Indeed, today's public interest and concern appears inversely related to the sheer ubiquity of the downsizing buzzword, such that it matters not if news magazines give national prominence to a few unlucky CEO's, who must play the role of coldhearted rapacious capitalists, or if the New York Times adds its special news-of-record voice to a sober, seven-part front-page look at "The Downsizing of America." Mixing theoretical metaphors, the
hyperreality of the American one-dimensional society continues to contain the political significance of economic dislocation for all but perhaps those directly sacrificed and otherwise immediately effected by massive layoffs.
The former book, to pirate Umberto Eco's title, travels in Reality and
Hyperreality to encompass the visual in art through maps, architectural perspective, illusions of surface appearances, and their effects in music, art and dance.
DeLillo has been widely hailed as an exemplar of postmodernist writing Typically, this assessment rests on readings that focus on his accounts of the postmodern experience of living in a
hyperreality.(1) But to postmodernize DeLillo is to risk losing sight of the (conspicuously unpostmodern) metaphysical impulse that animates his work.
Umberto Eco: Matka arkipaivan epatodellisuuteen (Travel into
hyperreality).
He confronts this position in a chapter developing the second term in his subtitle: "a journey in hype and
hyperreality."
Still, it should be duly noted that not only has Neil Postman never referred to himself as a postmodernist, but he never, to my knowledge, uses the term "postmodern." Nor does he use the jargon associated with postmodernism, including such terms as "decentering," "
hyperreality," or "pastiche." In short, Postman does not speak postmodern.
Within the black box, transparent watercolorg wash over his drawings and over the type he hand-set on the story's twelve oversize sheets, producing an impression of fantasy and dizzy
hyperreality. Color continues in the inner fittings, a pink rayon lining and lingerie-fringed spine.
It summarizes several author's works and several popular films, arranging them into broad categories: architecture (Robert Silverberg, The Towering Inferno); theme parks /
hyperreality (Kit Reed, Westworld); post-apocalypse (Rollerball, Logan's Run); the brink of radioactive disaster (The China Syndrome, Cobssus: The Forbin Project) and its aftermath (Robert Merle, Russel Hoban).
Whereas the
hyperreality of electronic media may have extinguished reality as we knew it, as Baudrillard argues, the Republic of Letters was never real.
What new crises of
hyperreality, irreality, and representation are instantiated, and even instigated, by the trend among contemporary documentarians to pursue subjects who inhabit the margins of mainstream society?
As a consequence, in The Thirty-Nine Steps or in North by Northwest there is no plausible explanation or resolution as there is no original to refer back to, no truth to be discerned, but just an obvious neutralization or implosion of meaning, in a sense parallel to that theorised by Jean Baudrillard in relation with the collapsing of reality and communication at the hands of mass media and
hyperreality (2002: 79-86).