The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a

representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had
gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the
original.[2] Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum,
where a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real.[3] Other art forms
that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil,[4] pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave.[3]

Contents

 1Philosophy
 2Recreation
 3Caricature
 4Iconography
 5Word usage
 6Simulacrum as artificial beings
 7See also
 8References
 9External links

Philosophy[edit]
Simulacra have long been of interest to philosophers. In his Sophist, Plato speaks of two kinds of
image-making. The first is a faithful reproduction, attempted to copy precisely the original. The
second is intentionally distorted in order to make the copy appear correct to viewers. He gives the
example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on the top than on the bottom so that viewers
on the ground would see it correctly. If they could view it in scale, they would realize it was
malformed. This example from the visual arts serves as a metaphor for the philosophical arts and
the tendency of some philosophers to distort the truth so that it appears accurate unless viewed from
the proper angle.[5] Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum (but does not use the term) in
the Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their
senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.[6]
Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the
real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. According to Baudrillard, what the simulacrum
copies either had no original or no longer has an original (think a copy of a copy without an original).
Where Plato saw two types of representation—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—
Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality
(where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".
[7]
 In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern
philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the
avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned".
[8]
 Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means
of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal
resemblance".[9]
Alain Badiou, in speaking with reference to Nazism about Evil, writes,[10] "fidelity to a simulacrum,
unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the situation not by the universality of the void, but
by the closed particularity of an abstract set ... (the 'Germans' or the 'Aryans')".