Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Anglistik II/American Studies
Hauptseminar: From White Noise to Fight Club:
Consumerism, Hyperreality and Simulations
in Postmodern American Literature
SoSe 2006

A History of Hyperreality –
The Rise of Clare Inc. in Richard Powers′ Gain

by: Christian Schmitz

Table of contents

1. Introduction  3

2. Hyperreality  4

3. Clare – A History of Hyperreality  6

3.1 Starting Referential  6
3.2 Fitting the Itch to the Scratch  8
3.3 The Birth of Fake  9
3.4 Incorporation  11
3.5 The Age of Simulation and Merchandise  13
3.6 The Age of Simulacra  17

4. Conclusion  19

5. Literature  20
 

1. Introduction

To write a history of hyperreality is a difficult and almost impossible task. When did hyperreality begin? With the first Neanderthals painting simplistic pictures of the environment they live in? With the introduction of money as a symbol for material wealth? Jean Baudrillard for example regards the Middle Ages as a time being not hyperreal. But what about the ideologies of that time enforced upon the peasants by the church? Of a hell and purgatory that can only be escaped by enough wealth and the purchase of a letter of indulgence. The idea of God itself. Isn’t that hyperreal as well? Richard Powers’ novel Gain does provide an adequate temporal and narrative framework for the problem. The last two hundred years of business, in the novel exclusively taking place in America but nonetheless valid for the whole world, are marked by an immense development in industry and commerce. I hope to show that this development can also be retraced with regard to the concept of hyperreality on the basis of the novel.

The first part of this paper will deal with the concept of hyperreality. As it would go beyond the scope of this paper to take into consideration everything that has been said and written about hyperreality, I will focus on two of its most prominent theorists: Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco. Their comments and ideas are not only relatively easy to grasp and therefore easy to apply to the novel but are also sufficient enough to explain the concept in adequate depth.

The second part will then focus on the novel itself, to be more precise it will exclusively deal with the storyline of the Clare enterprise. Although the second storyline also provides a number of examples for hyperreality, I decided to leave it out as it only takes place in the present and therefore would disturb the linear concept of this paper. This part will apply the theories of hyperreality onto the novel step by step in chronological order of the events, starting with the beginnings of the enterprise and stating the problems of a referential beginning. It will then treat of the beginnings of hyperreality with regard to Clare and its accordant society and later with the process of incorporation and its problems; then I hope to show in how far simulation and merchandise are intertwined and almost naturally lead to the age of simulacra we live in today. Finally I want to point out that this paper is not a full scale interpretation of Gain but only deals with the concept and development of hyperreality within the novel.

2. Hyperreality

To understand the idea of hyperreality it is fundamental at first to explain “Saussure’s structural linguistics, the semiological theories of language problematized relations between language and reality, words and things.”¹ According to this theory, language suffers from a basic arbitrariness between the real-world-entity, also called referent, and the sign, consisting of the signified which is the mental image of the referent and its match in language, also called signifier. There is no referential relationship within the sign. Whatever the name is that has been given to an entity, it is only the agreement of a certain community, e.g. German speaking people, which imposes the signifier upon the referent. We as a community have decided to call the four-legged mammal that barks and has a strange affinity for postmen a dog. Other communities use the signifier Hund or chien for the same animal.

The problem of arbitrariness goes even farther, not only do we have no concrete relationship between things and their names, even the names itself “are wholly circular, a set of signifiers reflecting back at each other lacking the grounding necessary to render meaning.”² E.g. if one would look up the word (signifier) cow in a dictionary, the basic definition would come down to: four-legged mammal, herbivore, female, etc…. But all these descriptions of what a cow actually is are only non-referential signifiers themselves. For someone with no idea of our world would have to look up mammal and herbivore and female and these words would provide other signifiers that would have to be looked up and so on and so on “in endless reproduction.”³ This “slippage of reality, its elusiveness encountered even in a basic search for definition, is an element of the hyperreal – a condition in which the distinction between the “real” and the imaginary implodes.”⁴

Jean Baudrillard, who was especially concerned with this gap between the real and the imaginary, extended and applied the theoretical background of Saussure onto everyday life. He argues that we have passed from an age of representation, where “the sign and the real are equivalent…”⁵ into “the age of simulation […] with a liquidation of all referentials…” (PoS, 343) Simulation meaning a version of reality that “threatens the difference between “true” and “false” between “real” and “imaginary.” (PoS, 344) So we are no longer able to distinguish between the simulation and its origin. The transformation of ages has happened in four phases, the first being the ideal condition, in which the image “is the reflection of a basic reality.” (PoS, 346) Realism or a mirror would be adequate examples. The second phase is marked by an image that “masks and perverts a basic reality.” (PoS, 346) This can be seen in modern beauty magazines where the image of a model is digitally changed and prettified by computer programs. The third phase “masks the absence of a basic reality.”(PoS, 346) If we consider God to be non-existent, then all of the images of Him are exactly what Baudrillard describes. Another example for this phase would be Disneyland. According to Baudrillard “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the real country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland […]” (PoS, 352) In other words the hyperreal Disneyland has been built in order to conceal the absence of a basic reality outside of the amusement park. The fourth and last phase in which the image “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (PoS, 347) can be exemplified with an isotonic drink called Mountain Blast. A flavour that bears no resemblance to reality at all, as it would be hardly possible to describe the taste of a mountain let alone a blast. The OED defines a simulacrum as “something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities.”¹

[...]

1 Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard, Polity Press, p.3

2 Nicholas Oberly, reality/hyperreality (1) http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/realityhyperreality.htm

3 Oberly

4 Oberly

5 Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, in Simulations, p.346

1 OED, quoted in Devin Sandoz, Simulations/Simulacra(1)http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/simulationsimulacrum.htm