The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext's new Foreign Agents Series. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period Production for the industrial era and Simulation, controlled by the code. The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort. ) theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of (. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, is in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves.
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