Baudrillard's notion of ‘simulacra’ is linked to the idea of ‘hyper-reality’, like Disney World.
He suggests, we are so caught up in the image and its copies that we have no access to any reality beyond the image itself.
The representation, i.e., the image, ‘bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’.
Postmodernity is characterized by the endless circulation of the copies.
Thus, the image, the copy and the photograph constitute our knowledge of reality because we cannot know anything other than the image.
This is simulation, where the process of image-making and the copies and the reflection are more important than the ‘real’ because there is no real.
We cannot distinguish between the real and the copy any more. Thus, the
reality of a war for us is the image, the visual that appears on our screen. The
image-making of the war itself is so realistic—with the superior technology,
the embedded journalists—that it takes on the appearance of cinema.
Lyotard and the Postmodernism
Lyotard inaugurated the key theoretical note in postmodernism when he
characterized it as a resistance to grand narratives, and focused on the marginal, the liminal and the fragmented, arguing against totalizing systems of thought.
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