The distinctions between object and representation, thing and idea are no longer valid. Instead a "real" economy of commodities that is somehow bypassed by an "unreal" myriad of advertising images, there exists a hyperreality.
In this era notions of truth and falsity, real and imaginary are the same. It is now a principle of simulation, and not reality, that regulates life. Our world has been emptied of meaning and has abolished the referentiality of signs as there is no "reality" - only simulation.
We live a hyperreal society - that is "reality". The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. At the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced. The hyper-real. In fact we should turn our definition of hyperrrealism inside out. It is reality itself today that is hyperrealist.
Simulations replace objects, and their representations. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.
Further to this, communication is completely generalised, it is no longer a discourse but everything that is an object of communication in a world where meaning has imploded on itself. There is no meaning; language replaces meaning. The ecstasy of communication: meaning is exhausted, but then it's time to come down.
