In the introduction to Postmodernism Jameson acknowledges a debt to Jean Baudrillard's work — or more precisely to the concepts of simulation and hyperreality which he developed in Symbolic Exchange and Death and Simulation and Simulacra. As we have seen, the power of Jameson's analyses derives from his appreciation of the complex relationship between capitalism and cultural production: the chapters on ideology, video, film and architecture expound a transition from modernist culture (in which the economy of signs was still relatively confident of its reference to the reality of man, nature and production) to the play of postmodern simulacra in which the sign only ever refers to other signs and "the real" is transformed into an ungraspable shadow. The relapse of "culture" into the repetitive forms of the pop video, the B-movie and the porno flick therefore are characteristic of a phase of capitalism which is fundamentally unstable; for as the distribution of capital across international markets becomes more and more chaotic, so the old securities of modernist culture begin to breakdown and are replaced by a play of commodified images which distract the masses from the conflicts of global economic change. This analysis of postmodern culture as the reflex of global capitalism however raises a crucial question: namely, how far is it possible to pursue the idea of culture as technological simulation and still be able to retain the fundamental structures of negative critique, that is, the allegorical forms of organic labour, class solidarity and revolutionary politics which Jameson presents in the conclusion of Postmodernism? In what follows I will argue that Baudrillard's account of simulation and the hyperreal is fundamentally opposed not only to Jameson's allegorical configuration of Marxism, but also to the attempts of his "postmodern" contemporaries — particularly Derrida — to transform the project of historical materialism.