Saturday, October 22, 2005

No, it's not a coffee cake at your local Starbuck's, though it could be your local Starbuck's.
For those who needed to know, from wikipedia:
Simulacrum is a Latin word originally meaning a material object representing something (such as an idol representing a deity, or a painted still-life of a bowl of fruit). By the 1800s it developed a sense of a "mere" image, an empty form devoid of spirit, and descended to a specious or fallow representation.
In the book Simulacra and Simulation (1981/1995), the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard gave the term a specific meaning in the context of semiotics, extended from its common one: a copy of a copy which has been so dissipated in its relation to the original that it can no longer be said to be a copy. The simulacrum, therefore, stands on its own as a copy without a model.

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