The objective profile of America, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland: digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly amongst those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality--energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation--a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its' sympathetic nervous system.
What society seeks through production and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.
All media and the offical news service only exist to maintain the illusion of actuality of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts. All events are to be read in reverse, where one perceives that all these things arrive too late, with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they have exhausted their meaning long in advance and only survive on an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events follow on illogically from one another, with a total equanimity towards the greatest inconsistencies, with a profound indifference to their consequences thus the whole newsreel of "the present" gives the sinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the same time doubtless everyone knows this, and nobody really accepts it. The reality of simulation is unendurable more cruel than Artund's Theater of Cruelty, which was still an attempt at a dramaturgy of life, the last flickering of an ideal of the body, blood and violence in a system already sweeping towards a reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood. For us the trick has been played. All dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has disappeared. Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the phantasmal parodic rehibilitation of all lost referentials, alone remain. Everything still unfolds before us, in the cold light of deterrence.
Every image, every media message, but also any functional environmental object, is a test---that is to say, in the full rigor of the term, liberating response mechanisms according to stereotypes and analytic models. Today, the object is no longer "functional" in the traditional meaning of the word; it no longer serves you, it tests you. It has nothing to do with the object of yesteryear, no more than does media news with a "reality" of facts. Both objects and information result already from a selection, a montage, from a point-of-view. They have already tested "reality," and have asked only questions that "answered back" to them. They have broken down reality into simple elements that they have reassembled into scenarios of regulated oppositions, exactly in the same way that the photographer imposes his contrasts, lights, angles on his subject. It is exactly like the test or the referendum when they translate a conflict or problem into a game of question/answer. And reality, thus tested, tests you according to the same grill; you decode it according to the same code, inscribed within each message and object like a miniaturized genetic code.
All is presented today in a spread out series, or as part of a line of products, and this fact alone tests you already, because you are obliged to make decisions. This approximates our general attitude toward the world around us to that of a reading, and to a selective deciphering. We live less like users than readers and selectors, reading cells. But nevertheless: by the same token you also are constantly selected and tested by the medium itself. Just like cutting out a sample for the ends of the survey, the media frame and excise their message bundles, which are in fact bundles of selected questions, samples of their audience. By a circular operation of experimental modification, of incessant interference, like a nervous input, tactile and retractile, that explores an object by means of brief perceptive sequences, until it has been localized and controlled. What the media thereby localize and control are no real and autonomous groups, but samples, samples modeled socially and mentally by a barrage of messages. "Public opinion" is evidently the prettiest of these samples---not an unreal political substance, but one that is hyperreal---a fantastic hyperreality that lives only off of montage and test-manipulation.
The very definition of the real becomes that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. This is contemporaneous with a science that postulates that a process can be perfectly reproduced in a set of given conditions, and also with the industrial rationality that postulates a universal system of equivalency. At the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.
There used to be, before, a specific class of allegorical and slightly diabolical objects: mirrors, images, works of art (concepts?) simulacra, but transparent and manifest (you didn't confuse the counterfeit with the original), that had their characteristic style and savoir faire. And pleasure consisted then rather in discovering the "natural" in what was artificial and counterfeit. Today, when the real and the imaginary are confused in the same operational totality, the esthetic fascination is everywhere. It is a subliminal perception (a sort of sixth sense) of deception, montage, scenaria of the overexposed reality in the light of the models no longer a production space, but a reading strip, strip of coding and decoding, magnetized by the signs---esthetic reality---no longer by the premediation and the distance of art, but by its elevation to the second level, to the second power, by the anticipation and the immanence of the code. A kind of non-intentional parody hovers over everything, of technical simulation, of indefinable fame to which is attached an esthetic pleasure, that very one of reading and of the rules of the game. Traveling of signs, the media, of fashion and the models, of the blind and brilliant ambiance of the simulacra.
A long time ago art prefigured this turning which is that today of daily life.