Reject the Hyperreality thesis; it rejects all truth claims which denies that representation is built from specific historical and cultural moments.

Baudrillard is undoubtedly correct to point to the importance of the television as a central element in contemporary culture. It is a startling development that in the last 30 years practically every individual in capitalist countries is able to witness footage of events from almost anywhere around the globe. It is also true that this footage is invariably misleading, even though it is apparently so compelling and ’realistic’. Television is only tangentially connected with the realities it seeks to portray as well as contrasting dramatically with the social experience of the viewers; we witness riots, wars and massacres as they occur from the comfort of our living-rooms. However, from these admittedly curious features, Baudrillard leaps suddenly and unjustifiably to the claim that there is no longer any reality. The television screen creates a ’false’ reality and it is in that reality that we now live. However, the television does not create a false reality either in its representation of the world or in its reception by viewers. Television coverage is determined by the cultural norms of the society to which it broadcasts and by those involved in the production of television. Thus any footage is an interpretation of the world and as such it is necessarily limited. It is certainly true that programme makers try to render this interpretation of the world as compelling as possible to attract viewers and to sustain their claims but those images are always and necessarily embedded in social discourse, which is itself related to the historic development of the society. The images are not then free-floating, mere simulacra but, on the contrary, concrete moves in a language game. They refer not so much to the reality of the situations they portray but rather to the society to which they communicate these images. Similarly the viewers of television programmes do not regard these images as empty, referenceless and fragmentary. On the contrary, just as the creation of these images was embedded in the interpretative practice of making sense of the world so do the viewers try to interpret these images in such a way that they will be able to make sense of their world. Whether the programme be a soap opera or news footage, the viewers interpret the images according to their cultural understandings (see, for instance, Fiske and Hartley, 1984; Hall, 1980; Featherstone, 1988: 220-1, 1991: 5, 11), although those understandings are under constant revision in order to make sense of new information. Thus rather than becoming the primary and prior cultural factor in contemporary society, the television is embedded in and dependent upon pre-existing and historically produced understandings and discourses.5 Furthermore, the footage does not exist above and beyond the lives of viewers but, as the briefest autobiographical consideration will reveal, the television is employed as a resource, where new interpretations derived from its footage are used in the renegotiation of social relations and understandings. Viewers discuss what they watch and make use of what they see to make sense of their own lives. The argument for the fundamentally interpretative nature of the television and, therefore, its fundamental unoriginality as a cultural form undercuts Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality at an empirical level. In short, the television just does not represent the ontological transformation of culture which he envisages. The production and consumption of the television operates in the same interpretative manner as the production and consumption of literature, theatre and, indeed, oral story-telling. All these methods of communication have to operate according to the same interpretative norms, typical of all human interaction, for the very reason that they are all primarily linguistic. Baudrillard’s failure to recognize the fundamentally interpretative nature of television suggests some deeper philosophical and, in particular, deeper epistemological shortcomings in his theories. The recognition of Baudrillard’s epistemological weakness brings us to the second, philo- sophical strand of the argument against the notion of hyperreality which will demonstrate that Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality is founded in an unsustainable Cartesianism.