The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Simulations

LAUREN LANGMAN

Loyola University Chicago, USA

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs212

The primary theorist of simulation/simulacra was sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who suggested (Baudrillard 1994) that there has been a transition from a society mass-producing goods to a postmodern order of mass-produced images and meanings wherein a world dominated by simulation has emerged. In this new order of simulation, it becomes ever more difficult to find the original until eventually there is total simulation and differences between true and false have disappeared. The simulacra, representations of representations, cannot be distinguished from the real – indeed one is led to believe that reality no longer exists. In 1961, Daniel Boorstin wrote of “pseudo events” that exist only in images or representations.

The first order of simulation, found in premodern society, was the counterfeit, the illusion, the fraud substituted for the real. The sign becomes more important than the physical reality it purportedly represented. The meaning of the sign, the signifier, became detached from what it represented, the signified. With the mass production and repetitive displays of images as part of the process of the commodification of information, we have the second order of simulation: the differences between images and what is represented begins to collapse. The image misrepresents, yet hides an underlying reality that can be discerned. For Marx, ideology is a set of understandings produced ...