Seeing is not believing: reality, simulation and the epistemic authority of the image

I'm Slim Shady, yes, I'm the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won't the real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up?
'Cause I'm Slim Shady, yes, I'm the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won't the real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up?

Eminem famously played with the distinction between the real and representation in his song (and accompanying music video) The Real Slim Shady, in which he plays with the idea of persona and authenticity. The beginning of the music video begins with an announcement, “May I have your attention, please, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?”. Everyone in the room stands, the announcement continues, “We’re gonna have a problem here.”

So, yes, we have a problem here, as the line between the real (Slim Shady) and the intimators becomes harder to locate.

 The desert of the real

Scholars have theorised for decades about the gap between representation and reality. Most famously, Baulliard proposed the concept of the simulacrum to capture what happens when representations of the ‘real’ eventually become detached from representation, insofar as presentation becomes a truth unto itself. Specifically, Baudrillard explains, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.” By this, he means the casual relationship between signs (the map) and what they signify (the territory) are irrevocably fractured, he explains that it is, “The desert of the real itself.”

This is all theoretically well-established and generally accepted by scholars as characteristic of the contemporary media environment. Despite this theorising, most people are not aware of the fracturing of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Generally speaking, the image still holds its epistemic authority. That is, we look at images and videos and generally consider them to represent reality, or the really real. Undoubtedly, the advent of photoshopped, and the widespread use of beauty filters and AI images has led to some fracturing of this relationship. We know, or at least we allow, the possibility that an image or a video is not a direct representation of reality. However, for the most part, we all behave (and, in fact, need to behave) as if it is. In a mediated world, where what we know about the world is transmitted through various forms of media, this is a necessary and vital relationship.

Enter Kate Middleton

As you might be aware, Kate Middleton has not been seen in public since Christmas Day, 2023. As someone whose job is to appear in public on behalf of the British monarchy, this is somewhat unusual. In early January, the palace announced that Middleton would be, essentially, on sick leave from her normal duties as she recovered from planned abdominal surgery. Planned? But the Princess’s diary was booked out months in advance, and the announcement set in train a series of unexpected event cancellations.

In February 2024, people began to realise that they hadn’t seen Kate in a month. No photos had been released of her convalescing at home or waving from a car. Where was Kate? At the same time, King Charles was going through his own health crisis and publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer. As rumours swirled about his health, we got the standard Royal statements and photo ops, with King Charles looking comparatively well as he waved from a car.

But Kate, Kate is a different story. In an attempt to squash some of the rumours circulating about her retreat from public life (she’d had a Brazilian butt lift, she was growing out her bangs), we were treated to a series of increasingly odd images. In the first, a grainy pap shot, she appeared to be sitting next to her mother in a car, but the photo was of such poor quality and taken from such a distance that online commentators were not convinced it was her at all. Mother’s Day in the UK rolled around, and Kensington Palace released a photo of Kate Middleton via Instagram with her children. The photo was later revealed to have been photoshopped and major news agencies took the step of issuing a ‘kill notice’ on the image, signalling that they could not verify its authenticity. A few days later, footage claiming to be of Kate and William at a local market market surfaced. Again, the footage was poor quality, and grainy. No other recordings of the outing appeared to exist, and again the internet said, “that’s not Kate.”

In a last-ditch attempt to fix the problem, Kensington Palace collaborated with the BBC to produce a video of Kate, sitting alone on a garden bench, explaining to the public that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was currently undergoing treatment following her surgery.

And yet, the rumours persist. Posters speculate that the BBC video is, itself, AI-generated.

What is ‘real’ anymore?

Why did this series of unfortunate events take hold in the way it did? My argument is that, for the first time, we are repeatedly encountering the collapse of the relationship between the sign and its signifier. We are used to thinking of these two categories in reference to each other, but as Baudrillard theorised in 1981, this direct connection has collapsed. There is “no more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept.”

We are encountering the difficulty of disentangling the real from the illusion. As such, we doubt the epistemic authority of the image or the video, asking, “Is this real?” while grappling with the fact that the real is becoming increasingly difficult to locate.  The image has lost its status as an authoritative representation of reality.

The failure of Kensington Palace to adequately address this situation also points to the difficulty in maintaining an illusion when the relationship to ‘the real’ has collapsed. So, we find ourselves in a world where Twitter (presently X) sleuths scrutinise every pixel of an image from the foliage in the background to try to locate the ‘real’. But in the age of simulation, the harder we chase the real and try to reinforce the binary between the real and the simulation, or illusion, the harder they become to locate.

Baudrillard argues, “Of the same order of impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is is no longer possible.”

Just as it is not possible to situate the ‘real’ in relation to the Kate Middleton PR crisis, it is simultaneously impossible for Kensington Palace to sustain the illusion that she was unproblematically recovering at home.

More materially, the case of the ‘missing’ Kate Middleton, marks, I think, the first time that the slipperiness between the real and the simulation, and the difficulty of orientating ourselves in this space has been broadly felt. It feels, a little like being tumbled head over feet in the surface, unable to locate which way is up. 

The image as spectacle

We can also draw on the work of Debord, who opens his book, The Society of the Spectacle, with the following compelling argument, “The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.” Arguably, this describes the intensification and proliferation of images in social media contexts, where we encounter both ‘real’ and synthetic media, including AI-generated images, in a platforms-based context in which they can only be ‘looked at’, not experienced. 

Debord also highlights the importance of the spectacle as a ‘means of unification’ and the ‘focal point of all visions and all consciousness’. The ‘faked’ images of Kate provided this very means of unification described by Debord, Twitter (currently X) was almost wholly given over to analysis of the photos, video, analysis of the PR response, and analysis of analysis. It was quite literally the focal point of all visions and consciousness, almost completely dominating international news coverage. Debord is a Marxist, and warns that the spectacle’s danger lies its ‘domain of delusion and false consciousness’. While I am less concerned with the production of false consciousness, in the landscape of media excess, I am interested in his point that the spectacle “is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by image.”

Debord’s critique here centres on how the spectacle is enrolled in the dominant mode of production, and how it supports and reinforces particular (capitalist) modes of social organisation. The spectacle is a distraction from the issues of capitalist society, which entralls and enraptures us, to the detriment of our own emancipation. In the society sketched by Debord, the image still has epistemic authority, in contrast to Baudrillard, who is pointing to the collapse of that authority and how the real and the representation fold in on themselves.

To quote the girl from the Old El Paso ad, “Why don’t we have both?”

Does this image function, now, more powerfully as a spectacle as it moves further away from the real?