Hyperreality
Hans Enzensberger also attempted his own ‘socialist theory of the media’ and proposed theories of domination and potential resistance based on a liberal/Marxist critique (1996). Yet, the world of hyperreality overturns any hope of a Marxist understanding of mass media, for the entire web of human meaning-making activities has been transformed into the symbolic exchange of empty signs, the modes of production have been liquefied and leukemized into the giant political economy of exchanging signs. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner present the hyperrealist argument against Debord and his colleagues, "this is not to say that "representation" has simply become more indirect or oblique, as Debord would have it, but that in a world where the subject/object distance is erased […] and where signs no longer refer beyond themselves to an existing, knowable world, representation has been surpassed […] an independent object world is assimilated to and defined by artificial codes and simulation models".
Hyperreality vs reality