Simulation: History and Concept A Survey on the Implications of Simulation for Contemporary Art and Society According to Jean Baudrillard

In the following article, the concept of “simulacrum” and its development and evolution through history is surveyed. This concept is coined by the French thinker, sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard who, with the beginning of the postmodern era and in the 1960s, delivered his ideas with his own style through essays and lectures using such terms as “simulacrum”, “simulation”, “hyper-reality” and “implosion”. Baudrillard starts with a leftist view and criticizes Marx’s theories and then summarizes the results of this collation in this idea: all existing actions are for increasing the consumption and passivity of the subject. This notion which is substituted for Marx’s key term “Production” conducts the whole existing areas in the postmodern phase and proves through the concept of simulacrum that the whole existing areas, including politics, arts and religion, are irreferential codes that devote their efforts to the will of a perhaps political or economic ideology. These codes are a set of chained, repetitive, intentional and drained-of-significance codes to the extent that Baudrillard claims that, apparently, the best plan to reach the economic- political goal is not to have a plan at all, namely the strategy of insignificance. The drained consciousness is the ultimate goal of the existing condition and the consequent amazement and silence of the non-conscious and non-revolutionary subject is the best result and answer to thisscheming in the postmodern condition. It is in this situation that the subject loses the choice of action and any kind of desire for sublimity from this condition is negated for another kind of life, a process through which the truth of contemporary or postmodern art assures itelf that regarding this situation it has carried out its task.