Simulacrum — From the Latin simulacrum (image, likeness, phantom). Traditionally it denotes the copy of something — and, more specifically, the degraded copy, the appearance without ground. In Plato, the simulacrum (phantasma) is opposed to the good copy (eikōn): it is the imitation that strays from the true model (the Idea), which is why the Republic distrusts the imitative arts. Gilles Deleuze, in “Plato and the Simulacrum” (collected in The Logic of Sense, 1969), inverted this hierarchy: the simulacrum — a copy without a model, one that affirms difference — would be precisely what ruins the primacy of the original and of the “same.”
The term’s contemporary fame, however, is owed to Jean Baudrillard. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), to simulate is no longer to represent a pre-existing reality but to generate it from models: what is produced is a real without origin or reference, the hyperreal — “more real than the real.” “The map precedes the territory,” he writes (the precession of simulacra), inverting Borges’s fable. Baudrillard describes four successive phases of the image: it reflects a profound reality; it masks and perverts that reality; it masks the absence of a reality; and finally it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever — it becomes its own pure simulacrum. Unlike representation, which presupposes a real to which the sign refers, simulation abolishes that reference: the sign no longer exchanges for meaning, it merely circulates with other signs. Baudrillard’s famous examples are Disneyland — presented as imaginary so as to make us believe the rest is “real” — and war mediated by screens. The concept became central to theories of culture, media, and the digital age. See Jean Baudrillard.
← Glossary