Simulations (Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents)

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. They all are generated by the matrix.Simulations never existed as a book before it was translated into English. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of theory, was The Procession of Simulacra. It had first been publi shed in Simulacre et Simulations (1981). The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort (1977). 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...