Reproduction now precedes production, just as simulacra precede the real.

Evidence

There is a precession of reproduction over production, a precession of the genetic model over all possible bodies. It is the irruption of technology that controls this reversal, of a technology that Benjamin was already describing, in its total consequences, as a total medium, but one still of the industrial age - a gigantic prosthesis that controlled the generation of objects and identical images, in which nothing could be differentiated any longer from anything else - but still without imagining the current sophistication of this technology, which renders the generation of identical beings possible, though there is no possibility of a return to an original being. The prostheses of the industrial age are still external, exotechnical, those that we know have been subdivided and internalized: esotechnical. We are in the age of soft technologies - genetic and mental software. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 340

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the core ‘precession of simulacra’ thesis applied to bodies — reproduction outpacing production is Baudrillard’s signature inversion of Marx.
• XREF: Contrasts sharply with Jameson’s late-capitalism frame; the exotechnical/esotechnical distinction inverts the prosthetic logic Jameson inherits from Marx (base/superstructure).
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that we are inside ‘soft technologies’ — genetic and mental software — as the fourth-order replacement of mechanical prosthetics is a dense paradigm shift on the order of the simulacra collapse itself.