Love Letters (Straight from Her Heart)

I wish I had been responsible for the soundtrack of the film  Her. 

For example, I can't get over why Spike Jonze didn't use the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene of the movie.

This would have opened the story line up to a far more interesting range of ironies than was the case. As it is the plot is held up at a gently ironic angle by the pastel colours, the knowing  references to social media conventions and the hipster soundtrack but this very subtlety (early in the film, at least) defeats the purpose of the irony.

In reflecting on the absurdities of a set of social/cultural conventions the film’s devices are too closely invested with those conventions.  “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” would have opened a wider space between the what and how of this movie. Of course, this would have sent the film in the direction of satire, rather than smug pastiche but then again, Spike Jonze is not David Lynch.

I like the opening scene. It begins with a close up of Theodore, the main protagonist. He’s making what seems to be a declaration of his deepest love but by the time he says “You make me feel like the girl I was when you first turned on the lights and woke me up and we started this adventure together” it is clear that this speech is no such thing.

The scene continues and we learn that Theodore is a professional writer of love letters. The camera pans out and we see that he works in an office alongside many others, each of whom is providing this same service. This is Cyrano de Bergerac on an industrial scale. A world where the most intimate language is outsourced, where the words of love are commodities, where words themselves are shown to float free from the most precious and secret parts of life.

This scene may be, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, love in the age of mechanical reproduction, but the vision is not a dystopian one. This does not seem to be a lament for the loss of the ‘aura’ of  love.

If anything, and maybe this is why Jonze didn’t use “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene, this is a celebration of the separation of words from reality. It is a kind of liberation of love letters from the parentheses of (straight from your heart).

The opening scene of this film suggests that the parentheses are always there. They were there in 1945 when the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” first appeared in the movie Love Letters (This film has an uncannily similar opening scene to Her's - the author of the lover letter that is being written as the credits roll turns out to be a ventriloquist  of another man's emotions, just as is the case for Theodore).

Romantic love has always relied on artifice for its existence. In other words, there has never been and there never will be an unmediated language that comes (Straight from your Heart). As everyone knows, movies, songs, poetry have always been the third person in the room. 

Polygamy, orgies, menages a trois; this is reality.

And yet despite its opening scene this film shies away from making this declaration.

In truth, Theodore longs for the stability of an intimate, exclusive, two person relationship.

Coincidentally I was listening to the radio and heard the song "I Love you Samantha" sung by Bing Crosby (in the film  High Society) - and once more I have to ask why Spike Jonze didn't use it in the film.

Bing could almost be Theodore as he sings:  "Remember, Samantha I'm a one gal guy!"

Theodore really seems to believe in the possibility that he could one day, use his words to express real love. There are flashback scenes where we learn that he has loved and lost and, of course, he does find love again, with Samantha.  That Samantha is an operating system is irrelevant.

What is relevant is shown in a scene early in the film. He is having virtual sex with a stranger. At first it seems to be going well – he jokes with the woman he contacts and their conversation soon becomes conventionally erotic. However, it is when she asks him to hit her with a dead cat that we see Theodore is a man at odds with his world. He spends his work day driving a wedge between love letters and the heart and yet he is disgusted and scared by a fantasy that relies on maintaining that very separation. A fantasy about being hit with a dead cat during lovemaking is just that -  a fantasy - it is no more or less real than having a love affair with an operating system.

The scene later in the film where Samantha hires a woman to have sex with Theodore while she speaks directly into their heads and plays the role acted out by the woman is only a more obvious expression of Theodore's basic longing for the impossible fantasy of a pure, unmediated, unproblematic love.

Polygamy, orgies, menages a trois; this the reality that Theodore would rather forget.

Accordingly, when it eventually happens, the love affair between Theodore and Samantha is vomit – inducingly sincere.  her voice is breathy and chirpy and her personality is everything that Theodore could want - she listens, she understands and she cares.

The virtual reality of the computer is basically forgotten. The exchanges between the two lovers show that the film makers are not interested in exploring the virtualisation of the reality of love and love letters signaled in the opening scene. For example; Theodore is lying in bed feeling depressed about the ending of his marriage. He tells her: "You don't know what it's like to lose someone you care about", after a pause she replies "yeah, you're right, I'm sorry".

Of course she knows what it's like - according to this film's opening statement about the commodification of reality, about the alienated nature of love and love letters she exists in the very space where love and love letters are made - she is pure mediation. She has access to every love letter ever written and can understand and process their implications faster than Theodore can ever hope to do.

How can she not know what it's like to lose someone?

Despite her immense processing power, Samantha is at a one level, only a voice. And what a voice! She's breathless, giggly, flirtatious; she is the vocalised 'essense' of emotion. This is the film's attempt to close the distance between what she says and who she is.

It's an ancient gesture - one analysed by Jacques Derrida as phonocentrism (the privileging of the truth of speech over the obfuscation of writing) - designed to assuage anxieties about the loss of immediacy because of the mediating obstacle of written letters and words. Phonocentrism is one possible attempt to ignore the parentheses and say that only through the voice can love letters come straight from the heart.

The anxieties about the alienating presence/absence of writing are also very new. What is the lament for the loss of'direct' interpersonal communication and its replacement by communications technologies if it is not the latest installment of (entirely understandable) phonocentrism?

When Samantha and Theodore's love runs into trouble this film improves a lot.

The credibility of the voice is not enough. At bottom he is a man while she is a computer - how can there be anything between them but an impassible gulf?

Late in the film Samantha tells Theodore that while they're talking she is at the same time talking to 8, 316 others and also - horror of horrors - in love with 641 other entities is as close as the film gets to comedy. As we know, Theodore is a 'one guy gal' so his reaction is predictable. He is hurt, betrayed and so on. And yet, Samantha is just as human as he is. If anything she is even more human than he is! She is the explicit admission that not only can there be no direct line from the heart to language, but also that once language arrives, unity leaves. Theodore is as atavistic in his desires as is Frank in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (whose expressed wish was to fuse with the body of his mother and destroy his alienated, air sucking self "Mommmy baby wants to fuuuck!") -  he just can't admit it.

This film for all its flaws got me thinking about how it is that even when someone is physically close they can be very far away, how it is that intimacy can be established without actual physical proximity.

Of course, as anyone who's ever had to live with a computer instead of a person knows, intimacy needs bodily contact. Does bodily contact create intimacy? Of course not. This film shows that love between a computer and a man is possible. But that is not the point. Love between a computer and a man is not sustainable.

The film ends with another love letter (straight from the heart). This time, Theodore is writing it for himself. He sends it to his ex-wife. Does this letter have more truth than the ones he writes for pay in work?

No, it doesn't. But this may be because this film has liberated love letters from the burden of truth. This film may have jettisoned the freight of the simple man seeking a simple love at the very end. Perhaps what Samantha has taught Theodore is that he is capable of far more than mere fixation on a particular incarnation of who he happens to be at that moment. As she has already shown him, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he is large, he contains multitudes. Samantha had already helped him get his letters published. He has, at the end, severed the link between his letters and his heart.

But that soundtrack? Why didn't they phone me?

Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero - David Lynch and Lacan's Imaginary Unconscious

Ecrits by Jacques Lacan, Wild at Heart & Blue Velvet by David Lynch

In my last post I wrote about Jacques Lacan's account of "the self's radical eccentricity with respect to itself". If even a fraction of what he says is true then we're all screwed. I was reading Lacan because, following Slavoj Žižek's path in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, I was trying to use Lacan to understand the films of David Lynch*.

For Lacan, the arrival and endurance of fear, desire and language mark the beginning and the end of each and every possibility of having a credibly stable identity. This is because, from the "Mirror Stage" onward the psyche is torn by conflict between unconscious desires and fears and conscious control.

However, it's not at all accurate to think of these drives as blind instincts. Such impulses belong to pre-linguistic children or animals. For Lacan the 'unconscious is structured like a language'. The unconscious comes into being at the moment of the repression of certain desires and ideals. The unconscious is these repressed desires and ideals and, moreover,  these desires and ideals are only possible as language.

For Lacan, these ideals and desires control the rational, conscious mind. As I mentioned in my last post one of the most demanding and defining of these ideals is the fantasy of the stable, perfect ego projected by the unconscious order of the 'Imaginary'. The paradox that Lacan reminds us of consists in the fact that these projections of an ideal ego are from the beginning, not the self's own creations at all: rather they are composed of and fueled by fears and desires, words and images that could never be anything but 'other'. For Lacan, the 'unconscious is the discourse of the other'.

Of course, as I pointed out in my last post, normality, or rather, normativity, is the unconscious, conscious and public work of policing that hides this truth.

Movies are part of this police force. The Australian writer Barbara Creed places this effect of cinema firmly within the context of Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking:

"....the viewing experience, in which the spectator identifies with the glamorous star is not unlike a re-enactment of the moment when the child acquires its first sense of selfhood or subjectivity through an identification with an ideal self. But, as Lacan pointed out, this is also a moment of mis-recognition - the child is not really a fully formed subject. He will only see himself in this idealized way when his image is reflected back through the eyes of others. Thus identity is always dependent on mediation."

Most movies work to seduce and deceive the audience into an unconscious moment of recognition. They answer the perpetual unconscious desire of the Imaginary order for objects to maintain the promise of a stable identity.

David Lynch's movies do not do this. They are about the tensions arising from the paradox I mentioned above that fear, desire and language simultaneously divide and seek to reconcile the unconscious and conscious mind.

His heroes and heroines are demented, disgusting, tormented and terrifying. None of them presents a credible stand-in for the Imaginary order's desire for a stable ego.

Willem Dafoe's performance as Bobby Peru in  Wild at Heart is typical. Lynch presents a scene that could have no place in a standard romantic film. His filthy teeth are shown in close up as he whispers 'say fuck me' to Lula as, all the while, he's groping her body. To add to the incongruity Lula responds with desire to this assault.

The point is not so much that this scene is disgusting - for all I know it is exactly what some people have in mind as an ideal scenario - it is that it challenges the audience's expectations that desire flows along conventional channels. It creates an analytic distance between the audience and the projected ideal egos because what is served up in this scene is basically consensual rape with a side order of bad dentistry.

In a pattern that Lynch had already established in Blue Velvet, Nicholas Cage plays the other side of desire. He is a rogueish character whose essential goodness remains despite his criminality. Where Defoe's character is basically a hyper-exaggerated abomination of a sick unconscious, Cage's is a similarly hyper-exaggerated cinematic staple: the eminently reformable (through the love of a good woman) bad boy.

The film begins with Sailor beating another man to death with hilarious cartoon violence that draws from Tom and Jerry and the fight scenes from an Elvis Presley vehicle. Cage smashes his victim’s brains all over the floor, hurls the obviously dead body against the wall and lights a cigarette.

The film concludes with an impossible reconciliation between the two lovers. It is as hilarious as the opening scene. Sailor comes running back to get Lula. The climb onto the roof of a car, embrace and Cage starts to sing:

"Love me tender" "Sailor!" she replies in ecstacy, this was the song he'd said he'd only sing to his truly beloved.

Blue Velvet  presents different versions of desire. Each version is animated by cinematic 'heroes' that challenge conventional audience expectations about what is normal and abnormal desire. In Lacanian terms, Lynch denies the Imaginary's desire for a stable, perfect ego-image. He does this by presenting different ways in which desire can go wrong.

In Lacan's account of the unconscious, desire operates by means of contiguous association. In the chapter of Ecrits devoted to this topic - "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" he writes: "Desire is a metonymy". What he means is that associations that trigger desire are not made by means of similarity - anything can become an object of desire. This concept is often paired with his constrasting claim that "The symptom is a metaphor"; in other words, mental distress or illness limps from one object of desire to another on the basis on similarity; not contiguity. Lacan: "...the subject cries out through his symptom..."

What has this got to do with Blue Velvet?

The desire between Jeffrey and Sandy is utterly conventional. Their relationship is more like a symptom than true desire. This is simply because their relationship is an off-the-shelf version of high school romance that is just like everyone else's. Lynch's presentation of their conventionality is ironic and exaggerated; their romance is played out in scenes suffocated by the cloying and saturating theme music of "Mysteries of Love" by Julee Cruise. Lynch's satirises their love as an illness (symptom) shared by everyone else (metaphor) in Middle America.  

The relationship between Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) could never be described as conventional! In Lacanian terms, Frank's association of blue velvet and his oxygen mask seems to exemplify the operation of desire. Neither one seems in any sense 'similar' to commonly understood objects of desire. Yet these are objects that have been fixated upon: the metonymy has been arrested as a fetish. Lacan describes fetish as a "'perverse' fixation at the very point of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen-memory is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen."

If fetishism was all that Frank had to worry about things wouldn't be so bad for him. There is so much going on here that is deeply unsettling. His version of desire involves sucking oxygen through a mask, stuffing a piece of Blue Velvet into his mouth and trying - quite literally - to enter Dorothy's vagina head first: "Mommy, mommy, mommy, baby wants to fuuuuck...uuughhhhh".

What is happening here? It seems that this is a bizarre but obvious enactment of unresolved Oedipal desire: Frank literally wants to fuse with the mother's body: he wants to erase the distance between the object of desire and himself.

This can be understood as such an unconscious frenzy but that is too easy.

Frank is fully aware of what he's doing. This is conscious, not unconscious action. His desire is a violent, oddly rational, attempt to invert desire. While Lacan points out that desire is truly the free play of metonymic association where the unconscious is allowed to move from one meaning to another, this is a crazy attempt to control the uncontrollable. Frank wants to effect some kind of crazy tautology where he reverts to an imagined state of infantile union with the female body.

This can't happen of course and this is the source of his rage: "Don't you fucking look at me" he roars as he punches Dorothy in the face.

Somehow I don't think that if a Lacanian pointed out to Frank the error of his ways; namely that "The subject is spoken rather than speaking" things would end well.

The relationship between Jeffrey and Dorothy shows the 'bleeding' effect of violence into sexuality. Dorothy was already represented as enjoying the violent attentions of Frank in the 'Baby wants to Fuuuck!" scene. If that was a disturbing encounter the sex between her and Jeffrey is only slightly less so: "Hit me!" she begs him, while he, a simple boy next door, at first refuses and then does as he is asked to do. In Lacanian terms this association (violence with sex) is a symptom because it is exactly what she has already experienced. And yet there is some degree of taming taking place. Is Lynch presenting a 'safe' version of S&M after the insane carry on of the scene between Frank and Dorothy?

Hardly. She ends up naked and demented on the streets and in any case her relationship with Jeffrey never gets off the ground due to the overweening imperative that Jeffrey and Sandy fulfill their 'destiny' as conventional sweethearts.

There are no heroes in these movies.  The Lacanian Imaginary may demand them but it's not going to find them here. This is good news: remember Brecht's ventriloquism of Gallileo: "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero"

* 1: My Reading of Lacan was limited to two sections of the Ecrits: "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" and "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" and illuminated by secondary texts, in particular the chapter on Lacan on Kearney's Modern Movements in European Philosophy.
2: I had intended to include Mullholland Drive in this post but a friend very generously wrote about it for me and this showed me that I didn't need Lacan to understand what was going on. Timing is everything.

My Nightmare

The most terrifying nightmare I’ve ever had: I had the sudden realisation that I was not me; that I had never been me. I felt the person who I was sliding away like a layer of skin that had suddenly turned to liquid.

Whatever I was or had been was a mask or shell; whatever remained was not me but was just some entity or project whose provenance was completely unknown. I woke up wailing in despair.

What was that all about? Is it so important for me to be who I appear to be? Why should I scream like a terrified infant just because this fiction unravels?

I suppose the answer is: well, because it was my fiction! People are very attached to who they are.

Recently I have been reading Jacques Lacan. According to him, a child first forms a view of herself as a whole person when she sees herself reflected in a mirror. This is what he calls the 'Mirror Stage' of development. The reflected image is an 'ideal ego' and it is desired and projected (in the senses of imagined and worked towards) because of a number of 'outside' influences.

First, the child is in flight from the dual traumas of weaning and the Oedipal re-ordering of who is permitted to desire whom  - both of  these are primal experiences of death, or not being.

Second, fear drives the child to compensate for this perception of lack, or not being whole or integrated, and the reflected image of herself - the 'ideal ego' or 'specular' ego -  is the solution.

However, this ideal self is, like everything else, compromised from the very start. According to Lacan, the child desires to be who the mother desires her to be, and in addition,  the child learns to desire through her entry into the already alien structures of language.

Loss of integrity through weaning. Learning about one's inadequacy through Oedipal fear. Necessary alienation through choosing an imagined ideal self that is in truth the mother's imagined ideal for the child. Permanent separation from oneself through reliance on language for any projection of the self by the self.

Through life, adults continually chase/are chased by this chimera of a fully integrated, whole, ideal ego. According to Lacan's formulation this is the work of the "Imaginary" function of the unconscious.

The Imaginary seeks to hide the unavoidable fact that the self is, was, and always will be divided and multiple, and not, as it drives us to imagine ourselves to be, perfected, whole, complete.

For Lacan, the truth for us is that "Je est un autre" - "The I is an other".

How successful is the Imaginary Ego in maintaining its fictions?

For a Lacanaian, at any rate, there is nothing successful about an Imaginary ego's sweet little lies. The key truth revealed by psychoanalysis about human beings for Lacan is that we are not autonomous individuals; rather we are 'heteronomous dividua' - multiple and divided selves:

"The radical heteronomy...gaping within man can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest" (Ecrits  1966)

If dishonesty is the defining characteristic of normality it may be a small price to pay. Consider the punishments ready and waiting for 'abnormality'. The Imaginary Ego is a kind of personal incarceration that masquerades as the ultimate reward. What if, in chasing, dog - like,  the balls and sticks thrown by our Imaginary unconscious we are doing nothing more than maintaining this tyranny?

In striving for perfection we do exactly what servile, biddable proles are supposed to do. And if, every now and then we are tormented by the truth of our own non-being all the better. It's obviously a good thing for some to have large masses of people beaten down and internally tormented by their own individual perceptions of inadequacy.

What maintains this dishonesty? Why do people so enthusiastically think and feel, live and breathe and plan in ways that serve the interests of ideals of perfect, fully realised selves that betray the most fundamental truth us?

Well, it's nice to be a part of something, isn't it? It's nice and cosy to belong, to hide in the herd, to live lives of what Nietzsche called "bovine mediocrity and green meadow gregariousness". That's normality.

Day to day passes and this 'sickness unto death' goes on and on.

What does it matter if, as Thoreau reminds us: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”?

Is it really all that bad if we live by refusing life, if we continue breathing and walking, to all appearances fully alive, but in truth we have already arrived at the check in gate for death, years early, our holiday over?

Social Media - the end of Plato's footnotes?

 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, The Republic by Plato

A N Whitehead famously said that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I have just finished reading (for the second time in my life) one of the more recent footnotes: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. For a long time I would have said that all bullshit was a series of footnotes to Baudrillard but I think this book has aged well. It has turned out to be something of an oracle for what has happened in the 'real' world in the last few years. More about the scare quotes around 'real' later.

Proving Whitehead's maxim, I suppose Simulacra and Simulation  is a very traditional book. It is about what is real, what is, what has meaning. More precisely it addresses the basic ontological question of the primacy of being and/or becoming.

What's more real? Stuff that changes all the time or stuff that stays the same? Is what we see passing before our eyes more real than what is hidden in some higher (or lower, or deeper, or further) place of existence?

The Pre-Socratics all asked these questions. Plato (I went back to the Republic to refresh my memory), Descartes, Hegel, and so on all grappled with them.

Baudrillard answers this question as follows: there are only appearances of what is real - there is no real beyond these appearances. He refers to these appearances as 'simulacra', and claims that there are only ever simulacra - his key concept is the 'precesssion of simulacra'.

In short, there is no reality. There is the 'hyperreal' - appearances, appearances and then appearances, for ever and ever.

This couldn't be further from Plato. For Plato the things that we could see with our senses were not real because they were not permanent:true reality was the form of the good, which was acccessible not by senses but by the intellect. The properly trained intellect was that which understood the difference between what is real and what is not real:

"Its orientation has to be accompanied by turning the mind as a whole away from the world of becoming, until it becomes capable of bearing the sight of real being and reality at its most bright, which we're saying is goodness" (Republic 518d)

Baudrillard doesn't hold out much hope that a properly trained mind - to use Plato's term, a mind trained in the skill of 'dialectic' can reach any other reality than just another simulation of reality - such is the radical extent of his ontology.

I might was well say now that I think the problem with Baudrillard was that he probably watched too much TV, too many movies and he was more than a little bit entranced by the coming age of the communications technologies that have virtualised reality in the decades since he first published this book in 1981.

He sees no minds trained in dialectic. He seems to see only a 'precession' of morons. And in fairness, when I look at the effects of social media it is hard to argue against the accuracy of his description of how think and feel, communicate and understand.

Baudrillard was keenly aware of the centrality of metaphor in the history of western thought. What is Plato's Republic when you strip away the metaphysical hope if not the most important metaphorical text in the history of philosophy?

The allegory of the cave would be on a Baudrillardian reading, one big simulacrum - pointing not to the form of the good but rather to just another metaphor. If there is nothing beyond the metaphor then Plato has backed the wrong horse. Instead of finding being, he's just found becoming!

Baudrillard points to the Old Testament as another example of simulacra that doth protest too much. He explains the anger of biblical iconoclasts as a function of their knowledge of the very fact that there is no divinity signing the cheques. The graven images so offend them because their very presence points to the absence of any guarantee of the truth of these images – their potency lies in their impotence – they do not signify God, they signify only other signifiers.

The precession of simulacra is as close as Baudrillard gets to a summation of what is in truth out there (and in here). This formulation is not particularly unique. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit draws the same conclusions about the primacy of phenomena but there are two important differences.

Firstly, like Plato, Hegel stresses the importance of dialectic. Intelligence, development, change, building on premises, logic and interrogation of logic are essential if human beings are to understand and develop anything beyond the most basic levels.

If Baudrillard sees a precession of morons Hegel argues with conviction for the struggle for intellectual autonomy

Secondly, Hegel's becoming is teleological. Geist's coming to full self consciousness of  itself is the destination of Hegel's thought.

It may be tempting to ridicule the audacity of philosophical visions such as Plato's and Hegel's but at least they are trying to scale mountains. Baudrillard's is going nowhere.

In his final chapter of Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard proclaims his nihilism. However, his philosophical scepticism seems to me to be a little bit off-the-shelf. He is drawing on the insights of structural linguistics that the vertical and horizontal planes of meaning are not absolute: there is no absolute mimetic connection between signs and things; neither is there anything particularly stable about the boundaries between signs themselves.

He uses the semiological assumption that meaning is never fixed or absolute is to make the ontological claim that reality is not reality. There is no ‘real’; only a ‘hyperreal’. There is no route through simulation to the real.

Reading Baudrillard challenges me to understand where this semiotic instability passes from theory into practice. Consider this: In actual fact language functions just as the structuralists say that it doesn’t. The point is that most of the time meaning does exist: words mean things and words mean what they mean and not what other words mean. How could it be otherwise? Try buying something in a shop or planning to meet a friend and you’ll see; stuff does actually have meaning.

What is true for meaning is true a fortiori about reality. I don't think I need to do much more than repeat Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's challenge to his certainty there is a reality beyond our ideas (and simulacra) of it:

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

That’s all fine in practice, but what about the theory?

Baudrillard's theory is most convincing when he talks about the destruction of meaning and ‘destructuration of the social’ through the proliferation of information. In particular, his account of how advertising had become the key simulation in media – saturated societies is compelling.

His account of how advertising literally erases the provisional and provisionally effective planes of meaning and manages to eviscerate meaning and meaningful social relations reads like a prophecy of how social media has come to dominate, moronise, homogenise and deracinate people’s minds and bodies:

"Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes."

The end of meaning occurs in advertising because of how the medium collapses the differences between its various types of content. Instead of differences between things there is a levelling off that tends to reduce everything to a lowest common denominator. Anything and everything can be used in advertising - almost nothing is sacred, almost anything can be used.

As advertising destroys meaning horizontally it causes the collapse of the signifying distance between the sign and thing being signified. Advertising tells us that we can have the real, that it is ours. It does the very same thing as religious fundamentalism. It suppresses the meaning of images because meaning requires that it be made, that it be negotiable.

I think Baudrillard is accurate in his description of the hyperreality of life lived through the lenses of advertising and commercial media generally. He is ontologically spot on.

I think he is wrong in considering the arrival of the  hyperreal as the moment where meaning dies. The opposite I think is true.

There is a paradox in any meaningful understanding of meaning, namely that the moment meaning becomes fixed is the moment that it dies. One to one correspondence of the sign and the thing signified is tautology and tautology says nothing - it is meaningless. In both directions. It erases the difference between signs themselves and the signs and the things they signify.

To my understanding meaning is what is always being made, meaning is what is being unmade, meaning needs the instability that Baudrillard names the precession of simulacra'!

Of course, the best advertising knows this. It hides its meaninglessness by parading the very properties of the most meaningful of texts! 'Good' advertising is thought provoking, mysterious, meaningful. Good advertising engages its readers, names them, allows them to name themselves, gives them a satisfying and meaningful space to feel, to act, to think and to be. Advertising tries to hide its implosion of meaning by aiming to envelop its consumers in meaningful experiences.

Social media is the elaboration of good advertising into a total social experience. So as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Google increase their domination of social life, their intrusion into the lived experience of private and public spaces to the point where they are coming to constitute those experiences they perform and ontological gestalt shift - nothing can ever be the same again.

Social media can have the effect of a world sufficient unto itself - it is has a closed ontology that recalls the middle ages in how it answers every question and places everyone and everything in its place - even, and especially if that place is only pending but, importantly within the space soon to illuminated within the horizon of technological progress.

When Baudrillard takes about the death of meaning, however, I think he is simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic.

He is too optimistic because what happens with the proliferation of advertising is not so much the death of meaning - rather it is the death of intelligence:

It is no longer necessary to understand - it is sufficient to 'like'. Social media does not demand thought and planning - fifteen word tweets are enough. Not only are images reproducible and therefore without their Benjaminian 'aura', they are instantly destroyed as soon as they're created.

Social media makes people very stupid.

He is too pessimistic because I think that he has looked too long into the abyss of commerical mass media and the hyperreal idiot monster has started to look back at him.

The answer is in Hegel and in Plato. Where else could it be? Plato stresses in the chapter after the allegory of the cave the absolute imperative that the philosopher kings in his Republic exercise their intelligence:

"dialectic is the only field of enquiry which sets out methodically to grasp the reality of any and every thing. All the other areas of expertise, on the other hand, are either concerned with fulfilling people's beliefs and  desires or are directed towards generation and manufacture or looking after things while they're being generated and manufactured" (Republic 533b)

The 'other areas of expertise' described by Plato sound like the totally alienated modes of thinking and feeling that have been swallowed up by and have in turn swallowed up a fatal dose of commercial social media!

Is there a way out of this? A healthy dose of Ludditism in relation to social media is a good start. At the same time it is imperative to treat prophets of doom like Baudrillard with active and imaginative scepticism. This is precisely because his foresight has been so clear. And so narrow. He sees the problem in horrific detail but he misses the solution that lies in the strengths of character and intelligence that invisible to him.

He is in a kind of prison - to paraphrase Hegel, Baudrillard's is the night where all the cows are simulacra.

I am not sure that Baudrillard could argue that there's a way out of this night. The appalling vista of his social ontology is so absolute that it seems hard to find an escape. I am not sure that there is any distance between  considering the precession of simulacra as such and not seeing it as such. His conclusion is ambivalent:

"There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins."

To my understanding he has taken his terms far too seriously. It is as if nothing exists but media. because if there is no outside 'hyperreality' then everything just cancels out and you might as well drop the prefix and just say that there is no outside reality. And this is nothing more than a fancy tautology.

And yet, the concept of 'seduction' seems to leave some hope at the end of a paragraph that explicitly denied it. Baudrillard thought the whole world was being swallowed by advertising and so the only hope he saw (since meaning is imploded in advertising) is seduction.

He was more right than he could possibly have known but he was also, too entranced by the coming age of information saturation to see that human beings are capable of far more than just blind seduction.

Are human beings as programmable and assimilable as they seem to be according to Baudrillard? I don't think so. I think his reports of the death of meaning and intelligence are greatly exaggerated.

If anything he describes a (hyper)reality lays down a challenge: Submit to your fate and live a static drone-like existence in thrall to Facebook and Google or rage with all of your intelligence to create meaningful social, political and psychological spaces in spite of (and because of), against (and with) the tide of simulation.

Hello, I'm Mr Ed!

“A horse is a horse, of course of course, and no-one can talk to a horse of course, that is, of course, unless the horse in the famous Mr Ed”

Mr Ed was a talking horse in the American TV show Mr Ed from the early 1960s. It was on the TV a lot when I was a child. For some reason, a black and white TV show about a talking horse was a big hit in Ireland in the early 1980s.

Anthropomorphism....

All art is metaphorical. Indeed most of it is anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism is the metaphorical equivalent of taming a wild animal. Anthropomorphism is what I was at with my 2 year old nephew  today; as far as this child was concerned my dog is his cousin. The highlight of my day was when I ventriloquized a conversation between them. They had a whale of a time.

Anthropomorphism is not always so explicit. It is nonetheless, taming. An act of making what is not, or, is not quite, human, human. A way of making the strange familiar, a way of forgetting that everything may actually be just as meaningless and empty as it surely would be if by some catastrophe there were no longer any anthropoi to morph everything else in their own image.

Mr Ed is patently anthropomorphic but why did he emerge when he did? What was being tamed, who was taming it and who was it being tamed for?

My first answer is sociologically functional. In 1960 there were still people alive who could remember when horses were the main form of transport. But Mr Ed was a kids’ programme. Kids in 1960 did not live in such a world so Mr Ed was a way of narrating the past, negotiating between generations, clearing the (horse – free) road for the future. Preserving and animating the past.

My second answer is about the symbolism of the horse its historical and social contexts. Mr Ed is a cunning, genius horse. He speaks. He makes some really sophisticated jokes. He is far smarter than the humans in his life and he has a killer sense of humour. For all that he has been tamed and domesticated; hidden from view. 

The horse is an obvious symbol for a world that had (in rapidly vanishing living memory) disappeared. He was a symbol of the wild west – a metonymy from the past that declared the hegemony of the state. It is no accident that this symbol of freedom, this memory of a time of lawlessness, was being domesticated week, in, week, out on American TV at the very time that that society itself was undergoing social disruption that called into question the legitimacy of its political and economic status quo. 

The hegemony of the American ruling classes had been won but was now under threat through internal and external tensions – the social upheavals around the issue of race and the international misadventures in South East Asia – Mr Ed was a feelgood reminder of all that had been won and all that had to be conserved. 

Mr Ed was a success story. Mr Ed was every untameable figure from the American past suddenly domesticated and turned into an comedian. Mr Ed is 'what we’re fighting for'.

And since Mr Ed was what could, without proper care, become destructive, he was also a threat.

But why did Ireland  ‘import’ Mr Ed? Why was this put in the nosebag for me every week in the 1980s?

Is there anything symbolic about Mr Ed’s ‘taming’  for the Ireland of the 1980s? This was, after all, the  heyday of the culture of political corruption perfected by Charles Haughey and his love of the finer things of life, including horses.

Remember, Brendan Behan defined a member of the Anglo Irish aristocracy as a ‘Protestant with a horse’. Maybe the domestication of the horse dramatized in Mr Ed answered a need to represent and observe the transfer of power from the Anglo-Irish to the Catholic Bourgeois ruling classes?

So Mr Ed was really the Anglo-Irish horse domesticated and tamed. If this is so he stages a lie as disgusting as the one he was used to pass off in America 20 years previously.

Mr Ed is a trophy but he is atrophy, too.

The trophies were the reins of power, landed wealth, privileged access to business/professional/political power relations.

Mr Ed is atrophy because he is so funny. He is a joke at the expense of the vast majority of the population of the country I grew up in. He is a reminder of what people could not have, of the victory that they couldn’t share in. 

The point is Mr Ed was fantasy - a fiction. When all is said holding the reins of power is not a TV show. A small few - the church, the Catholic professional classes, farmers, civil servants and publicans - could ride the horse. Everyone else had to settle for the illusion. 

But Mr Ed had a big mouth. He was clever. He was more than a stultifying atrophic sop for the masses.

I loved Mr Ed  because in every episode he is cheeky, defiant, hilarious. He is a surplus energy that remains untamed after he has been tamed. 

Even though most people were being ridden into the ground or forced to emigrate Mr Ed reminds me that a horse is a powerful animal, he reminds me that, really, change was just a kick away!

Je suis Mr Ed.