Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality (1986) tells about how the contemporary world is full of the imitation. Through his traveling journey in America, Eco described that imitations and replicas can be easily found in the museums and attractions. The sophistication of science and technology, has been trapped in a mere of falsehoods.
Eco stated that hyperreality is everything that exists in the form of replication, copy, or imitation (simulacrum) that originates from the past, then re-presented in the present, and regarded as nostalgia.
However, due to the different time and context, this replication/copy/imitation loses its reality reference — which somehow makes the replication to look “more real” than the original model.
This argument is also supported by Jean Baudrillard. In his writing, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, he critics the Marxist political economy that the concept of commodity value needs to be complemented by semiology. For him, commodities are not only own “use values” and “exchange values”, but also “sign values”. Moreover, this “sign values” then said to be greatly influenced the pattern of consumption.
In the postmodern era, people consume a lot of sign values that born from the hyperreality. In this context, a commodity is seen as a sign and managed the exchange of values. This value of a sign in this specific commodity then created meanings such as prestige, strength, and others that related to the consumption activities. This is by what Eco said, “hyperreality becomes an allegory for the consumer society”.
As a result of hyperreality, Baudrillard also believes that consumption as a semiotic affects the entire social system. This idea is based on Marx’s general thesis of the capitalist society’s logic that based on the accumulation of power and commodities. Therefore, for Baudrillard, consumption is a sign and symbol that manipulates — what we consume is not the object, but the system of the object.
Every act of consumption that is carried out is not only an economic act, but also an act of producing signs (Baudrillard, 1981: 5)
This is also stated in Eco’s writing about his trip to Disneyland and Disneyworld, where he then discovered hyperreality and realized that this fake world is full of sign value that is used as a commodity. Think about this: the Disneyland works as a sign that offers a big and fun world where everyone are welcomed to enjoy it. However, the fact that not everyone can go to the Disneyworld has established its own social value or prestige in society.
Not only that, Eco also found another meaning behind the Disneyland, which portrayed the capitalism. The Main Street at the Disneyland is presented in the form of a toy house, invites us to enter the stores. However, the interior is presented as a supermarket that will makes us to buy too much and believe that we are still “playing” (Eco, 1986: 43). Thus, Eco found that the Disneyland is an allegory of consumer society — a place full of signs so that everyone becomes passive and acts like a robot.
Bringing these theories to the modern society, the mainspring of it must be located in the sphere of consumption and of the cultural system in general. As with artistic, intellectual, and scientific production, culture is immediately produce as sign and as exchange value. Hence, in modern society consumption defines the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as signs, and signs as commodity.
For example, the Apple users. Everyone knows that this product can only be consumed by the upper class society, therefore when someone buy this products then others will classify he/she to a specific class on society. Therefore, it can be said that today’s society consumes a lot of sign values, which are formed by a few people, to determine their own value in the capitalist society.
This collection of essays attempts an analysis of the sign form in the same way that Marx’s critique of political economy sought an analysis of the commodity form: as the commodity is at the same time both exchange value and use value, the sign is both signifier and signified.
In this case, the real question is: seeing how today’s world is full of hyperreality with the constructed sign values, is there still a “real” fulfillment in the society that not related to the “fake values” which playing in everyone’s mind?
