Hyperreality

Hyperreality is a concept most closely associated with the work of one of today's most preeminent postmodern social theorists, Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929). Most simply, it means more real than real (e.g., the realities depicted in “reality television” shows). However, there is much more to the context and uses of this term that help give it deeper and richer meaning.

For Baudrillard, the contemporary world is one where modernity has given way to implosions, simulations, and a sense of hyperreality. He argues that there is no longer any truth or reality, and so signs no longer stand for anything; [Page 387]they no longer represent anything that is real. Instead, we live in “the age of simulation” (1983:4). At first, these simulacra are reproductions of actual objects or events. Eventually, these simulacra come to mask and pervert a basic reality, and then to mask the absence of a basic reality, and finally they bear no resemblance at all to anything existing in reality. The simulacra come to refer only to themselves and other simulacra and put “an end to meaning absolutely” (1983:11).

All of these simulacra begin to implode with what is left of reality. In this way, the differentiation that characterized modernity has given way to the dedifferentiation characteristic of a postmodern turn in society. With simulations and reality imploding in on one another, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between that which is real and that which is simulation. Since simulations often seem more real than reality itself, they come to dominate society and people are left without reality, with only hyperreality. Hyperreality is not something that is produced but instead is “that which is always already reproduced” (1993:73).

Baudrillard gives many examples of the hyperreal in today's society: Disney World, where it is cleaner, safer, and people are nicer than in the “real” world; television, which is arguably the ultimate simulation and sensationalizes “reality”; and even all of America itself, where Baudrillard “sought the finished form of the future catastrophe” (1989:5).

Even hyperreality itself has the ability to become hyperreal. Baudrillard speaks of the ecstasy of objects, their propensity to go beyond themselves and proliferate to the highest degree. In other words, the beautiful as more beautiful than the beautiful in fashion, the real as more real than the reality of television, sex as more sexual than the sex in pornography. Thus, ecstasy ends up producing hyperreal hyperreality.