Prologue to the Present

The postmodern was a period marked by the engendering of value from representation and status, breaking away from the previous modernist framework. What Jean Baudrillard defined as sign-value, a value which imparts prestige or status to the consumer, with this value function becoming preeminent. The precession of the simulacrum, designating an object’s value as the status, prestige, and other non-positive value functions attached to it. Thus, offering a degree of separation from the actual or “unsimulated” reality of the object. Baudrillard had originally conceptualized sign-value as an addition to the Marxist tripartite idea of value, namely labor-value, use-value, and exchange-value. Eventually, he began to see its distinction from and ascendancy over the other three modes, marking the complete erasure of them altogether as they became obscured in postmodernity’s loss of reality.

To be sure, this loss of reality was brought about exactly by the artificiality of sign-value. These simulatable forms of status attributed to objects and their consumption could be taken from actual sources or they could be a simulation of something which never truly existed (simulacra). Immediate examples of simulacra are readily seen in entertainment. Reality TV shows or edited photos on social media present a “reality” that does not or has not actually existed, but are positioned as if they did. Consumption is therefore marked by a symbolic distinction from the consumption of others.

In this sense, brand (used interchangeably with object hereafter) distinguishes values very clearly. The subject (consumer) is able to delineate himself from another merely by the brands which he consumes. Take for instance a Rolex watch, which functions like any other watch, but derives the bulk of its comparatively more expensive value from its brand image rather than its utility, cost of production, or other classical understandings of value. In return the subject who consumes this object takes on the sign of the brand, assimilating it into his own image. It says something about him in a superficial sense; perhaps he values luxury and seeks to project his taste and wealth to a certain group. However, as we move beyond the era of postmodernity, value has and must transcend these vague, simulatable self-descriptors, serving an evermore encompassing role. 

The Hypo-Real

Hypomodernity is here defined as our current transitional period away from the postmodern. Some refer to it as hypermodernity, digimodernism, or even post-postmodernism, but the prefix hypo is more illustrative. This is an age clearly yearning for and desperately attempting to reconstruct the real, but is doing so from below. Instead of looking for the causal chain of ideas and meaning, we are attempting to rebuild them within the abstracted context of the Liberal order. Liberal Democracy as a social order calls into question the premise of all tradition and seeks to uproot it and the authority derived from that tradition. It “liberates” all ideas from history and dismantles particulars making any authority and tradition appear arbitrary.

The modern flavor of Liberal Democracy is what the philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis refers to as Mass-Democracy1. An all encompassing and global social order not connected by a continual tradition or lineage of thought, but instead an atomistic island of abstractions. With no authority, Power is instead expressed as the economic relations between subjects. The important thing to note is that, although Mass-Democracy postures itself as a plurality of all social orders, its central contradiction is the systematic rejection of any social order outside its meta-narrative. Owen Gilbride elaborates on this paradox in the following way:

The individual receives behavioral imperatives, but these are never framed as imperatives. The Mass-Democratic individual must carry out every command as if it were his own idea. He must affirm certain views, and champion certain causes. He must recognize certain groups as oppressed, and others as the oppressor. He must concern himself with certain problems, and disregard other concerns as paranoid. These positions spread via mass (now increasingly "social") media. The individual is to present them as truths he came to by way of rational self-reflection.2

Mass-Democracy exists as a purely declarative space where every idea is an abstraction lacking an ostensive-imperative history. The Liberal subject cannot tell you where “Human rights“ come from, how we derived the ethical statutes of Liberalism, or even why something like marriage is an institution. These ideas are only parroted and proclaimed as self-evident. Insofar as social stability is concerned, the absence of a hierarchy or history among concepts is intentional. This is because each concept has been reoriented to be a nomadic and rootless thoughtform, rendering all ideas equal in significance.

The super-rationality of Mass-Democracy stands in opposition to human nature. If this wasn’t the case, then why do people clamor to form identities? The Subject has successfully been emptied-out of all particularities and essence. Consumption in postmodernity only temporarily satisfied Man’s want for purpose and orientation, in a shallow and limited way. But there is a desperate desire for community and a growing need for more fundamental meaning. This is the direction that consumption has been going for at least the last decade.

Brand and its image are no longer enough to satisfy consumption in a hypomodern environment. Consumption for status is crippling in an existential sense. When one can simulate any status as image (existing or non-existing) he implicitly affirms he has no authentic inner-self and must paralytically sift through an endless set of signs to wear. This is the postmodern conclusion; to leave the Subject confused in the virtuality of it all with no further understanding of himself and the world around him. This has necessitated the need for a more palpable, earnest source of meaning and source of knowledge. If Objects have truly won against the Subject, as they appear to have, then the Subject’s own thoughts must be subsumed by these now imperious Objects which sit above man. The Object must provide the Subject with what he has lost, such that the Subject becomes a participant in the Object’s essence. Objects must necessarily go beyond a simple offering of repute and impose a quasi-religious sacramental value, in which the Subject may partake. 

Man, once thought of being made in the image of God, becomes the image of the Object. Instead of Man’s relation to the metaphysical in hierarchical fashion, he is bound in servitude to the material, laterally. In this case, the Liberal philosophical project has come full circle: Traditions and universals scrutinized into obscurity, denial of authority, culminating in pure abstraction and denunciation of all particulars and that which is not “rationally” tenable. The metaphysical was dismissed in favor of the material, yet the hypomodern Liberal order has adopted the metaphysical qualities it once aimed to erase, donning them like the coat of a skinned animal.

The brand must now think for the subject, omnipotently decreeing his ideology with a religious dedication. Consumption is transfigured into a spiritual ritual of sorts. Brand is not merely an indication or imparting of status but the progenitor of worldviews with an accompanying mythopoetic personhood. By way of rejecting anything outside their purview, the object attains godhood as man clings to whatever inkling of religiosity he can grasp out of the material – The new age, everchanging godhead from which all thought and knowledge are derived.

Sacral-value of the physical

Firstly, consider consumption in the literal sense (brand and object referring to businesses and the goods they sell). Figure 1 typifies the social relation between brand and subject in the hypomodern.

Brand expresses an aspect of Mass-Democracy’s ideology as though it were preaching to a congregation. The response to the brand is clearly ironic but simultaneously seems to validate its semi-personhood (it is without agency lacking a meaningful capacity to respond). By engaging relationally to objects in this manner the dogmas of these objects triumphantly exert their will over their new dominion. 

Why else do companies follow social and political trends in advertisement? Often this activity backfires against them financially yet, for instance, every June, corporations become steadfast LGBTQ activists. At the slightest hint of controversial news, they adopt an entire Mass-Democracy approved mythology and establish a mythopoetic hero-villain dynamic immediately to then propagate with a glaring uniformity. Clearly, they cannot be activists for any idea, they merely produce goods whose functionality predominantly has no connection. But simply producing goods is antiquated and not a convincing enough ritual, thus it’s not part of the hypo-real. 

Perhaps less intentional, the hypomodern exposes its reliance on sacral value transparently in entertainment. If the Reality TV show was the defining form of postmodern entertainment then the internet streamer is hypomodernity’s. The Reality TV show only offers a view of a simulated reality, one that is either cathartically viewed or merely replicated by viewers till it becomes a "reality" through mimesis. The simulacra in postmodern hyperreality always changed, being lost in history, and so became tiresome. It did not allow for true participation in and development of the simulacrum. The Stream, however, does this on many fronts. When viewed as a product, the Stream is an “in-progress” participatory good; those who consume it actively shape the thing they consume (they are part of the content after all). They participate in a ritual-like manner. The Stream has an established date and time, a lead presbyter-like figure who speaks and arbiters ex-cathedra, community-specific phrases and even comradery, a history and lore, etc. It structurally has all the markings of a religious and traditional communal framework. It has an esoteric appeal in its initiatory phase into the streamer’s community. In these ways, the Stream fulfills what Reality TV could never. As Alan Kirby phrases this new activity:

“... a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding.” (The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond).3

There is a truly sacral ritual at play, one that satisfies the partakers need for meaning and a closed-off coherency in an infantile yet semi-spiritual fashion. The great hypomodern somnambulist, drearily attempting to approach higher meaning from below. A secular waltz cautiously stepping in between the real and the mystical.

It is in the consumption of these more traditional economic goods that we align ourselves to the ideology of objects in a surreal existentialism – existence precedes essence, and our essence is ordained by brand. This is the sacral-value of goods in the world at present; the sacramental worship of Object − the inverted mystery of faith. Value thus is derived from the potency of message and strength of faith rather than the attribution of status and the Subject is once again rendered opaque by that which is outside him.

Sacral-value of ideology

Brand itself is simulatable and subject to the flux of the empirical worldview. There is a symmetric property of objects in that brands may be arbiters of ideology and ideology may take on brand status. Ideas themselves become surjectively mapped to Object. A more abstract inversion is at work, whereas in the former period the physical fruits of man are elevated to godhood, here man’s intellect is worshiped as divine and ascribed a material eternality of precession (ideology preceding existence). 

It is apotheosis through ideology and man’s word in opposition to God’s. Foremost we find contradiction in this worldview; what came first, man or the abstractions of his rationality, and is his thought not merely mechanistic in nature? Like the central claim of existentialism (“existence precedes essence”) this merely attempts to scurry away any connection to metaphysics with an underhanded, veiled metaphysical response. Why then elevate brand as a precursor to being? Why give it sacral value?

Here in this distorted plane we find the melding of the political and the personal. Political brands like Democrat, Republican, Socialist, etc. are the material deities that dispense knowledge unto their congregations. The ethics, epistemology, and ontology comes prepackaged in easily dispensable forms as to not confuse the recipient and to make clear to the other that when one refers to himself as say conservative, he moves past status or basic voting preference and into the mystical. It is his personality, the orienting point of his life choices, purchases, participations, etc. It is that which dictates his next move and truly all possible future moves. It is an allowable “particularity” that remains in the bounds of predictable behaviors and outcomes required for Mass-Democracy to function and maintain its appearance.

From this branding, all can be known of the subject, by the image of the brand imposed upon its “creation”. There is nothing new under the sun; Once these impasses are stripped away, what we are left with is merely self-worship and apotheosis by another name, albeit more cunning and impenetrable. It is the Liberal order’s worship of itself; unending rationality venerating rationality.

Consumption in the former sense is dictated by this abstraction. The attributes of the brand must be made manifest in clothes worn, media consumed, figures of speech, how one interprets the latest news, etc. How we know things is not through God or through some absolute idealism, but through brand. Something like the act of voting or purchasing thus become a sacrament of the secular. As far as the hypomodern is concerned, is voting not a modern-day rain dance? It is a facsimile in its visceral and primal ecstasy; a fetishistic self-worship of Mass-Democracy. A whole burnt offering to the political god-brand in hope of better days to come. The championed liberators that are empiricism and materialism have morphed into religious sacrificial rites of the kind once ridiculed for their brute and anti-intellectual discernment. All this to only minimally satisfy man’s inherit desire for a grounded meaning and orientation in life, but if the postmodern couldn’t sustain it, how much more will Hypomodernity?