Introducing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality.

‘…hyperreality is here to stay. It will not pass by, and therefore it must be thoroughly understood and contended with as a vital part of contemporary political culture.’ (Soja 2005: 348)

The term hyperreality was coined by French theorist Jean Baudrillard to describe the postmodern, semiotic condition of society. In short, it is the condition in which we are unable to distinguish between reality, and our simulation of reality.

Baudrillard is often considered by scholars today as one of the most radical and controversial thinkers in the field of critical theory, with some to go as far as labelling his work as ‘simplistic and outrageous’ (Romano 2007). Yet to reject his philosophies would also do a discredit to a number of theorists who preceded him.

First published in 1981, Simulacra and Simulations provides the most thorough understanding of Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, though the formation of these ideas can be found in Symbolic Exchange of Death (1976). In this work, Baudrillard explicitly draws on his influences Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan, the former of which he praises for being the first ‘to grasp technology as a medium rather than a ‘productive forceʼ (at which point the Marxist analysis retreats), as the form and principle of an entirely new generation of meaning’ (1993: 56). Baudrillard himself acknowledges that his model borrows from Benjamin’s work on reproducibility, and thereafter McLuhan’s medium theory, whilst at the same time…