The eternally humble Baudrillard
One thing I definitely learned this week: my new goal as an academic is to write something and look back at it ten years later and think to myself, ?Oh my God. I was so right. I don?t even know what to do with myself.? A la Baudrillard.
It?s difficult for me to contextualize this week?s readings in a coherent, semi linear manner. Obviously this week?s readings were much more philosophical, and I did myself a great disservice by not reading Dr. Silva?s article first. Not to suck up, but Dr. Silva?s dissertation chapter was great and more worthwhile to me than any of the other articles this week. I will touch on other parts of her chapter later, but I will start with the final 3 pages of the chapter.
At the end of her chapter, Dr. Silva addresses virtuality and non-places, bringing Castells space of flows into the discussion. Jacob and I have both made our feeling known on non-places, so I won?t get into that here. What interested me was Dr. Silva?s astute (I swear I?m not sucking up) observation that while the Internet maybe initially took identity from places and formed that identity in virtual places online, the trend is to form the identity online and then pour that identity back into physical space, forming a place through online interaction. A great example is the silent rave I was talking about last class. The silent rave started through a facebook group (a semi virtual place) and ended up commandeering Union Square, one of the most famous ?places? in all of Manhattan. The virtual poured into the physical. I almost typed ?becoming more real that the physical?, but that isn?t quite true. Instead, they converged and blended, without one trumping the other. These people formed in virtual space and the virtual space spilled into physical space, combining the two and not valuing one over the other.
The discussion of simulacrum and hyperreality got me thinking about Oscar Wilde. I could be way off base here, so you?re all going to have to roll with me on this one, but I equated The Picture of Dorian Gray strongly with the idea of the simulacra. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde tells the story of Dorian Gray who has a portrait painted of mimself at a young age. He soon find that the portrait has the strange power to absorb all his sins, leaving his physical body young and beautiful. He then acts with impunity, ruining lives and committing cruel acts because the consequences of his acts only affect the painting, not his body. At the end of the novel, he finally sees the picture and how horrid it has become, and he plunges into the painting. His servants find him dead next to the painting, his body old and withered and the painting returned to its original, beautiful form.
I see strong links between the idea of simulation and Wilde?s novel. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting is the simulation and the physical body is the real. The real uses the simulation to hide itself from reality, with the eventual consequence that the simulation becomes more real than the ?real? body. It is the simulation that ages the way we are supposed to age; it is the simulation the develops the cruel snarl we would expect from a man who sins and destroys lives. Dorian Gray hides behind the simulation, eventually falling into Baudrillard?s fourth phase of the image?the simulacra, which ?has no relation to reality whatsoever? (54). The real Dorian Gray become an anomaly, a meaningless specter who hides reality in a simulation. The frightening part is that ?when the copy becomes more than the original, it consequently destroys the original? (54). Dorian Gray faced the simulation, and it destroyed him. Let me know if I?m way off base here.
I look over the readings from Deleuze and Levy and wonder how much I really absorbed from their readings. I understand the idea of the possible and incompossible and compossible worlds (though Jacob explained it much better than Deleuze). I don?t know how much I understand Levy?s discussion of how actualization proceeds from problem to solution and virtualization proceeds from solution to new problem. With words like Virtual, I get frustrated because I feel like once a word means so many different things, what does it mean? Does a ?virtual? community truly tie into Deleuze, or does it have an entirely different meaning altogether? Is the virtual community virtual because, like Serres says (through Dr. Silva), it is ?what does not exist here? (78)? I think it does fit with Levy?s statement that ?virtualization consists of the movement from actual to virtual? (26). I hope we discuss virtuality in class and it helps me flesh out my thoughts on the matter. I leave this week?s readings sure of one thing, and it?s actually from a reading we have for 702: ??Virtual? is a dangerous word, a word full of promise but maybe not so full of clarity? (Aarseth, 429).
I had heard of Borges, particularly as Marquez?s Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I had never read any of his writings. The Garden of Forking Paths is a brilliant piece, and describes the idea of the possible with a clarity I feel is missing from Deleuze. I am hitting my 1,000 words, so I?m not going to go into too much detail on Borges? piece. One thing that interests is the difference between Borges? Garden and Nietzsche?s idea of Eternal Return. I am not as familiar with Nietzsche as I?d like, but Eternal Return is discussed in some detail in the first chapter of Kunderas? wonderful Unbearable Lightness of Being. I believe Eternal Return posits something along the lines of ?time is infinite but the universe (matter) is finite.? While there are many possible lives, only certain options are open and time must eventually repeat itself. That is the eternal return. We will eventually live the life we live now in the exact form we are living it now. Rather than being infinite in the sense Borges? sees it, time is infinite in a fully cyclical sense. I could go into more detail, but I won?t. I just thought it was worth mentioning as an opposite way of approaching time.
And one final question. In Jacobs? post he writes, ?BTTF does not deal with God, but the compossibility of the worlds does depend on the choices of Marty.? That leaves me to ponder a truly existential question: Is Michael J. Fox God?