Hyperreality

Abstract

The capitalist mode of production has gone through some significant changes in the twentieth century (according to Henri Lefebvre, a mutation). A number of French social theorists inspired by Marx have attempted to grasp this process with new concepts and theories, especially in relation to new cultural forms and processes (e.g., media technologies) that are no longer treated as epiphenomenal superstructures that are reducible to the economic substructure of capitalism as orthodox Marxists have traditionally conceptualized this relation. Cultural phenomena have become critical forces in the moments of distribution, exchange, and consumption of commodities in late capitalism. The heroic age of the revolutionary bourgeoisie ended around 1910 with the decline of all of the referentials of classic capitalism: clock time, the vanishing point in art, the work ethic and productive values, history, proletarian revolution, etc. Class strategy has shifted from the organization of production to the bureaucratic organization of consumption and everyday life. The age of simulation begins with the liquidation of referentials, according to Jean Baudrillard. Signs and signifiers have become detached from their referents, from reality, and now only refer to each other. For example, according to Mark Gottdiener, Las Vegas casinos have a variety of themes and constitute a structure of differences that have nothing to do with the gambling and profit‐taking that goes on in them. What is the social and historical relation between a simulated pyramid and the gambling, entertainment, and profit‐taking that takes place there? If fantasies connected to ancient Egypt do not do anything for the consumer, there are a number of other fantasies with which to play (e.g., tropical paradise, the Wild West, simulated urban environments, etc.). For Umberto Eco, in themed environments like wax museums “[absolute] unreality is offered as real presence … The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference.” For Baudrillard, hyperreality “is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” The production and reproduction of the real or the hyperreal is what material production is all about in our postmodern society. Simulations, signs, and codes now structure social relations and social practices rather than the capital/labor production relations of classical capitalism. Modern men and women have been set adrift in a sea of signifiers and simulations.