Hyporeality, the Society of the Selfie and Identification Politics

This paper considers the relevance of Baudrillard’s work for the contemporary era. It argues that the digital revolution that has escalated since his death in 2007 represents the extension of that productivist project he identified in western, semiotic societies: the desire to produce and realize the real. The liberation of each individual as a producer of images and content increases our stock of the real, but it has the reversive effect of proliferating and hollowing out the real, causing the mass-media age of hyperreality to reverse into the digital-age of hyporeality. It also reverses the fate of individuals and their subjectivity, as they move from being merely nodes of a network to being the center of their own, personalized media ecologies and networks. The self now absorbs the world in the society of the selfie. This is not, however, the unleashing of a real interiority but the expansion of that system of semiotic simulacral control Baudrillard had critiqued in his earliest work. This emphasis on the self and its identity can also be seen today in the rise of ‘identity politics.’ This paper argues that Baudrillard would have opposed this as caught within the dominant system and instead argues for the importance today, in a digital-era defined by the dominance now of ‘signal value,’ of an ‘identification politics’ that functions as the real mode of control. The model for this relationship, the paper concludes, is that of the experimental subject, wired and surveyed in its pains and pleasures.