Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which he seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.

[citation needed] The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which human life and shared existence are rendered legible.

The consequence of the propagation of second-order simulacra is that, within the affected context, nothing is "real", though those engaged in the illusion are incapable of seeing it.

In his essay The Precession of the Simulacra, Baudrillard recalls a tale from a short story by Borges in which a king requests a map (i.e. a symbol) to be produced so detailed that it ends up coming into one-to-one correspondence with the territory (i.e. the real area the map is to represent); this references the philosophical concept of map–territory relation.

The method of this termination comes through the lack of oppositional elements in society, with the mass having become "the silent majority", an imploded concept which absorbs images passively, becoming itself a media overwritten by those who speak for it (i.e. the people are symbolically represented by governing agents and market statistic, marginalizing the people themselves).

In Baudrillard's rendition, it is conversely the map that people live in, the simulation of reality where the people of the Empire spend their lives ensuring their place in the representation is properly circumscribed and detailed by the map-makers; conversely, it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

Referring to "On Exactitude in Science", he argued that just as for contemporary society the simulated copy had superseded the original object, so, too, the map had come to precede the geographic territory (c.f.