Hyperreality

Hyperreality literally means “more (real) than real.” According to Jean Baudrillard, with whom the term is particularly associated, “The hyperreal … effaces the contradiction of the real and the imaginary” (1993, 72). Unsurprisingly, the term has gained currency wherever reality has been remade to the measure of the imaginary: one thinks of theme parks like Disneyland, the themed environments of shopping malls, and the “virtual worlds” conjured up by digital technologies. The term hyperrealism was, however, initially coined in the 1960s, as the European term for superrealism or photorealism (Battcock 1975)—the U.S. art movement that engaged in generating “hyperrealistic” reproductions of the real (such as paintings of incredible, “photographic” accuracy and detail). The way in which the term is most frequently used today is aptly illustrated by the (now defunct) “Palace of Living Arts” in Los Angeles, visited by Umberto Eco on one of his Travels in Hyperreality. There, waxwork displays reproduced “in three dimensions, life-size and, obviously, in full color, the great masterpieces of painting of all time” (Eco 1987, 18). The “living” art was advertised as better than the originals. Alongside the waxwork tableaux were reproductions of the old masters they represented—in vivid colors, unblemished by the ravages of time, as fresh as the day the completed canvas was first lifted off the easel. “The Palace's philosophy is not, ‘We are giving you the reproduction so that you will want the original,’ but rather, ‘We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original””” (19). Nonetheless, while the idea that the “copy” is better than the “original”—or the “image” more important than the “reality” (Boorstin 1961)—is frequently implied whenever the term hyperreality is invoked, the concept has more complex implications than this casual usage implies. It is telling that Baudrillard cites Disneyland explicitly not as a geographically delimited example of a hyperreal environment—an enclosed space where the imaginary becomes more real than reality—but as a means of “deterrence,” intended to put us off the scent of an altogether more disturbing hypothesis: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal” (1994, 12). Disneyland is presented as “fake” in a vain attempt to resuscitate the real: “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (12–13).

It has been a commonplace of Western thought to distinguish between the real (what really is the case, which belongs to the order of being) and the imaginary (what merely seems to be the case, which belongs to the order of appearances). The former is solid and reliable, the latter, flighty and untrustworthy. The notion of the hyperreal threatens to undo several centuries of dedicated effort to keep the two separate and clearly distinguishable—not least where representations (or copies) could be confused with the real (or the original). Baudrillard's suggestion that Disneyland functions to convince us that all is well on this score, when in fact all is far from well, launches a challenge to a way of thinking to which we have become thoroughly accustomed. Little wonder, therefore, that attempts to think through the concept of hyperreality can all too easily slip back into a way of thinking that the concept actually disqualifies. Baudrillard's point is not that the image has become more important than the real but that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of a distinction between the two—that this distinction [Page 751]can no longer be maintained, and that it is no longer upheld in our culture (even if our culture still insists on using now-redundant terms, in a desperate bid to disguise the fact that the distinction is no longer operative).

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