In what is not an Onion article, the President of Iceland had to clarify his comments on pineapple on pizza (quote above is a link to the story). In the process, he managed to drop a truth bomb:
First– President Trump, take note. I think Guðni Th. Jóhannesson was talking about you. Second, welcome to the new world. But third, I think I feel my post-modern sense tingling.
Recently I had an exchange with another scholar wherein I was told I wasn’t utilizing the work of Jean Baudrillard correctly. For those of you who aren’t into theory, Baudrillard wrote primarily about the concept that we are separated from the real. It’s his book that the architect is reading in The Matrix. That movie is pretty much a pop culture love letter to JB.
I often use Baudrillard to talk about the nature of identities formed in online space by players who create toons (think avatars if you’re not a gamer). I’ve drawn more than once from “the Procession of Simulacra,” my favorite part of which is this:
By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of the truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the system of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra.
That dense little nugget can be taken many ways, but given that the piece starts with a fake quote from Ecclesiastes, one pretty generous reading is that what is real has been ushered into era of ethos without logos. If we presume that Baudrillard is being honest and is an authority, then we assume that Ecclesiastes does say what he quotes. We might also believe, for example, that a President can ban pineapple on pizza or that an administration can invent terror attacks in Bowling Green and Sweden.
Real is gone.
But this is not a new topic of discussion, and it’s certainly not a unique discussion for someone who is mixed-blood. No one validates my existence as any sort of thing (oddly not even the academy for which I work, as I only found stable ground in a program that works to not settle into a routine identity). I attempt to be as real as possible, but real seems almost meaningless in the current world.
So how far from the real are we in February of 2017? We’re so far from real, the American president has so bent and warped our sense of an already tenuous reality, that what would have been an obvious joke a year ago– a foreign leader saying he wishes he could ban the placement of pineapple on pizza– was taken as real enough for people to respond in outrage and for an official clarifying statement to be made.
Reality isn’t just gone. Reality is broken. Reality resolved into what Stephen Colbert called Wikiality.
And so now we are left to look for our Oracle, to play Neo in our own strange matrix reality. It’s time to decide which pill to take: blue? red? orange?
And that’s #realtalk