Baudrillard, Simulacra and Hyperreality

Baudrillard suggests in Simulacra and Simulation, in the era of simulation: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real" (2).

hyper-reality: distinctions between the real and the unreal are no longer valid.

There is no 'authentic' reality behind the TV news. There may be critiques of the TV news and its 'inauthenticity' and 'distortion' of reality, but such critiques are another set of signs, another discourse, no more 'authentic' than the TV news. Debord lamented 'the affirmation of all human, i.e. social, life as mere appearance', but for Baudrillard there is no real behind the appearance, the illusion does not mask the real, the illusion is the real, which is the illusion, which is.... The very notion of 'reality' disappears, the images are more real than any other reality, the signs, the simulacra refer solely to themselves - the end of the real.

hyper-reality: it is no longer possible (if indeed it ever was) to distinguish truth from falsehood, or to cling to those old `enlightenment' values of reason and critique.

Reality just *is* what we are currently given to make of it by these various forms of seductive illusion. In fact we might as well give up using such terms, since they tend to suggest that there is still some genuine distinction to be drawn between truth and untruth, `science' and `ideology', knowledge and what is presently `good in the way of belief'. On the contrary, says Baudrillard: if there is one thing we should have learned by now it is the total obsolescence of all such ideas, along with the enlightenment meta-narrative myths - whether Kantian-liberal, Hegelian, Marxist or whatever - that once underwrote their delusive claims. What confronts us now is an order of pure `simulacra' which no longer needs to disguise or dissimulate the absence of any final truth-behind-appearances." (Norris 1990; 23)

The condition of hyperreality, as posited by Jean Baudrillard, leads to a world in which there are no distinctions between the simulacra and that which they simulate: "The new postmodern universe tends to make everything a simulacrum. By this Baudrillard means a world in which all we have are simulations, there being no 'real' external to them, no 'original' that is being copied. There is no longer a realm of the 'real' versus that of 'imitation' or 'mimicry' but rather a level in which there are only simulations."