the truth became a piece of broken silk in the desert. That is why he describes the world as "the desert of its true self" (le désert du réel lui-même). In the first part, Morpheus's phrase "Welcome to the real desert" is derived from this. (to be continued)

[1] Both are transgender. At the time of the trilogy, the media still used to call it The Wachowski Brothers.

[2] Please refer to the famous book "Platon et le simulacre" (Platon et le simulacre) by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

[3] Regarding the wording of the prefix "hyper-", please refer to the essays " Beyond the Face Book " and " Fever Metamorphosis". (continued)