Simulacra and Simulation is a book written (originally in french) by Jean Baudrillards in 1981. The piece seeks to interrogate the relationship between reality and ‘modern’ society. In said book, many of Baudrillar’s most famous theories were put into paper like the hyper-reality and the simulacra.
In the piece ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, written in 1981, Jean Baudrillard talks about the recent phenomenon in our society in which humanity became so dependent of models and instructions that it has lost any vincule with the true ‘reality’ around, the one which generated the instructions, the origins. In this alternative reality, society merely imitates the origin, and this ‘ilusion’ determines what is the real world – as in “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory” (Baudrillard, 1981: 01). According to the author the world is no longer a question of “imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard, 1981: 02).
Baudrillard suggests that all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice has been lost. According to him, there are three “orders of simulacra”:
1) the image is a clear counterfeit of the real; the image is recognized as just an illusion;
2) the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production, that allows the raising of the amount of copies being made around the world.
3) a precession of simulacra – the representation precedes and determines the real.
Baudrillard even points to a number of phenomena to explain this loss of distinctions between “reality” and the simulacrum, such as media culture, exchange-value, multinational capitalism, urbanization, language and ideology.
Baudrillard's Sandmen 