Screen reality

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​According to a Baudrillard’s statement - which is clearly brutally shocking and blasphemous to the same extent, as it is unusual and stimulating - reality does not exist [1] . Yes, we had an opportunity to meet theories rejecting the absolute certainty that our life is realistic, durable and rigid. We have heard such dictums as living is a dream, or even a madman dream. This is an illusion they have. Only this was related to life, but the theory of simulacra’ creator does not speak of life as such, but of a reality. So we have to realize this significant difference, which gives a space for potential abilities and hopes. In relation to this thesis I wonder and care about, on the one hand, the sphere of contact and life and reality overlap and, on the other hand, their compliance with their images. Hence I add to an analysis an opinion of Wilde, who dealt not with media crawling that time, but inevitably with art and literature, which I treat as images (simulacra).

Life is a physical conscious phenomenon, and reality [2] seems to be one of the many areas of its self-manifestation. I'll try to check, or just to understand (or even just to get closer to understanding), the authenticity of the Parisian philosopher’ statement; in my opinion, the special philosopher on the scale of the whole history of Thought. This does not mean he has no few antecedents.

  What were his reasons and basics for such a shocking statement? Life and reality are not the same in everything (because they cannot be), and thus they have different nature and their own phenomenal ranges. Core understanding of the concept of reality includes a positive assumption that everything what reaches us (each I individually) in a variety of ways, and what is not witnessed by us ourselves, in the obvious way belongs to it. We do not have to believe, because we just know.

There is also a parallel reality of our dreams; in fact, it is not less real during its continuance than conscious experience. A plural in language layer is a usual thing here, but all suggestions of universality of proposed opinion are continuously factual discrepancies and such they remain. Finally, it should always be understood not as usurpation, but as such a generic articulation of the writing object.

Intuitions (faith) and signs (religion, magnificent temples, cult, rituals, ceremonies and rites) give the feeling of eternal meta- and trans-reality. The most interesting thing is that we always live and perceive reality as individual unit or separate entities and individual consciousness. This means that all manifestations and other entities are included in our perception and mind. We know, as it seems, that we have this awareness of reality up to the point of physical separation from the world, i.e. to death.

It can be judged with a common sense that there is no equal sign between the reality or, taking precisely, the truth about it, and its image. But there must surely be some kind of a significant (metaphysical, mystical) connection (permeation) between them, the strongest one in the field of magic and theurgy. Faith in it or excluding of such a possibility was the reason of the antagonisms and strong conflicts. Hence, as the philosopher says, the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth. The simulacrum is true. It is the truth which conceals that there is none [3]​. Let's write this sentence easier; the simulacrum does not hide the truth, but the truth hides the fact of its absence. So this way simulacrum reflects the absence of the truth, i.e. simulated presence. There is some (but a rebus) parallel of this situation at Wilde’s. He defended clearly lies in literature and art, because in his opinion, if something does not suppress, or at least weaken our ugly love of facts, than an art shortly has to get sterilized and the Beauty will disappear completely [4].

Mentioned by the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray attitude of novelists of his times is clearly consistent with the practices of cartographers cited by Borges through Baudrillard, who, as the philosopher claims, during the map creation imitated an area so precisely that at the same time they kind of covered it. The map was fuzing with the territory. In this way they delivered simulacra of the second row. In the Baudrillard's analysis of four phases of the history of simulacrum hiding’ takes place on its two phases; on the second phase of perversion, when simulacrum masks and denatures a profound reality as an evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence. And on the third one when it masks the absence of a profound reality, it pretends to be one of the copies and belongs to the order of sorcery [5]​.

Wilde studied the relationship between life and art, as Baudrillard does, but he is mainly interested in mass communication and its simulation of life simulacrum, in other words the reality, the popular means of communication - tube and screen of culture and arts in their persistently broadest lynx, a popular and widely mass one. For both, the first and the second of the authors, comes a process of realignment of a great reality in its literary (naturalism) and alternately the TV (hyper reality) image. For the first one it happens due to the excess of the facts in prose, for the second one it is due to the replacing them with a precession of simulacra, which is an infinite number of (now also electronic) duplicated reflections of the world even in live twenty-hours retransmissions. In this sense, everyone who finds himself in the camera’s field of view can be an actor, a character or an artist.  

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For the nineteenth-century English (Irish) dandy a lies disappearance threatens writing novels so similar to the life itself, that it is unlikely to regard them as possible. As if it was a preapprehension of a simulation. After all, the Parisian philosopher talks about the similar situation, about the maintaining falsehood by truth, which conceals its own absence. Considering logically, it is the same. Wilde warns against disappearance of lies and Baudrillard tells to think of truth pretense to be present, as the only way of understanding the concealment of absence. Therefore it must be the same suppositions, which in result have similar meanings. Wilde wants lie and Baudrillard states (however, with some anxiety) an appropriation of reality by simulating, i.e. media lying practice.

But the Baudrillard's truth lies on such a scale that hides its nonexistence. It is present if it can simulate its own presence. Let's ask again, what can this mean? Probably enough to deceive about its nature (any falsehood should be out of the truth) and state of being (hides that it’s absent). This raises the question about the reason and meaning of such a behavior. This sentence means the unclearness of relation on the set of the truth presence, so the falsifying of the factual state or such intention. It is introduced in order to use technological terms of faults and disruption. TV image, as well as every photographic image, photo-digital one (but also every traditional one), is always truthful. But even in the most sincere situation it prefers immediacy of reference in a transmitted actual situation and its truth, and therefore it never can fully transfer the whole truth about a transmitted phenomenon, event or problem. Because the truth - whether on image or in a novel (taking wider – in Art) simply can’t be given out to its fullest. It is not about situations in which what is widespread, that is being manipulated for political strategy benefits, different manipulative practices, but just because of unpreparedness (randomness) of transferors. Simulacrum can show other areas than straightly real, but their fantasy and imaginativity or unavailability for direct experience will arouse ambivalent feelings. Not in the case of perfect simulation of Baudrillard’s allegory of overtaking the territory by the map. That the way the hyper-real message’ truth is, not reckoning with the real world, which is now only a desert of representation and references.

The simulacrum with ambition to transmit a factual complete and objective reality in a form of a snapshot flash or more complex form of message (with elements of self-analysis of the transmission process) will impoverish, distort it, it will be there - as the Parisian master wants – flattened to modules of program operations and nuclear fragmentation. Therefore the problem of inability to reveal the truth of what is transmitted lies rather in the nature of mediation which, from a McLuhan’ point of view is a message. Other issues are such as limitations of perception and cognitive abilities. That is what a great and certainly penetrating cultural critic should have known. And a flamboyant gentleman rejected with conviction the simulation of the world in literature as incomprehensible naive claims threatening imagination and aesthetic taste. He believed even that life imitates art, and that truth is solely and exclusively a matter of form. "Forms are truer than living human are" belongs to it [art] [6]. ​Art never expresses anything else but itself .  So it is the same mediation.

We must also realize that we operate intuition of reality, as it is not some absolute value in terms of invariant measures (even so it is commonly perceived this way), but it is already not at the level of the latest science. It locates antinomies in it, and most importantly, it is always understood and felt personally and individually, but confirmed by the collective testimony with the most repressive, oppressive and extremely blissful or ambiguous on a smaller scale, or paranormal features. It’s that there is no clear arbitration in this issue. But Baudrillard does not mean here this such a nuanced concept; he compares it on the level of truth and falsehood, reality and hyper-reality. So he treats it very commonly, but also very dynamic dialectically, and at the same time very generally.

The reality - as we understand it - with all its levels and plans is a space summing and containing a common understanding of beings inhabiting it in the given time, no matter if it is possible to get it with consciousness, memory or timescale. Life is a fragment and a part of reality, within which life is inseparable from it. But you cannot exclude its infinity, i.e. a possibility of exceeding the real limitations in both directions: to the past (i.e. alternative history, hypnotic regression and genetics), and to the future. Life changes while going through a phase of reality and it changes the reality inhabited by following beings and their consciousness.

According to Wilde, lie allows avoiding an unpleasant meticulous banality. Because, in fact, what is the essence of a beautiful lie? The fact, that it lets you understand it itself. And here we have a pretty distant, in measures of time, dandy who things similarly to analyst and critic, as he states, an attempt to make a story too true, in fact, deprives it of verisimilitude - it is a modern maleficence. [7]​... And this maleficence is, to different level, a feature of ubiquitous screen funded us by a corporate producing simulacrum and the Ministry of Truth, which is its owner. And each screen has two sides. To Baudrillard, TV monitor was an embodiment of images’ disappearing and transforming spectators into transparent screens [8]. ​Therefore let’s be careful with ubiquitous glass and plasma.

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[1] J. Baudrillard, Symulakry i symulacja, Sic! S.C. publishing house, Warsaw 2005.​​

[2] ​It is clearly understandable that the reality is a mental community of all modernly thinking and conscious beings.​

[3] J. Baudrillard, op.cit., Baudrillard states it to be a Qoheleth’s aphorism, what is, probably, rightly doubted by publisher.​

[4] ​O.  Wilde, Zanik kłamstwa. Dialog[1889] at: Moderniści o sztuce, chosen, prepared and supplemented with introduction by Elżbieta Grabska, Państwowe  Wydawnictwo naukowe, Warsaw 1971​

[5] J. Baudrillard, op.cit.​

[6] O.  Wilde, op. cit.​

[7] Ibidem​

[8] ​http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard​

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