So in doing some reading on Baudrillard I found this interesting “translation” of The procession of Simulacrum (1991). It’s quite comical and raunchy (Parental Advisory sticker here).
After getting a sense of Baudrillard’s arguments it has become difficult to conceptualize media without being reminded that, according to him, we exist in a world, that doesn’t even exist. This is a tough concept to wrap my head around. Even after reading the street version of his argument, I am still a little baffled. Is he saying that all that simulacra are unique to the post-modern era? Is there an agentive force behind our world of deceptions? Is it capitalists, religious leaders, and the Illuminati that are somehow facilitating this procession to protect their own interests? All of this is unclear to me.
If this is the case, I think I have to disagree. This weeks reading on new media have made me think about just how far back the simulacra goes. Particularly, I liked the discussion of Stiegler, and the notion that humans exteriorize their know-how and collective memory in the form of cultural artifacts and objective memory supports (Hansen 177). This is ability is presented as a kind of cultural evolution that accompanies our genetic evolution. I would argue that these two types of evolution should not be taken as parallels. Our biology, and thus capacity for abstract thought, is the source of this exteriorization. Our ability to to communicate to each other that this (sound, gesture, symbol, etc.) stands for that (object, emotion, symbolized).
Besides my notion of these two forms of evolution being one and the same, Stiegler via Hansen argues that “human beings, in their developmental and genetic evolution, are essentially correlated with technical media”. …i.e. “technical media are the exterior support for human life in its diverse sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and collective modalities”. Mediation forms the very basis of human existence (177).
I’m pretty sure I agree with this. And I think that it calls Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra as a post-modern condition into question. He, or at least translation I’ve posted, talks of how science kills everything it turns its gaze upon. I take this to mean that once we turn an analytical eye toward something we immediately understand it differently. It’s not longer the thing we wanted to know more about, but the thing that we examined from all angels and made observations and theories about. Our observations and theories then come to represent the thing to us. The original no longer exists. Baudrillard seems to be saying that only science or ethnography can do this. But aren’t these things just extensions of our ability to understand something. Didn’t this same thing happen when the first tool using hominid picked up a sharp rock and realized it could cut something? Rocks were not rocks anymore, but potential tools. This is an incredibly simplified example, and maybe I’m off base, but it would appear that we have never known a “real” world, if that is even the most fitting term. How can there be a real world if we are incapable of perceiving it. Doesn’t that make it unreal.
I guess that was a long winded way to say that I like what Stiegler had to say (as mediated by Hansen anyway). I think it captures the fact that humans are technical beings that have probably never existed outside of a mediated reality we create for ourselves. Has any organic being ever existed outside of the reality that their physiology mediates to them? In terms of new media, I would have to agree with Hansen that “new” is definitely a relative concept.
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