Aim// To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality.
1// To foreground Baudrillard's position, by showing how it develops out of a Marxist critique of capitalism.
2// To examine how Baudrillard's analysis of advertising led him to argue that a consumer's engagements with commodities had begun function like a language;
3// To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis into a fully blown theory of postmodernism.
- Throughout the late 1960s Jean Baudillard examined how the increased productive capacity of western nations in the post war era, and the rise of corresponding industries of marketing and advertising transformed the structure of consumer experience.
- Baudrillard argued in texts such as The System of Objects (1968) that with the rise of consumer society, promotion and advertising began to take on a primary role in determining the commodity's value, and the consumer's disposition towards it.
- In the 1970 and 1980s in texts such as The Mirror of Production (1973), and Simulacra and Simulations (1981) he integrated the rise of the mass media into this analysis, and developed the argument that our engagement with material reality had now been superseded by a system of representations that saturate our perceptions.
- This was Baudrillard's version of postmodernism; a hyper-real world where what we call reality was in fact grounded in simulacra.
- In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra have no natural link with a pre-existing reality. One can determine if an image is a simulacra, if one cannot identify a pre-existing concrete reality which that image can be understood to copy.
- For Baudrillard simulacra became the dominant form of image production in postmodern society.
This idea was explored in films such as Bladerunner (1982), and grasped the popular imagination in the 1999 with the film the Matrix.
'The film depicts a future in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality created by sentient machines to pacify and subdue the human population, while their bodies' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Upon learning this, computer programmer "Neo" is drawn into a rebellion against the machines, involving other people who have been freed from the "dream world" and into reality.'
Sourced from Wikipedia.com
- In the Matrix reality has been reduced to a blank white expanse, which is filled with constructed images. Here we can start to have a sense of what Baudrillard means by simulacra. They are pure constructions and refer to no reality outside of themselves, and on mass serve to corrode any sense of a tangible reality.
- Thus, in Baudrillard's analysis the postmodern consumer's sense of the world around them is generated by the manner in which they are continually bombarded by simulacra.
- Marx considers that mans industry generates products 'external objects' that are useful as they satisfy human needs the usefulness of the physical properties of a product makes its use value.
- As soon as a product becomes exchangable it becomes a commodity.
- Under Capitalism the workers labour becomes a commodity that he or she must sell in order to live. This seperates the worker from the products of his labour and makes them alien to him. Marx notes 'The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside of him, independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him.
- When people produce goods for the market, the value of those goods is not set by their usefulness, but by their ability to be exchanged for other things.
- The labour embodied in these goods is valued not for its usefulness but for its ability to generate exchange.
- Peoples labour also becomes a commodity , to be bought and sold for a wage.
- The transformation of production and consumption Baudrillard theorised can be rooted in the rationalisation of capitalist production.
- Ford separated the production process into a series of individual tasks allotted to individual labourers. Each worker fashioned or attached a particular part of the car in a synchronised production process that involved the cooperation of multiple workers, who each contributed to the production of individual cars as they travelled down the production line.
- Fords five dollar, eight hour day was only envisaged in part as a way of securing the discipline that working in a highly productive car assembly line required. It was also meant to give workers sufficient income and leisure time to consume the products of mass production.
- Post war period/ massive expansion in productive capacity needed to be met with corresponding rise in demand, and as factories continually produced large quantities of the same commodities, this demand needed to be made consistent.
- Equalling a corresponding industry developed, publicity and advertising. During this period advertisements became a ubiquitous phenomenon, colonising both urban space and home life.
- Individual competing adverts would sit along side each other or be broadcast in a system, yet they acted on the consumer as a system.
John Berger notes, “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, this car and that car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more”.
- Judith Willaimson says how advertising trys to address our desires and aspirations rather than showing or telling us how the product would be useful to us. This is the case with many things, such as cars, particular cars suite particular people based on their life style and personality rather than practicality.
- We gain fulfillment through products that address our desires rather than something we actually need and will make use out of.
- One of the fundamentals of advertising is to permit the consumer to freely enjoy life and to confirm his right to surround himself with products that enrich his existence and make him happy.
- Baudrillard argues that such simulacra, do not have any referent or ground in reality, and that our cultural condition becomes one of “hyperreality”. In hyperreality images of take on lives of their own and become templates for new realities.
- This vision of hyper-real society formulates Baudrillard's sense of postmodernism, which for him is an era in which progress has come to a standstill.
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