The urge to create, to delineate and represent human experience is an accepted, if not, necessary component of cultural and intellectual life.  In The Republic, Plato identified the urge to imitate life as mimesis.  What followed was a tradition of Western philosophy, thought, religion and literature created by the written word; first in manuscript form and following the Gutenberg revolution, in printed text, and expounded through the spoken word.  In the twentieth century Derrida posited that “the Western philosophical tradition privileges voice (the sonic) over written language (the graphic)” and that “within this tradition the speaker is assumed to be self-authenticating and in control of meaning of language” (Taylor xiv).  This position is supported by Marshall McLuhan who contends that although the western philosophical tradition is a visual/textual tradition rather than an auditory/tactile tradition, it has been changes in communication technology that have shifted the sensory environment from graphic to sonic.  It is my contention that the creation of simulacra differs from traditional representation in that the impulse to create simulacra is a defense mechanism aimed at deferring the painful effects of “new technologies (self-amputations of our own being) on the order of our sensory lives” (McLuhan 6).  James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is perhaps the first novel of the twentieth century to use simulacrum as the structural underpinning of an attempt to more fully represent human experience while the film The Matrix is a recent example of a work that illustrates the failure of traditional representation.
    In Ulysses, James Joyce creates a simulacrum (Bloomsday) that is essentially a completely inclusive parcel of the lives of its principal characters.  In the span of less than a day we are shown the history and future of the characters that inhabit this fictional universe through their ever-present actions.  Their actions and experiences are present because of a) memory and b) body.  Central to this ability to show past experiences as an integrated and essential element of the present and future is Joyce’s use of structure in Ulysses.  Joyce developed a very innovative structure for his Bloomsday novel.  He recreates the separate functions and organs of the human body within the chapter breaks of the novel.  Joyce uses this simulacrum of the human body in order to ground the experiences of Bloom (primarily) and Marion (as a feminine counterpart) in the universal.  The body is a necessity without which experiences cannot be rooted in time and space.  Ulysses is a novel about time and space precisely because it does not ignore the importance of bodily functions in the course of the perceiver’s life and experience.  Functions such as eating, digesting, and the movement of the bowels are the clockwork of human experience.  The clock in Ulysses is not the sunrise and sunset but rather the waking, the hunger, the preparation of food, the passing of waste, the moods that the mind passes through, the effect of substances on perceptions and the tiring of the body.  While Bloom’s body forces his progression through the day his experiences of the past and expectations of the future show a reliance on consciousness for the perception of time that leads one to believe “that one day can stand for the whole of time, and Dublin for the whole of the world.” (Anastaplo 239)
    The totality that the Bloomsday simulacrum presents is a model that postmodernist theorists have rejected.  While “there is completion and unity in modernism, one finds deferment and heterogeneity in postmodernism” (Taylor xv).  However, it is important to recognize that Joyce stands at the beginning of a tradition predicated on the shifting of sensory environments from textual/visual to tactile/auditory.  Joyce was in the midst of a change in communication technology that saw the newspaper eclipsed by the wireless as the most efficient mode of information transfer.  It is entirely possible that Ulysses was merely an attempt, by Joyce, to hold onto a moment in time when things were just right, or perfectly understandable. The use of media and media discourse in Ulysses is crucial to the development of Bloom as a character, to plot advancement, and most importantly, in providing a solid foundation for the construction of the Bloomsday simulacrum. Bloom, as a seller of advertising space-time represents a modern man.  He is a product of the middle-class liberal ruling class that had ousted the aristocracy and the Church from power.  He represents the reality of liberal capitalism in that he is the medium between the producer/seller and the consumer.  This may seem very self-evident at the beginning of the new millennium but in Joyce’s time these were new manifestations of industrial capitalism and middle-class liberalism.   From our perspective the past century has shown “the rapid proliferation of technologically mass-produced “products” that are essentially reproductions or abstractions—images, advertising, information, memories, styles, simulated experiences, and copies of original experiences.” (McCaffery 4)  Standing at the beginning of this trend is, in every aforementioned function, the novel Ulysses.
Ulysses can be read as much more than a product of new environments and technologies; it can be read as a prophecy for what was to come in terms of these changing sensory lives. After all, if Bloom has become the model for modern man, it has been the result of a system of commerce, industrial capitalism, and technological dependence that has alienated man from his natural surroundings.   If the switch from daily newspapers to broadcast radio could cause so much pain in the perceivers of the early twentieth century sensory environment than it is equally plausible that contemporary artists (and theorists) are also susceptible to pain from the perception of new technologies.  This pain accounts, to some extend, for the proliferation of simulacra and simulacra theory in recent years.  However, simulacra theory has also been bolstered by the decline of writing (textual/visual) and the rise in multimedia (tactile/auditory) presentations.  Derrida explains the way in which the term writing has changed from something primarily (if not exclusively) textual to an activity encompassing the entire range of presentation possibilities:
Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more:  to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible;  and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself.  (195)
And to move more explicitly into the present tense of presentation Derrida explains that we
Say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice:  cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing”. (195)
Derrida, I think, would not take license if I were to incorporate into his definition of inscriptive writing the likes of computer programming, software design, web-design, and most importantly virtual reality.  So although Ulysses is comprehensive in its treatment and (attempted) representation of the lives of it’s characters we can, because of the very forces which prompted Joyce to create his simulacrum (technological change), view it as the final flowering of textual representation.   
Technological change has brought new opportunities for attempts at representation but oddly enough, simulacra theory has remained a course of thought grounded primarily in the textual arenas of academia and science fiction.  Compounding the structural limitations of simulacra theory is the tendency for contemporary works to illustrate the process of simulacra rather than to attempt the construction of a simulacrum as Joyce did with Ulysses.  The most recent illustration of simulacra can be found in the movie The Matrix, which posits that our perception of reality is only a simulation of life created by machine artificial intelligence.
    The Matrix stands out as a work of postmodern art because it blends so completely the concepts of simulacra theory with the typical contemporary sci-fi ingredients.     And as for all types of 1980’s art (in this case cyberpunk) we might ask whether The Matrix reveals anything new about the condition of alienation that occurs in a world “where the real and the true are superseded by simulacra and the hyper real” (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. 193) or if the film is a self-annihilating simulation of cyberpunk and simulacra theory geared towards mass-consumption.   In The Matrix, what people perceive to be reality is in fact an incredible construct designed to keep humans mentally stimulated so that they can produce power to feed their machine overlords.  There are two worlds in The Matrix.  There is the construct, described here by Morpheus:
NEO:  Right now, we're inside a computer program?
MORPHEUS:  Wild, isn't it?
Neo's hands run over the cracked leather.
NEO:  This isn't real?
MORPHEUS:  What is real?  How do you define real?  If you're talking about your senses, what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then all you're talking about are electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
The construct can be interpreted as a world in which technological change, specifically in the area of communication technology, has come to dominate the sensory lives of all human beings.  Morpheus switches on a television set within the construct to show Neo
the Chicago you know.  Chicago as it was at the end of the twentieth century.  This Chicago exists only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix.
We GLIDE AT the television as he changes the channel.
MORPHEUS:  You have been living inside Baulliaurd's vision, inside the map, not the territory.  This is Chicago as it exists today.
At this point Morpheus shows Neo the other world of The Matrix:
The sky is an endless sea of black and green bile.  The earth, scorched and split like burnt flesh, spreads out beneath us as we ENTER the television.
MORPHEUS:  ‘The desert of the real.’
It is important to note that while Joyce uses the simulacrum of Bloomsday in an attempt to more completely represent the lives of his characters, the Wachowski brothers do not actually create a simulacrum with the intent to represent in the film, The Matrix.  Instead of creating and using a simulacrum for the purpose of representation in The Matrix, the Wachowskis illustrate a heterogeneity of perceptual possibilities.  Technological change, in this case computers and cyberspace, being in large part responsible for the change in the sensory lives of individuals in the twentieth century, is shown by the Wachowskis to disassociate human beings from their natural environments.  Furthermore, this disassociation of the senses from the tangible aspects of a natural environment, to a system of simulations and recreations is shown by the Wachowskis to be a negative and unnatural progression.  However, the use of simulacrum in The Matrix is merely illustrative and I think that this shows one of the important drawbacks of postmodern art;  the tendency for contemporary artists to shrink from actual representation and turn instead to the illustration of attempts at representation.
    At this point it is useful to read Baudrillard’s distinction between simulacra of the first order and simulacra of the second order.  Baudrillard compares the automaton to the robot:
A whole world separates these two artificial beings.  One is a theatrical counterfeit, a mechanical and clocklike man;  technique submits entirely to analogy and to the effect of semblance. (178)
The Matrix falls into this category because it provides all of the outward appearance of a simulacrum, in fact portraying an ultimate, world encompassing, simulacrum, but without the substance and technical competence of Ulysses.  Baudrillard continues with a description of the simulacrum of the first order:
The other is dominated by the technical principle;  the machine overrides all, and with the machine equivalence comes too. (178)
It is interesting to note that The Matrix makes extensive use of Baudrillard’s simulacra theory but fails in the end to provide the technical principles to produce a successful simulacrum or, in fact, a simulacrum at all.  To produce a simulacrum of the first order it should not be an analogy of the world for, as Baudrillard puts it “the automaton is the analogy of man and remains his interlocutor (they play chess together!).  The machine is man’s equivalent and annexes him to itself in unity of its operation process.  This is the difference between a simulacrum of the first order and one of the second.” (178)  
    The Wachowski brothers, as postmodern artists, can be excused for illustrating the simulacrum rather than creating a simulacrum primarily because simulacra have been reduced (or expanded) from the world of Bloomsday represented in Ulysses to multifarious simulations of our own everyday, ordinary lives.  The technological changes that have occurred in the twentieth century have made it possible for virtually anyone (in the first world at least) to create a simulacrum of their wedding day on 8mm videotape.  Or create an interactive web-site displaying the ordinary life of an ordinary person 24-hours a day via web-cam.  Perhaps where the Wachowski brothers have succeeded is in representing not the simulacrum of The Matrix itself but the heterogeneity of worlds that we live in precisely because of the all-encompassing creation of small packets of simulacra for our lives.  They represent something that Joyce could only have dreamed of, a world where the simulacrum begins to invade and overtake the reality of our everyday existences.  Although Joyce’s simulacrum is technically superior to the simulacrum of The Matrix, both works are responding, through the creation of simulacra, to the effects of technological change on the sensory lives of human beings.
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