Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original.Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance-it is of the order of maleficence”.The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality” (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called “the sacramental order”.
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“Simulacra and Simulation” breaks the sign-order into 4 stages (Wiki): Baudrillard called this phenomenon the “precession of simulacra”– expressed in four stages.” Baudrillard claims that our current society has “replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality.” Furthermore, these simulacra are not “merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives.” The simulacra that Baudrillard refer to are thus the significations of how the symbolism of culture and media constructs perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible “…Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Simulacra and Simulation furthermore converses how symbols and signs relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). …The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. “ Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original.
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In Baudrillard’s Simulcra and Simulations from 1981, he interrogates the relationships among reality, symbols, and society.