Simulacra and Simulations (1981)

In modern society, Jean Baudrillard contends, it was possible to distinguish between the represented and the real, between the ‘sign’ and the real ‘thing’ in reality it referred to – the referent. Disneyland provides the paradigmatic illustration of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. This world-famous holiday destination and theme park constitutes an idealised imaginary – a Utopian America and a perfect world. It has its own ideals, role models, structures of living and codes of practice. Abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, and future world.