sorry I got a new French guy
Gruesome Details
As a child, I excelled at disassociating (if one can call that a skill). I was so entranced when reading that my mother would frequently need to stand next to me and yell my name to get me to exit my book-induced haze.
Inevitably, as my brain started to firm up in my skull, I mourned the loss of this space, the small space between real and imaginary. We all do. It is a common enough childhood milestone to get its own Bob’s Burgers episode (season 9, episode 18 “If You Love It So Much, Why Don't You Marionette?”).
When creating Kenny Powers, the washed up baseball pitcher at the center of Eastbound & Down, creator and star Danny McBride said Kenny always think of himself as in a movie. And don’t all the least emotionally intelligent among us feel and act this way? Perpetually chasing that childhood space between the real and the fantastical. And surely we see that today. We’re living under an authoritarian who believes everything he sees on TV. A man who thinks of himself as Schroedinger’s cat (only real when viewed).
We are all stuck in a recursive series of windows or screens. The life we see on the screen is real and reality is only real if reflected. You’ve seen the post.
The collapse between signifier and signified created the hyperreality of which Beaudrillard (my new French man) wrote. He says of the hyperreal, “By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of the truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by the liquidation of all referential…” He later goes on to say, “substituting signs of the real for the real.”
Baudrillard seems sure we will be stuck in this recursive black hole of meaning. And, I get it. The idea of the community stands in for community. The idea of science stands in for science. The idea of self stands in for self. Even mundane activities are commodified into meaninglessness. What the hell is a “boo basket”???
As one of my favorite movies, In the Mouth of Madness, says, “Reality is just what we tell each other it is.” There is enormous potential in that idea, coupled with enormous dread. Baudrillard is a nihilist for a reason.
But, even if there is no space between object and subject, even if there is no objective truth on the horizon, we have ourselves at least. As a moralist, I feel for the compass inside myself.
Even those without values, have their feelings. For better or worse. As Joe Rogan recently said of an AI-generated Tim Walz, “I love it. It’s real. It has to be real.”
Reality may be elusive, but our feelings are not.
I feel fairly comfortable in dismissing the terror and potential nihilism of hyperreality. I am focused on the possibility and potential optimism of it. I think three things serve to push me in the optimistic direction:
I have always been comfortable making mythic of the mundane.
I experienced the grief of hyperreality, and feel less likely to be seduced by it.
I saw my grandfather’s body rolled out of my house during St. Patrick’s Day dinner.
#1.
As a child, I was taught to mythologize. All children are. The simplicity of myth is easy to understand, its lack of nuance ideal. Not to mention, you exit the womb mythologizing by default whoever feeds you, whether or not they ultimately deserve it.
For the record, my parents deserve their place in my personal mythos.
As a family mythkeeper, I understand maintaining and creating myths. (Please don’t confuse family mythkeeper and family historian. They’re different.)
The myths of my family serve an intensely emotional purpose. None of my family myths are meant to impress or elevate. Rather, all are designed to entertain and create a recollection so strong it defies time. I never met my maternal grandmother, but the mythmaking of her was so complete. We speak of her constantly, even now.
It is a hyperreality of sorts, but one centered in the real. Family myths are kinship-creating stories. By knowing the myths and becoming part of one or two, you become a de facto member of my family.
Any hyperreality created by mythmaking is centered in a corporeal place of connection, a shared emotion of care.
Who is to say we could not do the same for our broader communities?
#2.
In ninth grade, I got a particularly violent case of mono and was out of school for months. It was a strange period of nothing space. I spent days slipping between waking and sleeping, half watching television, half in a dream. At the time, I wrote in my diary I had reached a “particular low point” and started watching Dr. Phil, current ICE propagandist, religiously.
I would be confused by the images washing over me, unmoored by not experiencing time in the linear fashion to which I had become accustomed. In the privacy of my grandfather’s former bedroom, the world slipped by me and I by it. “Did I dream that or watch it on TV?” was a question I often asked myself.
It was lonely and odd. My body and brain were not fully my own. Months later, I arrived back to school brittle, thin, and jaundiced.
I cannot imagine willingly entering such a place again.
Hyperreality requires its own agreements. The central agreement is a self-imposed isolation. AI companies are jumping at the chance to seduce you into this isolation. They want to create the hyperreality around you. They want you to believe yourself together, while being alone. They want to build models, creating the idea that there are others with you, just behind the screen.
If hyperreality, as Baudrillard says, is created by power and capital, replicating over and over, the best defense lies, again, in the compass inside your own chest.
Absent reality—stuck in the false binary of dream and TV—can you locate yourself?
#3
Foucault and Baudrillard have a sense that the violence of modern life is obfuscated. Seems privileged, but OK.
Modern violence is hidden in onerous bureaucracy (Foucault) or in the collapse of meaning (Baudrillard). We are denied the spectacle (Foucault) or linearity of death (Baudrillard). We are, therefore, forced to replicate and simulate it.
I, on the other hand, would argue all that becomes pretty moot when your grandfather’s body is rolled out of your house during St. Patrick’s Day dinner. What is meaning? What is spectacle? Either way, he’s dead and I am performing the worst version of Greensleeves ever committed to a rental violin. I needed to get some feelings out.
I am not saying children should be legally required to attend a funeral before they reach thirteen. But I am saying Pete Hegseth seems like the kind of guy who has grandparents who are still alive.
Living and dying contain equal absurdities. Their randomness, how far they are outside our control, can prompt terror. Or we could power through Greensleeves before diving into the corned beef. Either/or.
The false concern of real and hyperreal seems minuscule compare to the emotional connection between you and me, me and you.
If what these French philosophers say is true, the only possibility for the existence of the individual is via the collective. To escape the panopticon, you must rely on the idea that we are all viewed (and, therefore, no one is viewed). To navigate the hyperreal, you must recreate the real in concert with those around you.
There seems no real option, except to use the landmarks of one another to place ourselves in time, in space, and in history.
Can I hold onto you to find me?