Rubber Soul, Baudrillard

Baudrillard offers a concrete example of "the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion" (466). He describes a scene of staging a robbery. Your intentions might be entirely harmless and aimed toward merely recreating the scene, but people experiencing the recreation of a robbery won't be able to determine if it's harmless or not. He describes the police officer at the scene firing a gun at the man recreating the scene of the robbery, and a man at the bank as an innocent bystander fainting and suffering a stroke from the implied danger of the situation. He goes on to state, "The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power" (466). For instance, how would one verify in court that the staged-robbery was merely a reactionary test and not an attempt at committing a crime. The power of order would be lost if this were a permissible excuse. Plus, how would punishment be distributed to merely a simulation of defiance? Baudrillard basically tells us that recreating the real gets lost in translation. Thus our society's (along with others) political economy thrives to produce and overproduce the "restored" real that has been lost. We are then diluted with resemblances of the real. I suspect he could mean interpretations of history that allot us a singular view point that is beneficial for maintaining order. And so the real that is manifested is one without definite origin. What can one make of the truth if the artificially sweetened truth is not what actually happened? It's an ongoing process that cannot be traced to a clear and logical solution. And he mentions that even if we destroy the system of power, the cycle would be renewed through an anti-power. "To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity, and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, or every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and of its fundamental nonexistence.." He envisions war and peace as equivalents because one deters the other. The creation of the nuclear bomb freezes it from ever being used because of the fact that engineers can flip a switch and destroy an entire nation. Apparently nobody wants to do that.. even tho the U.S. did on Hiroshima--that is supposed to act as a deterrent for other powers. "Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to liberating potentialities"(479).