Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

In my view, his point was more clearly made regarding the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident.

In both cases, Baudrillard argues what we “know” is not the event itself, but a representation that has been created through fictionalized accounts and “common knowledge” with varying degrees of accuracy. One is the Holocaust and the other is the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.

These two examples are very different, and I believe one is a stronger argument for Baudrillard’s ideas than is the other. To clarify, let’s discuss a couple examples of events that Baudrillard says that we don’t know, but instead we know a simulacrum of. I tended to find that there was a kernel of truth in the points that Baudrillard was making, but that he often blew that kernel up into an absurdity. A reasonable reader might conclude that much of the book consists of crackpot ideas. This is not to say that said ideas are all sound or unassailably true. The book’s strength is in suggesting outside-the-box, thought-provoking ideas. This is a collection of 20-ish essays that share as a theme the idea that we live not so much in a world of events, information, and things, but in a world of simulacra in which those things represent or symbolize something (either the true version of that object or something else altogether.) After an opening that introduces the idea of simulacra and simulations, the chapters each look at an example of illusion and simulation in our world. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard 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. 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. 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. 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.