Simulacra and Simulation

Author: Baudrillard, Jean, Glaser, Sheila

History of Western philosophy

Published on 31 December 1994 by The University of Michigan Press in the United States as part of 'The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism' series.

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.