How the Hyperreal Reigns Through Commodification; A Diagnosis of Postmodern Symptoms in K-pop

By Judy Zhu

Editors note: My god Ubqiue is doing research papers now. This is great. Seriously I know so many kids are just going to click off of this because there’s no pretty images but this is real literature -J

Jean Baudrillard was one of the most influential philosophers and cultural critics in the late 1900’s alongside many others who ruled the era of the emergence of structuralism. The title of ‘high priest of postmodernism’ is attributed to Baudrillard for his influence on cultural theory and post-structuralism, particularly his contributions to semiology. Structuralism refers to the category of thoughts that examines constituents of the structures, through which we cognise the world, not as mere singularities but as their function within structures. It encompasses linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and so on. Semiology, in short, is a term coined by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, referring to the study of linguistic significations. For instance, the most famous example of structuralistic analysis is of the ‘arbor (tree)’ – when the word ‘tree’ is uttered, it is not of a physical tree that the subject wishes to convey but the mental concept of a tree. The former, ‘tree’ is a semiologically named signifier while the latter is signified. Cooperatively, they converge into a sign, anything that conveys a somewhat definitive meaning. In succession to Saussurean structuralistic thinking, Baudrillard proposed his most renowned dissection of the post-industrial world: that our world is cognised as a hyperreality, in which we can no longer delineate fiction and reality, where signs and their respective meaning are in a constant state of dissonance. 

However, what does the above have to do with K-pop?

To understand hyperreality and its relationship to K-pop, we must, first, examine the nature of art from Baudrillard’s predecessors. All forms of music are widely categorised as ‘art’ and K-pop is no different. Theodor W. Adorno, one of Baudrillard’s biggest influences, argues that art, in itself, serves beyond self-expression. In How to Look at Television, Adorno asserts: “Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form.” Simply put, art posits itself between the artist and the structures within which art is situated. Art’s formation is carved by its law of movement, its dialectical non-staticity sublating between the artist’s authentic self-expression and social structures. As art acts as a mediation between structural norms and the artist, it becomes bestowed with critical function and becomes autonomous, Adorno describes, from ideological, commercial, and political forces. For instance, in The Third of May 1808 created by Fransisco Goya, Goya casts both a figurative and physical spotlight onto the executed Spanish rebels that contoured their faces with the hopeless humanness that faceless and synchronised French troops do not possess. The angle of the image is drawn from the perspective of an external bystander, possibly to evoke guilt, or even complicitness, within the audience. The Third of May 1808, to Adorno, although very much rooted in a political anti-war cause, is the perfect condensation of autonomous artistic expression as it emerged between the artist’s own experience and critique of structural norms, that is the occupation of Madrid by Napoleon’s troops in 1808, and not to be sold as a mere commodity or propaganda. To Adorno, when art is created with the sole purpose of being traded, it becomes a reifying commodity and no longer an autonomous functioning critique. When art loses its autonomy, it is but another commodity to be sold on the market. Reification, here, refers to the naturalisation of such objectification. 

Yet, in our age, most forms of media are created mostly, if not purely, for commercial purposes. The K-pop industry epitomises such manifestations of devoidness of meaning. In addition to serving a merely commercial purpose, the industry, even, principally lacks the autonomy to begin with. From its commonly known title, the K-pop industry, it is presupposed that K-pop never purported itself to create art for the sake of art. Undeniably, the creation and surgence of K-pop are inseparable from that of the internet, and without the internet, K-pop would not have established itself as it is. Consequently, because of the industry’s reliance on the internet, a simulacrum, and simulation of reality (more on this later, cue Baudrillard’s yap-fest), it must reduce its compartments into digestible commodities to be sold. For instance, it is through specialized terms, signs, such as “comeback”, “maknae”, “visual”, and “face of the group” that K-pop is fragmented into accessibly consumed commodities. By designating signs to each concept and the idol’s role in the manufacture of ‘art’, every piece of work created under the K-pop industry amalgamates into the same categories. Instead of creating art, this process deprives music of autonomy and its independence of a solely accessible commercial cause. Concepts that originated from K-pop are, again, often merely symptomatic of this commodification. Take the proliferation of K-pop physical album sales, for example, where the album’s other constituents (photo-cards, posters, physical images) are more valued than the generator of music, the CD, itself. It is almost as if the industry does not even bother to pretend that it was built upon the rudiments of art, it blatantly flaunts itself as the perfect commodity. Even idols themselves must undergo commodification and embody the identical, automation-like beauty ideals, synchronicity, robotic mannerism, andso on, with condemnation of their nonconformity normalised and even encouraged.  The popularity of ‘selcas’ (selfie photocards) within the industry further affirms the fact that idols are, both physically and figuratively, boxed and shelved as commodities. 

Another aspect that we must examine is the notion of commodity fetishism. In Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (please hear me out before you accuse me of being an ‘evil Marxist’ 🙏🙁), he coins the term to explain the conflation of a commodities value to one that is higher than its use and labour value. To Marx, commodities embody three key values: labour value, use value, and exchange value. In over-simplified terms, labor value refers to the amount of labor used to create a product, use value is a product’s tangible degree of utility when it is consumed, and exchange value is the price for which commodities are traded on the market. Marx infamously identified money as the ‘universal equivalent’ for exchange values, as goods’ exchange values must be interpreted through monetary means. Fetishism, within this context, derives from the Hegelian postulation of human’s propensity for designating divinity onto objects. When commodity and fetishism are uttered in tandem, it becomes apparent that our tendency to attribute immaterial values to products has been exploited by those who profit from the surplus. This phenomenon is another central aspect of the K-pop industry. Realistically, commodities such as the Supreme Brick and K-pop photocards, alike, inhere no use value beyond their signification of status and individualism. Commodity fetishism also exists through the false equivalence of rarity and value. An example within K-pop is the naturalisation of fan-calls and fan-signs, in which fans purchase designated albums (and practically gamble) for a slim chance of communicating with their desired idols/groups, online or offline. As dystopian as this sounds, not only does it commodify idols as products of gambling, it further fetishises idol-commodities as it deifies them as unattainable and images of a product, thus more desirable. 

Finally, now I shall link the above and Baudrillardianism. 

The aforementioned ‘state of dissonance’ between signs and their respective meanings is epitomized by the K-pop industry. In addition to the three traditional Marxian theoretical values, Baudrillard posits the fourth that shadows beneath us: sign value. The sign value legitimises the prices of the $1000 Supreme brick, the $1500 Tiffany & Co. paperclip, and the beloved K-pop photocards. Yet, the hyperreal extends even further beyond the reduction of idols to images – the very online images of idols supersede the idols, themselves, in realness. K-pop idols are recognized through their role in a simulation, instead of their ‘real’ selves. For instance, K-pop content is often strictly online, and idols’ activities are circumscribed by their proximity to cameras, instead of real fans. So much so that when images and evidence of idols existing in the real world have been exposed, they are condemned. For instance, we rarely see idols outside of screens despite their popularity to such an extent that their ‘real’ features are of constant discussion for that they are masked behind the hyperreal. The topic of ‘dating’ among idols is considered scandalous rather than a natural process of human proximity, as it strips an idol’s image away from one that is completely unattainable. This condemnation is, again, emblematic of the fact that, for idols, their image in the hyperreal is very much more real than themselves in reality, as they are expected to flawlessly behave and resemble their hyperreal selves – the signs of the real predominate the real. 

In his 1981 seminal work, Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard once posited that ‘pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the real and the imaginary.’Products of K-pop are, indubitably, not only subservient to this simulation but also subsumed into the simulacra. Returning to the example of idols’ stigmatized personal romantic experience, regardless of the extent to which their romantic relationships are frowned upon, an overwhelmingly majority of K-pop songs are about romance. This is a result of the simulation, not dissimulation, as the accessible image of a romantic idol is much more profitable than the reality of the idols’ own romance; the former invitingly obfuscates the distance between fans and the idol when, in reality, both can only conceive each other through a screen. Baudrillard often refers to the ‘pure screens, and constant projections’ upon which our world is built. We realize that K-pop is but ‘pure screens’ as it is rarely conceived outside the simulation that is the internet, even when the industry appears to interact with its subordinates, it must do so through screens of ‘constant projections.’

In respect to the Baudrillardian simulacra, he posits that the post-industrial world is an indefinite copy of something and itself, yet we lack the faculty to conceive the something, for all that was original had effaced. In his 1968 work, The System of Object, he writes: “Desire is, in fact, the motor of the repetition or substitution of oneself.” Again, K-pop not only epitomises the simulation of various once autonomous elements (R&B, rap, Afro-beats, and many other aspects of art that only proliferates because of Black culture) it also exemplifies the loss of meaning between signifiers and the real within the simulacra. Despite K-pop’s constant downplay of Black culture through misappropriation, it continues to profit from it in a simulated environment in which the industry pretends to be original. The loss of autonomy is, again, marked by K-pop’s overly repetitive lyrics to such a great extent that lyrics no longer play a major, if any, role in K-pop consumers’ choices. While lyricism was once the pinnacle of verbal art, it no longer serves as a medium of expression, and the meaning of words, signs, is lost in pursuit of accessible commercial causes. I believe there is no need to spoon-feed readers instances where K-pop lyrics are repetitive, cringe-worthy, or meaningless, for they are ubiquitous. Once the same signs are repeated to an immense extent for merely commercial purposes, their meanings become obsolete within the endless simulacra of repetition. To Baudrillard, we are ruled through an ‘un-organisable sensory overload.’Within K-pop, the simulational overstimulation’s sovereignty is made apparent through repetitive fast-paced 808s that simulate real percussion, synthesizers that were once simulations of the piano yet are now more common and real in K-pop than pianos, and idols’ robotic synchronicity that is praised for its lack of humanness. It is not until we attempt to uncover this mirage that we discover that behind the simulacra, reality is none. We cannot discern where, precisely, a lyrical line or a synth note becomes ‘real’ or ‘original’ for its very repetition rids us from finding its stem. 

“All of the real is residual, and everything that is residual is destined to repeat itself indefinitely in phantasms (141).” However, here, we realise that commodification, the sequential fetishism, sign values, and even the endless repetitions, in which we are forever blind to its origin, do not solely occur in the K-pop industry, although within it they are significantly prominent. Signs of the simulation, simulacra, and hyperreal are, indeed, ubiquitous. Yet, how often do we find matters with their meanings untouched by the hyperreal? Ironically, at this very moment, my article is more real in the simulation than in the real.
At last, we have arrived at the (possibly dreaded) conclusion – the hyperreal is inescapable, or in Baudrillard’s terms: the objects have triumphed and the vestige of man is left intangible. Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal, ultimately, underlines the failure in Marx’s prediction of the fall of capitalism. We are so engrossed in the simulation that we cannot find a way to escape, and for that, we cannot cognise what lies beyond the dissonance of signs and meanings. To say this does not mean to point to the (often antisemitic) rhetoric that there are specific groups of people, or deities, behind and above the simulation to trap us within. It is, simply, that in the process of attempting to achieve great technological advancements, we have overlooked how its byproducts will forever haunt us.