Simulacra and Simulation

Why it’s on the list: Baudrillard’s 1981 essay on the copy that precedes and replaces the thing copied — the map before the territory, the model before the reality, the four orders of the image ending in the simulacrum that has no original at all. The source of “the desert of the real” and, via that, of most of the vocabulary popular culture uses about simulation.

Where I saw it: Kyle pasted the cover of the 1994 University of Michigan Press translation into the note. The cover image is archived in the repo at wiki/attachments/simulacra-and-simulation/cover.png.

Connections

• Postmodernism — the tradition; this is one of its load-bearing texts.
• Media · Advertising — the machinery Baudrillard is describing.
• Language of Discourse · Ideological Family Tree — the portfolio ideas this sits across.