simulacrum: a standalone construct

The idea reaches back to Plato's Sophist (ca. 360 BCE), which separated the faithful likeness (the eikon, a copy built to the true proportions of its original) from the mere semblance or phantasm, an image that only looks right from the viewer's vantage point and so counted, for Plato, as a degraded and deceptive copy. Gilles Deleuze (1983, in an essay translated by Rosalind Krauss) reversed that ranking, arguing that the simulacrum is not a failed copy but a distinct kind of image that escapes the original-and-copy hierarchy altogether. The modern construct is Jean Baudrillard's: in Simulacres et simulation (1981, translated 1994) he defined the simulacrum as a copy or sign that has no original, or whose original no longer exists, so that the sign comes to stand in for reality itself and, once such signs saturate a culture, produces what he called hyperreality, a state in which the model precedes and replaces the real. As a landmark the construct is distinctive for naming a specific breakdown of reference: a sign whose original has dropped away, rather than a falsehood measured against some hidden truth, and it is among the most cited terms in postmodern accounts of media, images, and consumer culture.[1][2][3]

Unit

An image or sign treated as a category of representation, ranked by its fidelity to, or independence from, any original

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through close reading and semiotic analysis of images, media, and texts, tracing whether a sign still refers to a real original or circulates as a copy without one