Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway are two key figures that anyone reflecting on digital culture and postmodernism inevitably encounters. Baudrillard warned: we live in a world of simulacra — signs that have lost contact with reality. Haraway offered consolation: become cyborgs, fuse the biological and the technical to survive. Sim‑narrative accepts neither Baudrillard's catastrophe nor Haraway's fragile hope. It proposes a third path — not escape, not fusion, but honest recording of conflict.
According to Baudrillard, the modern world is an endless chain of simulacra. The map precedes the territory. Media create events that never happened. Politics becomes spectacle. A person can no longer distinguish the real from the fake. In this picture, any literary method claiming "truth" looks either naive or totalitarian. Postmodernism responded with irony and the rejection of the grand narrative. But sim‑narrative does not ironize. It says: a simulacrum is a simulacrum, but there is also a fact (layer one), an experience (layer two), and a systemic report (layer three). They conflict — and in this conflict, what emerges is not "truth" but honest volume. Sim‑narrative does not flee from simulation; it dissects it.
In the «Cyborg Manifesto», Haraway rejects rigid boundaries: nature/culture, human/machine, male/female. The cyborg is a being that is always already hybrid. This is a liberating position, but it carries a risk: if everything is mixed, why distinguish layers at all? Sim‑narrative answers: hybridity is not amorphousness. On the contrary, the more hybrid, the more important it is to record where the seam runs. The event layer and the reflective layer are not the same. The systemic layer is not an illusion but an independent reality. Haraway's cyborg feels perfectly at home in sim‑narrative — but only if it agrees to conflict with itself.
Baudrillard described the disease — the loss of the real. Haraway proposed a cure (become a cyborg). Sim‑narrative does not cure. It creates an observation protocol. Imagine a layered cake: simulacra can enter any layer. A fake event is still an event (layer one). A fake feeling is still a reflection (layer two). A fake report is still a document (layer three). But it is precisely their simultaneity and conflict that allow the reader to notice the discrepancy — and thereby notice the act of simulation itself. Sim‑narrative does not destroy the simulacrum; it makes it transparent.
In the event layer (the tale), we see the birth of rhythm. In the reflective layer, operator Kay cries, remembering the experience. In the systemic layer, the AI coldly records an «anomaly» it cannot explain. The reader sees three versions of one event. Baudrillard would say: this is hyperreality, all three versions are simulacra. Haraway would say: the very fact of their coexistence demonstrates the cyborgisation of memory. Sim‑narrative says: it doesn't matter whether it is real or not. What matters is that these three layers resonate and produce volume. And that volume is all we have.
Postmodernists (including the later Baudrillard) often fell into despair or cynicism. Haraway tried to build a politics of hope through hybridity. Sim‑narrative goes further: it offers a working tool for creating new meanings under conditions where reality is not given but constructed. This is not a game with simulacra, but an engineering use of them. And perhaps that is the true courage of the 21st century.
This essay is part of the research on sim‑narrative. Other materials about the method are available at the GitHub organisation.