Simulacra and Simulation

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy. The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance. Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine Set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.