BAUDRILLARD

The Sublimity of
the Hyperreal
NOVEMBER 18, 2014 / LEAVE A COMMENT

In aesthetics, the theory of sublime refers to a quality of physical, spiritual, or

artistic greatness that spans beyond any possibility of calculation or imitation.
The sublime may be as earthly as an expansive oceanic horizon, an earthquake,
or a rocky mountain range. Or it may be more intangible and spiritually jarring,
such as the description of Death as a dauntingly dark formless being in Paradise
Lost. The philosopher Kant believes that when a person comes into the presence
of a sublime object, they are overwhelmed by its magnitude, which surpasses
the power of the imagination to fully grasp. As our imagination wrestles with
reason to absorb the sublime object, it generates a disharmony that produces
almost a feeling of displeasure, which Kant attributes to the feeling of awe or
fear that one experiences when regarding the sublime. He believes that we are
able to transcend this terror, and experience an almost cathartic release and
pleasure from the wonder of the sublime.
I refer to Kant’s theory of aesthetics because his sublime is one that functions as
a boundless, formless object, which generates simultaneous terror and pleasure
in the fascination with it. We have been asked this week to consider the line
between the real and unreal, or rather, the schism between real and the
confounded reality/illusion of the hyperreal. The hyperreal is “more real than
real” to quote Baudrillard, it is the inability to distinguish reality from the
simulation of reality. That grappling with reason is one that leads me to believe,
much like the paradox of the sublime, that the boundary between the real and
hyperreal exists in a state of dynamic tension, from which we derive both
pleasure and pain. I detect in Baudrillard’s description of simulacra a sense of
the Kantian idea of excess, which leads me to propose that perhaps the hyperreal
is sublime because it exceeds the boundaries of reality, and can only be
imagined and rationalized, though it is basically beyond our grasp.
I’ve considered whether applying sublime theory to the real/hyperreal or
reality/illusion binary sheds light on the boundary between them. I believe there
are quite a few parallels to be drawn between our reception of the real as
something we are “compelled to experience…as a nightmarish apparition”
(Zizek) and the sublime, which incites terror in its magnitude and formlessness.

“When we get too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into
disgust at the Real of the bare flesh,” here Zizek’s argument is aesthetically
charged. John Milton describes the sublimity of Death as, “the other shape…had
none distinguishable in member…shadow seem’d…black it stood as night,
fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell” (Milton, Book 2). This parallels the idea of
“fascination” turning into “disgust” and revulsion at the real once upon
approaching the object. To this effect, in Nihilism and the Sublime
Postmodern, William Slocombe states, “we can discover meaning in the
hyperreal—that which resists all meaning. Baudrillard’s sublime does not stem
from the production of meaning, however, because it is the very denial of
meaning implicit in the hyperreal that creates the sublime feeling.”
Slocombe determines that the “hyperreal is sublime because of its status as
something that exceeds the boundaries of the self.” Perhaps the troubled barrier
between the real and hyperreal is akin to the barrier between the sublime and the
non-sublime/beautiful. When an object or experience reaches a
sublime/hyperreal stasis, it is not apprehendable by the human confines of
reason. Rather, we are intended to marvel in its grandiosity with reverence as
we attempt to untangle it. At this point, the sublime, and by extension the
hyperreal, takes on a quality of the divine, which too may be contemplated but
never fully understood.