"...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true" (Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulation")
The concept of Simulacra, or Simulacrum, was not invented by Jean Baudrillard, and it was a recurring concept in French philosophical thought, such as that of Deleuze, before the publication of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" in 1981. In its lexical ordering, simulacra refers to a material image that appears as something else without having the features or essence of that something. This is reminiscent of Plato's objection to representations that come to replace the "real" and from which we lose access.
In "Simulacra and Simulation", Baudrillard poses the question of what happens in a world that is ultimately denied all access to the real, where only simulacra and simulation exist. For Baudrillard, this is indeed the world in which we live. Simulations take over our relationship with real life, creating a hyperreality that is a copy without an original. This hyperreality occurs when the distinction between reality and representation collapses, and we can no longer see an image as reflecting anything other than a symbolic exchange of signifiers in culture, rather than the real world.
In the chapter "Precession of Simulacra", Baudrillard describes three orders of simulacra. The first order is one in which reality is represented by the image (the map represents the territory). The second order of simulacra is one in which the distinction between reality and representation becomes blurred. The third order of simulacra is that of simulation, which replaces the relationship between reality and representation. In this order, reality itself is lost in favor of a hyperreality.
Baudrillard famously gives the examples of Disneyland and Watergate to demonstrate the function of the third order of simulacra and the production of a hyperreality that leads us to believe that we can distinguish reality from representation, the real from the imaginary, and the copy from its original.
