I was looking at an essay I might or might not revise today. This section struck me. Here’s some Phill-circa-2013.
Jean Baudrillard wrote:
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.
The first time I read Baudrillard, I was pretty sure I was incapable of understanding dense theory. I felt like someone just hit me in the head with a sock full of quarters and took my lunch money. But over time, his work has come to be of tremendous value to me as a scholar as I try to sketch out an understanding of how we exist, form communities and do work in virtual spaces.
The second time I read it, I finally understood why The Matrix is so good and the sequels are so lacking; the idea is genius, and obvious, but also spellbinding, the closest to magic an academic can get.
We think we know what is real, but real is gone, daddy, gone. There is no real. All that we know are symbols, signs, and simulations, representations of the long-lost real in various shapes and forms. Our world is not our world, in that we do not see the world as it is. We see the simulations, constructions. Of things. Of people. Of home. Of everything. This allows our memory and desire to sift into the gaps, making that which we cannot really see “real.”
I grew up with comic books, with cartoons, with toys I spoke to, with an absent father and an absent family. I’ve had to fill in my share of gaps. My mind, like most human minds, is a pattern recognizing, symbol utilizing machine. I’m like a video game console, only with a chubby face and fifty-percent more sarcasm. Carl Rogers claimed that very early in life we learn to complete images in our minds. We know, for example, that if Phill steps behind the door, and all we can see is a Phill head, there’s still a Phill back there, behind the door. Phill didn’t lose his body; Phill didn’t lose his head. We complete him, even as we are uncertain of the “real” Phill’s spatial positioning. We still know what we expect, how we think the rest of what we just saw is functioning. It’s like a living dead cat in a box we might open. We complete things because we know how they should look, we re-cognize things (‘that’s a family!’ ‘that’s a dude!’ ‘that’s text!’) and we complete the parts we cannot see.
That’s what I do. I look at things that we can’t see all of—I believe Bruno Latour and his set call them black boxes, not to be confused with the things in airplanes—and I try to figure out the story that rounds out the random bits of stimuli.
I make up lives for my toys, I talk to myself, I think, and I write, and I push boundaries, and ask questions, and I get things wrong, and so I ask sarcastic questions, and I fall down, but I get up, and I pass out from exhaustion, and I rage, and I cry, and I celebrate, and I laugh, and I get up.
The story doesn’t end.
Not yet.
There’s more to be said,
More to be known, more to be added. More to see behind the door, behind the curtain. More rising, more falling. Up down up down up down up down.
And it’s as real as it gets, man, it’s REAL, but at the same time it will never be “real” for you the way it is for me.
You can never see me, and I never you. You never get to hear the stories in my head. I never get to tell you the things I don’t know how to say, to express the things that mean the most to me, the core elements of what I am. And I will never know who you are when you aren’t pretending to be who you are when I’m around.
We are simulations.
I made me. You made you. Who watches the Watchmen? The Watchmen, of course.
If a tree falls in the woods but no one is there to see it, it created sound. That’s science. But I only know that because I know that’s how sound is supposed to work. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not really sure this tree you’re on about is even there. You want to show me the tree? Not the Derrida version of the tree. Not the symbol. Take your hat off, boy. Show me the tree.
Yell it with me, Jerry! SHOW ME THE TREE!
I don’t hear you tree that you apparently can’t show me. I’m not sure it’s real.
But you can hear my story, can help me write, can remind me when I forget details, can help me punch up the lacking points. You can listen and tell, you can be in the story.
That much can be “real.”
This thing, this life, this story… you can stand here and read it with me, can stumble through the parts that are written so sloppy you can’t make them out. You can read me the fine print when my eyes are too tired and too weak.
And in the end, that’s what it’s all about.
We all want to understand.
We want to feel at home, to be at home.
We want to share something, to be part of the story, to be thought of and remembered, missed and oft quoted.
We want to belong, to have a place slated for us, a role that we are meant to fit in a play that entertains. At the end of a long day, or after trials and tribulations in this world, we want to go to that place.
We want to go where things are real.
We want to go home.