Jean Baudrillard - On the Murderous Capacity of Images
From "The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra," in Thomas Docherty, ed.,
Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993) pp. 194 ff.

Thus perhaps at stake has always been themurderous capacity of images, murderers of the real, murderersof their own model, as the Byzantine icons could murder thedivine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed thedialectical capacity of representations as a visible andintelligible mediation of the Real. All of Western faith andgood faith was engaged in this wager on representation: That asign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign couldexchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee thisexchange---God, of course. But what if God himself can besimulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest hisexistence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it isno longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum---not unreal, but asimulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, butexchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit withoutreference or circumference.

So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed torepresentation. The latter starts from the principle that the signand the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is utopian,it is a fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts fromthe utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radicalnegation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion anddeath sentence of every reference. Whereas representation triesto absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation,simulation envelops the edifice of representation as itself asimulacrum. This would be the successive phases of the image:

• it is the reflection of a basic reality.
• it masks and perverts a basic reality.
• it masks the absence of a basic reality.
• it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its ownpure simulacrum.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra," in Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993) pp. 194 ff. Available: http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/precession.html