Hypercommodity

Definition

The hypercommodity is Baudrillard's name (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981/1994, "Hypermarket and Hypercommodity") for the commodity that has passed beyond exchange and use into pure operational simulation. Where the ordinary commodity is a sign one can decipher and appropriate, in the hypermarket "the objects are no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meaning and message one could decipher and appropriate for oneself, they are tests, they are the ones that interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them, and the answer is included in the question." "Here a critical mass beyond which the commodity becomes hypercommodity, and culture hyperculture, is elaborated — that is to say no longer linked to distinct exchanges or determined needs, but to a kind of total descriptive universe, or integrated circuit that implosion traverses through and through." The hypermarket is the model institution: "already, beyond the factory and traditional institutions of capital, the model of all future forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a homogeneous space-time of all the dispersed functions of the body, and of social life (work, leisure, food, hygiene, transportation, media, culture)." Architecturally, Baudrillard makes the hypermarket a nucleus: "the hypermarket… preexists the metropolitan area; it is what gives rise to metro areas." "The city, even a modern one, no longer absorbs it. It is the hypermarket that establishes an orbit along which suburbanization moves." Its "fundamental function" is deterrence: it is a "pole of simulation," "the hyperreality of functional nuclei that are no longer at all functional." The concept is the commercial-urban counterpart of the simulacrum and the retail ancestor of the wiki's edge-city/decentralization material. See consumerism, consumption, exopolis, edge-city.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the hypermarket as nucleus, tests rather than signs, "controlled socialization" (1981/1994).
• Gregory Marinic — the architectural reader who carried Baudrillard's hypermarket/atrium-hotel analysis into interior-architecture criticism.

Related Concepts

• Simulation / Hyperreality — the condition the hypercommodity exemplifies.
• Consumerism — the social order the hypermarket serves.
• Consumption — the general practice, here radicalized.
• Exopolis — the decentralized metropolis the hypermarket helps generate.
• Edge City — the parallel urban-form term for satellitic commercial nuclei.
• Sign Value — the commodity-as-sign, pushed past legibility into the "test."
• Deterrence — the hypermarket's "fundamental function" beyond its apparent function.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the hypermarket's object pushed to the absolute: the absolute commodity, "more commodity than commodity," and the "ecstasy" of value ("money is distributed as pure simulacrum"). See absolute-commodity, sign-value.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("Hypermarket and Hypercommodity"): objects as "tests"; "critical mass beyond which the commodity becomes hypercommodity"; the hypermarket as "model of all future forms of controlled socialization"; the hypermarket as nucleus that "gives rise to metro areas."
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the prehistory: the commodity-sign system of the everyday object-world.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the urban-regional register of the satellitic commercial nucleus.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the hypermarket-as-nucleus a testable urban-morphology claim? Suburbanization predates the hypermarket in many regions; is the "orbit" thesis another instance of Baudrillard's precession (the model retail format "engendering" the metro area) rather than a causal history?
• If objects are "tests" that interrogate the consumer, what does that make the contemporary platform's recommendation algorithm — a hypermarket of tests perfected, or a different apparatus altogether?
• The hypermarket's "fundamental function" is deterrence; does that make all functional architecture (the airport, the stadium, the campus) a deterrence apparatus, flattening the concept? (See deterrence, non-places.)