Hyperreality

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why is there a Parthenon… in Nashville? Jean Baudrillard might have the answer. In Episode 112 of Overthink, Ellie and David pick apart hyperreality: the provocative suggestion that our reality today is so inundated by signs that the gap between reality and simulation has all but broken down. Your hosts talk through the history and experience of hyperreality, from its presence in Superman and Bridgerton to its uncanny role in legitimizing presidential power. And they wonder: does the idea of hyperreality motivate political action, or does it slide into complacent provincialism?

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Works Discussed
Jean Baudrillard, America
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

An American Family (1973)
Superman (1978)
Love Island (2023)
Bridgerton (2005)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey listeners, I am so excited to share that we have a brand new way for you to support
0:05.1	Overthink. We've partnered with Pomona College, where I teach, to allow you to submit
0:09.4	one-time donations to support our show. These donations are fully tax deductible, and funds from them
0:15.1	go directly to student assistants working for Overthink. You can learn more at our website,
0:19.3	overthinkpodcast.com.
0:23.0	Also, you probably know about our Patreon already,
0:25.8	but that's a great place to support us in an ongoing fashion to receive access to bonus segments,
0:28.0	our Discord community,
0:29.3	and monthly Zooms with David and yours truly.
0:31.7	Thank you. Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:48.3	The podcast where two friends who are also philosophers put ideas in contact with everyday reality and hyper-reality.
0:57.1	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:58.9	And I'm David Peña-Gusman.
1:00.8	Today we begin with a quote from Jean Boudriard's 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation,
1:06.6	where Bodriard writes,
1:08.9	Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of Simulacra.
1:13.9	It is, first of all, a play of illusions and fantasms, the pirates, the frontier, the future
1:19.9	world, etc. But this masks something else. And this ideological blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order.
1:30.5	Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real country, all of quote-unquote real America
1:38.2	that is Disneyland. A bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal
1:46.2	omnipresence that is carceral.
1:49.3	Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas
	...

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