![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 9th, 2007 09:55 amCirca 1968, I read a book by Ira Progoff I didn’t like very much except for the title, The Symbolic and the Real. In those antique pre-Lacan days, “real” meant pretty much real, and “symbolic” meant symbolic, no signage and semiotics about it.
As in the Kafka parable I cited in one of the recent posts I didn’t post at all: “You have won.” “But unfortunately only in symbol.” “No, in reality. Symbolically, you have lost.”
Everything transitory is but a symbol. (The upshot of Goethe’s Faust, for those of you who came in late.)
Eventually there is a reality that whops us one upside the head, no matter how we define it. The problem is that what we think is symbolic also whops us one upside the head, or has unnervingly physical effects. Baudrillard said once you couldn’t have a simulated bank robbery because someone not in on the joke would have a heart attack, or start shooting, and it would all turn real.
Well, the teen bandits (and I had meant to write this, coincidentally, citing that very Baudrillard quote, a few days ago) of a town just up the road staged a simulated bank robbery, and it was obvious in retrospect that the clerk was in on it. The laughing, the smiling, the quick handing over of money without display of weapons, the whole thing got down on bank cameras with only sunglasses as disguises for the pair.
But the money was real enough, and they spent some of it, and the quick arrest was real, too.
And the explanations don’t quite make sense unless we think of them in terms of the symbolic. Or of the staged as reality, Baudrillard’s ideas of how fictional hypotheses have real effects. These are two previously unknown young women fresh out of high school whose career choices had been Army nurse in the case of the one; the other (perhaps as a joke) cited as her profession, “dancer.” Now they have had their few hours of national TV and global internet attention, and the charges against them have been reduced to conspiracy to commit fraud because the bank teller colluded in cooking up the whole deal.
So can a reality TV show be far behind? A simulated bank robbery, pace Baudrillard or possibly as per him, was clearly a good career move. Even if it wasn't, it assuaged the pain of being singularly anonymous, without doing lasting harm to anyone except perhaps themselves.
As in the Kafka parable I cited in one of the recent posts I didn’t post at all: “You have won.” “But unfortunately only in symbol.” “No, in reality. Symbolically, you have lost.”
Everything transitory is but a symbol. (The upshot of Goethe’s Faust, for those of you who came in late.)
Eventually there is a reality that whops us one upside the head, no matter how we define it. The problem is that what we think is symbolic also whops us one upside the head, or has unnervingly physical effects. Baudrillard said once you couldn’t have a simulated bank robbery because someone not in on the joke would have a heart attack, or start shooting, and it would all turn real.
Well, the teen bandits (and I had meant to write this, coincidentally, citing that very Baudrillard quote, a few days ago) of a town just up the road staged a simulated bank robbery, and it was obvious in retrospect that the clerk was in on it. The laughing, the smiling, the quick handing over of money without display of weapons, the whole thing got down on bank cameras with only sunglasses as disguises for the pair.
But the money was real enough, and they spent some of it, and the quick arrest was real, too.
And the explanations don’t quite make sense unless we think of them in terms of the symbolic. Or of the staged as reality, Baudrillard’s ideas of how fictional hypotheses have real effects. These are two previously unknown young women fresh out of high school whose career choices had been Army nurse in the case of the one; the other (perhaps as a joke) cited as her profession, “dancer.” Now they have had their few hours of national TV and global internet attention, and the charges against them have been reduced to conspiracy to commit fraud because the bank teller colluded in cooking up the whole deal.
So can a reality TV show be far behind? A simulated bank robbery, pace Baudrillard or possibly as per him, was clearly a good career move. Even if it wasn't, it assuaged the pain of being singularly anonymous, without doing lasting harm to anyone except perhaps themselves.
