A Critique of the Hyper State: Aesthetics, Technology and Experience

Abstract

Hyperaesthetics is, amongst other things, a discourse about the nature of experience. During the mid-1990s, such a discourse about hyperaesthetic experiences appeared in advertisements for a range of media and other technologies. The ads promised that use of the particular products would result in extraordinary and intense sensory experiences. This article unpacks this cultural rhetoric about the intensification of experience, drawing out some of its ambivalent characteristics and possibilities. On the one hand, it notes the instrumentality of the “hyper state” and discusses the characteristics of the hyper subject that is engendered by this discourse on experience. On the other, it recovers an alternative conception of experience, after Raymond Williams. Noting the term’s complexity, Williams wrote that experience was “once the present participle not of “feeling” but of “trying” or “testing” something,” that is, of experimentation.