Simulacra and Simulation

Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical essay by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which he 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.

...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that 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 people's current understanding of their lives.^{[citation needed]} The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which human life 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 human life 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".

Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages:

Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period:

Part of the three-order simulacra, the second-order simulacra, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, are symbols of a non-faithful representation of the original. Here, signs and images do not faithfully show reality, but might hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

The first-order simulacrum is a faithful copy of the original and the third order are symbols that have come to be without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent, but that pretend to be a faithful copy of an original. Third-order simulacra are symbols in themselves, taken for reality, and a further layer of symbolism is added. This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative than the original entity, when authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).