Why France is not a real
Throughout history, humans have always given abstract concepts a paramount value. Honor, morality, names, and sin are some of the examples of abstractions that govern our day to day life, even though they don’t even exist. Modern people, at least those in developed countries, pride themselves in neglecting these faux notions and instead focusing on what is “real”.
This movement that prefers “real” to abstract is also known as Postmodernism, which came into being after the atrocities of World War 2. Postmodernists are quick to criticize value systems, morality, and objective reality. For them, each person’s reality is different, based on the person’s self-consciousness, moral hierarchy, and life experience.
While Postmodernism might seem like a perfect, humanitarian, and utopian philosophy in theory, we can see how in reality it yields some questionable results.
Since the movement denies any kind of objective religion or spirituality, it’s followers(most of whom don’t even know they are postmodernists) seek refuge from the misery of reality and life in materialistic objects. Just like the protagonist in Fight Club, we pay ridiculous amounts of money on even more ridiculous items. We are more than ready to pay 120$ for a plain t-shirt from Yeezy, with no extraordinary design or particularly good material. Some victims of the post-industrial society, even go as far as to pay 200$ for a simple brick that has “Supreme” engraved on it.
When Karl Marx developed his “Labor theory of values”, he postulated that a commodity has 3 values:
- Value — the price of making the commodity,
- Exchange-value — the price of the commodity on the market,
- In use-value — how useful the commodity is.
To these 3 values, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard added the fourth — sign-value — the value the commodity gained from differentiating from other brands, by representing luxury or status. Baudrillard believed that over the last few decades, the sign-value of an item has become more important than the other three.
Baudrillard’s theory has been very influential and his book Simulacra and Simulations can be seen in the movie Matrix. The theory is further explored in the Fight Club and more prominently in the American Psycho.
The American Psycho, based on a book where the narrator spends 4 pages describing the things he owns, is about the life of a rich investment banker revolving around fancy restaurants and luxury brand names. The movie literally starts with the main character, Patrick, taking a scrub mask off of his face, symbolizing that he has no soul or value. He exalts himself from others only by the objects he owns. In his own words:
There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.
We can also see this pattern in how much importance they give to business cards:
Look at that subtle coloring. The tasteful thickness.
Even though throughout the movie, it’s often for them to forget each other’s actual names.
But what does all this have to do with France not being real? To answer that question, we have to go back to Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation.
You all know what simulation means, it’s an imitation of a process or object. Simulacra is very similar to simulation, except one small detail — inferiority. Photo-realism is an example of simulacra, a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the reality.
In the book, Baudrillard claims that people have become so detached from reality and have been so influenced by signs and maps that it is Reality that now imitates the simulacra.
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory
Here, Baudrillard is not just saying that the post-industrial society is artificial, for a clear distinct reality is a prerequisite for artificiality. He claims that humanity has clearly lost what is simulacra and what is real, and this distinction becomes more vague every year.
We can trace everything mentioned in this article back to France, or any other country, being a mere simulacrum. But, as mentioned earlier, the simulacrum is an imitation of something, then what do countries imitate?
My proposal is that a country is a simulacrum of nationalism. You might wonder how that’s possible, considering that a country is a prerequisite to nationalism. Well, when it comes to the collective consciousness, not everything is that simple.
Nationalism is a shared sense of belonging amongst humans, most of whom were born inside the same geopolitical borders. We can view nationalism as a more advanced, and perhaps dangerous, version of tribalism.
In his book “Banal Nationalism”, Michael Billig argues that nationalism is being engraved in our brains daily through — national songs, use of flags, implied “togetherness” in the national press — or even through more subtle and subliminal ways — use of terms such as the weather, our lands, domestic and foreign. Even though Michael doesn’t make any explicit mentions of the simulacrum, I believe that countries are simulacra of national identity.
Hence, even though countries do exist on paper and in mind, they are not any more real than integrals or units of measurements.
Nevertheless, unfortunately, countries and nationalism pose more threats to humanity than numbers and subjects. As mentioned earlier, brands profit a lot from the use of simulacra and signs. But so do governments, more so authoritarian regimes. They make the “patriots” feel immense pride and accomplishment for loving their simulacra. Furthermore, they encourage the “us vs them” mentality by always having an enemy, either internationally or domestically.
And hence, people get divided more and more, preaching peace to other countries, but advocating for war in their illusions that they claim to be real. The saddest part of this is that real people have to suffer to keep their illusions intact.
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that
there is none.
The simulacrum is true.-Ecclesiastes
