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By Root 987 0

Baudrillard’s book TV World discusses how the image of the television doctor is sometimes taken for a real doctor, specifically telling the story of how Robert Young, a television actor popular as “Marcus Welby” in the 1960s and 1970s, received thousands of letters asking for medical advice. The fact that he later appeared in commercials to advise viewers about the wonders of decaffeinated coffee only reinforced the confusion. Similarly, Baudrillard notes, the actor Raymond Burr (known as defense lawyer Perry Mason) received thousands of letters asking for legal advice in the 1950s. This “hyperreality,” in Radiohead terms, would amount to asking Johnny Greenwood or Thom Yorke for advice about fixing a laptop because, after all, they recorded an album entitled OK Computer.

Hyperreality blurs together real life and representational, simulated life. That’s why we need to be reminded that in many ways life is “not like the movies,” as Yorke croons on “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” Less than optimistic, Baudrillard sees us believing in the hyperreal because we are so far removed from the original reality that it becomes difficult to give conclusive evidence that there is a reality outside of hyperreality (think The Matrix here). The scale models of the United States on display in Disneyland—another famous Baudrillardian example of this—are hyperreal because they maintain and promote a certain conception of reality that is more readily accepted and circulated through representations by the Disney Corporation than what we might believe to be “real” homes that actually exist in the United States. The representation is more real, in this way, than reality.73 Radiohead concludes Kid A by pointing to these curious features of our world, beckoning us to reject the hyperreal (if that is even possible anymore), by reminding us “it’s not like the movies” (even if the governor of California was an action film star, and people still write to Perry Mason for legal advice).

Today I Woke Up Sucking a Grammy

So what kind of album is Kid A (really)? One problem with “Best Alternative Album of 2001” is that it presupposes the reality, perhaps hyperreality, of the very kinds of categories that Kid A lyrically and musically rebels against. “Alternative” may not be precise, but along with every other category it presumes there exist certain stable qualities and categories of albums, of musical experiences, to be labeled and named—all of which becomes doubtful when viewed through the postmodern lenses the album itself puts on us. Perhaps the choice of “Optimistic” as an airplay-single makes a lot of sense. Even if we know the limitations of our language, and the way some ideas and things resist being said, understood, or seen through the fog of postmodernity, we have to use language and, when we do, acknowledge these limits and try the best we can.

21.

Hyperreally Saying Something

TIM FOOTMAN

It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues—ever since Narcissus bent over his spring.

—Jean Baudrillard

The search for ‘reality’ and ‘authenticity’ has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. Consider Plato’s analogy of the cave, in which the shadows of puppets on a wall form the only reality known by chained prisoners, or René Descartes’s well known introspective mantra: “I think therefore I am.” We can also see this search for authenticity in George Berkeley’s questioning of whether or not an unobserved event truly happens or in Martin Heidegger’s musing on the ultimate meaning of the verb ‘to be’ in human existence.

This philosophical tradition has been recently furthered by French cultural thinker Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007). Baudrillard argued that modern culture and media have effectively destroyed any notion of authenticity, replacing it instead with a succession of images that purport to represent reality while, in fact, masking it from view. One of the key concepts most associated with Baudrillard is the simulacrum, which he defined as the image’s inevitable victory over reality. He saw this simulacrum