I first encountered Baudrillard from a friend in Brooklyn. He was embarrassed by his interest in the author - “I love him, I’m weird, it’s crazy”. and so decided to read his books myself. Later, I reconnected with an old friend, she was much cooler than me and loved literature, when I mentioned Baudrillard she became animated and we reconeccted stronger. She told me no one she knows get’s this. The feeling I got from each of these encounters, was that anyone reading Baudrillard felt they stumbled across something secret, and they felt connected to his writing, even alienated. I first heard about Baudrillard from a friend in Brooklyn, he was embarrassed by how much he loved his writing labelling it (and himself) as weird, crazy, disgustingly grandiose. This made me read it immediately. Later, I mentioned Baudrillard to a friend I had grown apart from. She was a literature major, and though we had shared interest in philosophy in the past, became animated in a way I hadn’t seen before. She said no one she knows gets this. We became closer again. Baudrillard’s readership feels like people who noticed something, and then feel alienated in holding of that knowledge. That feeling is probably intentional, or at minimum fitting. The book’s argument is that we live in hyperreality, a condition in which the simulation precedes and eventually replaces the thing it was meant to represent. The map comes before the territory. The price comes before the value. The model comes before the phenomenon. Once this has happened far enough, pointing it out sounds slightly mad, because the simulation is now the shared ground everyone is standing on. Of course the map is the territory. What else would it be? Baudrillard moves through four stages of this displacement. An image begins as a reflection of reality. It then masks and distorts reality. Then it masks the absence of reality. Finally it bears no relation to reality at all and becomes a pure simulacrum… a copy with no original. Disneyland (staged as fiction so that the surrounding Los Angeles feels real, even though it isn’t), Watergate (a manufactured scandal whose function was to prove that scandal is still possible, therefore that power is still accountable), and the Borges fable of the map so detailed it covered the territory exactly, now inverted: it is the territory rotting beneath the map, not the map that fades. The limitation is Baudrillard himself. He writes in cascading assertion rather than argument, and at several points the opacity feels load-bearing, as though certain claims would not survive being stated plainly. The style does real damage. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, written fifteen years earlier, makes most of the same points with more rigour and less performance. Read Debord if you want the argument. Read Baudrillard if you want to feel the argument, which is a different and sometimes more useful thing. This is for people who have already sensed the thing the book describes and want a vocabulary for it. Key ideas

  • Simulacra: representations that no longer have an original. The copy preceded the thing it copies.
  • Hyperreality: a state in which simulations are functionally more real than reality, they structure behaviour, allocate resources, define what is possible.
  • The four stages of the image: reflects reality → masks reality → masks the absence of reality → bears no relation to reality.
  • The precession of simulacra: models do not represent the world; they produce it.
  • The desert of the real: what remains when the territory has been replaced by its map.