Why is there a Parthenon… in Nashville? Jean Baudrillard might have the answer. In Episode 112 of Overthink, Ellie and David pick apart hyperreality: the provocative suggestion that our reality today is so inundated by signs that the gap between reality and simulation has all but broken down. Your hosts talk through the history and experience of hyperreality, from its presence in Superman and Bridgerton to its uncanny role in legitimizing presidential power. And they wonder: does the idea of ...
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Hello and welcome to Overthink, the podcast.
Where two friends who are also philosophers put ideas in contact with everyday reality and hyper reality.
I'm Ellie Anderson.
And I'm David Pena Guzman.
Today we begin with a quote From Jean Baudrillard's 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, where Baudrillard writes, disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra.
It is, first of all, a play of illusions and phantasms, the pirates, the frontier, the future world, et cetera.
But this masks something else, and this ideological blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order.
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real country.
All of real America that is Disneyland, a bit like prisons, are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety.
In its banal omnipresence that is carceral, Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
Whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.
Ooh, this quote, man, it's a good one.
I bet the listeners didn't expect that we were gonna start with a quote about Disneyland, but I feel like I'm hearing it as somebody who grew up in Southern California and just like getting chills thinking about the pirates, the frontier, et cetera, in Disneyland.
And what's so fascinating is that it ends in a really different place, place than you might have expected.
It's not that Disneyland is fake, but presents itself as real.