Simulacra and Simulation
The copy without an original. Once the sign stops referring to anything, reality is not hidden — there is nothing behind it to hide.
Baudrillard’s 1981 essay on signs, images, and what happens when they stop pointing at anything. A simulacrum is not a false copy of something real; it is a copy with no original. His four stages of the image run from a faithful reflection of a profound reality, through perversion and masking, to the pure simulacrum — where signs only reflect other signs.
The opening image: the map that comes to precede the territory. Disneyland is his worked example of a place that exists to persuade you the world outside it is real.
Read it against the Kashmir Shaiva material and something sharpens. One tradition says manifestation is consciousness appearing as form. The other says the sign has detached from anything appearing in it. Both are descriptions of the same gap.