Simulacra and Simulation

Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.

The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernism.The publication of “”Simulacra et Simulation”” in 1981 marked Jean Baudrillard’s first important step toward theorizing the postmodern. Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra – the copy without an original – and simulation.

These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture.Baudrillard’s book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.

Table of Contents

1. The Precession of Simulacra
2. History: A Retro Scenario
3. Holocaust
4. The China Syndrome
5. Apocalypse Now
6. The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
7. Hypermarket and Hypercommodity
8. The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
9. Absolute Advertising, Ground -Zero Advertising
10. Clone Story
11. Holograms
12. Crash
13. Simulacra and Science Fiction
14. The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses
15. The Remainder
16. Untitled
17. Values Last Tango
18. On Nihilism

About the Author

Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.