Reading Simulacra and Simulations has spooked me the fuck out. Constantly I am seeing new simulations inmy own life flash before my third eye. When you realize that certain narratives, ideas, indicators, models, shape the way you think, what way to retaliate is there? How do we even strike back? Or is it simply navel-gazing, wanting-to-see, wanting this book to be meaningful? Can’t you view practically everything through the lense of Simulacra and Simulation? Lately I’ve had an epiphany about porno, based on really just a short sentence, a snippet of an undeveloped idea. It develops, grows roots, until it is steadfast implanted in my mind. I can’t share it, precisely because it sent a shiver down my spine and revealed some things that I might not be ready to deal with.. yet:
The pleasure of an excess of meaning, when the bar of the sign falls below the usual waterline of meaning: the nonsignifier is exalted by the camera angle. There one sees what the real never was (but “as if you were there”), without the distance that gives us perspectival space and depth vision (but “more real than nature”). Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno, which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level.)
Get it? Well, you don’t have to. Half this book is indecypherable for a small light like moi. Oddly enough it feels like his ideas still stick, like one can suck all the meaning out of a passage without understanding half of it. Maybe that is his forte, too, to convey ideas not solely based on concise language, but based on something that goes beyond feelings, a sort of inherent understanding of concepts we have internalized subconsciously, but cannot explain with our conscious mind. Seldom has a book manage to both captivate and influence me. Still, I remain critical. Still, I re-read every passage, and sometimes declare them overtly wordy bullshit. Mental masturbation with no trajectory or body. It’s a conflicting read. You can be sure that in the future, there will be more Baudrilliard, hopefully next time it’ll be something substantial, an Essay perhaps, and not another directionless ramble.
SCATTERED THOTS 