My Hyperreality

I’ve created this blog (for a second time) in a bid to try and increase my thought coherency, and to have somewhere to record all those little bizarre musings I make (so that I don’t have to bother my long-suffering boyfriend or house mates with them). I’ve promised myself to write something on here once a week - regardless of how insane or stupid it may sound to me. Who knows, maybe something that I think sounds ridiculous may spark a religion, and soon the world would be covered with Ser-worshippers …

A brief note on the word “hyperreality” – a hunt through a dictionary might tell you that the term “hyperreality” refers to an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, but this is a pretty simplistic definition. Of course, mine is not likely to be much better, because I did say that this was going to be brief. French theorist Jean Baudrillard, now sadly deceased (I wanted to have his babies), theorized that our world has become so saturated with images and symbols (thank you consumerism) that any sense of objective reality lying behind these images or symbols has been obliterated. It is a world overrun with simulacra (another delicious Baudrillardian term): Images are reproduced so many times that they become objects themselves, rather than representing or reflecting them, self referential and devoid of their original meanings. These images, which simulate what they are representing, begin to be viewed as what they are representing, if that makes any grammatical sense at all to somebody other than myself.

Frederic Jameson’s notion of the depthless pastiche links in quite nicely to simulacra and hyperreality, as he theorizes that in our current postmodern environment we have a habit of simply yanking symbols and signifiers out of the past, ignoring and destroying its history as we mash it together with something else. Think of the proliferation of t-shirts with that iconic image of Che Guevara – I’m sure that there are some people out there who brand themselves with an image of El Che because they agree with his leftist guerilla actions, but I’m also sure that there are many people who buy and wear these shirts because they look awesome, and they’ve seen other people wearing them, so they must be awesome. The image of Che Guevera becomes a fashion statement, not a political statement.

I seem to have gone off topic a bit here … But that’s pretty standard for me. This is the interwebs, after all. Also, because this is the interwebs, and because right now I’m feeling lazy (and getting a headache due to sitting in a dark room and staring at a screen) I’m not going to give you any references, nya nya nya. But for a more in depth look at these theories, I recommend checking out Baudrillard’s own work, particularly his book Simulacra and Simulation, or Jameson’s book Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Also, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought is a must in the arsenal of any individual who professes him/herself to be a cultural theorist.