Although the term has been around since Plato's time, it is really only in the 20th century that it has acquired the
significance it has today.
The two most important manes that have come to be associated with with this concept are Jean Baudrillard and
Giles Deleuze.
Baudrillard tends to use the words 'simulation' and 'simulacrum' interchangeably, and offers not so much a new
theory of the simulacrum as a new history of the present viewed through the conceptual lens of the simulacrum.
For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is essentially the copy of a copy, that is to say, the copy of something that is not
itself an original, and hence an utterly degraded form. As its limit, as in certain accounts of postmodernism, the
simulacrum is used to deny the possibility of anything being the singular or origin of either an idea or a thing.
On this view of things, anything deemed to be an original idea or object is in fact, an optical illusion of the same
order as back-projection in cinema. Another way of putting this would be to say that a simulacrum is only ever an
effect an never a cause.
In contrast, Deleuze uses the concept of the simulacrum against that of simulation, to create an immanent theory
of representation.
The simulacrum is not a concept Deleuze wrote much about, indeed addresses it directly in two essays(on Plato
and Lucretius) attached as appendices to Loguque du Sens (1969), translated as Logic of Sense (1990), but his
contribution has been decisive. His argument is that the copy or simulacrum is an image 'with' resemblance
(by definition, the copy resembles the thing copied), whereas the simulacrum is an image 'without' resemblance
(man is made in the image of God, according to catechism, but since the fall - I.e. because of his sin - he no longer
resembles Him.). The simulacrum is not just a degraded copy, Deleuze argues, it has its own positive power, which
interrupts the relation between original and copy.
His example of this is Pop Art, which in his view pushed the copy so far it became a simulacrum, an image without
resemblance (e.g. Andy Wharhol's famous Campbell's Soup prints).
Simulacrum-an image or representation of someone or something,
late 16th century, from Latin 'simulare'.
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