Hyperreality in Postmodern Literature
While some authors and theorists welcomed postmodernism with open arms, others have argued that it's not all fun and games. Guy Debord wrote an influential book called The Society of Spectacle (1967), in which he flagged the downsides of a world in which the media had seemingly invaded every corner of society. His conclusion was that we're now living in a society in which nothing's real anymore: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."
Deep.
Jean Baudrillard was another guy who held this outlook, expanding on it in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). For Baudrillard, postmodernism wasn't just about experimental art and fiction: he focused on the 20th-century background in which it had developed, arguing that media and consumer culture had gone into overdrive and led to a Matrix-style scenario where there's no originality left and what seems real is just a simulation.
Rather than embracing the postmodern age, Baudrillard saw its speed and its blurring of real/unreal as having had a damaging effect. According to this guy, we've become so bombarded with images that we've lost touch with reality and, what's more, mistake these images, or "simulacra," for reality. The result? Life may seem real but it's no longer really real—we're now living in a state of hyperreality.
Trippy, right?
Though Baudrillard puts a negative spin on things, his theory has its roots in one of the big ideas behind postmodernism, which is that there's nothing original left so say and no story that hasn't been told. Words like originality and authenticity used to have a lot of street cred, but for postmodernists, nothing's truly original anymore. In this view, art and literature are created by reworking existing texts and ideas.
Postmodernism usually doesn't sweat this lack of authenticity or concepts like "reality" and "truth." Its attitude is pretty much "so what?"—it takes it as a given and works from there. But there were some folks who weren't too happy about this turn of events. So is postmodernism a thrill or is it the demise of civilization?
You be the judge.
Chew on This
Want to see how ideas about hyperreality and simulation play out in fiction? Take a look at William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984). As well as featuring a pastiche of different genres and mixing high and low culture, the novel takes Baudrillard's vision of a hyperreal society and places it in a futuristic setting: a high-tech consumer society called "Freeside", in which folks occupy virtual streets, bars, and shopping malls, and reality has been replaced by simulation.
Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" (1961) hinges on the concept of hyperreality. It's set in society in which everyone is finally equal. Sounds like a good thing, right? Well, not so fast—this equality is achieved by making sure that no one is allowed to have any individual skills or characteristics. It's a seriously bleak world, but thanks to brainwashing techniques, folks are stopped from recognizing—or confronting—what's really going on.