Post-Baudrillardian Practice Claim

Matt Watt

In response to Jean Baudrillard’s four stages of simulation — reflection, distortion, pretence, and pure simulacrum — this theory proposes a contemporary extension in the context of my art practice: a sixth-order model of artistic simulation under conditions of saturation, recursion, and eventual collapse.

Baudrillard charted the death of the real through successive layers of image detachment. What he didn’t chart was what comes after the death. In art today, we aren’t mourning the loss of the real — we’re circulating and imitating the idea of it. My claim is that through this exhaustion of such ‘realness’, something peculiar happens: we don’t return to an idea of the truth, we produce a new one.

This framework proposes two additional stages of simulation that describe this shift:

Stage 5: Recursive Referencing

The work references a reference which itself was a reference — each loop producing its own new context. There is no original, only iterations that generate new origins. A true yet momentary reality emerges from recursion, not despite it.

The artist becomes a performative reality generator.

Stage 6: Collapse into Authenticity

At a certain density, the simulation ruptures. The gesture or performance — performed with such totality — stops signifying and starts being. What began as irony is now identity. The fake becomes sincere through exhaustion.

There is the emergence of a new total reality — grounded completely in recursive affirmation. A loop rehearsed so fully it forgets it was ever a loop. Sincerity (or lack thereof) emerges from this repetition and in this space, the performance no longer simulation of belief.

Example outside of art: Wellness Culture (becomes a performance of itself and results in… wellness culture)

Meditation apps, mantras, gym bro culture. Initially adopted as self-care practices, now commodified and aestheticised into a lifestyle that signals balance and soft power. But beneath the 120kg bench press lays a quietly coercive logic: perform wellness not for the sake of healing, but to function more efficiently under the expectations of neoliberal productivity.

As Byung-Chul Han writes in Psychopolitics (2014: 29–32), under the chapter Healing as Killing, contemporary wellness culture no longer seeks to cure, but to optimise. It doesn’t ask “what ails you?”. it asks “how can you be more resilient?”. Wellness becomes internalised discipline. The body is no longer governed through pain (biopower), but through self-care rituals that camouflage compliance as empowerment.

Wellness, in this stage, performs its own truth so convincingly that the result is… wellness.

Philosophical Anchors:

1. Žižek’s critique of ideology: the moment illusion reveals the truth beneath itself.

Slavoj Žižek reminds us that ideology is at its most potent when we think we’ve escaped it. The moment we laugh at the system, we are already part of its feedback loop. Irony, in this framework, becomes lubricant as opposed to resistance. It allows the machinery of ideology to keep moving without friction, without guilt.

Žižek’s horror is that even our resistance is complicit. He asks us not to trust what we think we believe, but to look at what we do. And if what we do is endlessly perform our discontent, that discontent might not be as radical as we hoped. Maybe it’s just… content.

2. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle — images that no longer represent, but rule (a slightly more existential consideration).

Guy Debord’s diagnosis is bleak and strangely familiar: in the spectacle, we no longer relate to reality directly. We relate to its images. Life becomes something we watch, not something we do. He wrote this in the 1960s. He didn’t even have Instagram.

For Debord, the spectacle is not a layer added onto reality. It is reality. It’s how capitalism extends itself into affect and aesthetics. Art in the spectacle doesn’t have to say anything — it just has to be seen. The performance, the installation, the persona — these become nodes in a network of visibility. You exist because you circulate and therefore, you become what you circulate.

Exit Wound:

A post-baudrillardian sixth order model of artistic or any simulation:

1. Basic Reflection – The work references something real.

2. Perversion – It knowingly distorts that real.

3. Pretence – It pretends to reflect reality but floats free of any original.

4. Pure Simulacrum – It becomes entirely self-referential; no origin, only performance.

5. Recursive Referencing – Reference becomes a generative engine, spawning performative yet total realities.

6. Collapse into Authenticity – The loop of reference collapses into a new, accidental yet total real.

This a model of production.

(Watt, 2025)