In 1991 Baudrillard wrote an essay called ‘The Gulf war did not take place’. Considering that in January 1991 America had invaded Irak and proceeded to invade this country in what was a planned military operation called ‘Desert Storm’ this statement of the famous French philosopher might have sounded slightly unhinged to many observers.
However, the purpose behind this deliberately provocative statement was to make audiences realise to what extent our participation in national and international events had become a voyeuristic affair where we are invited to always be spectators to always deferred experienced, which can be lived only through the signs which represent it.
In this case the war was televised on live television and commented upon round the clock. This was the first time that a war actually 'took place' on television. Since then there have been many and we are since living under the throes of another such event- the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which bespeaks of a return to an old perception of tribal territorial rights, with invader nation justifying their rights to occupying territories which are not legally theirs in the name of jingoistic nationalism.
Both the notion of tribal leadership and the concept of territorial expansion through invasions are issues which deserve in-depth exploration. This will have to be deferred for later.
In the present article we wish to look at the concept of the deferment of experience which has become a sinequanon of our contemporary experience, speeded up by the advent of social media. So that we have the illusion of participating while being merely spectators to lives and events which always have to be staged. We have become hostages to the idea that if an event is not staged it does not really take place. The sleuth of new YouTube careers and reality shows, as well as social media staging of private and intimate moments, has reached its apogée in our present time. The positive aspect of this is that as McLuhan anticipated the world has become connected in one global village. In the wake of the lockdowns occasioned by the 2020 pandemic, we discovered to what extent digital connections were important to keep our world going and the connection occurred not just within landlocked territories but also across the world, connecting people with similar interests across the vast geographical divides of North and South, East and West.
However, on the obverse side of this, is the fact that our perception of events has acquired the quality of superficial understanding, often evoked in code names which spark automatic reactions, somewhat in the manner of the Pavlovian response to automatic stimuli. So that we do not really have the patience to think through the implications of events, becoming potentially prey to invisible manipulation through the judicious use of specific code words, which often are enough to spark and direct reactions, which are unfortunately increasingly becoming uniform under the dominating pall of political correctness.
Citizens of the world are avid for justice and fairness and they want to stand on the side of good in all circumstances. But it might be important here to realize that there is no abstract notion of goodness against an out-and-out villainous party. We have had enough novelistic rewritings and movie prequels to make us realize that there is always a story within the story, that the narrative of the good avenger against the evil villain always masks an obscured reality, which is not transmitted down through mainstream narratives but which might exist in the alleyways of unacknowledged popular memory.
Because of this avidity for justice, coupled with a certain naiveté in unraveling the semiotics of the obvious at the expense of the more coded aspects of events, it is now relatively easy for news outlets to manipulate audiences by coding information, depending upon the type of responses which are expected of the readers or audiences. There are codes to evoke outrage, codes to rally behind causes which serve specific purposes of power, codes which are also reflected in the news hierarchy, as well as what is given priority, as opposed to what is obscured through silence. One of the strategies of present news reporting consists in providing increasingly superficial news reporting which skim the surface of events, reproducing what is both common knowledge and readily visible to any observer, with little attempt to get beneath the surface of matters.
To be fair, the advent of 24 hour television has contributed a lot to this type of superficial coverage which suffers from an excess of repetition, for the imperative of broadcasting at all cost, before real investigations can be carried out. Unfortunately, this surface reality explained by the conditions of live news reporting has spread to written news as well. Thus today we have news which pretends to inform but which consists in reporting what is commonly known with little attempt to go beneath the surface. This has as consequence the creation of pools of absent knowledge on the part of readers, simultaneously with the reinforcement of the comfort of known territories of social understanding, which has neither the desire to question its own limits nor to understand difference.
There is no answer to the equation of what exists outside the conditioning that mainstream media provides. But to understand the situation is already the beginning of empowerment.
This situation has been significantly exacerbated by the proliferation of new modes of engagement provided by the explosion of social media. In an unprecedented way digital participation of national and international events has exploded the top-down power of big news outlet by providing the illusion of participation and trans-corporeal presence. We can be following the New York Marathon, the refugees in Kiev, the Indian ocean mega cyclones all within a few minutes from the comfort of our domestic space. At the same time this potential expansion of surface knowledge like a sparkling mirror ball nullifies real engagement and uses the enumeration of facts to mask lack of real understanding. Information becomes a series of consumerist objects or moments which vie for our attention. It is obvious that to return to a pre-digital age is a near impossibility, nor would it be desirable. But there is a need to reflect on the quality of our engagement with the flow of information, so as to halt the arrow-like flow with rhizomic offshoots, which ground and personalize our engagement through localized experience. Simulacra 101 is one of the rhizomic offshoots in such a vision.