The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. As Baudrillard explained in his opening to his 1981 essay,Ībstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. If consumer goods are signs that are symptoms of desire, then logically Baudrillard would take the next step which is to make the case that nothing is “real” and that we are functioning in the hyperreal non-world of simulacra. The System of Objects (1968) was essentially a book for its time–based on the philosophy of Ferdinand de Saussure and Structuralism. Writing in the wake of May 1968 in Paris, the former Marxist Jean Baudrillard moved beyond Marxism and into a critique of Marxism and then, by the early eighties began a long engagement with the new economic system which appears in embryonic form in his early works. The simulacrum is never that/ Which conceals the truth-it is/ The truth which conceals that/ There is none./ The Simulacrum is true. “ The Precession of the Simulacra” (1981)
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