Abstract

The notion of the simulacrum has played a significant role in recent discussions concerning the “postmodern” condition. In particular, it deflates the autonomous form and subjectivity of high bourgeois modernism. The distinction between high and popular genres is seen to be spurious, since simulation, forgery, “bad copies,” and kitsch are highlighted to undermine the idea of an authentic essence traditional aesthetic sensibility supposedly revealed. Nevertheless, the critical potential of simulacra in postmodernism depends on a reification of modernism itself. The concept gives a formal unity, coherence and aesthetic distance to modernism, even as these very attributes are being dismantled from within modernism itself.