What is the precession of simulacra?

Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Jean Baudrillard answers

The map no longer follows the territory. The territory follows the map — or rather, there is no longer any territory at all, only the map generating what we mistake for one. This is what I mean by the precession of simulacra: the model precedes, and produces, the real of which it appears to be a copy.¹ The old Borges fable — cartographers so meticulous that their map achieves perfect coextensivity with the Empire — was once the most beautiful allegory of simulation.

But even that fable is now obsolete, because it still presupposes two terms: map and territory, representation and referent, with the representation arriving second, derivative, subordinate.² What has happened since is the collapse of that order. Simulation is no longer the doubling of a real that precedes it; it is the generation of a real without origin or referent — a hyperreal.³

The territory whose shreds persist here and there is not the Empire's territory; it is ours. There are three orders through which this has passed.⁴ The first order — counterfeit — operates on the natural law of value: the sign imitates, it claims to represent something it is not, and the fraud is possible because the original still exists as a standard.

The second order — production — is the industrial era's dominant schema: signs are mass-reproduced, but the logic of seriality still refers, however distantly, to a use-value, a referent, a real process. The third order — simulation, the current phase — operates on the structural law of value alone: the sign no longer refers to anything outside the code; it refers only to other signs.

What distinguishes the third order is that the real is no longer measured against an ideal or a negative instance; it becomes purely operational.⁵ The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, memory banks — models of control — and can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational because it no longer has any outside by which rationality would be measured.

A hyperreal, sheltered from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of differences.⁶ The definition of the real has itself shifted: the real is that of which an equivalent reproduction is possible.⁷ Push that definition to its limit and the real becomes that which is always already reproduced — which is to say, the hyperreal is not a copy of something prior; it is what reality has become when the process of reproducibility has consumed the original entirely.

Today reality itself is hyperrealist.⁸ Political reality, social reality, historical reality — all have incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation so thoroughly that we live inside what I called the aesthetic hallucination of reality, with no fiction left that life might confront as its conqueror. The precession of simulacra is not a metaphor for media saturation. It is the structural fact of what has arrived.

Sources

1. the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory

   Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 8–9

2. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction.

   Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 9–10

3. 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

4. There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance

   Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 71

5. 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.

   Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 9–10

6. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

   Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 9–10

7. The very definition of the real is that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction.

   Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 94

8. today reality itself is hyperrealist. The secret of surrealism was that the most everyday reality could become surreal... 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. 94