Page 114 - Cultural Studies Dictionary
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HYPERREALITY
encompassing flow of fascinating simulations and images, a hyperreality in which
we are overloaded with images and information. He argues that today it is everyday
reality that is hyperrealist so that we live in an ‘aesthetic hallucination’ of reality.
Here, the hyperreal is the real retouched in a ‘hallucinatory resemblance’ with 91
itself whereby the real implodes on itself. Implosion in Baudrillard’s work describes
a process leading to the collapse of boundaries between the real and simulations.
This includes that between the media and the social so that ‘TV is the world’.
Television simulates real-life situations, not so much to represent the world as to
execute its own. News re-enactments of ‘real life’ events blur the boundaries
between the ‘real’ and the simulation, and between ‘entertainment’ and ‘current
affairs’.
Links Advertising, commodification, postmodernism, representation, signs, simulacrum
