Simulacra and Simulation
Simulacra and Simulation () is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which the author seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence. Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Summary. Definition. "Simulacra and Simulation" is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and  how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which  our lives and shared existence are rendered legible. (These ideas had appeared earlier in Guy Debord's 1967 "The Society of the Spectacle".) Baudrillard believed that society had become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was becoming meaningless by being infinitely mutable; he called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra". Stages. "Simulacra and Simulation" delineates the sign-order into four stages: Degrees. "Simulacra and Simulation" identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period: Phenomena. Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and  simulacra originates in several phenomena: Analogies. A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from "On Exactitude in Science" by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map was expanded and destroyed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is conversely the map that people live in, the simulation of reality where the people of the Empire spend their lives ensuring their place  in the representation is properly circumscribed and detailed by the map-makers; conversely, it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse. When Baudrillard refers to the "precession of simulacra" in "Simulacra and Simulation", he is referring to the way simulacra have come to "precede" the real in the sense mentioned above, rather than to any "succession" of historical phases of the image. Referring to "On Exactitude in Science", he argued that just as for contemporary society the simulated copy had superseded the original object, so, too, the map had come to precede the geographic territory (c.f. Map–territory relation ), e.g. the first Gulf War (which Baudrillard later used as an object demonstration): the image of war preceded real war. War comes not when it is made by sovereign against sovereign (not when killing for attritive and strategic neutralisation purposes is authorised; nor even, properly spoken, when shots are fired); rather, war comes when society is generally convinced that it is coming.