Simulacra and Simulation

A collection of essays arguing that in media-saturated societies, signs no longer represent reality but replace it. The opening essay, The Precession of Simulacra, starts from Borges's fable of a map so detailed it covers the whole territory, and reverses it: now the map comes first and the territory rots away, leaving what Baudrillard calls the desert of the real. He traces successive phases of the image, from a faithful copy, to a distortion, to a mask for the absence of reality, to a pure simulacrum with no relation to any reality at all. The result is hyperreality, a world of models more real than the real. His examples include Disneyland, which he says is presented as imaginary so that the rest of America seems real, and political scandal. Later essays treat cinema, television, cloning, the Pompidou Centre and nihilism. Critics find the claims sweeping and hard to test.

It supplies the vocabulary of simulation and hyperreality that many readers now reach for when thinking about advertising, virtual worlds, social media and news.