Simulation in Vineland

[Josiah Miller]

Pg. 40 of Vineland.  "Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that'll give a clue, but - well the signs are there on street corners and store windows - but I can't read them."  The consultation of these signs and landmarks - even if he could read them would lead to nowhere.  This is a hyperreal where there's a generation of these models of a real without origin or reality.  This stems from Zoyd's "third eye" of which he is confessing to Prairie.  Signs and landmarks are all means of mapping out a location and Zoyd is the cartographer.  As Baudrillard states in Simulation and Simulacrum:  "This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operations is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive.  It is all of metaphysics that is lost" (pg. 2). Now we see in Baudrillard that
 "simulation threatens the difference between the 'true' and the 'false,' the 'real' and the 'imaginary'" (pg. 3).  Zoyd, in his dreams to where he can "fly" to any location where Frenesi is at, can't understand the signs, the representations, the images, the references; "it's in English, but there's something between it and my brain that won't let it through" (pg. 40 Vineland).  And maybe for Zoyd, this is "the end of transcendence, which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs.  Behind the baroqueness of images hides the eminence grise of politics" (pg. 5 Baudrillard).  Hhis politics.  His "hippie" ways.

Josiah