Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Simulation is not metaphor and not rhetorical heightening. It is the diagnosis of what has actually arrived. The precession of simulacra is the structural fact that the model now precedes the territory: the operational sign — the model, the survey, the genetic code, the algorithm, the simulation of an event before the event — generates the real of which it appears to be the copy. Hyperreality names the condition in which the distinction between the real and its representation has imploded, not because representations have been multiplied excessively but because the order in which the real preceded its representation has been operationally reversed.12
The four orders of the image (the reflection of a profound reality, the mask and perversion of a profound reality, the masking of the absence of a profound reality, the pure simulacrum that has no relation to any reality whatever) describe the historical itinerary by which the operational sign has displaced the symbolic. Integral reality is the mature formulation: the condition in which everything has been realized — made visible, operational, transparent — and there is therefore nothing left that is not real, which is to say, nothing left that retains the form of the real, which required a constitutive outside.34
The Enlightenment project of universal transparency has completed itself, and the completion is the perfect crime: the murder of reality by its own technical and semiotic perfection.
All Western faith and good faith became 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?Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6
It also hides in the signature, the metaphysical sign of painting and the metaphysics of representation at the limit, where it takes itself as its own model (the 'pure gaze') and turns around itself in the compulsive repetition of the code.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 94
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
This gigantic enterprise of disillusionment -- of, literally, putting the illusion of the world to death, to leave an absolutely real world in its stead -- is what is properly meant by simulation. It is not, then, the real which is the opposite of simulation -- the real is merely a particular case of that simulation -- but illusion. And there is no crisis of reality. Far from it.The Perfect Crime, pp. 24–25
The Frankfurt-School and Anglophone-Marxist reception read simulation as either metaphor (a dramatic way of saying the media saturate everyday life) or aestheticizing nihilism (the replacement of social analysis with sign-play). Both readings domesticate the thesis. The thesis is not metaphor and not nihilism. It is a diagnosis of integral reality, and the diagnosis IS the position: there is no critical posture external to integral reality, because the critical posture has itself been absorbed into the operational. What remains is judo — using the system's own force against itself — and the fatal strategy of pushing the system's logic to its ironic limit. Merrin's reading of integral reality as the mature formulation, Hegarty's reading of the animal as irreducible limit, and the late aphoristic register of Cool Memories III-V are the contemporary scholarly recovery of what the early reception domesticated.