Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

If you wish to understand this book, first please understand the fundamentals of the Post Modern Condition!! Then you can comprenhend the true meaning of this book.

The book explains the trend of cultural materalism in our current society that has created subcultures and materalistic trends (fashion, music, art, ect.), that are based on nothingness. They are purposeless and have engulfed in many different ways our society and everyone in it.

The seduction of materialism has led to APATHY for the real issues in the world, and has caged each one of us in our own hyper reality!!!

That is the message in this book. My sysnopsis is far too short, because it is very difficult to explain this book an its meaning in such a short paragraph. Once you have read it and understood it, you will see why the Matrix movie alludes to this book, and uses quotes from the book throughout the movie.

The seduction of materialism has led to APATHY for the real issues in the world, and reality itself has faded from sight!!! This is the true meaning of this book, and it explains how through simulation, simulacras become real, and lead to a culture built on nothingness, thus an inevitable self inflicted NIHILISM for our society!!!. Real information is distorted through every median it travels through, from biased opinions to exaggerations, and parasitic materialistic trends from either corporate marketing schemes or cultural insecurities, this distorion turns reality into a hyper reality that each one of us is living in.

This book and the study of the Post Modern Condition have led me to be a better, more moral person, by rejecting the socioeconomic garbage that our society tries to feed you in different forms, everyday of your life.


Pointless? Sure. But enlightening still.   February 1, 2003
A. Steinhebel (Tacoma, WA United States)
79 out of 104 found this review helpful

Everything you have heard about this book is true. It is dense, complicated, annoyingly analytical, and fairly pointless. Yet it's also genius. To preface...Continental philosophy, in the past hundred years or so, has not been known for it's practical applications. Existentialism and Postmodernism are mental games for the Ivory Tower intellectual, sure. But that doesn't mean that they do not provide a model for looking at and thinking about the world that the average intellect can relate to and use. And this book is no exception to that. It IS dificult to understand, yes, but no where near as bad as most people in these reviews seem to think. Anyone with a basic understanding of Objectivism v. Subjectism, Platonism, and the empirical philosphers can get plenty out of it. The vocabulary is no worse then most other philosophy, and a lot less complicated then some (this isn't Kant). Baisically, Baudrillard shows us that reality no longer exists, and has been replaced by simulacra via the process of simulation, creatin what he calls the "hyperreal". It is a very enlightening read, and will make you really rethink how you view the world. The major problem with the book, as at least one other person has pointed out, is Baudrillard's cultural references. They are quite dated by this point, and you'll find yourself completely lost as to his point, since you can't relate to his subject. In the end though, it is a book that anyone interested in contemporary philosophy should read.


The desert of the real.   July 18, 2003
Miguel B. Llora (Honolulu, Hawaii USA)
50 out of 57 found this review helpful

The profundity of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" as a complete set of essays, in total, and his 1983 essay "The Precession of Simulacra" lies in its simplicity. In this book, Baudrillard plays in the postmodern realm of collapsing realities into social construction. According to Baudrillard, the construction of the "real" is done through "myths" or conceptualization. These myths though have no connection to reality. What in effect occurs in that the fine line between an image and "reality" collapses into itself, what we are left with is hyperreality. Baudrillard writes:

"No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks and models of control, and it can be reproduced an indefinite numbers of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere."(2)

Hyperreality results, eventually into confusion and apathy. Baudrillard again:

"The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of the simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself." (1)

In this hyper commercial scenario viewers are inundated with simulation and simulacra. In the event that viewers get wind of the deception, apathy is results. Can Baudrillard really prove this? I have not found any proof. What he is, in fact, saying is the referent is dead. The referent has been killed in the sea of simulacra. Baudrillard writes:

"This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murders of the real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith become engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum, not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference." (6)

With the death of the referent, simulation and simulacra become the "real." What results is a destruction of what as a perceived stable structure that grounded theory. Where are we to seek groundedness now? Again we return to Baudrillard:

"Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a basic reality.
it masks and perverts a basic reality.
it masks the absence of a basic reality.
it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own
pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance - representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance, but of simulation." (6)

What are the implications of this? What most critics of postmodern analysis prey on is a sense of utter desolation and destruction and that there seems to be no starting point for action. The question asked is: Where to from here? How can we effect action in a world always in a state of flux? As much as Baudrillard proves informative about how we construct truth and knowledge the decimation is so complete, so total. Baudrillard may or may not prove difficult to read but he is certainly more difficult, if not impossible, to use to effect any action. The reader now has to decide.

Miguel Llora


A Metafictional Mystery Novel   December 4, 2003
Scott J. Bogucki (New York, New York)
50 out of 54 found this review helpful

This is by no means an easy text to read. For those unfamiliar with postmodern tropes-and especially those who have never read Baudrillard before-this text may seem especially daunting. I recommend that these people start with the essay entitled 'Simulacra and Science Fiction'. In this essay, Baudrillard details the three orders of simulacra: the first, natural simulacra, are operatic, founded on images, and aim at the restoration of "the ideal institution of nature made in God's image"; the second order are both productive and operative, based on energy, and work toward "a continuous globalization and expansion [and] an indefinite liberation of energy"; the third order, the simulacra of simulation, are "founded on information [and] total operationality, hyperreality, [and the] aim of total control" (121). The differences between the various simulacra exist in the distance between the real and the imaginary exhibited by each order. This illuminating interstice provides the locus for projecting critical activity and idealism. The first order maximizes the projection, allowing the utopia to stand in direct opposition to the real. The second order reduces this projection. Baudrillard describes it as a hyper-productive universe in which "science fiction adds the multiplication of its own possibilities" (122). As all previous models implode, the third order of simulacra witnesses the complete disappearance of the projection between reality and the imaginary as it becomes reabsorbed in simulation. To Baudrillard, this is the world in which we live: no more real, no more imaginary, no more fiction, just an endless regression of lost meaning with no foundation, or rather an endless precession of simulacra.

The book could easily be read like an apocalyptic Mythologies or a nihilistic Logic of Late Capitalism. In the first essay alone, 'The Precession of Simulacra', Baudrillard draws on such diverse cultural examples as the Tasaday Indians, the mummy of Ramses II, Watergate, and Disneyland. Bordering on the prophetic, Baudrillard heralds the end of Foucault's panopticon by referring to what was then (in the early seventies) only an experiment in TV verite, or what we now effortlessly refer to as reality TV. This first chapter heralds Baudrillard's "Anti-Copernican revolution": a world in which the universe presents itself as its own simulation, reality dissolves in its relentless self-representation, and Ockham's Razor loses its edge (42). As the book continues, Baudrillard presents history as false nostalgia, numbing fetishism, and desensitizing mythology. War and film find themselves conjoined by technology in 'Apocalypse Now'. 'The China Syndrome' further reveals the "telefission of the real and of the real world" as Baudrillard juxtaposes the images of the movie of the same title alongside those of the nuclear catastrophe of Three Mile Island, the latter occurring shortly after the release of the former. Defying causal logic, these events blur the distinction between symptom and effect (53-54). Baudrillard samples modern architecture ('The Beauborg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence') and current fiction ('Crash'), criticizes the effects of simulacra on historical tragedy ('Holocaust'), and, in 'Clone Story', warns of the dangers in allowing the reproduction of aesthetic forms in political forms. Through observing the media and the marketplace, Baudrillard sees society drifting away from the primary language of fascination as it becomes reinterpreted into a prolixity of discourse in which information far outnumbers meaning and semiology offers no recourse.

Most critics condemn this book for its dense prose, of which there is plenty. To escape this, the text should instead be read as a metafictional mystery novel. The crime Baudrillard reports is the dissolution of the real at the hands of productive operationality. As the precession of simulacra unfurls throughout the course of the book, the reader is provided with Lacanian quilting points, clues which lead forever forward while constantly trying to refer to the past. With every subsequent presentation of ordered simulacra in the hierarchy of simulation, readers find themselves referencing the previous order, only to be propelled farther from reality. One becomes lost in cultural references and almost gives up completely on the notion that reality exists at all. Clues implode upon themselves, losing all referentiality. Perpetrators are lost, or rather dispersed across the universe. We confront ambiguous motives, polyvalent modus operandi, and amorphous crime scenes. The crime itself becomes erased, the victim disappears, and what we are left with is 'The Spiraling Cadaver', "the simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power" (149). Baudrillard, as the one who reported the original metacrime, offers up his own defense in 'On Nihilism': meaning is mortal while appearances are immortal, the latter remaining forever invulnerable to the nihilistic influences of the former. Referring once more to the beginning of the text, the reader finds renewed meaning in one of Baudrillard's first gestures toward the effects of simulacra. In 'The Precession of Simulacra', he shows that the police will react the same in a holdup regardless of whether it is real or simulated. As such, law and order remain nothing but simulation, therefore effectually nullifying any of our own detective abilities (19-22). Through investigating the crime, we lose all equivalence to the real, leaving the murder unsolvable. In order to fight the fascination we have with the mystery of reality's fate and the crime of its dissolution, we must marshal theoretical violence since truth no longer exists. Seduction, as opposed to fascination, begins through accepting the always already lost referential and the primacy of appearances.

Far from what the Wachowski brothers produce in The Matrix, Simulacra and Simulation is both unforgiving and relentless in its presentation of hyperreality. Unlike the movie, there is no transcendental savior, no neoplatonic allusions to ideals-only the stark unreality of our existence. Welcome to the real desert of the real.


Mega-intellectual, hard to follow, rambling, and fun   May 23, 1999
Peter F. Delaney (Gainesville, FL United States)
39 out of 44 found this review helpful

This book is not about coming up with the truth, or with understanding how things really work, or anything like that. It's about pointing out that the emperor is not only naked but standing on his head and juggling. Baudrillard is eternally fun as long as you don't take him too seriously. Let his insanity wash over you like a flood and turn off your reality filters for a while. Let him ask all the questions P. K. Dick does, only in greater and weirder detail. What is real? What is a commodity? Why are some things valuable? Things have no value outside of their relationship to other things... and sometimes, relationships and ideas are the only real commodity, hollow fronts for a system with no foundation in the real world at all. Could you have science without testing things against what is real? Can you simply study unreal things forever, producing paper after paper, all logically consistent but studying something that ultimately doesn't exist?

All of Baudrillard since he stopped his Marxist tirade has been a wildly funny and insightful parade of wrong ideas. Enjoy it, be altered by it, and then go back to your regularly scheduled Nike shoe purchase.