Hypertely

Definition

Hypertely is the term Baudrillard borrows from evolutionary biology in Fatal Strategies (1983) for finality pushed past its own end — the excess of function that arises in a system increasingly governed by chance. "Finality does not give way to the aleatory, but to a hyperfinality, a hyperfunctionality: more functional than the functional, more final than the final — hypertely." Where a system loses its determination, it does not become indeterminate; it redoubles its finality into "delirium." The examples: the cancerous cell ("hypervitality in only one direction"), the hyperspecialization of objects and subjects, the crustacean "that leaves the sea far behind (to what secret ends?) and will never have the time to come back," the "growing gigantism of the statues of Easter Island." Hypertely is thus the biological-evolutionary name for the same movement the book calls ecstasy and metastasis: "To deny its own end through hyper-finality—is this not also the process of cancer?" It is the "secret canker of all obese and cancerous systems — communication, information, production, destruction — all of which have long passed the limits of their function." See inertia, metastasis, the-obese, ecstasy.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "more functional than the functional, more final than the final — hypertely" (1983).
• Not yet paged: the evolutionary biologists (and Canetti) from whom Baudrillard takes the excess-of-finality motif.

Related Concepts

• Inertia — hypertely is "the fate of inertia in a saturated world."
• Metastasis — the organic form of hypertelic excess (cancer, the obese body).
• Ecstasy — the aesthetic/general form of the same overpotentiality.
• Catastrophe — what hypertelic systems end in ("catastrophe in slow motion").
• The Obese — the body's hypertely made flesh.
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the informational register: obesity of information stocks, "no longer treatable."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "more functional than the functional, more final than the final — hypertely"; "the secret canker of all obese and cancerous systems"; the crustacean, Easter Island, the cancerous cell.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — "the metastasis that began with industrial objects ends with cellular organization."
• 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

• Does hypertely name a real pathology of systems, or retro-fit evolutionary biology to a rhetorical pattern? The concept's scientific warrant is thin in Baudrillard's text.
• Is there a good hypertely — an excess that liberates rather than kills? Baudrillard's answer, in "For a Principle of Evil," is the "spiral of worsening" as the sole liberation.