Simulacra and Simulation

In his opening chapter, Baudrillard claims that humans no longer live in a real, authentic world of experience. Instead, everything they encounter is either a copy of a real experience, or a copy of a copy, and so on—until it no longer resembles any aspect of the original. He terms these copies “simulacra.” The persistent abstraction caused by simulacra has destroyed the possibility of an authentic life, leaving behind a poor simulation, which he describes as “[the] desert of the real itself” (1). At first, the abstraction feels novel and exciting, as it did during the modernist movement. However, Baudrillard explains that the magic of abstraction is lost over time, and it begins to feel real. Humans lose the ability to differentiate between reality and simulation until, eventually, they find no difference at all. This forms the basis of Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality,” which he argues is the simulation that humans take as real.

Hyperreality differs from pretending or representation because it accepts the abstraction as truth. In a hyperreality, humans are surrounded by signs that merely symbolize other signs instead of tangible objects rooted in reality.