Recuperating Reality: a (relatively) brief addendum

Topics Covered:
criticizing the critic,
a personal denial of cultural imperialism,
spring break (wooo!)

In a recent correspondence with official Bro o' the Blog and Future Shipwreck WEBMASTER, Graham, he raised some very shrewd points about my latest post which I feel need to be addressed in order to give a more balanced view of the subject matter. I mean, that should be pretty easy, right? I'm just talkin' 'bout reality!

First of all, I think I might have come off as a bit too uncritical of Baudrillard's theories. Looking back over the piece, I think the only explicit skepticism I voiced was in reference to the false sense of nostalgia embedded in his "successive phases of the image". However, as with any highly abstract theory making dramatic claims about the nature of existence, there is obviously a lot more with which one might take issue. Though I think in general he makes some really good points I too have some significant concerns.

Glitter Graphics


Portrait by K. Winfrey

Blingees: Possibly the ultimate manifestation of
"late capitalist" excess.
Certainly the most sparkle-y.

1. To a certain extent the arguments in "The Precession of Simulacra" are elitist. Not just in the sense that they are often unnecessarily convoluted and couched in esoteric terminology which excludes the casual reader, but they also assume a degree of economic/social over-development. A prevalent amount of excess and leisure is required for a society to produce things which are purely representational rather than purely functional. The same is true on an individual/consumer level. Try to talk to a homeless man on the street about the symbolic significance of the McDonald's cheeseburger he is eating (their current "urban-hip" image they are promoting, their status as an international standard of corporate America and fast food production in general, etc) and he would probably tell you to fuck off. To a person who requires cheap nourishment and doesn't possess the resources to prepare that food themselves the "reality" of that cheeseburger is not in question. I am hungry, the hamburger will temporarily alleviate this hunger. Baudrillard seems to forget that a lot of the time people act simply out of necessity, not to make a statement which in a Kantian sense means they are not actually exercising free will and therefore not fully "participating" in the discourse of representation. Furthermore, even if conflicting arrays of meaning exist as a result of an individual action that doesn't necessarily mean they will be personally relevant.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

From Nietzsche Family Circus.

2. How urgent is this crisis of reality, really? There is a famous line in Apollinaire's poem "Merlin and the Old Woman" which states: "J'ai fait des gestes blancs parmi les solitudes." (Loose translation: "I made blank gestures among the solitudes.") In spite of the nihilistic implications of this sentiment, Susan Sontag observes in her excellent essay "The Aesthetics of Silence" that he is still making gestures. Even if an action is ineffectual in its aim to create/enforce a desired meaning something is undeniably happening. What is its significance purely as a gesture? Baudrillard never bothers to address that.


It's one thing to have critics and academics saying, "There is no reality any more!", but at the same time it's not as if the world is on the verge of immediate collapse. You couldn't perform the activities necessary for daily existence if you didn't believe in at least a fundamental, empirically observable reality. Obviously the majority of people, even those who accept the aforementioned critics' arguments, have found ways to cope (though not always with positive results) and if you're not going to offer a more inspired method then what's the benefit of worrying about what's already happened? Though the process might not be entirely conscious, I think we all have a sort of a Nietzschean moment in our life when where we're faced with the overwhelming subjectivity of existence and we're like, "Ok, maybe there's no objective basis for this, but I've considered the available information, I've satisfied my intellectual conscience, and like my way of seeing things the best so I'm just going to act according to that." There's something noble in that kind of egotism. If Baudrillard's theory has a practical value it lies in the formation of perspective (i.e. don't be fooled into making false judgments based on relative hierarchies of real/unreal), but it's pretty useless in terms of actual, personal application.

Brings new meaning to the phrase "gender performance".

3. Can we find a middle ground between iconoclast and iconolater? I believe the answer to this question is a resounding, "Yes!" and yet Baudrillard never explicitly investigates this possibility. Instead of completely accepting or rejecting a system of imagery one can alter or subvert it from within. You know, that whole SLC Punk, "taking down the system from the inside" ethos. On a level of personal representation, Queer theorist José Muñoz refers to it as "disidentification": neither fully identifying with an image (which involves artificially ridding oneself of personal traits which don't fit the desired identity and adding ones that do) nor counter-identifying (which merely sets one up as the opposite of the existent image, effectively allowing the rejected system to set the criteria of "what you are not"), but rather actively performing an identity in such a deliberate way where one is legible as such even without fitting the assumed prerequisites.



On a broader level of "social" realities, Slavoj Žižek refers to the Lacanian notion of "traversing the phantasy" in which we fully accept our constructed reality in order to come in more intimate contact with the truth it contains: "The lesson of psychoanalysis here is [...]: we should not mistake reality for fiction - we should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it." This has the additional benefit of recuperating some of the value of simulated realities which in Baudrillard are merely alienating. Žižek contends that the "real" events in our lives (pain, tragedies, etc.) often take the form of the spectacular and thus they are not necessarily of any more value as an apparatus to "ground" oneself in a fixed sense of reality. Both the real and the simulation contain elements of each other and that overlap is perhaps the most fecund mental space to inhabit.



4. This ain't no Neojaponisme. I'd just like to make it clear that the examples I used in my post are in no way meant as an attempt to make my arguments seem more interesting by instilling them with the sense of "exoticism" and "wackiness" typically associated with Japan in our culture. They simply happened to be the most conducive examples to making the points I wanted to make. That's all I really have to say about that.

Well, I'm heading off to LA for the latter part of my Spring Break. Until next time, celebrate your subjectivity with these jams:

The Commentator Strikes Back (never first!)

Topics Covered:
Words of hope for all of you melancholy word-lookin' folks,
A Brief Q and a long, involved A
(including exactly one Lil' Wayne citation),
A defense of Existentialism as a defense for criticism

Dear Reader,

Don't worry, I have already found the perfect Pablo Neruda poem to express the rollercoaster of emotions you have undoubtedly been experiencing in that long, anxious void between my last post and this, my triumphant return:

I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent,
and you hear me from far away, and my voice does not touch you.
It looks as though your eyes had flown away
and it looks as if a kiss had sealed your mouth.

Like all things are full of my soul
You emerge from the things, full of my soul.
Dream butterfly, you look like my soul,
and you look like a melancoly word.

I like you when you are quiet and it is as though you are distant.
It is as though you are complaining, butterfly in lullaby.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
let me fall quiet with your own silence.

Let me also speak to you with your silence
Clear like a lamp, simple like a ring.
You are like the night, quiet and constellated.
Your silence is of a star, so far away and solitary.

I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent.
Distant and painful as if you had died.
A word then, a smile is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it is not true.

It ain't true. And you're welcome. Now, back to business.

When we left off so long ago you were in deep suspense about what our interviewee, Brad Troemel, would ask the interviewer, me, when the power of question and commentary was shifted his way. The result, terse though it may have been, prompted the following manifesto/mission statement. I hope it will give y'all a better sense of who I am and what I'm trying to accomplish with this, one blog in an endless sea of artistic/social commentary available on the internet.

BT: tell me about yourself. you're no joke, man. you're from kentucky? did you go to college?

Dan: Though I don't think I'll end up staying here forever, Kentucky actually kind of rules in its own way. It's beautiful, it has a monopoly on the production of bourbon/champion racehorses, and it is now home to a 27 million dollar Creation Museum (that's a museum funded mostly by private donations the sole purpose of which is to disprove evolution.) There's also this weird confluence of Southern tradition and hip, super-motivated, creativity in its major cities. For example, Kevin Schnieder of Apples in Stereo lives in Lexington and Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy) is from Lousiville. In general, you do have to put up with a lot of social crap in order to live here, but, given the proper level of personal remove, that crap can be kind of awesome. Go to any flea market and you will find the most amazing ideological merchandise possibly in the entire world:

As for me, I'm currently double majoring in Literature and Japanese Language/Culture at Miami University in southern Ohio. As an institution of learning it's incredible (and very demanding; I spend about 10-12 hours a week outside of class working on Japanese alone, thus my prolonged absence), but as a social environment it ranks up there with the crowd at an Ann Coulter book-signing. The majority of the student body consists of rich, white, hyper-conservative kids with an astoundingly large sense of entitlement. Plus we're basically in the middle of corn fields. I guess you could say my "life of the mind" has benefited as a result, I mean, I practically started this blog as a way of keeping myself sane until the end of this, my final semester before graduation.

From Brad Troemel's Zero's Heroes Series
Not such a far cry from the average Miami Student

As far as art, I tend to gravitate more towards "high/conceptual" (or what might be deemed "hipster-ish") stuff just because it's already been placed in a context which invites analysis and commentary by insisting on its own "artistic-ness" so to speak (as opposed to "low/genre" stuff which, when interpreted, often leads to the accusation that one is "reading too much into it.") However, I'm also pretty much disgusted by the shallowness of the culture and criticism it produces. The majority of music blogs, "hip" magazines, etc operate from the assumption that whatever they like is good and therefore all they need to do is sort of point it out, relate it to another obscure work, and take all the credit for establishing their subject's career. Even interviews, which should be at least mostly about the person they're talking to, tend to look more like private conversations whose only purpose is to demonstrate how the interviewer is "totally bros" with the interviewee. I on the other hand, to quote Lil Wayne (best rapper alive, sorry Kanye), strive to "break a bitch down like Tanya Harding".



I don't think my ideas or tastes are the best for anyone but me, but I really try to respect the artist and their work by engaging them/it seriously, extrapolating some of the valuable ideas, and placing them in a broader context to demonstrate their relevance to other art and the world in general. The whole point of art criticism and appreciation to me comes across well in Sartre's famous Existentialism is a Humanism essay:

"Now, for the existentialist there is really no love other than one which manifests itself in a person's being in love. There is no genius other than one which is expressed in works of art; the genius of Proust is the sum of Proust's works; the genius of Racine is his series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing. Why say that Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn't write it? A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing. To be sure, this may seem a harsh thought to someone whose life hasn't been a success. But, on the other hand, it prompts people to understand that reality alone is what counts, that dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations. In other words, to define him negatively and not positively."

In other words: "great art" does not exist objectively, rather it is dependent on the work of humans (the artist and the audience) to extract its value through creation and active interpretation. I write about stuff because I care about the ideas it represents since its often something I've experienced myself. I'm aware that even the most well-reasoned criticism can never be totally objective and at least part of the fun of reading an essay or review is getting a specific, inherently limited viewpoint. On the other hand, I don't want to be like the commentator from Nabokov's Pale Fire and praise the work of others mostly to make myself look good by association.

As a sidenote: I'm generally not a very serious person. I mean, I jam ABBA and Prince way more often than Gang of Four or This Heat, but I sometimes worry that I come off as pretentious or exclusive just because I'm used to writing research papers for strict grammarians. That's not my intent. I'm just trying to communicate in the most efficient manner I know.



That'll be all for now. Enjoy the jams and look forward to another post this week on the hyperreality of Japanese reality television!