We Happy Few: Simulacra and Signification

I explore the idea that an action or an event becomes detached from the 'real' by repeated signification and resignification until the signified is no longer part of the 'real' but only another sign. In this way it becomes hyperreal; in other words, what is left when representation has become the primary feature of experience in place of the real. We Happy Few engages with Jean Baudrillard's assertion that,

[t]he impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. (1999, p.19)

What gives rise to experience is simulation and what is experienced arises from simulation rather than experience itself. It arises from the position in which signification is no longer exchanged for the 'real' but refers only to signifying processes and ceases to refer to a signified or referent that is part of the 'real'.

The image We Happy Few: Our Flags is itself a simulacrum of the invasion of Iraq that we understand to have taken place in 2003. This (non)event, in Baudrillardian terms, was itself a simulacrum of the 1991 invasion, as well as the 1917 invasion and by extension every invasion of military aggression, most particularly those which are imperialist and whose inflection is Orientalist. The invading force depicted in We Happy Few: Our Flags is a group of toys which are carriers of meaning both as replications of military personnel and bearers of meaning as commodities that are culturally constructed and designated as being 'appropriate' as playthings, to the received category of 'toy'. They enact the 'universal-soldier' notion on which the legitimacy of warfare is based within international law whilst thereby dramatising the inherent contradiction between this legitimising facelessness in which soldiers execute impassively the political project of an accountable legislature with the heroism and singularity that popular discourse on warfare seeks to claim in inspirational oratory, the respect accorded through military decorations or the valorisation of the individual dead soldier returning to the colonial centre. The toys are tools for the transmission of cultural values, and tools for the inculcation of values in coming generations. They reinforce the political ideology of militarism as an accepted, consensual, a priori given, right down to their designation as appropriate for children. The assortment of toys – not all of them representative of military personnel – along with the framing of the photograph implies a much larger invading force of cultural values. In this way, the simulacrum becomes a precession of the values of commodification, mass production and reification as well as militarism. The thesis of the image is that the invasion is cultural; it posits that the suggestion that invasion can somehow 'blankly' be solely military without imparting cultural regime change is disingenuous. Further, it is therefore an agent of Orientalism, a discourse which self-replicates through cultural and political engagement with the 'Middle East' ranging from trade and artistic production to military intervention.

The haphazard, chaotic grouping of cheap toys forms a rag-tag troop, at once coherent and chaotic. It is haphazard on a number of levels: in their physical arrangement, disordered, out of rank, incoherently grouped, physically disorganised in the action; implied action which is itself haphazard in purpose, caught between defence and aggression, 'truth' and untruth of political discourse, economic action, patriotic purpose, Islamophobia and racism, realpolitik expediency and the pre-existing ideological construction of Orientalist tendencies and the unbidden precession of simulacra. Further, the toys symbolise the naivety of children's play in which death and combat are available as tropes to be conjured without consequence in an 'innocent' magical realism. I pose this as an irony because the political and military leaders seemingly deploy a parallel understanding of militarism to that of the toddler, similarly unaware of the structures of meaning underlying their 'innocent' actions and choices.

The ground on which the invading toys stand is constituted of the precession of simulacra of invasion, specifically three speeches: the 'St Crispin's Day' speech before the battle of Agincourt from Henry V by William Shakespeare; the celebrated 'Proclamation of Baghdad' made to the people of Baghdad Vilayet by General Sir Stanley Maude in 1917 and the speech of Colonel Tim Collins to his troops on the eve of the 2003 invasion, 'Our business now is north', which was much celebrated at the time by the right-wing press and circulated online, itself a tissue of crude quotation and allusion, possibly unconscious, to Winston Churchill, the Agincourt speech and popular culture's representations of 'noble' warfare.

In this way We Happy Few is elevated beyond a banal statement about the repetitious nature of history (though this is necessarily demonstrated in addition), to become a document demonstrative of the workings of simulacra within our understanding of militarism and the engagement of Britain (and England) with its colonial subjects, particularly in the theatre of the 'Middle East'. Baudrillard explores the example of hold-ups and hijackings but this could be just as easily applied to military invasions:

[T]hey function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their occurrence as signs, and no longer at all to their 'real' end. But this does not make them harmless. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer with a specific content or end, but indefinitely refracted by each other, […] that they cannot be controlled by an order that can only exert itself on the real and the rational. (1999, p.21)

For Baudrillard, the ability to see something as a simulacrum is to see beyond its own posited status to something of 'truer' value. The photographs comprising We Happy Few take the unusual and contradictory position of declaring themselves as simulacra and inviting an analysis of engagement with Iraq in light of this.