The Simulacra

Have you ever fallen in love with a made-up world? Some fantasy in a book or a film that engrossed you so completely, resonated so deeply within you, that you ached to think it would never be real as it is within your own heart and mind?

I've fallen for many such worlds, lived whole lives within stacks of pages, series of images within a screen that felt more real even that my own so-called reality, chaotic and clumsy as it can be. I have shed some very real tears, spent innumerable hours trying and failing to summon into existence the figures and forms of these alternate realities: the inconjurable scent of cherry blossoms wafting over Kyoto; the burn of absinthe in a Parisian cafe; a place beyond the stars.

All the while knowing that such things have never truly existed as I imagine them, and that my only access to their reality is through the limited conduits of symbols: lines scratched out on a sheet of paper, captured light projected upon a screen, markings that bear no meaning but what I give to them.

Roland Barthes spoke of the difference between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. Some stories are uni-directional and simply offer themselves up to us with their meanings naked and fully-formed, while others require us to fill in the blanks and come to our own conclusions, to inject something of ourselves into them to create a synthesis of meaning.

I believe all texts are writerly texts. All texts demand something of us; no narrative exists independently of our interpretation of it. And though every reader drinks in the same set of symbols from a text, is it not filtered through a unique lens: a completely distinct set of experiences shaped by a singular set of experiences and personality?

If you and I watched the same movie, or read the same book, how often would our experience of it be the same? How often would we agree as to what it all means?

And is our world not another text, another set of symbols that we must navigate, the meaning we draw from it inseparable from the lens through which it is viewed? Is our experience not mediated by eyes that can be fooled, to be filtered through minds that can be flawed and perceptions that are tinted by our own neurosis and biases?

And in our interpretation of this world we must all share, are we not each fully alone within the bubbles of these bodies, the prison that is our discrete existence as separate Selves, able to interact with our reality only through symbols, building maps in our minds of a thing we can never truly quantify?

For the map is not the territory, the symbol is not the reality, and in our age of mass-media that gives us more streams of conflicting information than ever, diluted through yet another degree of separation from its source, we are left with a simulation of a simulation, a copy of a copy of a copy. Shadows dancing on the cave wall, from which we cannot look away.

It would seem that we are bound to this one reality at least: that there is no true means of knowledge available to us, nothing that is not tainted by the faulty lenses of our perceptions. That we are forever chained within this Platonic cave, watching the shadows upon the wall, never seeing the fire that casts their flickering forms, nevermind the true light that lay beyond the doorway to the cave.

Or is that assessment just another shadow on the wall?

The Entrance to the Maze

It has been seven years since I last posted on this blog. I doubt any of my original audience will read this, but I figure it is as good a place as any to pick up the train of thought that has taken me to the center of the labyrinth and back in the time that has passed since my last post.

IASC 1F00 was where my journey began. I found myself sitting in that classroom at Brock University because I had always felt that there was an ocean of knowledge waiting for me just around the riverbend, and I was so excited to venture out and dive into it. I was wide-eyed, innocent, and so excited to sink my teeth into this big beautiful world we are all a part of, to learn all of its secrets and contribute to the Great Work of making it even better.

I was standing at the gates of the maze, unaware of the true scope of the twists and turns contained within.

Sitting in our circle of desks, student and professor alike as equals, we were encouraged to ask "so what?" Whatever question you've asked, whatever answer you think you've arrived at, what does it mean? Why is it important? What difference does it make?

This is the concept that consumed me: the idea that knowing for its own sake is not enough. What is the purpose of knowing? What does knowledge mean for us as human beings?

I began to wonder about the nature of knowledge itself. How do we KNOW anything? Descartes famously said, "I think, therefore I am," but that seemed myopic to me. How do we know that we are what we think we are? Does our perception of consciousness provide proof of concept? If we were simply a brain in a vat being stimulated electrically, or advanced artificial intelligence in a Matrix-type simulation, who had been programmed to be absolutely convinced of our reality, would we ever know the difference?

At worst, I concluded, the captial 'T' truth was inaccessible to us, and at best, it was a very convincing illusion.

After all, as we discussed in class, we are quickly moving towards a world that is post-reality, a simulacra, where it is near impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Each of us try our best to assemble a model of reality that works, but when our sources of information all conflict, when they are simulations of a simulation, a map based on no real territory, what is there for any of us but a void without meaning or purpose? What orientation is possible?

Wherein lies the exit to the maze?