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7 years ago

469 words

I am reading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a postmodern text from the 1980s about the simulation of the real which has replaced our conceptions of reality. It largely works as a critique of the media as a means by which we “recognize” the reality of our world as consumers, a reality which is in fact a simulation of a reality now lost to us. We no longer live in a political economy but rather a production-centered social arrangement which, like Disneyland, refers to a reality that is beyond our grasp,  one which is hidden from us (which is a falsehood because nothing exists outside of the simulation of reality, or hyperreality, in which we exist and understand ourselves). If it feels a little nihilistic, perhaps even a bit like the movie The Matrix, it should. (The book inspired and appears in the film.)

I am writing a paper to talk about the possibility of hope, the hope for possibility, in an era when reality appears ever-larger as a face on a screen, divvying up alternative facts between greedy news conglomerates and sinking all of us in the United States into various states and prostrations of apathy. My graduate students express this, and I also feel that same drag on my positivity, on my creativity, in the fact of what appears to be a superstructure that seeks to cancel out my participation except through Facebook posts and, haha, blogging.

Still, I have faith that this writing can be practice for something bigger. I came to a beautiful, poetic thought today while riding the long train ride to Manhattan from Queens, a thought about hope and a way its unknowing of our present time could mean something powerful, something real, and not a simulation of real as expressed by Baudrillard. This is my thought:

Hope is the articulation of what is possible at the somatic and political level. It is neither loud or quiet, and it necessarily is accompanied by cultural and historical voices. Like agency, it is conditioned by the times in which it comes into being. Unlike agency, however, it by nature is diachronic, occupying a distinct ontological position in relation to reality. There is an unknowing to hope: it must to a point be ignorant of the current limits to reality in order to project forward into possible future contingencies. Yet simultaneously, hope knows what we are capable of before we come to attempt it. This can be a single individual, of course, but hope also can be multiplied across relational lines as such capabilities, untapped, join with those of kindred spirits and equally in-pain or joyful folk.

I hope to write more against this reality, and I hope more writing will find me and others who wish to hope, and hope together.


Hopeful” by ALEX Hill PHOTO

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