Hyperreality

This article is about the concept of hyperreality as it applies to contemporary continental philosophy. For hyperreality in art, see Hyperreality (art).

In semiotics and postmodern philosophy, Hyperrealism (not to be confused with surrealism) is a term to describe a symptom of an evolved, postmodern culture. Hyperreality is a way of characterising the way the consciousness interacts with "reality". Specifically, when a consciousness loses its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, and begins to engage with the latter without understanding what it is doing, it has shifted into the world of the hyperreal. The nature of the hyperreal world is characterised by "enhancement" of reality. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existant world of the pornography, and even though the pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of "sex" becomes something non-existant. Some examples are simpler: the McDonalds "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" (according to critics) the "M" represents nothing and the food produced is not identical or infinite, but low-quality ingredients which have branded such that it is difficult to even identify them.

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Borges, the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal.

Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.

The birth of a hyperreality

Although the concept is rooted in ancient debates on reality and illusion, some trace the origin of the concept of hyperreality to Walter Benjamin's Arcades study of the commodity as sign. Benjamin was carrying this proto-psychogeographical work when he took cyanide to escape Nazis at the French border in 1940. The themes were formalised in Isidore Isou's study of Lettrist hypergraphics in the early 1950s.

Consumer objects have a sign exchange value, which means that they indicate something about the owner in the context of a social system (see Baudrillard). For example, a king who wears a crown uses the crown as a sign to indicate that he is king (though in reality, the crown is meaningless).

Sign exchange values have no inherent meaning or value beyond what is agreed upon. (So, for example, the crown jewels are worthless until someone agrees to trade them for 50 diamonds.) As sign exchange values become more numerous, interaction becomes increasingly based upon things with no inherent meaning. Thus, reality becomes less and less important, as sign exchange takes precedence. If grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a table, at some arbitrary moment the grains become a heap of sand. Similarly, at some arbitrary point as sign exchange becomes more complex, reality shifts into hyperreality, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish what is "real".

Significance of hyperreality

Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain the American cultural condition. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks the consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, (although Baudrillard himself would perhaps balk at the usage of this word) fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality.

Interacting in a hyperreal place like a Las Vegas casino gives the subject the impression that one is walking through a fantasy world where everyone is playing along. The decor isn't authentic, everything is a copy, and the whole thing feels like a dream. What isn't a dream, of course, is that the casino takes your money, which you are more apt to give them when your consciousness doesn't really understand what's going on. In other words, although you may intellectually understand what happens at a casino, your consciousness thinks that gambling money in the casino is part of the "not real" world. It is in the interest of the decorators to emphasise that everything is fake, to make the entire experience seem fake. The casino succeeds in returning money itself to an object with no inherent value or inherent reality.

Note: Many postmodern philosophers, including Baudrillard, do not talk about hyperreality in terms of a subject/object dichotomy.

Definitions of hyperreality

"The simulation of something which never really existed." - Jean Baudrillard
"The authentic fake." - Umberto Eco

Quotations

"The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert - a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth." - Baudrillard on Las Vegas

Examples of hyperreality

a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry")
pornography ("sexier than sex itself")
a plastic Christmas tree that looks better than a real Christmas tree ever could
a magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer
a well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal)
any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts"
the Gulf War, to the extent that America understood it: Baudrillard, in fact, claims that the Gulf War never even happened (See Baudrillard)
Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo: Disney World, Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas
TV and film in general, due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds

Reference

Boje, D.M. (1995), “Stories of the storytelling organization: a postmodern analysis of Disney as ‘Tamara-land”, Academy of Management Journal, 38(4), pp. 997-1035

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