A short book, published in France in 1981, by a sociologist who had stopped doing sociology. Most of the vocabulary in use here comes out of its first thirty pages.

It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, 1981

The centre of it is a sequence. An image, he says, passes through four successive phases, and only the last one is new:

• it is the reflection of a profound reality;
• it masks and denatures a profound reality;
• it masks the absence of a profound reality;
• it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

The fourth is not a lie. A lie is oriented: it points at something true and stands in front of it, and it can be got out of the way. The fourth order points at nothing, stands in front of nothing, and cannot be corrected because there is no position from which the correction would be made.

His example is a theme park. It is held up as imaginary, he says, so that everything around it can be taken for real. Prisons are there so that the society outside them will not read as carceral. The visibly fake is load-bearing.

He supplies no procedure for telling the third phase from the fourth. There is none in the book and the book does not appear to want one, which is the standing objection to him, and which does not dispose of him, because the objection is a demand for a test and the claim is that the test is the thing that went missing.

A lie can be exposed. This is the condition that follows exposure.