hyperreality
Sun 8.13.23
Two books, “America” and “Simulations & Simulacrum” by Jean Baudrillard, a brilliant French academic in many disciplines, sociology, philosophy, and a voice in the field of semiotics. Baudrilliard and a rash of others, Jacques Derrida, Lacan, Michel Foucault, exploded the novel. The novel’s story was saying more about itself than the author could. There’s something else going on.
According to Baudrillard, we attach meaning to objects, to all nonhuman phenomena through a system of signs, i.e. it’s a dog because it’s not a cat, it’s a dog because it’s not a gorilla, a process of signs that lead us to, it’s a dog. It’s a binary classification system. The object is always, not something else. This system of attaching meaning (value) is incapable of producing the desired results at which point humans are seduced by hyperreality. What is hyperreality?
Hyperreality is the bubble in which we now reside, we Americans, and we have foisted our philosophy on the rest of the world. Hyperreality is an image, a simulation of the real thing. At one time the market produced only what the people demanded. A real exchange. The market now produces product with a short shelf life, it has created a hyper similation of the original exchange between buyer and seller, a similation of the real thing. Finances, as Rothschild points out is in unknown territory, an experiment whose results, a similation of the real thing, the green stuff, or gold, are as yet unknown. All of America is a similation of objects and ideas, empty shells of the original. Politics is America’s epitome of hyperreality. It is just stories upon stories, upon stories. I do not believe that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others, the framers of our constitution, would embrace its results as theirs. Would they agree with Joe Biden’s use of power as the Executive Branch’s representative? Research has proven that matter occurs only because we are there to observe. When the observer is taken out of the picture, matters do not move, do not act. Scientists conjecture the Matrix, we are creating this world with our imagination. Without us it does not exist.
Baudrillard’s America is wonderful. He sees everything, the haunting Mojave Desert, the hyperreal world of Las Vegas, NYC, Los Angeles, driving his car, a Quixote on a journey to non-journey, to the land of hyperreality, it’s all been reduced to an icon. Our world is truly unknowable. I love Jean’s adventure.
I once unknowingly smoked a joint that had been laced with some psychedelic material. A very strange thing happened to me; I lost my “self”, the central control center of my being gone, and I am merely connected impulses, a series of isolated incidences connected like beads on a string, that there is really no self, an illusion. I am merely a computer pulling up the right or wrong files. Scary, scary moment, I even called one of those rap lines to help me come down from this unnerving reality.
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MANHATTAN SEERESS NOW ON EBOOKS
Eight o'clock Sunday morning, the police arrive at her apartment in Greenwich Village, "How long have you been living here?" The roommate Elizabeth, after having accepted her half of the deposit money and rent for their new apartment, has called the police.
New York City doesn’t open its arms to welcome her, but she’s arrived and the adventure of her life is about to unfold. She’s come from Maine with an invitation from Sarah Lawrence College to participate in the graduate writing program.
How one becomes a seeress is what this memoir explores. Stories have been specifically selected to illustrate, from the sublime to the practical, a spiritual journey introduced in each chapter by an atout, the Tarot’s major archetypes. From the Fool, to The World, our human journey with its risk and folly unfolds. There is also an artist here alive to her new world seeking inspiration among artists on the Lower East side, learning the ways and foods of her Chinese neighbors, falling in love.
