Rachel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kleenexwoman) wrote2008-03-28 03:23 pm
kleenexwoman) wrote2008-03-28 03:23 pm
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where pixelated men eat pixel food
Baudrillard once wore a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels while reading his poetry in a Las Vegas bar.
How cool is that? How cool is that? I'm so fucking shallow. Simulations is blowing my fucking mind. Jean Baudrillard is so crazy and so classy and so totally right about shit. I don't have my copy with me right now or I'd bombard you with quotes. I need to get more books by this person. I need the Futurist's Manifesto too. I need to get this stuff from Amazon for cheap because I have a really bad habit of not returning books to the library ever.
My copy of Simulations is from a publishing company called Semiotext(e) and it is from the "Foreign Agents" series. FOREIGN AGENTS. There's a repeating clip of an Interpol document about naturalized citizens on the front cover. It makes me think of Naked Lunch. All agents defect sooner or later. Agents becoming their cover stories, and their "true" natures are...not true. Or were never true. Or are just as true as the "false" ones. Or the "false" ones are just as true as the true ones. ILLUSION.
ANYWAY SO THE POINT IS Baudrillard talks about three levels of simulacra, which I want to talk about now because I just figured out what he means by "precession."
LEVEL ONE: Counterfeits. This is basically simulacra for beginners, where you just need to start getting your head around the idea of "copying." A counterfeit depends upon the existence of the original for its existence. Counterfeit $20s only work because everyone knows what a real $20 looks like; realism in art only works because everyone knows what a real apple looks like, and a still life looks like an apple (with a banana and some flowers and maybe a dead bird or something). This is where you need to figure out that there are things that don't want to be things in themselves, that are deliberately trying to be like other things. It's so sad. Poor copy-things. If they were people, they would have low self-esteem.
LEVEL TWO: Industrial simulacra. Once you've gotten your head around the concept of a copy, it's time to make things that are copies of each other. These were invented by Henry Ford and made cool by Andy Warhol. Industrial simulacra are not copies of anything that already exists. They are only real because they are exact copies of each other--anything that deviates from the mold may be an object, but it's not a real copy, it's a deviation, a typo, an irregular. Like a Coke can that is blue and green instead of red and white. (Which may have gotten Warhol serious bank, but is less okay if it's being rejected from the factory for being overly colorized. Or if you're paying $1.25 for the privilege of drinking it and it turns out to taste like toothpaste because it doesn't follow the Coke recipe.) This is why off-brand things are sort of weird and why people get seriously upset if their Burger King burger is square and little kids throw fits if their Halloween costumes are not officially licensed--they want real copies.
LEVEL THREE: Simulation. First, you need to have recognized that Level 2 simulacra are real because they can be replicated. Good? Good. Now, check this: Reality itself can be replicated. This is where people get tripped up and start making references to the types of movies which think they are clever because they put their protagonists in a world which is actually just virtual reality. Yes, we know we're living in a world which is completely created by computers. That is not the point. The point is that we believe that that world, being a level 3 simulacra, is no more real or no less real than the "real" world. That an exact replica of, say, Stonehenge or the Grand Canyon or even a person is exactly equivalent to the "real thing." Is it? Maybe. I don't know. How can you even tell? Does it really matter? Who's keeping track? What feels more real? Which one has the brighter colors, the tastier food, the bouncier music?
Simulations, being less "real", have to try harder; to this end, they overcompensate and create hyperreality, in which they become more "real" than what is actually real. (My teacher liked to use the example of watermelon-flavored bubble gum for this: It's an imitation of watermelon flavor, and it tastes nothing like real watermelon, but the fake flavor when you finally bite into a piece of real watermelon after eating nothing but watermelon-flavored bubble gum, the real thing is kind of disappointing.) And that is where we are today.
Baudrillard points out that we are essentially living in a huge simulation--this is not because we are literally living inside of a computer program, but that society alters so much and bombards us with so many signs and signifiers and copies of things that we are incapable of confronting reality as reality, of being able to discern the difference between what is real and what is a simulacra. Things like movies and video games and Disneyland, which are deliberately presented to us as unreal copies of reality, are there mainly to help us pretend that there is anything left that is real, just as scandals like Watergate or the Lewinsky thing are presented to us as deviations from the norm so that we can pretend that there is a norm to deviate from. Which is why, as he put it, "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce."
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I am averse to the idea that there is no reality, but I find the approach to it that makes best sense to me is not a direct reply to this, but to solipsism. So for a moment I, supposedly a created idea, will address you as a solipsist who entertains herself with the idea that all reality proceeds from her mind.
Since I am not real, these arguments are of course only ones that you have had yourself, and prefer to play with, but in that case to confirm yourself in your view of solipsism, you must reply to these issues that you raise with yourself through the imaginary creature, me.
If you have always existed, why can't you remember back beyond what has become known as your 'birth' ?
If you were born, what part of you that you are not aware of led to your being born?
If you are not aware of the part of you that led to your being born, how can you say with certainty that it is a part of you?
If there is something that you cannot prove to yourself is a part of you, then as a solipsist you must suppose that it is not real, but just your imagination.
If you were created by your own imagination, then how did it exist in the absence of your bodily organs, which it created?
If your imagination created your bodily organs, then it also created all the things that you imagine that you perceive through them, so your imagination must also have created itself, then created the appearance of organs through which to experience what it imagined. But if it can, alone, experience what your organs see and feel and hear - why did it bother to make organs that you do not require?
Well leaving aside the idea of you as solipsist for a moment, I submit that the argument for solipsism actually is penetrable; one can raise perfectly sound reasons that prove that solipsism is absurd.
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Suppose that there is any reality at all, which provides us with at least some part of the things that we need to live and continue living. If not, then we are solipsists. If we are not solipsists, then something outside ourself must be real, and above I have proved to my satisfaction that solipsism is inconsistent with itself, and therefore illogical and unreal, even if we prefer to think otherwise.
But if there is any requirement for outside contact, then we cannot be solipsists, and must consider this argument:
Any creature that better adapts itself to comprehend the reality outside itself that provides itself with some portion of its needs, will have an advantage in gaining those resources over other creatures that have not adapted as well as it has. And thus by an evolutionary process, all creatures must adapt to the reality that surrounds them, or they will become extinct. Over many generations this will result in surviving creatures becoming aware of all the parts of reality that have any bearing on their own survival to the best extent that they can be so adapted.
And thus using only the idea that some part of our needs is real, and accepting the truth of natural selection, we must suppose that we have evolved to perceive the universe around us as accurately as any living being can comprehend it. If not, something will come along that will out-evolve us until it takes over the use of all natural resources for its own purposes.
We are that thing; mankind. Because we control resources that we require better than any competing kind of life, we must reasonably assume that this infers that we comprehend the reality of a real universe better than anything else of which we are as yet aware.
And thus, the idea that there are equally real alternative realities, or no reality, or indeed any alternative to one real reality, do not make any sense at all.
A unique reality may sometimes make little sense; but its alternatives make far, far less sense. We can point out the problems of a unique reality, but if we do so, it is only rigorous if we also point out the failings of alternative states of being with equal rigour. The reason that we do not, is that they are actually so unreal and non existent that we have not yet developed the faculties with which to examine their non-existent complexities, because doing so is not relevant to our needs, which are rooted in a unique and real reality.
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Just like, as you left in your comment on the monkey post, humans.
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and thus I was really talking about an interesting, related, but separate subject.
How would you define the differences, and does anything of what I am talking about bear on what you are talking about (which I thought possible), or if not, was I at least entertaining? :)
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As far as being able to neurologically adapt to sense the real, that does apply to the type of solipsism that could be described as a species-wide schizophrenic hallucinatory fugue, but philosophically, where it is to our advantage to sense the non-material concept of real...well, we had that before we were able to make copies. Slowly, as we got to be very good at copies, we lost it. That's the thing that a lot of people think is the problem, and people get uneasy if they think it's a problem.
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OK so I can appreciate not wanting the headache right now, but I think from the above line of reasoning one can resolve it; one can show that it is logically inconsistent (unless the solipsist really can account for all the above, and I bet not one person alive who thinks they are a solipsist can do so). The best defence is that the solipsist is capable of existing and creating their own world despite being logically inconsistent, and since solipsism appears to be a disease of the excessively logical, I doubt there will be any takers. Rather, I out-logic their argument.
I think you are saying that
- we need to have imagination to be able to make copies
- making copies leads to the death of imagination
But in that case, it should also lead to the inability to make copies, as well. It becomes circular.
You have the most entertaining and lucid contribution to the study of being nuts that I've read :)
I hope I didn't discourage you with my comments on poetry; I think you have something others don't, but in this age it takes a conscious decision to leave the mainstream that doesn't have what you have, and then make the best of what you do have. Thus I think if you turn to structured forms (even if unique) what you have will be better and more beautifully expressed. Is that any clearer?
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And thank you again for the comments...I haven't been able to touch my poetry in a while, but this weekend I'm probably going to sit down and go over some old pieces like that.
I used to write a lot of rhyming poetry, actually, until I got to college and started experimenting a little more. I'm thinking of trying my hand at some slam poetry now, and I think that it could be very effective to do an entire slam poem in something with definite structure.
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Baudrillard is interesting, but infuriatingly hard to parse.
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More real than real. Simulations trying too hard.
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I hope that by writing it, you also understood it better...perhaps that's how you work. You certainly seem more.. comfortable(?), confident(?) with the material. I will happily read whatever else you want to relay from PoMo because it is important. (Anthro was fun too.. Bonobos occupy a special and probably idealised position in my web of life)
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:) I'll relay more things from my class as they come up. I like this.
Bonobos are pretty awesome. They're dying out, sadly. Poor things...
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