Hyperreality

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What is Hyperreality?

Hyperreality is the condition in which a model comes first, and the place, the person, or the day is judged by how well it matches the model.

It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

That sentence is Baudrillard’s definition in the chapter read here. He then says the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. The map precedes the territory. He calls that the precession of simulacra. A simulacrum, on the neighboring page Simulacra and Simulation, is the copy in that series. This page is the condition of living by the model: the picture, the persona, or the film name becomes the score. The everyday picture is a trip planned from one photograph. The beach, the alley, or the café may be real. The plan is to arrive at the photograph. If the hour on the ground cannot be made to look like the picture, the hour is treated as a failure, even when the place did what a place does. A persona built only from posts works the same way. Friends, work, and an ordinary Tuesday drop out. What remains is the test the picture set. Map Is Not Territory keeps the older warning: a model is not the place it describes. Baudrillard’s sentence is the further claim that the model now engenders the place people will accept. Allegory of the Cave is the older picture of shadows taken for the things that cast them. Those shadows still have things behind them. His fourth phase, below, is the claim that the image no longer has that relation.

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Hyperreality in 3 Depths

• Beginner: If a photo is the reason for the trip, write one thing you would still do if that photo cannot be taken. An empty line means the model is the plan.
• Practitioner: For a feed, a résumé, or a product shot, write three lines: what the picture shows, what was cropped, and what a Tuesday there contains. Decide on the Tuesday.
• Advanced: A picture that hides a defect still has a place behind it. A picture of a place that was never there does not. Most check-in photos are the first. Calling every filter “nothing is real” skips the check that would have told you whether to go.

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Origin

Hyperreality, as this page uses the word, is Baudrillard’s name for a real generated by models. The text read here is Sheila Faria Glaser’s English translation of the chapter “The Precession of Simulacra.” It was read on the European Graduate School copy captured by the Internet Archive on 29 July 2010. The French book is Simulacres et Simulation, 1981. The University of Michigan Press edition of Glaser’s translation was not opened. No page number from that book is printed here. Borges’s fable is not opened either. The chapter summarizes it: cartographers draw a map so detailed that it covers the territory, and the map later frays in the desert. Baudrillard says that even inverted, the fable is unusable. His inversion is the sentence this page uses: today it would be the territory whose shreds rot across the map. It is the real, not the map, whose vestiges persist. He calls that remainder “the desert of the real itself.” The same chapter separates pretending from simulating. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one does not have. He quotes Littré: whoever fakes an illness can stay in bed and make others believe he is ill; whoever simulates an illness produces some of the symptoms. Pretending leaves the principle of reality intact. The difference is masked. Simulation threatens the difference between true and false, real and imaginary. A filter that hides trash on a real beach is closer to the first. A picture of a beach that was never there is closer to the second. The chapter’s claim is that the second does not stay a private lie. It becomes the test other people use. He lists four successive phases of the image. It is the reflection of a profound reality. It masks and denatures a profound reality. It masks the absence of a profound reality. It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the fourth, he says, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation. The turning point he names is the move from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing.

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 hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.

That is his Disneyland sentence in the same translation. He calls the park a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra: pirates, the frontier, future world. The sentence is an argument, not a count of streets, visitors, or crimes. He says it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality, but of concealing that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. One marked fiction, on this argument, keeps the unmarked outside looking real. He also says the park wants to be childish so that adults can seem to be elsewhere, in the “real” world, and so conceal that the adults came to act the child. This page does not treat that paragraph as a finding about Los Angeles. The same chapter says an exact replica of the Lascaux caves was built five hundred meters from the original, that visitors glance through a peephole at the authentic cave and then visit the reconstituted whole, and that the duplication suffices to render both artificial. The five hundred meters is his clause. This page does not open a conservation report, and it does not export that distance as a surveyed measurement.

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Key Points

Four splits keep a real place, a cropped picture, and a model with no place from becoming one claim that nothing is real.

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Applications

These four checks follow the split between a place, a crop, and a model. They do not carry a date from one mountain, or a sentence about Los Angeles, into a shop, a class, or a household.

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Case Study

In January 2010, a film’s name was put onto a quartz sandstone pillar in the Yuanjiajie area of Zhangjiajie, in Hunan, and the city’s tourism bureau then said the scenic area had not been renamed. Local reports dated 25 January 2010 described a ceremony that labeled the pillar 乾坤柱 with the floating mountains of Avatar. The reports do not agree on the other local name. Some call the same pillar 南天一柱. In the 26 January account carried by China Daily’s Chinese service, Yuanjiajie management official Song Zhiguang said the online “南天一柱” was a misreport, the labeled peak was 乾坤柱, and the film’s name was an added appellation rather than a replacement of 乾坤柱. Those pages were read here as the search text of the articles. The hosts blocked a direct fetch. On the afternoon of 27 January 2010, Zhangjiajie Tourism Bureau director Ding Yunyong gave the bureau’s first formal response, as reprinted the next days by several papers, including the text carried on Sina from Qilu Evening News, News Evening, Guangxi News, and Lanzhou Morning Post. The scenic area had not been renamed because of the film. Residents and scenic-area managers had labeled 乾坤柱 with the film’s mountain. He said the purpose was to show that the film’s mountain took Zhangjiajie as its prototype, and to market the place. His statement, as those reprints give it, dates a CCTV News 1+1 segment to 26 January 2010 at 21:30 and titles it 张家界傍“阿凡达”. It says that in December 2008 a photographer named Hansen, accompanied by Li Te of Hunan University’s digital media institute, photographed Yuanjiajie, including 乾坤柱, and that those pictures are the film’s mountain. It also says the film runs two and a half hours, with about half an hour of those peaks as background. That half hour is his sentence. It is not a shot log opened for this page. The reprints use both spellings 哈利路亚山 and 哈里路亚山. The lesson is the order of the test. The peaks were photographed first, on the bureau’s own account, so the film is not a picture of a mountain that was never there. The ceremony then invited people to meet the pillar under the film’s name. The bureau’s correction still argues the pillar by way of the film: the label is justified because the prototype is Zhangjiajie. The rock had a name before the film. For those days, the film’s name was allowed to grade it. A filtered check-in photo is the same shape in miniature, and it is not this case. A later provincial letter about taking the film’s name off official signs was not opened. This page does not say when, or whether, the signs changed.

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Boundaries and Failure Modes

Hyperreality fails as a tool when it is used to skip the difference the chapter itself draws, or when one argument is exported as a measurement. The first boundary is the difference between a crop and an invention. A queue cropped out of a true photograph is a masked place. A picture of a beach with no beach is a model without that place. Advice that treats both as “the real has ended” will not tell a traveler whether to go. The second boundary is export. Ding’s half hour, the 25 January ceremony, and the 27 January denial belong to that pillar and those days. They are not a rate of renamed landscapes, and they are not a finding about every film set. Baudrillard’s sentence about Los Angeles is an argument in a chapter. It is not a count of the city. The common misuse is the leap to a computer-simulation claim, or to the advice that checking is pointless. The chapter’s four phases are a scale. Most of the pictures in an ordinary feed are on the second phase, masking and denaturing a place that is still there. The check is to write the cropped part back in. Declaring the fourth phase in advance makes that writing look naive. It also makes a real fraud harder to see, because every picture has already been ruled unreal.

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Common Misconceptions

Three confusions turn a grading error into a claim that the world has already been replaced.

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Related Concepts

These neighbors split the copy, the shadow, the map, the feed, and the wider family from the grading error on this page.

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One-Line Takeaway