Moving deeper past the surface layers

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by Flowperson

However I guess I'm concerned about the effects of all this upon those of us who purposely devise and sell illusory materials to others. Besides the gnawing dishonesty effects upon the purveyors of illusion, what of the spiritual effects of it all when the receiver of such illusions comes to recognize the emptiness of paying for and accepting falsehood ?

Behind the baroqueness of images lies the eminence gris of politics.

This way the stake will always have been the the murderous power of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith became engaged in in this wager on reperesentation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange--God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum--not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference of circumference.

Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.

Such would be the successive phases of image:

1. It is the reflection of a profound reality.
2. It masks and denatures a profound reality.
3. It masks the absence of a profound reality.
4. It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality--a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, paralel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears...

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

I gotta get dinner going, but I'll comment on this later.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Take a look at this last paragraph from the quote I transcribed:

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality--a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, paralel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears...

"When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning."

Boudrillard talks about "nostalgia for the lost referential." What he means is that in the post-modern world where everything is surface, hyperreal, and self-referential, there exists an overwhelming desire in people for some reference to something real. This is the key to understanding how we are dragged around by the nose by advertisers, government, religious authority, and other artificial power structures. It's what makes the propaganda work.

To see how this works think about the whole route 66, 1950's nostalgia thing. This is a super-set of images created by the media and entertainment industries, and doesn't represent anything "real" in a historical sense. It's faux real, but it functions as a simulated reality anchor in order to sell us things to help quench our desire for some sort of "age of innocence" americana thing that we can build a mythology on.

"There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality--a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared."

This goes straight to the point of the original post. This idea that there MUST be something real and true underneath all the surface B.S. Check out the New Age section of your local book store and tell me if "resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared" doesn't come to mind immediately. The truth is that without a simulated nostalgic referential to take the place of some sort of foundational truth the whole hyperreal, surface, matrix world we inhabit and think of as reality would collapse. But the problem is that the "signs", or images, or icons (whatever term you wish) no longer have any real value that can be "exchanged for meaning." IOW, The trappings of identity, whether ethnic, religious, or political are themselves part of the simulation. There is nothing real to go back to: no conservative ideal, no golden age, no proto-pagan innocence, no hippy-dippy utopia...nothing.

We have arrived at phase four in the precession of simulacra: Existence here on the surface "has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Chris

[flowperson]

Well Chris, you have single-handedly shown why conservatives hate the French so much. The terrific observations of Mssr. Baudrillard and your absolutely right on analysis of it about covers all of the bases.

I guess the primal question is now, if we're in the fourth stage of essentially living in new realities, do traditional beliefs apply, or can they be modified to adapt to our situations? Yes, nostalgia is comforting (right now I'm reading Tom Brokaw's tome about the WW II generation).

I have maintained for about twenty years or so that the effects of science and technology in the world are shoving our beliefs into limbo at an accelerating pace each day, week, month, year, and not much from the past applies anymore. Nor does anyone care to peer back, down, and into the memory hole anymore to look for the truth.

What does it mean to be a human being anymore ? How can we stop to smell the flowers when we are implacably driven by our urban environments in such merciless ways ?

Denial is not just a river in Africa.

flow....

[China Cat Sunflower]

Flow,

Thanks for sticking with me on this, it pleases me that you understand my flogging attempts to explain what is perhaps unexplainable. I want to say that these are just ideas, and that I don't presume to have the answers, so I'm not in a position to be preaching to anyone.

That said:

I have maintained for about twenty years or so that the effects of science and technology in the world are shoving our beliefs into limbo at an accelerating pace each day, week, month, year, and not much from the past applies anymore. Nor does anyone care to peer back, down, and into the memory hole anymore to look for the truth.

I don't think that belief systems evolve very well or efficiently. The problem is that there's no eraser in the belief process. Everything that's built up to accomodate the cutting edge of science has to re-explain the old belief structure by adding a new layer of special theory to make the old stuff work. We are way, way beyond the point of simplicity, and deeply advanced into the realm of the rediculous on this. It's no longer a question of finding and identifying truth, but rather the necessity of incorporating everything we ever thought was truth into our latest version of truth in order to avoid the admission that we were ever in error that's screwing us up.

Within the tangled, self-referential hierarchy of the simulicrum there is always an escape hatch. I don't accept that a totally illusory condition can exist. There would be no urge for the real if there weren't some element of the real to tantalize us. The point of the simulation of the real is to fulfill that urge, placate us, and keep us on the hamster wheel, but it wouldn't work if there weren't some element of the real that's lurking somewhere close enough for us to at least get a sniff now an again. So, hidden somewhere under all the self-feeding logic and liars paradox of the system there is an escape mechanism. There has to be or the illusion wouldn't work.

But the illusion of reality keeps us looking in all the wrong places. It sets us up to look for truth in the places where it wants us to think its found. It makes it easy to find just like I do when I play hide-and-seek with my four and five year old daughters. And the answers we find just feed and reinforce the delusional logic that stokes the machine. The truth is, we CAN escape, but we can't take ANY of the logical constructs of the system with us.

Now, if that seems crazy, just consider that this is exactly what Buddhism is saying. Everyone wants enlightenment, but what they really want is to get it, and then bring it back into the illusion and do something groovy with it. You can't.

Chris

[flowperson]

Chris

There's been a quiet scientific revolution going on for about twenty five years now, and it is my belief that it is about to come out of the shadows.

It has been popularly referred to as Chaos Theory for much of that time, but I call it complex systems theory. I would recommend that you obtain a book written in the 80's by James Gleick, who was a science writer for the NY Times, titled, Chaos, Making a New Science. Another good book is Godel, Escher, Bach, written by an Indiana University computer scientist, but his name escapes me. Another good book on the subject was written by a Belgian chemist. Ilya Prigogine, who received a Nobel prize for his work, but the book's title escapes me in this case ( I really hate this getting older crap !). Another good book peripheral to all this is, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.

While much of this foundational information began to be made known in the 80's not much of it has seen the light of day in the wider media since it's implications for the world as it is are so profound. Aspects of the science address the matters that we have been discussing, but not in ways that are very comforting, shall we say, to traditionalists of any stripe. Let's just say it's implications are probably equivalent, and probably much greater than the upset caused by Galileo's findings which essentially placed him under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

I think that your curiousity to seek and to know is very human and very healthy. Don't ever lose that, and pass what you can of it on to your kids. They've got the genes.

Peace and Love....flow....

[China Cat Sunflower]

Flow,

I appreciate the book recommendations. I've got to be careful because I can easily get in over my head on this stuff. I don't have any scientific training. I'm a blue collar guy with a high school education. I started trying to understand post-modernism, but I gotta say that it's really, really difficult for me. This isn't self-deigration, I'm just being honest.

I read The Holographic Universe probably ten years or so ago, and another book titled Stalking the Wild Pendulum (I don't recall the author). This was follow on reading from an interest that was stirred up after I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I recently read The Self-Conscious Universe, by Amit Goswami.

What is Chaos Theory? Can you give me a layman's thumbnail sketch? I've thought for a while that the idea of an ordered universe didn't make sense. I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

Chris

[flowperson]

It is a philosophical approach based upon scientific observations that teaches that there is always hidden order which is self-organizing, self-emergent, and self-referential; and, which emerges from periods of chaos, or transformation in matter. This appears to be a basic, if not the basic, law for the ways in which nature operates.

The popular example used most often is to describe the phase transitions that occur as water moves from gaseous form, to liquid form, to solid form; or, steam to water to ice. Of course temperature gradients influence the movements between phases, but patterns of molecular movements within the materials being studied show consistencies that appear when, for instance, the same things happen with other elements and compounds. In other words there are reference points and forms observed that show similarity and consistency across the entire spectrum of materials that are observed during phase transitions; and, they are consistently similar whether or not the materials are organic or inorganic. One of these forms is the spiral or gyre, which is also one of the most widely used sacred symbols used by ancient cultures in religious and/or artistic expression.

Be careful because you may become as hooked on this stuff as I was. And about the blue collar stuff ? Forget that. From what you've said you could probably hold you own pretty well in discussions with most professors I've known. Besides the joke at the university where I worked in administration was that a PhD. degree only meant that the person that had one knew more and more about less and less.

But really, most of them were pretty smart people, and very nice also. The jobs I held for a while required a master's and preferred a PhD., but I didn't even complete my bachelor's requirements. I grew up in a blue-collar factory town near Chicago, but fell into the university work by being in the right places at the right times with the best answers. That can still happen sometimes, even in these distorted times.

Oh, another thing I would suggets that you do is to buy a copy of the NY Times and read the Science Times section every tuesday, religiously. Over time you'll pick up more scientific knowledge than you can imagine.

flow....