At 06:57 PM 20/03/2007, Mark wrote:
>I'd say hyper-realty goes one step further, where the
line becomes
>blurred between the pop references within the fiction
and the fictional
>world itself. For instance, on the simplest level,
Remington Steele
>used to solve cases by finding a movie that fit what
was going on. This
>was also used on Andy Barker, PI last week. He told
several people a
>woman had hired him to find her husband. Every one of
them interrupted
>him to say, It's not his real wife, haven't you seen
Chinatown? These
>people were living in a hyper-real world where they
were forcing reality
>to conform to the pop references, and it did, thereby
confirming their
>postmodern worldview.
Yes, of course, but this cycle of culture affecting reality
affecting culture has always gone around. The old structure
of referring to common cultural touchstones, as Jim observed,
hasn't changed all that much. Even the post-modern
observation that nothing exists outside of the text goes back
to the biblical observations that culture or civilization,
communal ideas about what's real and what isn't, began with
"the word" and that humanity is the word made flesh. What
Adam and Eve got from the apple was knowledge, or
information. So we've been in the information age long before
post-modernists recognized it as such.
What's different, what makes this post-modern is
technological change that has advanced both the reach and
pace of the process. Took a while for "the word" to get
around when monks had to copy books by hand, and widespread
literacy is only about 200 years old, in western culture at
least. This had to change for there to be a new "pop" culture
reality for a writer to refer to. Now anybody with a high
school education and some decent computer software can write
and publish a book, produce a movie and/or distribute their
own music, complete with cultural references based on their
individual realities from the preceding week. Realities can
now change several times within a lifetime. The current pace
and volume of communications has also meant that references
are becoming fragmented, at the expense of a central
consensus about reality, so Jim can ignore post-modernism as
unimportant, left-wing bullshit and live in his own reality
while you and I still get to live in our observed hyper
realities.
The post-modern notion of hyper reality is really a statement
about the speed and influence of communications on culture.
What makes it important in a forum outside RARA AVIS is that
some ideologues can use this understanding of the speed and
reach of modern communications, a small group of
middle-eastern clerics for instance, to manipulate the
realities of competing ideologues who rely more on slower
technologies such as military hardware to exert power,
provoking them to make disastrous mistakes. Maybe I can bring
this back to RARA-relevance by suggesting that in the Satanic
Verses, Salman Rushdie mixed "real" history with fiction in
much the same way as James Ellroy has in his work, another
post-modern technique that shortens the cycle noted at the
beginning of this black-pot diatribe.
Best, Kerry
P.S.- If this stuff goes another round I'm going to stop
hyphenating postmodern and catch up with reality.
Best, Kerry
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