The Simmer Of Simulation

I like food. Who doesn’t? What’s not to like about food?

Some people like everything. Broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, asparagus, beetroot, cabbage.

Not me. Not yet. My preferences lean toward pasta: fettucine, spaghetti, tortellini, penne, rigatoni. Preferably with meatballs.

At the moment, there is all kind of food in the local grocery stores. But that may change soon. I’m hearing reports of further ice melt in the arctic. That isn’t good. This is an indication that temperatures will rise globally destroying crops and habitat.

How will our populations react when there’s no food available? People do not react well to this. We’re facing a terrifying situation.

Let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about illusion. I love illusion. Though I also hate it a little, too. Because it’s illusion, and people often use illusion to hide themselves from ugly truths that could use some mitigation, some alteration.

There’s nothing illusory about an illusion except the illusion itself. It’s a bubble with chandeliers. It’s a Disneyland of the soul. Remember childhood?

I’m assuming that everyone had a pleasant childhood. A lot of people didn’t. I apologize for my presumption.

Let’s not fool ourselves (though fooling oneself is at the heart of illusion) illusion can hurt. Illusions of worth based on commodity are toxic.

Jean Baudrillard famously argued that the commodification of everything is powerfully alienating. Illusions of self-worth or public esteem based on what, and how much, you own. Never mind what you did to own it, what you did or do or didn’t do to own it. What matters is owning it. Land, houses, cars, politicians. You can be an exquisite maker of speeches, a shamanic spirit à la Terence McKenna, giving tremendous insights, mind-boggling, paradigm-shifting illuminations of colossal import, all of it embedded in gorgeous, voluptuous sentences and phrases, and none of this, not a bit of it, will matter if you’re poor, or even just modestly situated with a two-bedroom cottage and a rattle-trap car.

But if you own a number of luxury cars and live in a mansion with thirty-four bathrooms with golden faucets and handmade Italian tiles, people will hang on your every burp and fart.

Also, don’t forget, people love mediocrity. Don’t get too smart. Don’t be too eloquent. If you don’t dumb it down a little, people will throw tomatoes at you.

And goop. People love goop.

Goop and simulation. Simulacra. The simulation of goop. People love “worlds.” Places of artifice and amusement. Mirrors, selfies, reality TV. Christmas. Pumpkin spice latté. Jesus riding a triceratops.

Simulation has, according to Baudrillard, replaced the real: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”

Celebrities are the inhabitants, the true replicants, of the hyperreal. Our current president is a hyperreality of a blonde Aryan comb-over that looks like the hood of a car, a terminally fake tan that makes his bloated face appear orange, and a flagrantly pornographic relationship with women. He likes fast food, doesn’t read, and worships money. I can’t think of a more perfect president for the United States in its current manifestation.

Paradoxically, simulation has killed illusion. “Illusion is no longer possible,” says Baudrillard, “because the real is no longer possible.”

Reality itself is too obvious to be true. Nothing is entirely explicit without becoming implicit. Meaning has imploded. There is no meaning. There’s information, we live in a world inundated with information. When the capacity for reflection has been undermined, when the triumph of anti-intellectualism is so final that a book is a cause for embarrassment if it’s discovered in somebody’s home, information assumes the form of an anarchic, ongoing fiction, a sensationalized pablum of electronic banality. Information proliferates like toxic algae on the surface of a dying ocean. There is more and more information and less and less meaning.

I crave the illusion of meaning. I crave the illusion of transcendence, of a public, or at least a tiny fragment of the public, that continue to appreciate art. Real art. Art in its most intense, most subversive, most imaginary form. This is a futile ideal. It’s like hoping for a spaceship and a habitable exoplanet to move to. The public is told what to like. Not overtly. It’s subtler than that. But with the right trickery in the popular media – the superficial patter, the toothy grins - the herd instinct kicks in and the next thing you know the art museum of a major city is featuring a miserable hack like Andrew Wyeth.

Public taste follows the line of least resistance. People are lazy, especially when it comes to anything the requires sacrificing a sense of normality.

“This is what implosion signifies,” Baudrillard elaborates. “The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning.” There is no longer a mediating power between one reality and another. The medium and the message have, at last, homogenized. They are one and the same.

Baudrillard calls for a “pataphysics of simulacra.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but it sounds good. “…only a pataphysics of simulacra can remove us from the system’s strategy of simulation and the impasse of death in which it imprisons us.”

Pataphysics, a term coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry, is “the science of imaginary solutions.” It’s a branch of philosophy that examines imaginary phenomena that exists in a world beyond metaphysics.”

Everything, in Pataphysical terms, is a unique event with its own singular laws. It insists on a universe of exceptions. Homogenization cannot exist in such a universe. Imitation is quintessentially imaginary, and therefore impossible. Imitation cannot be imitated. The inimitable is illimitable.

Pataphysics sounds great, sign me up, I’m all for it, but I’m not entirely sure a science of imaginary solutions is what I want to be relying upon when my stomach starts growling. Imaginary solutions don’t go very far in the real – that is to say the un-simulated – world. The world of food. The world of fruit. The world of meat. The world of wheat and rice and fennel and mint and avocado. My fantasies extend outward toward other planets these days. Because this one is about to go tits up. Geronimo got it right when he said: "When the last tree has been felled, when the last river has been poisoned, when the last fish has been caught, then finally we will know that money isn’t meant for eating.”