This is the book in which Baudrillard's apparatus arrives assembled: the precession of simulacra, the hyperreal, the four phases of the image, the three orders of simulacra, implosion, deterrence, and the thesis that the real has not been falsified but liquidated and replaced by its operational double. It is not a treatise. It is eighteen essays, several of them readings of films and events, that circle one reversal from different entry points: the model no longer follows the real, it precedes and produces it, and the real survives only as the model's alibi. The brief reconstructs that movement essay by essay and carries the load-bearing formulations whole, so the passages can be lifted straight into writing. Two pieces of scaffolding are reproduced first, because Baudrillard deploys them throughout without re-explaining them: the four phases of the image, stated in the first essay, and the three orders of simulacra, stated late in "Simulacra and Science Fiction" but operative everywhere.

The conceptual spineThe apparatus, stated once

The book opens by retiring the Borges fable of the map as detailed as the empire, then inverting it. What has disappeared is not the map but the territory, and with it the difference that gave abstraction its charm.

Page 1

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. 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. 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, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

The hyperreal is not the unreal. It is produced, indefinitely reproducible, and indexed to nothing outside itself.

Page 2

The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. 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. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

The hinge of the whole book is a distinction that looks merely lexical and is not. Baudrillard takes the proof from Littré, the simulated illness: where the symptom can be produced, the medicine that treats real illnesses by their objective causes loses its object.

Page 3

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."

The army case runs the same logic to the point where the institution capitulates to the produced symptom.

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Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" and the authentic symptom. "If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion.

Simulation is then set against representation as its opposite principle, and the relation between them stated as an envelopment rather than a falsification.

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Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). 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. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.

The most-cited passage in the book follows immediately: the four phases through which the image passes, and the gloss that names each.

Page 6

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.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance—representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance—it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.

The decisive break is between the third phase and the fourth, and Baudrillard marks it as the passage out of the regime to which ideology still belongs.