Guido Alvarez
Ph.D. Committee
Qualifying Exams Part Two.
April 04, 2010
Question One:
Discuss the concepts and theories related to the nature of reality (and simulation) that are most convincing to you and most useful to your project. Some issues you may want to address: Is Simulation theory dependent on a basis in Western philosophy? How does a cosmology (such as pre-Columbian) differ from Baudrillard's concept of simulacrum? Is Reality the opposite of Simulation?
Is Reality a Simulation or Simulation a Reality?
In any given day after a long day of hunting any given person in any given town drives his car at speeds he could not obtain by walking. As he moves on a man-made flat surface designed exclusively for this purpose he listens to music that delivered through a surround sound system that fools him into thinking that he is the middle of a concert. It is raining – slightly- but he doesn’t get wet. It is cold and windy outside but he is wearing nothing but his white-collar shirt. The temperature inside is controlled by a series of sensors and electronic machines that push warm air through the vents. He grabs a cup of coffee; it is still a bit too hot so he puts it back into the cup-holder of the natural-looking wooden console in his car. He grabs his cellular phone and softly says, “Call home.” A few seconds later he listens to himself request a message. He leaves none. Then, fully aware of his wrongdoing, he text-messages his wife, he lets her know he’ll be a few minutes late, as he has to return a movie into a Redbox® nearby. He reaches for the GPS, touches its screen and –while driving- searches for the closest one. “Recalculating” the female, humanized robotic voice tells him, “When possible, make a U-turn,” she commands. Without questioning the machine he obeys. Half an hour later he is outside his house, no parking spot. He drives in circles until he finds one. It isn’t that close but walking a few extra blocks may be the daily exercise his overweight body –according to the doctor-- demands. He walks into his house, removes his shoes and leaves them in the foyer. He picks up the mail to find out –again- that nobody writes anymore. It is another bundle of “very personal” offers for free stuff and secured happiness. He opens the fridge, grabs an organic frozen pizza and a zero-calorie soda, decaf. Then he walks to the family room, nobody is there. He sits in front of his sixty-inch LCD HD TV blended to the wall and watches the news. He believes them. Was this story real? Are you sure? Would there be any difference if I told you that it was not fiction? Will it make a difference if I could assure you that it will happen tomorrow? What is reality? Where does it begin? How does it end? Does it ever?
In America (1986) Jaen Baudrillard describes his observations about public space, the culture, and the people as he travels across the United States. These observations provided him the foundation to proclaim that reality is no longer the norm, that it has been replaced by simulation. What is reality anyway? Indulge me for a few seconds and allow me to generalize that animals are less intelligent than us humans. Better expressed, that animals are incapable of complex abstract thinking in the same fashion that humans are. This observation, one could argue, is accepted as a truism among humans. What is reality for animals then? Animals perceive the environment with their senses and behave accordingly triggered by what scientists theorized as the “flight or fight” reaction. They abide by their instincts. Animals receive electrochemical inputs into their underdeveloped brains with basic scripts such as: “hungry,” “tired,” “sexually aroused,” et cetera. Each electrochemical input procures a very specific behavior to respond to it. This dialogue, so to speak, between animals and their physical environment is defined as reality. Reality for animals is the presence of a body in space. One animal in a given space perceiving this space in that precise moment it time that is neither before, nor is it after. It is now. In terms of the perception of time, reality for animals is reduced to a series of “nows,” split into infinitesimal moments in a continuum flow of time when the electrochemical dialog takes place. The animal’s highly accurate sensorium provides it with innumerable and endless electrochemical inputs that allow the extension of this dialogue with space over time.
Humans are also animals and what was described in previous paragraph applies to us as well, except there is a big difference. Scholars call that difference “consciousness” or the state of being alert and aware of our surroundings. But more importantly, humans perceive that pass of time thanks to our elaborate abstract thinking capacity. In 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty published a book based on the works of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger called The Primacy of Perception. In this intellectual construct, he argues that we do perceive the world with our senses first and then we philosophize about it. That initial perception of the world is crucial for the construction of the world and our engagement with it, he suggests. Merleau-Ponty describes this intellectual construction of reality as “The Phenomenal Field.” A space in the “here” and the “now” working also as a dialogue between mind and body, he names it the Sense Experience (‘le sentir’ in its original French text) and he explains it in these terms:
It [the Sense Experience] points to an experience in which we are given not “dead” qualities, but active ones. A wooden wheel placed on the ground is not, for sight, the same thing as a wheel bearing a load. A body at rest because no force is being exerted upon it is again for sight not the same thing as a body in which opposing forces are in equilibrium. The light of a candle changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops attracting the child’s hand and becomes literally repulsive, Vision is already inhabited by meaning (sens) which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence (1945: 52).
What Merleau-Ponty is describing implies the action of time in the construction of the narrative of reality. When a person is static and closes the eyes his reality is altered as a result, as he no longer can receive information from the sense of sight he must intensify the other senses to compensate and to rely upon his mental construction of the real world. Even though this is a natural process on its early stage it becomes quite complex as the brain of humans grow and mature rapidly during the first years of life. To better illustrate this point, think of young children and how their construction of reality is mostly based in the sense of sight. When they play peek-a-boo they close their eyes and they are temporarily gone from reality. Their consciousness temporarily leaves the room to come back as they regain that particular sense. As we grow older and our brains mature the relationship between the Sense Experience and the construction of reality becomes more complex, as it is described by Merlau-Ponty in these terms:
The problem is to understand these strange relations relationships which are woven between the parts of the landscape, or between it and me as incarnate subject, and through which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a whole scene or become the imago of a whole segment of life. Sense experience is that vital communication with the world, which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue which the effort to know will try to take apart (1945: 53).
One could argue then that Reality could be reduced –intellectually- to two different abstract constructs: First, the relationships between the chemical, mineral, and environmental presence of objects in space and time as they are molecularly constructed by the physical forces that govern the Universe, forces that are in constant flux. And secondly, the relationship of those objects and the way the senses perceive them in a particular time and in a particular space. What is of my great interest is precisely the latter, that dialogic void, the empty space between the world --physically constructed-- and the way it is perceived by a brain capable of exercising elaborated abstract thinking.
To get a sense of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of reality is crucial to understand Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. Baudrillard’s observations about how the world operates today led him to propose the idea that reality --as Merlau-Ponty describes it-- is no longer attainable. He suggests that our relationship with this physical manifested experience has become a game of survival, a pretend game, a make-belief, a play between humans and they ways by which we keep interrelated to the natural world. Baudrillard’s introduces his concept by referencing Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean leading figure in the world of Literature. In his seminal book Simulacra and Simulation (1981) He makes use of a particular short fiction story that Borges wrote entitled Del Rigor en la Ciencia (1945,) translated to English as On Exactitude in Science, where he describes in omniscient narrative voice the story of a place that, by order of the ruling powers, had been completely replaced by a map of itself; a map that is the exact representation of the territory itself. This map, Borges describes, is so precise that had replaced the physical reality, inch by inch until nobody could tell where the map ended or the territory began. Interestingly enough, the story itself was constructed in the same fashion as it was not only co-authored but it was delivered using pseudonyms and making references to alleged realities that meant to dissimulate the simulation. Using the genius of Borges as stepping stone Baudrillard challenges the notion of reality by constructing a claim that quickly became controversial and profusely discussed: Reality is no longer valid, reality is not relevant anymore, he says:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory –precession of simulacra-- (1981:1).
What Baudrillard describes as the world of the hyperreal is a symbolic construct with no references to a physical reality that may be experienced through the human senses. It could be argued, based on this concept, that reality is a mental construct that happens to find a way into our senses through physical molecular manifestations, and all these intellectual constructs no longer require a reference to their origins simply because their origins are also mental constructs. Think about dinosaurs for instance, are they real? One could argue that they real, real in the sense that they are accepted intellectual constructions but nothing more than that. Obviously, any paleontologist would be offended with the claim that dinosaurs are not real; there is evidence that proves their existence, there is physical tangible evidence. The undeniable physical manifestation of them through their remains is there, archived, and catalogued. Scientists may indeed touch, weigh, measure, and describe them. They may even put the bones together and make wonderful and colorful stories about them. They could construct amazing exhibits showing the remains of what used to be unquestionably real. Animators may recreate them in computers and render them as real. Real? Not really. Hyperreal. If we analyze this example we may agree upon dinosaurs not offering a phenomenologically possible experience beyond a close inspection of skeletal remains. A phenomenological experience with dinosaurs would not be possible even through the narrative of Michael Crichton’s 1990 Jurassic Park or its interpretation through the magical lens of 1997’s film with the same name made by Steven Spielberg. The acceptance of dinosaurs as real entities with names, lives, behaviors --even emotions-- are making a reference to skeletal remains and intellectual constructions made by scientists and acknowledged as real by the ruling intelligentsia and the institutions of power. Claiming that the actual bones in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. are not real would be problematic to say the least, but that is not the point. The point is that what we “perceive” as dinosaurs today is, according to Baudrillard, hyperreal, an unquestionable accepted reality that has no reference to the real phenomenological experience of these creatures in their original habitat. What interests me deeply is to analyze the process by which these signs or symbols evolve from intellectual constructs to myths, to forms of culture accepted via the mass media. How, in other words, skeletal remains become Barney, the purple dinosaur.
As anybody could argue, Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is always complicated to navigate, let alone to defend, but its controversial nature invites to many paths of discovery that are much more interesting when they are applied to a contemporary cultural discourse. This holds particularly true when the concepts of media, and new media are invited to the table. Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and the notion of the hyperreal become of great importance when they are used to theorize about cyberspace, social networks, and contemporary means of intercommunication because the evidence of implementation of the hyperreal abounds. The hyperreal for Baudrillard is effective because it is no longer visible, the simulation, he says, is “no longer anything but operational” (1981:2), the hyperreal is integrated into our lives at the molecular level, it is invisible to us, it is us. We are the simulation and as such we must find a reference to make ourselves meaningful. The hyperreal has demanded the creation of a mediator to explain this ordeal. Pushed by the invasion of the hyperreal we, humans, invented God, the ultimate bodyless embodiment of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, and with it the most important simulation ever created: the afterlife.
Pre-Columbian Art History expert, professor Dr. James Farmer -Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Va.—suggests that there is one single original thought in human history: To bury the dead. This gigantic claim became a powerful construct in my mind. After that original thought, he explains, humankind has been recycling the same concepts over and over again throughout history. This brief and powerful concept relates to the theory of simulation in many ways as it can be proven through different disciplines. Theologians do not study one concept of god but many; sociologists don’t deal with one culture but a vast array of them around the world. It could be argued then that we’ve been telling the same story --replacing the same story-- with another story of the story that pretended (simulated) to be the original one, and by doing so, we have been reinforcing the idea that there is no story at all. No story that could be accounted as real, therefore all of them are real. The moment humans embraced the idea of the concept of the afterlife they shattered the limitations of time and space determined by the physically manifested world in more than one googol.
This seemingly simple idea put humans into a complicated predicament: the acceptance of time and space as limited entities impossible to fully control. From the burial of the dead to cyberspace there has been nothing but storytelling, narrative construction. Ever since humans decided to make the act of burying the dead meaningful, the need to tell stories was born in an attempt to provide value to that transcendental disruption of time. Dying is a physical and evident event in time and space. It is impossible to bypass in the phenomenological sense. Death is experiential and it acknowledges the limits of the physical human experience. And one could easily argue that death is the ultimate universal experience. On the other hand, we could agree, with no doubt, that telling stories is a human trait that is accomplished by the construction of narrative. Narrative is inherent to humanity as it procures the appropriate development of cognitive skills as Mary Laure-Ryan suggests in her book Narrative Across Media (2004) when she says:
Why is narrative so fundamental to cognition? Because to notice objects or events in our perceptual environment is to construct embryonic stories about them (2006:7).
Telling stories is eternal, repetitive, rhythmic, and transcendental. The creation of a human narrative, a shared experience common to us all, a meta-story could also help demonstrate Baudrillard’s concept of simulation as a representation of the representation of an altered sense of reality. The hyperreal is, to an extent, a meta-narrative that supplanted reality itself.
For Scholar Porter Abbott, narrative is “the representation of an event or a series of events” (2008:13), where “event” for him is the key term. Events are actions, opposed to descriptions, the construction of a meta-narrative, a story told to everyone in such a way that it could be imagined, a mental image that helps construct an abstract reality, perhaps even experienced in the phenomenological sense. Additionally, Marie-Laure Ryan defines story as: “A representation… a mental image, a cognitive construct that concerns certain types of entities and relations between these entities. Based on Dr. Farmer’s claim of a single original story (a meta-narrative) applicable to human kind –argument that I accept as valid and meaningful-- one could argued that all stories that humanity has created based on the same representation of reality --validated by the recognition of an imagined afterlife perpetual state attainable only by dying-- are equally valid; there is no reason why “story A,” is better in any way than “story B,” or “story C,” when they are describing the same event.