Identity in a Hyperrealistic Society
How technology that enables near perfect reproduction and simulation affects us
I wrote this a few years back when I was first exposed to theories of art and visual culture. It was quite an eye opening experience. I had so much trouble understanding the postmodern stuff during the class because all the concepts were so new to me as a freshman. After all, society tries to instill modernism in its children because it paints a much rosier and stable picture. However, after the semester was over, I began to understand where all these theorists were coming from. It was a loss of innocence I suppose even for someone who’s always been a skeptic. I don’t regret acquiring the knowledge but the price was a long period of depression. It’s why I decided to avoid advertising. At least as much as possible without starving myself out of a job. I suppose it’s really comes down to the clients and what they stand for that determines if I’ll do the work.
Introduction
With the advent of mass media technologies that allow images to be easily reproduced, the lines flickering on television screens or the photographs that populate magazines have become as real as the things that they represent. This calls into question what is authentic in this era of rapid information exchange, where identity can be stolen in the form of a few numbers. The conception of identity in the sense of subjectivity is facing a moment of great uncertainty as this question of authenticity is being examined. The very definition of subjectivity, however, is that it only exists in the mind and has no physical manifestation. This further complicates the issue because of its illusory nature. Jean Baudrillard attempts to explain this crisis of authenticity with his theory of hyperrealism.
Baudrillard’s Hyperrealism
Baudrillard argues that the space that reality once occupied has now been flooded with “meticulous reduplication” 1 to the point that the line between the real and the representation has become blurred or all but lost. He calls this hyperrealism and notes that it is an evolution from surrealism. In surrealism, realism is “redoubled” with elements of the subconscious imaginary. Surrealism sought to expose the blocked reality of dreams. It mixed realism with fantasy and the unreal. Now that unreality is no longer found in the imagery manifest in dreams, but in the representation of the real because the representation has a sort of déjà vu dream-like nature. Baudrillard also says that surrealism is limited to expressing itself in “privileged moments,” such as art and the imaginary, whereas hyperrealism is evident in many facets of culture—“political, social, historical, and economic reality.” Thus, hyperrealism is a more developed form than surrealism that has spread from its original container of art to all parts of reality. Particularly, it challenges traditional notions about identity because subjectivity is grounded in images, and our relationships to them in delineating what is real and what is not. Though the hyperreal has an affect on culture as a whole, the impact of hyperrealism, and the culture of simulation that it perpetuates, is readily identified in art because of modern technology’s ability to mass reproduce. This is paired with a society based on the foundation of mass media consumption.
Hyperreal Art
Artists like Andy Warhol and Sherrie Levine utilize the ideas of the hyperreal in their art production that critiques society. Warhol’s painting of Marilyn Monroe Diptych2 redoubles the image of her famous publicity photos by cropping and duplicating the image. The image is presented as being real because the idea of Marilyn Monroe 
does not exist anywhere outside of the image. Even the person that is Marilyn Monroe may not be what society perceives her persona to be as through the images presented by the media. This mix-up between the symbol and the thing becomes even more evident when looking at photography redoubling itself. Warhol exploits the cliché of the car accident photograph in his Ambulance Disaster. The work is based off a preexisting image of an actual car accident but the original photograph is reduplication as well. How that evidence photo was composed and framed is based off images of other accidents that came before it in an example of infinite regression. There is no original to a photograph and the negative serves as a representation without a real, or a simulacrum. This is what Sherrie Levine tries to expose in her appropriation of art for her own work, such as After Walker Evans.3 Her photographs of famous photographs questions and challenges originality. Therefore, the crisis of originality and identity naturally carries over from photography to filmmaking.
Bladerunner
In Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982),4 identity in a hyperrealistic society is examined though the confusion, for both the audience and the protagonist Rick Deckard, of what is actually real and what is a representation and whether it really matters. The setting of the movie is a future society where advancements in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) have made such leaps that the only way to tell between a human being and a “replicant” is through a Voit Komp (VK) test, a machine that measures the physiological reactions to emotional responses. It is believed that no replicant can pass this test because only humans would react in particular ways to certain questions because of experiences that replicants presumably never would have had. This is a very humanistic view of subjectivity as it assumes that there is an authentic humanity that cannot be recreated artificially. The humanistic perspective, however, appears to have faded away as the highest goal in the future hyperreal society is to redouble reality in the form of near perfect replications of the original. From a human eye specialist to a genetic engineer that makes the bodies, to a brilliant scientist that is able to perfectly simulate the human brain that drives replicants. The post-human desire for enhancement and expansion of what can be defined as human seems to have taken hold without apology in Ridley Scott’s world.
The newest generation of replicants is imbued with fake childhood memories so that they are able to better deal with emotions, and are thus much harder to detect with the VK test. In a sense, they are more human. At the core of this new enhancement for the replicants are fake photographs that are given to them to reinforce the memories. According to Baudrillard, “A possible definition of the real is: that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent representation.” 1 Typically, photographs serve as the representation of something that is real, which is partially how films, such as Blade Runner, draw their audience into suspending disbelief. But in the case of the replicants, the photographs serve the inverse function of creating reality by playing upon the definition of the real. The photographs are simulacra much like the replicants themselves. It is believed that the events depicted in the their pictures are actual experiences that they had in the past. In the hyperreal sense, these images are the reality to the replicants. As such, when Deckard tells Rachel that the memories she has were planted in her, her first reaction is denial and a reflex to revert to her photographs. When Deckard denies even this to her, she has a crisis of identity expressed through the very human emotional response of crying. The post-human idea that a being without a natural body can think and feel is embodied in this poignant moment.
On the other hand, post-humanism does not completely go unchallenged in Blade Runner. Humanism is not completely lost in this society as everybody in the film is seemingly seeking an authentic. Though a replicated snake is essentially the same as an actual snake, the cost of an actual snake is still far higher than that of the replicant, suggesting that there is a higher value placed on authenticity. Even the replicants that are being hunted down by Deckard attempt to find authenticity by reconciling their lack of history and “loss of origin” by seeking their own creators. Through the progression of the film, the viewer gains a sense of the humanity of the replicants. Though they may not be natural human beings, they embody the humanist notion that thinking and emotion are linked together and inseparable.
But in the end, post-humanist and post-modernist ideals are the themes that dominate Blade Runner. There is almost no denying that the replicants are beings that experience emotion and display the ability to think. The Tyrell Corporation’s motto “more human than human” comes to mind. This is true especially of the rogue replicants’ leader, Roy Batty, when he expresses love and mourning over the death of Pris. And again, in a moment of humanity that seems all but real, when he contemplates the summation of his life just before his death by telling Deckard the amazing things he’s seen and done. The final jarring moment that completely breaks the barrier between what is real and what is not come in the last scene. When the audience comes to realize that the only “human” character that we come to sympathize and identify with is actually not a human at all but a replicant. The film ends on this note by leaving the viewers to question their own identity and conceptions of reality and representation.
Artificial Intelligence
This debate of what is human is not entirely relegated to pure fiction however, as the debate over artificial intelligence grows ever more relevant with computing power growing exponentially and the development of software that emulates the human brain under way. Like in Blade Runner, the earlier generations of AI were relatively easy to differentiate from humans. But is a machine that appears to think really thinking is the question posed in both Mitchell Waldrop’s “Can Computers Think?” and Douglas Hofstadter’s “A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test.” To the humanist, humanity is special and can never be reproduced or exhibited by a machine. As Sandy argues in the coffeehouse conversation, “There’s something about people…they’ve got a sort of flame inside them, something alive, something that flickers unpredictably…something creative!” 5 John Serle had a similar proposition when he presented the example of the Chinese Room in which a person would receive Chinese writing input and give output based on a rulebook without really understanding Chinese. 6 It can be counter argued though that the system as a whole understands Chinese, which is what a person is, an entire system thinking and acting. The mouth does not understand English that is spoken through it. Therefore, it can also be said that a perfect simulation of thinking is to think. This is what Chris argues to Sandy in his hurricane example. It is almost inevitable that machines will one day be able to simulate thinking. Whether this means that they have a consciousness or not is a different issue all together. The question then will be a crisis between machine identity and biological identity. As Baudrillard puts it, “The ‘cool’ cybernetic phase supplanting the ‘hot’ and phantasmatic” 1. However, this issue of identity tomorrow also has implications for sexuality today.
Sexual Identity
Ideas of shifting sexuality and gender identity, or the transgender, are explored in Liz Kotz’s interview with Judith Butler. Butler acknowledges that gender is a “kind of psychic norm and cultural practice…[that] will always elude a fixed definition.” 7 But she denounces the reading that one can decide each morning what gender identity to adopt based on what clothes to wear and what style to implement as the commoditization of gender and a form of consumerism. To Butler, that identity is not fixed in the clothes one wears, but is constantly shifting based on a conception of self-identity by the individual. She also argues against images as the basis for subjectivity by criticizing the feminist denunciation of pornography. She does, however, believe in the post-modern idea of multiple readings of representation as opposed to the fixed truth claim. “I don’t think you can draw lines from a representation to a set of social situations in any kind of stable way. What’s interesting to me is how those lines can perpetually be redrawn.” Cindy Sherman also takes up the idea of gender identity and representation in her feminist work through a series of self-portrait film stills8 that criticizes the male gaze in cinema, and the stereotypical poses of women in films. The black and white films stills are simulacra in that they are representative photographs pointing at an image that doesn’t exist. When looking at Sherman’s work, one is filled with a strange sense that the film still is really from a actual film because these images have been so ingrained in our minds that they no longer require an original. The representation will suffice in producing reality.
Conclusion
In this modern era of increasing media saturation that the situationist Guy Debord coined the Society of the Spectacle, not only are our relationships with others mediated by images, our very identity is mediated by images as well. Combined with a society where the difference between the real and its representation is all but the same, this poses serious questions for all to consider. From the realm of art to technology to the intimate question of sexual identity, no aspect of culture is left unaffected by this shift in reality. One can either view this as a crisis of authenticity or embrace the hyperrealistic society by realizing the power of images and acknowledging its role in creating reality and subjectivity.
- Baudrillard, Jean. “The Hyper-realism of Simulation.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. 1018-1020.
- Warhol, Andy. Marilyn Monroe Diptych. 1962 Ambulance Disaster. 1963.
- Levine, Sherrie. After Walker Evans. 1980.
- Bladerunner. Dir: Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982.
- Hofstadter, Douglas. “A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test.” The Age of Intelligent Machines. Ed. Raymond Kurzweil. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 80-101.
- Waldrop, Mitchell. “Can Computers Think?” The Age of Intelligent Machines. Ed. Raymond Kurzweil. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 62-67.
- Kotz, Liz. “The Body You Want.” Artforum. Nov. 1992: 82-89.
- Sherman, Cindy. Film Stills Series. 1978-1980.
Identity in a Hyperrealistic Society by Daniel Yang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.