Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Simulation is not a lie about the real. It is the condition in which the real has been replaced by its own model — not covered over, not distorted, but generated from models that precede any territory they might once have been said to represent.1 The old Borges fable of the map that grows until it covers the territory exactly was, for a time, the most beautiful allegory available.
But even inverted it no longer serves: we are past the point where the map and territory could be distinguished, however closely they overlapped.2 What we have now is the generation of a real without origin or reality — what I call the hyperreal.3 The territory does not precede the map. The map precedes the territory, engenders it, and what persists in the deserts is not the fraying map but the shreds of the real itself.
The four phases of the image mark the historical itinerary. First, the image reflects a profound reality. Second, it masks and denatures that reality. Third, it masks the absence of any profound reality. Fourth, it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.4 The transition between the third and fourth phases is decisive — the move from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing.5
The first regime belongs to theology; the second inaugurates the era in which there is no longer a Last Judgment capable of separating the false from the true. Representation rested on the principle of equivalence between the sign and the real. Simulation is the radical negation of that equivalence — the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference.6
Simulation does not absorb into representation as a special case of false appearance; it envelops the whole edifice of representation as a simulacrum. The industrial order introduced a preliminary stage worth distinguishing. With serial production, objects become indistinct simulacra of one another: the relation between them is no longer one of original and counterfeit, but of equivalence and indifference.7
The extinction of the original reference is what makes production as such possible — the general law of equivalences rests on it.8 Benjamin saw the essential implication of mechanical reproduction, but the serial-industrial simulacrum is still second-order, still relatively modest in ambition compared to what the third order — simulation proper — achieves.9
What the third order achieves is integral: everyday reality, political reality, historical and economic reality, has already incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation so completely that we live entirely within what I called the aesthetic hallucination of reality.10 The old surrealist slogan — reality is stranger than fiction — has been outrun, because there is no longer any fiction that life can confront as its outside.11
Reality has passed completely into the game of reality. The system protects itself from any referential anxiety by duplicating itself as its own critique, operating its own metalanguage from within.12 This is the perfect crime: not the murder of the real by its enemies, but the murder of the real by its own technical and semiotic perfection.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 8–9
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly... this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 8–9
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.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 8–9
Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 13–14
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 13–14
Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 13–14
In the series, objects become indistinct simulacra of one another and, along with objects, of the men that produce them.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 76
The extinction of the original reference alone facilitates the general law of equivalences, that is to say, the very possibility of production.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 76
In relation to the era of the counterfeit, the double, the mirror and the theatre, games of masks and appearances, the serial and technical era of reproduction is basically an era of less ambitious scope.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 76
Today everyday, political, social, historical, economic, etc., reality has already incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation so that we are now living entirely within the 'aesthetic' hallucination of reality.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 95
The old slogan 'reality is stranger than fiction'... has been outrun, since there is no longer any fiction that life can possibly confront, even as its conqueror.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 95
Every closed system protects itself in this way from the referential and the anxiety of the referential, as well as from all metalanguage that the system wards off by operating its own metalanguage, that is, by duplicating itself as its own critique.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 95