Hyperreality
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Also, you probably know about our Patreon already, but that's a great place to support us in an ongoing fashion, to receive access to bonus segments, our Discord community, and monthly Zooms with David and yours truly. Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where two friends who are also philosophers put ideas in contact with everyday reality and hyper-reality. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I'm David Peña-Guzman.

Today we begin with a quote from Jean Baudrillard's 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation, where Baudrillard writes, Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms, the pirates, the frontier, the future world, etc. But this masks something else. And this ideological blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order.

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real country, all of quote-unquote real America that is Disneyland. A bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence that is carceral.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyper-real order and to the order of simulation. Ooh! This quote, man...

It's a good one. I bet the listeners didn't expect that we were going to start with a quote about Disneyland. But I feel like I'm hearing it as somebody who grew up in Southern California and just like getting chills thinking about the pirates, the frontier, etc. in Disneyland. And what's so fascinating is that it ends in a really different place than you might have expected.

It's not that Disneyland is fake but presents itself as real. It's that Disneyland presents itself as fake in order to hide that it is the most real America, right? Or so real that it goes beyond the real. It becomes hyper real.

I really feel this, having grown up in L.A. and having gone to Disneyland many times, because one of my problems since childhood has been that I compare things to Disneyland. First time I went to the Grand Canyon, I was like, this looks like Thunder Mountain. First time I went to the Alps, I was like...

I thought of the Matterhorn ride. Actual castles in Europe, I'm thinking about Cinderella's castle. And I am not even kidding. This is so true. This is something I've talked about with some of my friends who also grew up in LA. Although I think it's like also just an American problem, which we'll talk about.

Yeah, at some point it just becomes a mise en abyme because you're from Los Angeles. I grew up in Las Vegas. So whenever I think about those things, I think about the Disneyland in Las Vegas, which is like a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. But I mean, I'm curious, do you feel like that experience of filtering everything through Disneyland impoverished in a significant way your experience of these other places? Like when you were there?

Yeah, my brain was just cooked since childhood. I mean, I honestly wouldn't even know the difference, right? I don't have a counterfactual to compare this with. I do think it's a natural tendency of thinking to compare things that you witness to other things. And so in my case, Disneyland was just...

sort of the model for these other things that I ended up witnessing. For reality. Yeah, but I think we do see that in other ways in everyday life. It's like when you see the Amalfi Coast on a bunch of influencers' feeds and then you go there yourself and you're trying to recreate the scene you saw on social media for your picture in order to prove to yourself that you've experienced the Amalfi Coast. It's like, what even is the Amalfi Coast outside of the filtered reality you've seen online and are now recreating?

And I take it that that's Baudrillard's precise point. And just to clarify, although Baudrillard thinks that Disneyland collapses this difference between reality and simulation, it is really not the only place that performs this ideological function, right? That performs this covering over the unreality of the rest of the country. For Baudrillard, everywhere we look, we...

Find spaces where the distinction between the real and the fake is no longer meaningful. And that leaves us deeply disoriented because the real can no longer be for us that secure and stable grounding for experience. I really like a quote, a passage where he says that we are living through the liquidation of all referentials, right? The sign reference distinction is imploding.

Yeah. And he has this passage where he talks about Main Street, which is one of the first places that you walk into when you walk into Disneyland. Maybe it's the first place. I am due for a Disneyland trip, David. I was so close to asking if we could use Overthink funds to sponsor a trip to Disneyland so we could talk about it on the episode. But it's a little too expensive and it's the middle of summer. Our patrons didn't know that they were signing up for that. For setting us to Disneyland. Yeah. So we didn't.

not indeed do that. But anyway, Main Street in Disneyland is basically a

a simulacrum of what an average Main Street in the U.S. of old might have looked like. But of course, Main Street, on Beaujolais' account, is hyper-real. It's like weirdly more real than the actual Main Streets that you might find in any number of small towns, even when those Main Streets were vibrant. Nowadays, many of them are no longer what they once were. And so it sort of consolidates all of the

expectations that you might have around a main street, but it's like so real in that it's fake, such that the very distinction between fake and real doesn't even make sense anymore. And I think that's what he's talking about when you talk about the liquidation of all referentials. Today, we are talking about hyperreality. In a world rife with images and fakes, have we moved beyond the notion of the real? Why is America the country of the hyperreal par excellence?

And might the idea of the hyperreal be, well, overhyped?

When we decided to do this episode, we thought that the idea of the hyperreal came from the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard. After all, he is the person that is most commonly associated with this concept. Yeah. But then I discovered that the Italian theorist Umberto Eco has an essay from the 1970s entitled Travels in Hyperreality, where he uses this term extensively, and it seems to me, before Baudrillard. Woo!

And we'll definitely talk a lot about Baudrillard in this episode. Yeah. But I wanted to devote some time to Eco and give him his due because his account of hyperreality is very interesting. Eco argues that we live in a world where absolute unreality is offered as real presence. And that substitution gives birth to what he calls the hyperreal.

And so in this topsy-turvy world of the hyperreal, we are inundated with signs and images and representations whose very status as a sign or as a representation is ultimately forgotten. And that results in a collective inability on our part to distinguish between sign and referent.

And he captures the essence of this hyper real world by talking about Americans infatuation with holography, with the production of these like hyper real images that look like real things in 3D.

And at the time that he wrote this in the 1970s, holography was the highest expression, technologically speaking, of course, of this desire that we have to make signs that give reality a run for its money.

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Subscribe to Modem Futura wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you there. See you then. You listeners have not picked up on this yet. This is very much a postmodern concept. And what we are talking about in this episode today is like really deep in the weeds of postmodern theory. And I think a lot of this really has been borne out in fascinating ways, even beyond the thinkers that we're going to be talking about, because most of the thinkers that we're going to be talking about were writing in the 70s and 80s. And

And now I think we see this even more, but also some of the stuff feels kind of fun and dated. Like Echo's discussion of holograms feels very 70s. But then we have immersive virtual reality today. I mean, the Apple Vision Pro is one example. The Apple Vision Pro, at least in my circles, has not become mainstream at all. I don't think I know

anybody who owns one, but it is out there and available. And with Apple Vision Pro, you can wear these goggles that project a TV screen on your living room wall for you. But that TV screen doesn't exist actually on the wall. You can project imagined furniture onto your wall. If you're redesigning your home, you can pull up your notes app

on your refrigerator if you'd like to. And that, I think, really seems to be a logical next step of Echo's argument about unreality offered as real presence.

No, I think you're right that virtual reality would be, let's say, hyper-reality 2.0 or that now we're in postmodernism squared. But one point that Echo does make that I think is worth underlining is that the reason that Americans were obsessed with holography in the 1970s and maybe by extension virtual reality now is because Americans, I'll say we, we are obsessed with realism. In America, realism is the highest aesthetic and political value.

And that's why he says if you travel through America, and his essay is written like a travel blog where he's like traveling from place to place across California, the Midwest, Florida, you find all these spaces that are devoted to the curation of hyper-reality.

So for instance, yes, he also talks extensively about Disneyland like Baudrillard, but he also discusses things like wax museums where we create these lifelike replicas of human beings, attraction parks, zoos, aquaria. Think about also ghost towns. He talks about ghost towns in places like Nevada, you know, where it's all about creating a simulation of something that is lost to the past and

And he calls all these places of the hyperreal fortresses of solitude. And that's a reference to Superman, to the comic book Superman. And I'm not a comics person, so I did not know what he meant. So I ended up having to do a little bit of Googling to make sense of this reference. Mm-hmm.

But it turns out that in the Superman universe, there is this place called the Fortress of Solitude that is in the tundra. It's made of ice where Superman goes to relax, I guess, and where he has all these replicas of himself that help him sort of cover the globe and save people all over the place. Because one person can't be everywhere at once. Yeah.

And Echo says what's really important about these replicas of Superman is that they're not robots. They are literal replicas of him. They are other supermen, such that the difference between the real Superman and the replica Superman is indistinguishable. You cannot tell which one is the real Superman. And that's what happens in all these fortresses of solitude all across the U.S.,

I have a lot of questions following this about the ontology and personal identity of Superman, but I will leave those aside since our focus today is on the hyperreal. And throw in an example that I couldn't help but think about when we were prepping for this episode, which isn't about replicas of actual people, but replicas of places. Because I think following the Disneyland discussion, replicas of places are really often where the hyperreal lies as we think about it in everyday life.

I went a number of years ago to the Parthenon in Nashville. So not the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, but in Nashville, Tennessee, because the city of Nashville created in 1897 as

as part of a state fair, or I don't know if it was a state fair, sorry. It was called the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. So it was one of these like gilded age kind of big fairs where people were showing things off, which is also how the Eiffel Tower was started. Eiffel Tower, yes. So the city of Nashville did not create an Eiffel Tower, but created a replica to scale of the original Parthenon. And what's fascinating to me about this Parthenon, which you can still see today because they kept it up after the exposition, is that

It's more realistic than the Parthenon in Greece because it's meant to look as the Parthenon would have looked in ancient Athens, not as the real Parthenon is today in ruins, right? I've been to the real Parthenon as well. And I mean, it's amazing there, but it's kind of hard to imagine what it would actually have been like to be in the Parthenon. Whereas when I went to the Parthenon in Tennessee, I was like, oh, whoa, this is it.

Because I could kind of imagine myself there better, given that even though it wasn't the real stone of the Parthenon, it gave the impression of being a more realistic Parthenon because it's more like what it would have been like back in the day. Yeah. So here the hyperreal as time traveling directly into the past and having the authentic experience of, you know, somebody looking at it.

And interestingly enough, this is exactly how Umberto Eco interprets the Getty in Los Angeles. He says that the Getty pretends not to be a museum, right? And so in doing so, it wants visitors to feel as if they're having this pure historical experience of art, right?

as if they were literally in a Roman villa back in the days, right? Experiencing art that they're seeing as a Roman citizen would have done. And in this way, Eco says, the Getty is actually much more

artificial than any other museum that maybe acknowledges that they are artificial constructions for the preservation of the past. And so again, this echoes that earlier claim I made that even places that are not, let's say, as spectacular and as bombastic as Disneyland contain that kernel of the hyperreal.

Yeah, and I just need to clarify here, the Getty that Echo was talking about is now known as the Getty Villa. So people who've been to the Getty, like it's actually a modern museum that was written well after both Echo and Baudrillard were writing, because Baudrillard also writes about the Getty. Following this, you read the Echo, I didn't, but I did read the Baudrillard. I have a lot of questions about whether Echo was just like the secret background source for a lot of Baudrillard's claims, but if anybody knows...

The answer to that, let us know. But yeah, so the Getty Museum today, it's like this huge modern museum, but there's also the Getty Villa, which was formerly just known as the Getty, and that is shaped like a Roman villa. And I think it still feels like a museum, but I guess maybe it was a little bit different in the 70s. In any case, point taken that if you're building a replica of a Roman villa and that is your museum...

It's more hyper real than, you know, having a minimalist Frank Gehry designed building that houses art in a way that's like more self-consciously museum-like.

I think it's telling that both the Getty and Disneyland are in America. And so is the Parthenon, right? Because Echo and Baudrillard both talk about America as the country of the hyperreal par excellence. And Baudrillard even identifies California specifically, which both Disneyland and the Getty are found in. It's also where we live, of course. Yeah. And so who better to speak about the hyperreal than two philosophers at its epicenter, the

Come on. But actually, Baudrillard would say we're not in the best position to speak about the hyperreal because we're too close to it. So he says in his book America, which I read in addition to the Simulacra and Simulation book for this episode, that Americans have no sense of simulation because we are.

are simulation in its most developed states. Well, in my defense, I'm not American, I'm Mexican, so I have unique epistemic access to simulation and simulacra. You try on that American identity when it suits you. You identified as American like 10 minutes ago. You are technically a citizen. You're just not my origin American. Well, you know, I am embodying the liquefication of the reference sign distinction.

But I mean, I think you could make that same argument and take the same message away from any other aspect of California and Los Angeles. You know, all the fake lips and the Botox faces that we see all around us. That's the evidence I need for the hyper real. Totally, totally. Instagram face as the hyper real, right? Yeah, and in this book,

In this book, America, that I mentioned, Boudreaux justifies this idea that America is a hyperreality by saying America is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.

A utopia. Yeah, I'm curious what you think about this. Yeah, a utopia, I don't know. Tell that to the migrants who are working in 100-degree weather picking almonds as the fires rage all over California, right? Like, not quite the embodiment of the American dream or an American fantasy. Yeah, I honestly found Baudrillard's book America deeply annoying because it seemed very rose-colored glasses-y. It's like...

The whole premise is that this snobby French academic takes a road trip to America and has a Lana Del Rey-like experience of open roads, deserts, and cold beers, and then concludes that America is a utopia. Like, it's a bit more complicated than that, but suffice it to say that I did not find the arguments convincing. And there are also times in it where Baudrillard makes America sound as though it's

Like this completely history-less place where Europeans suddenly plop down out of nowhere. And even though he does sometimes mention Native Americans in the book...

I found the argument super Eurocentric and low-key colonialist. Like, it was very frontier mentality, like desert and open space, no history. Well, and I mentioned that the essay by Umberto Eco is also written like a travelogue where he's moving through. So it's like the Italian version of that snowy French guy. And Umberto Eco actually develops that kind of historylessness into a theoretical point and says something very similar, which

He says that Americans have a taste for realism and for hyper-reality because this obsession with eclecticism, with this compulsive desire to imitate reality 100%,

That tends to prevail in places where there is a combination of two things, a lot of money and little history. And I take him to be saying not so much that there was literally nobody or nothing there before the Europeans arrived, but rather that our contemporary historical narratives about who we are begin from that moment of the Europeans' arrival, right? So our historical consciousness is kind of truncated.

And you can even see that, for example, with architecture. Often Europeans who come to the U.S., they kind of laugh at Americans who are like, oh, my God, this building is so old. It's 200 years old. And, you know, it's this sense that our historical consciousness only reaches back so far. Yeah. And there is this quote from the Umberto Eco that I want to share that is about this precise issue. He says,

In America, the frantic desire for the almost real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories. The absolutely fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.

I guess to the extent that my family has lived in the U.S. since like the 1850s and I know very little about them, let alone a lot about what it was like before they moved to the U.S. at that point, I can kind of jive with this idea that America lacks history. I think my situation is similar to a lot of Americans, like a lot of people whose families have been in the U.S. for a while but were immigrants in the 19th century don't know all that much about their families. But I think

I disagree with Bojardin Echo that America is the country of the hyperreal because it lacks history. Because I would say instead that America is a country of the hyperreal because it's the country where cinema has flowered. And this is also why California is the epicenter of the hyperreal because of Hollywood.

Like America is where everything goes to be represented on screen and where the onscreen representation starts to seem more real than the referent itself. Beau Jarrett calls the hyper real a model of the real without origin. And that's what we find in Hollywood. The representations don't actually have their origin in the real events, but in a fictionalized version of them.

I see. Well, I might have a slightly different take on this because I might venture instead that America is the home of the hyper real, not necessarily because of the lack of historical consciousness, although I kind of agree with that a little bit more than you, and not so much because of the centrality of cinema to the American identity.

but rather because America is the place where our desire and our need for illusion is systematically nourished. And again, so think about the American dream and how central that is to how we think of ourselves. And we know that it is not real, but we deep down love to perversely move through life pretending that it is. And America offers us a space for that pretense.

And it encourages us to kind of abandon ourselves to it. Yeah, the connection to the American dream is interesting, although I'm definitely going to hold on to my view that the hyperreal is related first and foremost to cinema's dominance in the U.S. But Bouchard does say that the slogan of power in a hyperreal world is take your desires for reality.

And I think whether we're talking about the American dream or about cinema, the key here for me with the hyperreal is the proliferation of the image. It's the image that comes to be more real than material things. And so let's talk a little bit about how this relates to the idea of a simulacrum, which is related to the image but not quite reducible to it.

Yeah, not quite reducible to it is right because Baudrillard has a very specific understanding of simulacra. Simulacra are not just images or illusions in the kind of traditional sense of the term. Rather, they are images that have reached a certain degree of autonomy relative to the reality that they're thought to represent. And early on in his essay,

Baudrillard says that images go through various stages of development, or rather our relationship to images goes through various kind of evolutionary stages. And simulacra refers to the very last stage of this process. So at the beginning, images begin as very simple reflections of reality, right? Like a painting of a landscape that represents it. Mm-hmm.

Then at some point, the image evolves and starts distorting the reality that it represents. So think of like a cubist painting of a landscape where it's not just a mirror image, it's doing something artistic to mold it. On the third stage of development, images start concealing reality. They start masking over it and they start presenting things that are just not real, that are fully imaginary.

And then finally, at some point, images evolved in such a way that they have absolutely no relation to reality anymore. They are independent and above all, they are self-generating. So they are images referring to other images, referring to other images, such that we are now in the stage of pure simulation. And so that's what Baudrillard means when he talks about simulacra and simulation. Images producing images producing images.

Yeah. Yeah, and then one question becomes, what happens then? And in this stage, a stage of pure simulation, power's strategy, Beaujard thinks, becomes to persuade us of the reality of the social. So power re-injects the real and the referential everywhere. Society has to produce and reproduce the real in order to prove that it exists. And David, this point leads us...

to what I've been wanting to talk about, which is reality TV. Because Bojern actually discusses the first ever reality TV show, which followed an American family in the 1970s. They were called the Louds. But of course, a lot has happened in reality TV since then. I'm just finishing up Love Island.

Oh, yeah. And I know we both love reality TV. We watch different shows. But you told me that you really wanted to talk about Love Island USA. So Ellie, here is your chance. Okay, there's way more to say about this show than we have time for. So David, rein me in if I'm going on too long. But I did binge watch this show over the summer. And it takes a while because there's like 37 episodes or something. What? The season of Love Island USA. Yeah. So that's why I'm like still finishing it.

There's a lot of love to go around. There's a lot of love. But what I find so fascinating about this show is that I think it's a great example of Baudrillard's claims about the era of pure simulation. The premise of the show is that there are men and women. This season is like a heterosexual season. I don't know whether they all are. This is the only one I've watched. And the boys and girls, as they call them, they are adults, but they call them boys and girls, are always paired up in a couple.

And there are different like repairing ceremonies so you can switch whom you're in a couple with, but you're in a couple the entire time. However, being in a couple does not actually translate to being in a relationship, being in a monogamous relationship. In fact, there are all of these other weird terms that the show uses, like closing off is when you decide that your couple is now monogamous. And closing off doesn't even mean that you're girlfriend and boyfriend yet.

And so there are all these weird signifiers of love and coupledom, but it's revealed that that's just like very far from the whole story. Yeah.

But it's not as simple as, okay, the couple form is fake and then the closing off or becoming girlfriend and boyfriend is real. Because what actually happens in the show is that you totally cannot tell what is real, what is unreal, and it doesn't even really matter. There's a game show format to it that the show really leans into. They'll read audience social media posts aloud about what people think of them and then that becomes part of the show. And so

And so there's just like this really weird imbrication of audience member, contestant, game show format. Is there real love going on, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just like this fascinating but horrible mishmash. Yeah, and it's not just, it would be too simple to say that it's all fake. I think the Baudrillardian interpretation of this would be that

There is a kind of reality that emerges from the play of appearances, almost like in a house of mirrors, where it's like a mirage, where from the flow of images, you get this third term, almost like a hologram to go back to the Umberto Eco that is on the same plane as what is fake. And this brings to mind for me also Baudrillard's remarks about the Lauds, this family, because while the Lauds were being filmed,

their life basically fell apart. And the parents ended up separating and it became this symbol of the collapse of the American family in the 1970s. And everybody's question was,

what would have happened if television hadn't been a part of the equation, right? If the cameras hadn't been there. That is, was there a separation caused by the presence of the cameras or did they just capture this thing that was going to happen anyways because it was just their reality? But Baudrillard thinks that this is the wrong question to ask.

In the age of hyperreality, the better issue to consider is the illusion of filming the louds as if TV weren't there. So he wants us to focus on why it is that we want to believe that we're seeing something real when it's clearly mediated through an entire television crew.

And even the producers of that show were really proud of the fact that the Louds lived, quote unquote, as if we weren't there. But what that actually means is that the Louds lived as if there were no mediator between them and the audience. So the audience ends up with the illusion of direct access to the family, which is something that they never had to begin with.

Yeah, and that seems very different from the way that reality dating shows in particular are produced today, where there is a lot of intervention on the part of producers. There are even people doing storyboarding, deciding what plot lines are going to be the dominant ones of the season. They're in the contestants' ears all the time. But I think this point that you're making is still relevant in the sense that at the end of the day, the contestants are still, when it comes to

their conversations with each other, knowing that there's a camera crew there, but sort of willfully forgetting, denying, rejecting that. So there's still this effect of a lack of mediation. I think for Baudrillard, reality TV really marks the beginning of a new era

form of power, really, that he describes as the end of the panopticon. And the panopticon, of course, is a reference to Michel Foucault and the idea that there are institutions where power works through a center of observation that has direct visual access on subjects that are being observed. So it's a very top-down model for the application of power through optical access.

And Baudrillard says that with the age of reality TV, that unidirectional top-down model gets destroyed because it's not just that we are the panopticon sort of watching the louds or watching Love Island USA. There is actually a bidirectional relationship where we are watching, but we're also being watched in return, right?

Right. Like think about the fact that the audience gets to send posts that have an influence on the dynamics of the show, for example. And so we live in this fussy other world where we no longer can tell whether we're being acted upon or whether we are acting freely because we are immersed in this world without a stable sign reference distinction. So the audience participant difference eludes us.

David, you mentioned that Baudrillard writes that the late 20th century involves the decline of strong referentials. In a sense, we're unmoored as we go about the world. And one of my absolute favorite novels that depicts this is Don DeLillo's White Noise. There are so many parts of White Noise that I could have talked about here. Like, the book is just packed with elements of hyperreality, I would say. But I think it's also important to note that the book is not just about white noise.

But one of my favorite moments is at the beginning of the book, where the protagonist and his best friend drive 22 miles to the, quote, most photographed barn in America. And as they're driving to this barn, they keep seeing signs for most photographed barn in America. When they get to the parking lot, there's a ton of people with cameras. You know, they're all ready to take a photograph of the barn. They walk down this path to get to the place from which you photograph the most photographed barn in America.

And what they find is that their experience of the barn has been so strongly overdetermined by the presence of the cameras, by the signs, that they can't actually see the barn.

One of the characters says, once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. And I think this is true of the Amalfi Coast, as we talked about it earlier, about Disneyland, about so many things, whether they're already in and of themselves, quote, real or hyper real, that our experiences of them are overdetermined by lenses, you know, such that things become hyper real in that sense. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this happened to me with the White House. The first time I went to D.C., I was like, what the hell? That is the center of power in America. This is a little white house, which I guess is in the name. But it was this overdetermination of reality by expectation rooted in images. So I definitely felt like...

this was not the most photographed political building in the world. Well, yeah, because in order to actually be hyper real, it would be that you couldn't even really see the White House. Well, yeah, that happened. Okay, okay. Like I was looking at it and I was like, where is the White House? Because I was looking for a gigantic building that imposed itself kind of like America on the world stage. And people were like, that's it. That's the White House. Yes.

Oh, what? I just don't see it. And I think following a Baudrillardian analysis, what happens then, I don't want me to speak for you in the White House case, but you end up grasping at the simulacra rather than at the real thing, because the, quote, real White House can't give you the reality that you seek. And so Baudrillard says that one thing we do is turn to history.

In the past, it seemed, things were actually real. And so we kind of rely on that. You know, like maybe the White House now isn't the real White House, but it certainly was when it was built, right? So Baudrillard writes that history is our lost referential, our myth.

Yeah, and I think the question of how we relate to the past is something that is central to both Baudrillard's and Eco's account of the hyperreal. Although I don't think they think about it in the exact same way because Eco really thinks that one of the consequences of living in hyperreality is the disappearance of our historical consciousness.

And the reason for that is that in the world of the hyperreal, where everything is a replica of a replica, there is the democratization of images. The hyperreal, he says, is absolutely democratic. And what he means by that is that

In the hyperreal, everything is equally worthy of being cherished and presented as a copy with value. So everything has the same status, whether it's real or imagined. And so we lose the sense of what really happened in the past. So we lose historical fact. And he tells this story of going to a wax museum in Buena Park, California, and

And seeing a wax replica of Marie Antoinette right next to a wax replica of Alice in Wonderland. Oh, my God. And he says they're both treated as ontologically equal. They are both given the same level of attention, the same level of detail, the same focus on a realistic expression. And so they are presented as belonging to the same ontological register, you know, as if the two are equally historically real. Right.

And what you see here in this wax museum, which is emblematic of the hyperreal writ large, is a very casual attitude toward the question of authenticity. Like, who cares? It's all just whatever. Oh my gosh. That is so interesting. And it reminds me of a lot of the period pieces that you see today. I mean, I have my own personal beef with Bridgerton, which is also a story for another day. Um...

But I think one of the things that you see in Bridgerton is just this kind of weird mashup of like Jane Austen style fan fiction with, you know, different referentials. There's like racial diversity in it and some kind of vague references to colonialism. But yet it's also happening in this like heavenly, largely post-racial space. And so there's this weird way that there's like a mashup of actual historical references

you know, costumes, for instance, and a revisionist notion of history. Well, and I think this would be a good example of what ends up happening in hyperreal societies, which is that since we have, quote unquote, lost the real as a stable point of reference,

we enter into a kind of state of nostalgia and we start to panic about creating the real that we feel we have lost. And that's why we have all these places that again, Echo refers to as fortresses of solitude because what they try to do is they try to give us something that we think we don't have anymore, but that again, maybe we never had to begin with.

I want to turn a little bit more towards politics and news events because I think this is really important to consider in this age of hyperreality. One of my favorite books of social criticism, which, by the way, I think gets at some of the same points as Baudrillard and also Christopher Lash, whose book on narcissism from the 70s has been really popular lately. But I think this book does much better than either the Baudrillard or the Lash and therefore should be considered more seriously than either of them.

It's also from earlier than both Baudrillard and Lasch. It's from 1961. And this is Daniel Boorstin's book, The Image, a guide to pseudo events in America.

Borson's idea in this book is that American culture in the present is not dominated by reality, but with many new varieties of unreality. So he's not using the word hyperreal, but I think the point is basically the same. And he focuses especially on what he calls pseudo events, which are events staged in order to be reported. Pseudo events are happenings that are planned, planted or incited, and they're not the opposite of real events.

Because the very rise of the pseudo-event blurs the distinction between real and fake events, as we've kind of been talking about in the episode so far. Instead, pseudo-events are opposed to spontaneous events because pseudo-events are planned or planted. So an example that he uses is an interview. An interview is planned, but a train wreck is spontaneous.

And the pseudo events, which are planned, are planted primarily in order to be reported. So the question, is it real, is less important than is it newsworthy. We care less about whether somebody in an interview said something true and more like, oh my God, was it extreme? Was it wild? Et cetera. Yeah.

And pseudo-events come to overshadow spontaneous events because they're a lot more dramatic. They're also easier to disseminate, right? It's like, oh my God, someone said this in this interview or in this press conference. And they're also more intelligible and packaged for communication than spontaneous events. To use a word that Boorstin did not have access to writing in 1961, pseudo-events are clickbait events.

Yeah, they're hackneyed and sensationalist molds. Yeah, no, exactly. And one of the moments that really got me when I was reading this in 2020 is that Boorstin says...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Action. Action.

Statements, these little packages of information are more important than like on the ground concrete material realities. Yeah. And the fact that most of those statements are also formulaic, right? They all sound like they were written by ChatGPT. And we know the formula. Yeah, they're packaged for communication. Yeah, exactly. And so I think this notion of the pseudo event really picks out something quite significant and important about our political reality. So I really like it.

And it does connect to a point that Baudrillard makes about the nature of political events, where he says that in the age of the hyperreal, all political events are emptied of their content, i.e. of their specificity, before they are disseminated.

And that means that by the time the news of a particular event reaches us, those events have become palimpsests of one another, like carbon copies, where it's all roughly the same. And so everything is a variation of the same old theme. All crises look the same. All demonstrations are talked about using the same language.

And when I read that also in the Baudrillard, it made me think not so much about those statements that we make after political upheaval, but it made me think a lot about media reports about school shootings, where we can always predict the message based on some structural features of the events in question. So if there is a shooting that is...

carried out by a white student, we know that it's going to be reported as a mental health tragedy. Mm-hmm.

But if it was committed by a person of color, it's going to be a story of the crisis, of the radicalization of the youth, and of evidence of growing anti-American sentiment, you know, and the endangerment of America's way of life. Well, and I think, David, that that points to the way that even spontaneous events, like, right, a school shooting is not a pseudo event, that's a spontaneous event, right?

end up being treated like pseudo events because they get put into this ritualized form where the news coverage is predictably the same. You know, there is like, it's following the same format, the same script as other shootings. And that's a really disturbing thing to me because it's not, again, about real versus fake events, but about planned versus spontaneous events. And I feel like even that distinction gets a bit blurred in recent politics. I think

A lot of the success of Donald Trump has been that he is a master of pseudo events. Like this showman businessman knows how to put on a real pseudo event. And that does not mean that he's also not creating a lot of damage in the real world, right? So whether it's Trump's actions or even I was thinking about the way that the assassination attempt from earlier this year was

ultimately was covered like a pseudo event to the point that people were even wondering, was this planned, right? So Trump got grazed by a bullet in the ear. This was an assassination attempt. He happened to turn his head just at the right time. And then the Secret Service was trying to get him off stage. But with his ear bleeding, Trump turns to the audience and starts yelling, fight. It's almost like even in this moment of his life being threatened, he's

He turned it into a newsworthy event by making it about some political battle and by providing the best possible photo op. That is really, really shocking to me. And I think it was so shocking to so many people that people really were like, oh my gosh, was this actually...

Yes.

He says that in America, the result of the hyperreal in the domain of politics is that we don't have a source of legitimacy anymore. There is only the simulation or the pretense of legitimacy, this kind of Trump-style showmanship about politics. And when he talks about these presidential assassination attempts, he says that the paradox of the assassination attempt is that in America,

Attempting to assassinate a president, we actually create the illusion of political legitimacy when there previously was none because it creates a crisis. And there wouldn't have been a crisis if there hadn't really been political legitimacy in danger in that moment. So the attack on legitimacy creates the very legitimacy that presumably it was attacking. So you see how the cause and the effect gets reversed.

Right. Like the president wasn't attacked because he's a legitimate president. He becomes legitimate because he was attacked in his function as president. Wow. You did such a better job of describing that than Baudrillard. I have to say it was a really it was a hard read. Very confusing at times. But he says the same thing about just scandals in general. Political scandals are basically the Disneyland of politics. Right.

Although, of course, an attempted assassination doesn't actually have any bearing on your real qualifications for being president, right? And this reminds me of something that Boorstin says in his analysis of pseudo events, which is that

An emphasis on pseudo events leads to an emphasis on pseudo qualifications. And I think even if we're leaving the assassination attempt aside, the whole basis on which Trump has run his entire political career, that has been like a series of pseudo qualifications. Even before Trump, this idea that the president is somebody you should want to get a beer with, that is a pseudo qualification.

qualification. That is not an actual qualification for being president. Yeah, no, that's right. And I mean, the real worry that people had about the assassination attempt for Trump was precisely that it would produce legitimacy, that it would make him look like a martyr and give him an aura of presidentiality that he's never had, not even when he was president, you know, he becomes president after the fact.

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It's clear from the episode so far that I think you and I find the concept of hyperreality to be quite helpful, even though we find Baudrillard's writing kind of annoying. Hyperreal? No, I don't even know about that. Just like bad sometimes. Overly abstract, undefended, American particular bothered me. There are some, of course, legitimate critiques of the notion of hyperreality. And I'll start with one that comes from Sadie Plant.

who has a sort of guide-de-bord style critique of Baudrillard. And let me explain if that means nothing to you. It doesn't honestly mean that much to me. Let me explain what this means. So for Plant, Baudrillard acquiesces to the status quo too much. He accepts a dominant group's description of reality without questioning it. So this idea that we've moved into a world of images, that's kind of a

of a dominant mainstream way of viewing things. That's like actually maybe what the powers that be even would describe the world today as being. Whereas for Plant, we should question that dominant group's description. So she says that hyperreality is a faithful representation of the self-image promoted by capitalist social organization and that Baudrillard takes this too seriously, right? Capitalism...

loves the liquidation of all referentials. It loves the mixing up of Marie Antoinette and Alice in Wonderland. That's not only something that aids capitalism, but it's also a part of capitalism's own self-narration. And so Plant says, look, Baudrillard, you just need to be a little bit more critical of the dominant capitalist way of thinking about capitalism and modern society. She suggests that we need to look behind the self-image of capitalism.

Yeah, I think that's a good point.

that's fair to say. There's a sense in which Debord wants to move underneath, like, the narratives that capitalism tells

itself, about itself. Baudrillard has a project of lateral critique. Like, it's a project without stakes. It just sort of critiques capitalism from within capitalism, right? And as Debord puts it, places itself to one side. But instead, and this is one kind of Marxist element, I think, in Debord's account, is that we need to demystify capitalism.

these narratives and sort of look at the fact that there's actually not a complete indistinction nowadays between reality and unreality, such that we're like living in this age of a hyper real. There still are secrets and realities to be revealed. And so I think to that extent, the demystification approach can be considered a form of ideology critique.

Yeah, no, that's right. And I actually really find compelling this notion that those who describe reality as free flow of images self-generating out of themselves to be a somewhat elitist position. You know, earlier you described it as like a snobby French guy traveling through America. Yeah. Oh, there is no reality. There is no history here. And I think we can make a critique about the...

let's say the provincialism of that speaking position. And this is something that I'm getting from Susan Sontag's regarding the pain of others, where she talks about the

And in this particular text, she is describing her own experience as a witness to the Bosnian War. And she's also describing her own experience as a witness to the Bosnian War.

And she notes the indifference of these, she calls them French day trippers to Sarajevo, who relate these triumphant and very simplistic narratives about the media's role in the tragedy, where they almost created the illusion that, oh, look, the tragedy is just created by the media. It's all image. It's all spectacle. And she worries that Sarajevo

It is spectacle for people who are outside of the war zone. But there is an underlying, undeniable material reality of trauma, of violence that cannot be reduced to a spectacle-spectator relationship. And that's the experience of the people who are living through the war zone, right? Like the people who are caught in this cycle of violence. Oh my God, there's like so many parallels to that.

Today, I'm thinking about what's going on in Gaza in particular, but I think you could apply it to many, many conflicts happening all over the world at any given time. Yeah, correct. And so there are a lot of individuals who watch those scenes of violence from the safety of their living room, on their computer screen or on their television screen. And those of us who do that are protected from the pain that is unfolding. But again, it's

there is a kind of luxury in assuming that it's all just images upon images, like an origami. I'm wondering here, though...

how far we want to take this as a criticism of Baudrillard. Because as we mentioned before, Baudrillard suggests that we're no longer in a society of the spectacle. This idea that everything is spectacle is sort of an outdated way of thinking about things. Sure, like there is an idea that all is image. It's just that that idea that all is image, it's not that all is image compared to reality. It's rather that

Like the proliferation of images or pseudo events in Boorstin's terms means that there's no longer really a distinction between the image and the real that we can even hold on to. And so I hear that Sontag's point seems to be, tell me if I'm wrong, but her point seems to be that, no, there is still something real that we should distinguish from the image. But I'm wondering, like, to what extent you think Baudrillard might be able to defend against that criticism or not?

Yeah, so you're right that this is primarily a criticism of the society of the spectacle and the notion that we no longer have access to the real because we're caught in the image. Yeah, which is, and society of the spectacle, we didn't mention this before, but it's written by Guy Debord, the guy that Plant was, yeah, sort of using in a critique of Baudrillard.

Yeah, and so the critique here is Guy Debord, but I think a similar argument about the provincialism of that speaking position can be made of Baudrillard. Because Baudrillard is writing from the perspective of this, you know, like the weird acronym, like, what is it, like Western educated, industrialized, democratic countries. It's a very privileged position of being able to look at the world from the perspective of a traveler.

and assume that the distinction between the real and the fake no longer holds. And so just to make this concrete, if we just take his central example, which is Disneyland, I think Susan Sontag-inspired criticism would say, yes,

Disneyland is the collapse of the reference for the visitor who pays to throw themselves into the fantasy, but it's not the same experience as the exploited workers who are behind the scenes making that illusion a reality.

Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder what you think about this idea from Baudrillard about work. This is in Simulacra and Simulation, where he says that what sort of happens in this world of hyperreality is that there's a doubling the process of work. There's neither striking nor work, but both simultaneously. And

I didn't really get what he meant here, which is not an uncommon experience of reading this. I mean, I'm literally somebody who specializes in French poststructuralism as one of my areas of expertise. But that doesn't mean that I am always going to get exactly what the French poststructuralists are writing about. Baudrillard is particularly dense. But one thing I thought about this is the way that a lot of us go about our work nowadays, especially if we're in jobs that we don't enjoy.

So I'm thinking maybe about the exploited worker at Disneyland in this weird doubled way where there's like a rebellion against work even while you're working, right? Like you're sort of on strike while you're working, but you're also like working when you're not working. Yeah, I don't know how relevant that is to this, but maybe that's like one place where Baudrillard would be able to be like, no, I do consider that the exploited worker is exploited and also is part of this regime of the hyper real. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I think you're right that in the same way that politics now incorporates the political assassination as part of the daily business of politics, work incorporates resistance to work, which...

within it as a way of making itself more resilient. But I think this would be, again, potentially accepting the dominant group's description of reality, where work now has become absolutely immunized against the threat of an overthrow, either in the form of organized resistance, in the form of strike, because it's neutralized any kind of outside threat.

And so there's also a politics to accepting the truth of that statement that there is no outside to work.

Okay, so Sontag and Plant, albeit for different reasons, rejecting this idea that hyperreality canvases our experience today, at least for most of us, right? This idea that the very notion of hyperreality might be a story that capitalism tells itself that the elite has accepted and that maybe, if not entirely without use, deserves to be put into question a bit.

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