Baudrillard is maddeningly (and deliciously) coy in his uses of the term “real.” We have spoken of the hyperreal, but what, for Baudrillard, is the real? In Lucidity Pact, he states that physical reality exists, but that objective reality is an illusion (39, 40). By “objective reality” he intends “the Real as something face-on,” that is object-ive, as opposed to subject-ive (39). However, because”consciousness is an integral part of the world, and the world is an integral part of consciousness” (Ibid), objectivity and subjectivity are illusory. Thus, “[human consciousness] will never produce an objective truth, since the mirror is part of the object it reflects” (41).

So what? Often we focus on the “illusory” nature of the hyperreal, we are threatened by the notion that we might be living with a “copy” instead of the original. But for B, it is the hyperreal that destroys illusion not the other way around. In a world where everything is realized we lose the “sign and the artifice . . . the spectacle, alienation, distance, transcendence and abstraction” (67). It is in this context that we speak of the symbolic as belonging to the order of the real not to the order of the hyperreal, where everything is “disseminated absolutely.”

So we come full circle and ask, was Barack Obama’s election an event? Did it crash into the hyperreal from outside of the frame? For, though it was completely en-framed by the media, it holds a strong symbolic power. Barack is a sign which stands for unity, hope, change.

This is where I will leave it for now, but it deserves more probing. It seems to me to be an extremely important question: “Just who is Barack Obama?”

Before we try to answer that, let’s go deeper into the void. Baudrillard continues: “they disappear into the void of news and information…” First, we must ask after why events disappear. Is it because they are (re)produced in real time? Did not the ‘real’ event take place in real time? Is it the impossible proximity of the past–experienced in dissemination–that ruptures the event? No. The absolutization of proximity is an effect of the hyperreal, not its cause. The cause of the hyperreal, rather, has everything to do with the mise-en-scene of an event. Hyperreality is the framing of the real–the staging of the real–rather than a participation in the real. That is why the unexpected collapses the hyperreal. It is outside the frame, unstaged and unpredictable.

Finally, if an event is disseminated absolutely, but is of the unexpected, does it collapse into the void of annihilation that is the hyperreal?

Also Baudrillard writes the following about what media coverage does to an event:

“The singularity of the event, that which is irreducible to its coded transcription and mise-en-scene, that which quite simply makes it an event, is lost. With this we enter the transhistorical or transpolitical realm – the realm where events no longer really take place, precisely by dint of their production and dissemination in ‘real time’; where they disappear into the void of news and information…If we see history as a film (which it has become, whether we like it or not), then the ‘truth’ of information consists in the post-syynchronization, the dubbing and subtitling of the film of history (Impossible Exchange, 132-133).”

“Fulfilling that representative-function, he [Obama] is at once black and not-black (some say “not black enough” and others say “too black”), and, as a result, he can appeal to voters who not only have no way of resolving their ambivalence on this issue, but do not want one. The public figure who allows the populace to sustain and mask its ambivalence nevertheless appears as a figure of “unity”: this is surely an ideological function. Such moments are intensely imaginary, but not for that reason without their political force.”

The amount of money the Obama campaign spent on promotion (8 mil for internet ads alone) testifies to the fact that the image of Obama is more important than Obama himself. We can go round and round about levels of hyperreality, but if we are talking Baudrillardian philosophy, Obama is not an event.