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d to say that she was glad she didn't live in Oxford because Inspector Morse finds two or three murder victims each week and, "...it can't be a very safe place to live then can it!". The real is no longer real, it no longer exists, everything is hyper-real simulation. The crime is created by the newspapers, the medical profession by 'Casualty', the war by journalists, the family by fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Baudrillard's latest work on the Gulf war explains how the Gulf war did not occur in reality but rather it was a hyper-real event which took place on the T.V. screens of millions of viewers around the globe. The internet represents a good example of hyper-reality. In the process of creating this paper I held conversations with fellow sociological researchers from all over the world: Japan, Hawaii, The United States, Norway, and Sweden to name but a few. One must however ask, 'where did these conversations take place?'. They did not take place in England, Japan, the United States or even at a mid-point between all of these places. They took place in the hyper space that is the internet. It is not tangible, it is an ethereal dimension that nonetheless has a reality of its own. Similarly the hyper-reality that makes up our world has no touchstone. It is all embracing yet distinct, it exists in what we objectively assume according to the discourse that surrounds the object we are interpreting. Thus for Baudrillard (1983), "...reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image". Now that we have an outline of Baudrillard's thoughts on the nature of reality and objects we can formulate a critique of this in the light of materialist perspectives. The next chapter will put forward a model of reality which puts discourse and simulation firmly into the realm of production in order to explain their origins. This is an exercise that Baudrillard fails to complete. 4. The origins of discourse and simulation. "Regarded as exchange-values all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time." (Marx, 1981:30) Of the materialist and realist theorists I have, for the purposes of this paper, decided to concentrate on the work of Marx1 and Gramsci with special emphasis placed on concepts of the political economy, ideology, and hegemony. The work of theorists such as Althusser2 and Hall are also relevant to this discussion, references for the relevant works are to be found in the footnotes. This chapter will first of all look at political economy and hegemonic theory and indicate in what ways it is useful for the purposes of this paper and studies of culture in general. Secondly, I will show how discourse (and therefore simulation) fits into the sphere of production. 4.1. Marx and the political economy. The opening sentences of Marx's (1981:27) seminal work on the political economy states, "The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its units being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a twofold aspect - use value and exchange value". Instantly we can see that such an approach is distinct from that of Baudrillard who recognises only exchange value. What then is the distinction between use value and exchange value? 4.2. Use value. For Marx use value is that part of the object's value that satisfies a fundamental human need and this value is only actualised durin