The article reveals the features of the postmodern era and its main feature - hyperreality, which is characterized by the replacement of the real with signs of reality - simulacra. First of all, postmodern literature and art reacted to the challenge of hyperreality, reflecting and overcoming the hyperreal world by creating simulacra of a higher order. The article focuses on the specifics of the language of postmodernism, knowledge of which allows it to be adequately evaluated. An analysis of the performance society, which is carried out by G. Debord, leads to the idea that in the postmodern era, mass media also become the main instrument of socialization, which neither the family nor the school can compete with. The artificial world of images that forms mass media separates the individual from reality, and “the more he contemplates, the less he lives, the more he agrees to acknowledge himself in the prevailing images of needs, the less he understands his own existence and desire. The external character of the performance in relation to the person acting is that his own actions no longer belong to him, but to the other - to the one who offers them to him. That's why the viewer doesn’t feel at home anywhere - there’s a continuous performance around him.” Debor comes to the disappointing conclusion that the historical consciousness is being eliminated in the society of the performance, because if any event does not become the property of the media, then it does not seem to exist. We can say that Guy Debord anticipated the views of J. Baudrillard on hyperreality, saying that “the performance is not any supplement to the real world, a superstructure to it or decoration. This is the cornerstone of the unreality of the real world.