Abstract
I build my approach to hyperreality around a distinction between France and the United States – and I hone my approach to the cultural distinctions through a characterization of hyperreality of the homo americanus kind. To close this book, it will help to revisit, from a somewhat more popular angle, the concept of hyperreality and particularly its unique relation to American unculture in contrast to the more intellectual-dialectical French culture, which was inspired to write plays about it, or more to the point, to write itself into homo americanus hyperreality by reinventing it dramatically. As I have tried to make clear throughout the chapters of this book, the French respond not so much to Americans as ‘Americans’ per se, but to the insatiable demand for ersatz reality that is fostered, nurtured, by Americans as homo americanus. If we understand how the French perceive and theorize the uncultural effects of postmodern hyperreality, along with the United States’ homo americanus exceptionalism as regards its penchant for living an alternative, virtual reality to the sacrifice of lived experience, we will better appreciate French methods of theatricalizing the images of what appears to be a deviant, if fascinating national culture.
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Notes
See also Deirdre Barrett’s discussion of our food system as it has been altered by the ‘supernormal stimuli’ syndrome. The term, coined by Niko Tinberger, refers to ‘the problem instincts create when disconnected from their natural environment’ (Supernormal Stimuli 3). Modern humans’ ability to unnaturally over-stimulate our appetite for food, sex, aggression, and entertainment has wreaked havoc with our natural evolution. In the area of food, ‘the fast-food industry has perfected the supernatural stimulus’ (81). Barrette explains how easily organisms can be harmed by that which they desire, ‘especially when encountering new stimuli for which
evolution hasn’t prepared them’ (136). This human predilection for following outdated instincts is the more harmful as a function of our hyperreality.
The ‘toxic substances’ consumed in moderation by the French beg a comparison to those consumed in mass quantities by too many Americans. NPR’s Morning Edition, 16 July 2012 (‘It’s State Fair Season: What’s on the Menu?’), reported that the official food of the 2011 Iowa State Fair was ‘deep-fried butter,’ and this year’s is ‘a double-bacon corn dog.’
The ‘franchised landscape’ of the national corporate highway culture expressed by William L. Fox and the ‘monocultural placelessness’ experienced by Jeff Brouws. See Chapter 4.
In his recent Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, Ralph Nader criticizes another model of monoculture, one engineered by free-market fundamentalism. One of the super-rich who collaborates on the project to save the world by exposing corporate totalitarianism for its ‘omnicidal trajectory of unbridled corporatism,’ says ‘The world was never meant to be run according to one overriding and narrowly conceived standard of profit that smothers the values of a humane, sensitive civilization’ (113). As a consequence of the continuously evolving hyper-world, the differences within material reality increasingly break down and, despite the persistence of a superficial, external difference, what formerly were perceived as substantially discrete entities and effects, once they are commodified, con-fuse and ‘ab-stract’ and begin to resemble one another. In the food industry, corn, for example, con-fuses with beef and soft drinks; in our local supermarket, the taste and texture of outwardly purple plums resemble outwardly pink peaches; at the center of our living rooms (and maybe even in our bedrooms), television programs become formulaic, despite some superficial mechanical attempt at originality, and actors and actresses are equally either seductive or repulsive, and their characters become heroes or villains, or perhaps some well-defined and familiar place between. The political arena is laden with flag-waving jingoism and inhibited by the force of fundamentalist religion – to the satisfaction of corporate interests. Consequently, as both American and French critics have pointed out, Democrats resemble Republicans. Those individuals who represent rare exceptions to the Democrat or Republican litmus test for (token) political viability (such as Ralph Nader) are considered megalomaniacal ‘spoilers’ at best, freaks or non-entities at worst, and they function merely as convenient foils for the true contenders. The abstractionist hype of American politics contrasts with the much less hyperreally charged atmosphere of multiparty French politics.
In the US fresh-food marketplace, as in the supermarket chains, the emphasis too often gets deflected from a concrete symbiosis between society, nature, and gastronomy, and toward the abstractions of consumerism, the practice that ‘feeds the beast.’ Witness the presence of booths that promote commercial ventures quite unrelated to local food.
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© 2013 Les Essif
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Essif, L. (2013). Conclusion. In: American ‘Unculture’ in French Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299031_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299031_7
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