I think for Baudrillard, Watergate served not to purge immoral and unscrupulous officials from the government; but instead it served to maintain an intrinsically immoral and unscrupulous political/economic system. It was a symbolic ritual. The Washington Post reporters purged and then revived a “moral order, an order of truth” (173); however, the truth (or “relations of force”) in this moral order are “indifferent” and shift and reconfigure “in the moral and political consciousness of people” (173). By denouncing Watergate as morally indifferent, even though the system itself is what is morally indifferent, the reporters serve to uphold that morally indifferent system through a symbolic purge and consequent revitalization.
Baudrillard also says, “Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance” (180). While he is perhaps talking about political power, I related this “signs of power’s resemblance” to the idea of conspicuous and competitive consumption. For example, carrying around a bottled water is not only convenient for quenching your thirst, it signifies your power: you have the economic power to not only purchase goods that are available for free, but you can afford to be concerned with your health, while members of other socio-economic classes can not; you also have the educational power to know that drinking water is good for your health. This leads into the selling of brands, as opposed to products, and this blurs the line between signs and reality: are you buying the shirt or what that shirt’s designer represents?
Baudrillard keeps mentioning circuits, for example he talks about an “uninterrupted circuit” (170) and an “unreal circulation” (172). It seems that a few of the authors we’ve read have mentioned circuits, but one in particular stands out, Pynchon. In The Crying of Lot 49, he says “the ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had” (14). Another connection I made was that, when describing San Narciso, Pynchon says, “like many named places in California…was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway” (13). Baudrillard describes Los Angeles as “nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation” (172). It seems that Pynchon’s world clearly corresponds to Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacra in that both sort of see reality as this abstract circuit of representations.