Puncturing The Hyper-Real

One of the most pernicious legacies of postmodernism has been the idea of the ‘hyper-real.’ Its import,to put it bluntly,is modern man’s immersion in the world of the images constantly churned out by electronic media and enveloping human consciousness to such an extent that the real world is erased from the mind.So far so good.But then,by a sleight of hand the theorist brackets the real world out from discourse.Discourse replaces the world.

Postmodernism in theory junks the objective world,turning it into projections of words or, if one likes, of the mind.Thus different minds/discourses emerging out of different contexts project different world-pictures which are inherently incommensurate.The magic spell cannot be broken because these become unalterable givens.Unless of course they change of themselves.

Erasure of any external agency is tantamount to total subjectivity. Hence it is akin to unqualified idealism.The redoubtable representative of tough uncompromising common sense,Dr Johnson of eighteenth century London when confronted with the logical web spun by Bishop Barkley high-priest of idealism by a travelling companion had turned round suddenly and kicked with all his might at a roadside rock and exclaimed:”Thus do I refute him”.

Often dismissed as uncomprehending dogmatism,I believe Dr Johnson’s response hints at a solid irrefragable gap between the word and the object that human action negotiates. Perhaps this is too gross an explanation.The intended meaning is that action makes us aware of a world outside mind.Word alone is passive contemplation.

The celebration of the hyper-real as overtaking the real in life is actually a typical example of postmodernist passive acceptance of technology as a condition of human consciousness, somewhat like space and time.The elephant in the room is the agency that DEPLOYS that technology as its master,in this case advanced monopoly capitalism.

This class of masters of technology that envelopes the world and the human mind is not setting it up like a disinterested God.It aims first at sustaining and increasing profit by influencing the mind and next at ‘naturalizing’ or making habitual like the air we breathe the environing capitalism. Thus it continues the message of advertisements and media propaganda at a subliminal level.Something like the role of advertisement in perpetuating the rule of business or capital,as traced out half a century ago by Vance Packard in his HIDDEN PERSUADERS.

The second dangerous and pernicious effect of the hyper-real world of technology-spawned images is blurring the line between the real and the imaginary.This allows the capitalist empires to win our unconscious or mesmerized support to a world THEY had created.An artificial world,an artificial social and cultural order,is accepted as the given,the one and only world.

This extends to our experience of frauds that sometimes rob us of our judgment,our life-long savings, cheats our love,loyalty and our faith in such fashion as to drive us to suicide.

It also shapes behaviour in such ways as to forestall attempts to break the spell and change demeaning degrading conditions of capitalist way of life.Either by drugging us with addiction to sensual imagery,trivia of life,or abstract mind-games,or commentary in social media as a rhetorical substitute for real resistance and struggle in the street.

Hiren Gohain is a political commentator