Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

    Another challenging book. I had originally planned to read this in French, but after failing miserably with Society and the Spectacle in French, I figured English was better for this. That was a good choice because I could barely read this in English. 

    Here is what I think I understand. Simulation is getting more and more important these days (1980 when the book was written). Simulation is different from dissimulation. Dissimulation hides something that is there, while simulation creates something that is not there. Simulation is different from representation. In representation, the sign/symbol is equal to the real thing. Simulation negates the sign as having any value. I don't really know what they means, but it creates four phases of "the image."

• The image is the reflection of a profound reality;
• The image masks and denatures a profound reality;
• The image masks the absence of a profound reality;
• The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

And once again, I am winging this and did not understand this, but I think that those four things, in order, are representation, dissimulation, simulation, and simulacrum. I found an example on the internet that may or may not be accurate:

My understanding is that Baudrillard is identifying a way that society is becoming more and more rootless and alienated from reality. The modern world is a fake world where we have fewer and fewer real, personal experiences, and more and more mediated experiences: mediated through technology. Right there in the name social media you can see it: our socialization is not personal, but is mediated by both the hardware of the phone/computer and the software of the app used for socialization. While in the 1800s the media was a letter, today it is facetime. We might be getting better ways to mediate social interaction, but the result has been an increase in mediated social interaction, and an increase in the tolerable distance for people to live apart from each other. I think it is sort of the opposite of what McLuhan said about an implosion when it comes to close relations. Technology has imploded the world into close interaction through social media, but exploded close relations into living further apart and interacting less than ever. I have no doubt that the average person today lives way further than the average person in 1425 from their friends, family, and loved ones than ever before, and yet it able to interact over social media with people on different continents. This is one part of what Trow was saying in Within the Context of No Context, about how the medium space has disappeared. That also interacts with the Bowling Alone and "third place" discourse.

    Something very interesting is that Baudrillard mentioned the Loud family from the show American Family, which I learned about in the Emily Nussbaum book, Cue the Sun. This unit on the media has been my first real success on these reading units. It feels like one cohesive course as each book references the others previously published. In the same vein, Baudrillard says that we are no longer the "society of the spectacle," thanks to reality TV--now there is a feedback loop. The result, as I understand it, of the advent of reality TV is that there is no more distinction between the real and the fake in the world of art. The participation of the audience is huge now--someone who watches Survivor becomes a contestant on Survivor, bringing their experiences as a viewer to their experience as a contestant performing the art. Then, that same person goes back to being a viewer of the show, but now viewing the art form with the experience of the contestant. Then, the same person starts a podcast, a new art form in a different media, where they criticize and comment on the next season of Survivor, as other viewers/listeners take in that new content, and perhaps become contestants themselves. At this point, can anyone really say that Survivor is just the show that airs on Wednesdays at 8pm Eastern on CBS? I would say that the fandom is now just as big a part of the show as the contestants themselves, because there is no way to separate the two. The same goes for the writing of TV shows and movie series. George RR Martin can sit on the internet and hear all the fan theories about the next Song of Ice and Fire book before he has finished it. He has been able to see the mass reaction to the end of the TV show that adapted his book, and change the ending of the book if he wants to. The artist-to-viewer/reader/listener feedback loop moves faster now than the actual publication of the art.

    

    One other concept I thought was interesting from the book is the discussion of surveillance. Baudrillard writes that surveillance cameras on the wall don't just surveil by videotaping, but surveil by signaling to the shopper at the supermarket that she is being videotaped, even if she is not. Some stores go even further (and I am doubtful this existed in 1980) by videotaping the entrance of the store and showing the captured footage in real time on a TV screen, so a shopper can see herself being taped. Moreover, Baudrillard writes that billboards and ads surveil their viewers, because even though they don't record anything, they inform the viewer that she is not the only viewer, and that she is in a public space, where this ad is meant to reach others. Today it goes even further. Ads have entered the personal sphere, making it a less private one, even more than in Baudrillard's day. Today, the majority of ads we see are on our phones, the most intimate personal objects we have, that we interact with every day. Advertisers are able to send us ads even there, reminding us that nowhere are we truly private or out of the reach of capitalist forces, which need advertising to convince people to buy things they never needed. But on the other hand, lots of the products being advertised are very useful!

    So that's the good part of the book. Then it gets very weird. Just like Society and the Spectacle, it gets all into Marxism that makes no sense whatsoever to me. There is also a CRAZY chapter about a book called Crash, which is apparently all about people who get off on car crashes. That chapter came out of nowhere. I was appalled. He just heavily quoted the book and it was the nastiest stuff I have ever read. Ever. It read like Baudrillard read that shit and now he was making us read it too. I guess it made some impact on him. I could not make heads or tails of it except that it was shocking and gross. A masterwork of nasty work.

    I'll end by saying this was an interesting book. It was short, but could have been shorter without all the weird stuff in the end. It made me think though, so in my mind, that's a good book.

Miscellaneous:

• This line cracked me up, this drama queen: "The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot--a veritable concentration camp--is total." That's somebody who has lost his car in the lot and spent hours looking for it lol.

 

 

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, translated by Michael Gallagher

    This was sort of a random book I picked and it was very interesting. I started it and absolutely loved it and then I looked up the author and I just thought what the heck. This guy was a psycho. He tried to stage a coup and committed seppuku? It sounds like he went insane at the end of his life with radical nationalism and this book was a part of it, letting him imagine a time at the height of imperial reverence in Japan. He was also apparently a closeted homosexual, something that is clear from his descriptions of men in the books.

    But he has a really beautiful way of writing, and clearly likes to write about beautiful things and beautiful people. Here are a couple passages I liked from the book:

The butler came in to announce that the carriage was waiting. The horses neighed and their breath flared white from their nostrils, to swirl up into the black, wintry sky. Kiyoaki enjoyed seeing horses proudly displaying their strength in winter, when their usual musky smell was fainter and their hooves rang clearly on the frozen ground. On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horseracing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.

Iinuma had plenty of time to reflect later, but very often a man's whole life alters course because of a moment's hesitation. That instant is like a fold made down the middle of a sheet of paper. In it, the underside becomes the upmost, and what was once visible is hidden forever.

One hot sultry night, as Kiyoaki was settling into an uneasy sleep, he began to dream. It was quite unlike his previous experiences. If one flounders in the shallows of sleep, wading where the water is tepid and full of all sorts of flotsam that has come in from deeper water to pile up with the land debris in a tangled heap, one is liable to slash one's feet.

Her lovely white hand grew more and more emaciated until she could no longer move it. It lay there as cold and still as a single moonbeam coming in through a window.

    Maybe the biggest theme in the book is the contrast of the East and West, with Japanese embrace of the West usually being considered as an indication of decadence or weakness. In this book all about aristocrats, the best things are the Japanese things. I think that when Mishima writes his flowery descriptions, he focuses them on aspects of Japanese culture and Japanese people's thoughts, usually using Westernness just as a marker of someone's personality. Our principal characters in the book, Kiyoaki and Satoko, don't really do the Western imitation thing that other aristocrats do in the book. Similarly, devotion to the Emperor is a huge theme. All the characters are totally dedicated to protecting the Emperor, even if it means hiding things from the Imperial Family, because it is better to hide the truth from them so that scandal never touches them.

    One thought I had reading about Mishima is that he must have regretted not serving in the Japanese military in World War Two. I read that he faked Typhus to get out of it, and this book makes me think he regretted it, since Kiyoaki, the protagonist, also fakes illness at one point, and looks wistfully at the soldiers he sees. And then Mishima became an ultranationalist later in his life and then committed seppuku. If Kiyoaki is autobiographical, Mishima doesn't seem like a pleasant guy. The protagonist is conniving, cynical, and cruel. 

 

The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, edited by Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk

I am too busy to properly reflect on this book. 

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

    I found this book a lot more readable than The Gutenberg Galaxy. Gutenberg had way too many literary references, and this one had them too, but it was more of what I was looking for. That said, between these two books, I feel like I've read half of Finnegan's Wake. 

    McLuhan starts by telling us that "After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding." Electricity, writes McLuhan, has brought the world closer together than ever and will only continue to do so. The electric age's implosion is in conflict with the explosion and expansion of the mechanical age. But one of McLuhan's precepts is that technologies stack on top of each other, and don't really fully replace each other. So there isn't a complete implosion. Something interesting about McLuhan's perspective in 1964 and mine today is that he sees electricity as necessarily imploding the world and forcing us to all live in close proximity. However, today, the internet allows us to all ignore each other better, being siloed into political bubbles. I also find the idea that most previous inventions, like the wheel, were "explosive." McLuhan calls Roman roads explosive inventions, but Roman roads carried barbarians in just as well as they brought Romans out.

    One principle that I didn't understand before or after reading the book was the idea of hot and cold media. I understand that hot media are supposed to engage one sense in high definition and require focus and cool media are more passive, but I don't really think these ideas match with the technologies he describes as being hot and cold. Radio is hot, but the telephone is cold. Movies are hot, but TV is cold. But today I can listen to the radio on my phone or watch a movie on my TV. So I don't really understand what these mean. Cool media, like oral speech, have more gaps to be filled in by the listener, while hot media fill everything in for the listener. Who knows why a film does that but a TV show doesn't. Hot forms allow less participation, and exclude, while cool media require more participation from the audience and includes. I don't know.

    One important concept from the book, that is shared in The Gutenberg Galaxy, is that Western culture is built on the written word, and that the rise of electrical communication will threaten that by focusing more on oral communication. The ear is rising back up to challenge the eye. But McLuhan, who sees a possible panic about this, views the transition with optimism. He suggests that, if we see the American flag, we get a lot more symbolic value out of it than if we read the written words "American flag." The transition from that written word to more pictures in the form of TV and movies and sounds in the form of radio increases instances of seeing the genuine article, the flag, and not just reading the words. But I am not really convinced of any clear outcome from this like McLuhan is.

    Something else that was interesting from the book was that in the age of the manuscript, authorship of a text was less important. People didn't "express themselves" in books as much as they wrote something that was more universal or copied it without attributing the text, sometimes adding their own flourishes. But with typography, when one could speak to the world rather than just whoever was literally holding or copying your book, people expressed themselves more. People could be more personal when they could write for a broad audience instead of just the individuals who could actually get a hold of their book and its few copies.

    Here are two semi-predictions that McLuhan makes that I think are coming true. McLuhan writes that privacy is "unknown" in tribal societies, which would fit well the idea that electricity is making us a more tribal society, since we are definitely losing privacy. He also writes that alcohol is a social bond in an individualist and fragmented world, but is a destructive force in a close-knit tribal society. On the other hand, gambling is viewed more favorably in tribal societies than in individualist societies. Gambling is up among young people and drinking is down, so maybe that is some indication of America becoming a more tribal, less individualistic society.

Miscellaneous:

• This was interesting: after the rise of Islam, Romans were cut off from their papyrus supply in Egypt. Byzantium relied instead on parchment, but it was more expensive of a material. It was paper, brought all the way from China, that accelerated education and commerce and provided the basis for prints to set off the Renaissance.
• Until 1700, more than 50% of all printed books were either ancient or medieval.
• McLuhan writes that "In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices." Is this really different in other countries?
• Something interesting that McLuhan writes about politics is that the advantage of the legislative branch is its ability to dive into "unsavory subjects." While the executive has to project all the good things, the legislative can get into the bad stuff, which is more interesting to most people. It can use its investigative powers to outrage people.
• I loved this line on cars: "In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparable more hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the world, if gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the hourly and daily experience of the internal-combustion engine."
• Once again, McLuhan's generalizations about nationalities are so ridiculous. He even says Germans don't count as Westerners in this book.
• "Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly. Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all." Very hot take. Crazy person talk.
• I'm pretty sure this book coined the term media fallout.

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

    Reality TV doesn't get a lot of respect, which makes this book a really interesting take on it. Nussbaum treats reality TV like a true art form, and really elevates it in that way. She shows how the development of reality TV in the 90s and 2000s actually has deep roots. That aspect of the book, probably the most important in terms of a contribution to thinking, is also the least interesting to me. I picked the book up to read about Survivor, not Candid Camera. But it was a good inclusion (if a little long). 

    My read on reality TV is that is came about in the 90s from an amalgamation of three categories of unscripted television: game shows, clip shows, and documentaries. Game shows like The Newlyweds Game brought the competition element. Clip shows like America's Funniest Home Videos brought real-life to TV and also encouraged audience participation to get clips. And documentary-style shows ("dirty documentary" in Nussbaum's words) like An American Family or Cops just tried to capture something from real life. All of those genres of reality TV still exist on their own in the present day. But Survivor and Big Brother are probably the first shows to combine them all in one. The combination of all three elements creates reality TV and there is some amount that each one on their own can be reality TV. Something critical about the 90s, when reality TV could start to take off, is advances in editing. On The Real World, they shot tons and tons of hours of boring content. It was the editors who made the show interesting by using clever cuts and music to create a narrative. I'm not sure if the confessionals were a part of the real world, but that would also become a huge tool for the editors.

    The only reality TV show I have watched in any serious way is Survivor, so that was the most interesting part of the book to me. I learned a lot, like, for example, Jeff Probst, the host, was only hired in the last minute, after the rest of the crew. Apparently, Probst sent in a goofy audition video, had a bad interview, and ended up sending a "letter in a bottle" to Mark Burnett and Ghen Maynard, the producers, which was stuffed with fake newspaper articles praising him as the super-likeable host of the show. Jeff Probst ended up becoming the guiding visionary of the show over Mark Burnett, who turned to producing The Apprentice. 

    The final thing I think that is really interesting about reality TV is the new era that began within a couple seasons of shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, Big Brother, etc. getting big. In the earlier years, a big part of the shows was that they were more "dirty documentary," filled with naive people who were showing you a more real snapshot of who they were. By 2025, that element of reality TV is almost completely gone. Today, reality TV is dominated by people who want to be on TV, who are fans of the shows they participate on. That completely changes the dynamic for viewers, and helps their popularity, since of the early concerns in reality TV was that the shows were mean-spirited, taking advantage of people, and publicizing their failings.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Richard Lewis was pranked as a teenager on candid camera, where he was one of many high school students given aptitude tests, and the results told them they should be bricklayers.
• As I read, I recognized from the book I read on The Office that Randall Einhorn came from the reality TV world of Survivor to start directing scripted shows like The Office and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
• During the Iraq War, ABC reality shows about the military got better access in the Pentagon than ABC News got, and they lodged an official complaint.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

    This was a great book. I'm a little busy these days and having trouble dedicating the mental energy to this post that it deserves, but The Caine Mutiny was a thought-provoking book. It is driven by interesting characters, who are all flawed in different ways. Queeg is especially interesting, especially towards the end of the book. Also a cool picture of naval justice in World War Two.

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan

    The Gutenberg Galaxy is a classic in the study of the media or communication, but for being a book about communication it was really hard to understand. McLuhan writes it in the "mosaic" style, which is nice because of the short chapters with pithy titles like "Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world." But he assumes a really deep knowledge of academic and classical literature that I just do not have. References to Shakespeare, Joyce, and Pope just went over my head. Another criticism I have is that the book is not very empirical and generalizes a lot about different countries, and usually just determines everyone is in a preliterate, oral culture unless they're in New York of London basically. The man says that Russa, Ireland, the Old South are oral cultures I mean come on. And he says that "The miseries of conflict between the Eastern and Roman churches, for example, are a merely obvious instance of the type of opposition between the oral and visual cultures." What the hell are you talking about man? That is not obvious to me at all.

    The book is a classic for introducing concepts still used today, like "surfing," which became used for surfing the web, the "global village," and the idea of "the age of information." I found the most engaging parts of the books to be the ones where he talks about unique aspects of writing and reading in how they impact our thinking through the way we gather information through our senses. McLuhan goes in depth on the difference between hearing information and seeing it on the page, and between seeing it handwritten on the page versus typed on the page. He discusses four eras, which layer over one another: oral, handwritten, typed, and electronic. No one era replaces the others, but adds a new way for humans to consume information. 

    McLuhan quotes extensively from other authors to make his points. From J.C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry (1959), McLuhan pulls that 

When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, thy become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element, in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as one dictates.

I thought that was interesting, because when people now take in more information from reading, we read things that are not usually letters directed to us. Rather, most of what we read is in newspapers or books, in which the authors did not intend for any specific individual to read what is written, rather a large audience. In the pre-print or really the pre-manuscript era, most of what an individual heard was directed at them, or a group of limited size in which the speaker could see every individual they spoke to, and likely knew them. It would be on rare occasions when someone would attend an event at which a speaker could address a large enough crowd for the speech to be impersonal in the pre-writing era.

    McLuhan points out that many individuals of the classical era, who lived in largely illiterate societies, did not choose to write things even if they, individually, could write. Socrates wrote nothing, and the "Middle Ages regarded Plato as the mere scribe or amaneusis of Socrates. And Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord committed their teaching to writing because the kind of interplay of minds that is in teaching is not possible by means of writing." I gather that McLuhan views speech as a more direct form of communication, since "speech is an outering (utterance) of all our senses at once," whereas "writing abstracts from speech."

    Part of that abstraction is the idea that (and I haven't heard this elsewhere) people used to read aloud in the age of the manuscript before type became popular. Apparently medieval manuscripts were written without spaces or punctuation, so it was necessary to read aloud to get a feel for what was being said. Moreover, that is why medieval monks had cells--so that they could read aloud without disturbing one another. I am a little skeptical, but that is very interesting if that is the case. The result would be that we remember words on the page thinking of what we have seen, whereas the manuscript reader would have an oral or aural memory of what they read aloud.

    Something I thought about is that maybe the printing press is to Catholicism as the internet is to Evangelicalism. The printing press had a massive influence on Catholicism by bringing the gospel into the vernaculars of Europe, the result being a huge rebellion against the Catholic Church and the rise of Protestantism. I wonder how the rise of electronic media and social media will affect religions today. To me, electronic media seems likely to rapidly diffuse "control" over religious texts, allowing laypeople to interpret them in diverse ways and "influence" others with new and divergent interpretations. McLuhan talks about how type created new religious emphasis on literalism, and a willingness to put faith not in "experts" who could interpret the holy book, but in the book itself. For the reader of the Bible in AD 1000, it would feel more human than the reader of the typed Bible 500 years later. The AD 1000 reader could see the strokes of the quill that wrote the manuscript, the spilled ink, and the human elements. But the reader in the age of the Reformation would see something mass produced and put more faith in the specific words that became authoritative. McLuhan writes that

The new homogeneity of the printed page seemed to inspire a subliminal faith in the validity of the printed Bible as bypassing the traditional oral authority of the Church, on one hand, and the need for rational critical scholarship on the other. It was as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of the book as an independent of and uncontaminated by human agency. Nobody who read manuscripts could achieve this state of mind concerning the nature of the written word.

McLuhan continues to say that that very reproducibility of printed text would become responsible for everything that makes the West the West.

    Something else interesting that the book brings up is perspective, in an artistic sense. Really, this book is an art history book in many ways, and spends a lot of time talking about art. One big part talks about the revolution in perspective, which is, for McLuhan, a result of type. In the manuscript age, the audile-tactile culture did not imagine that art should be seen from one specific point of view. They had already mastered sculpture, music, and architecture, but painting and the visual arts did not reach their modern form because the audience was meant to be able to look at art from different places. In the Renaissance, artists pioneered the vanishing point, and created two-dimensional art that required the viewer to see it only from the front.

    McLuhan also says that print bears significant responsibility for the rise of nationalism "because by print a people sees itself for the first time. The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity co-extensive with vernacular boundaries. And more people have experienced this visual unity of their native tongues via the newspaper than through the book." Print also encouraged people to write more in their vernaculars than in the Latin lingua franca. Print exposed to Renaissance humanists how far their own Latin was from classical precedent, and then decided to teach Latin through the written page rather than by speaking Latin. As teachers abandoned teaching in spoken Latin, pupils grew up only with a knowledge of written Latin, and did not speak it to each other. Once people no longer spoke to one another in Latin, it became superfluous to write in Latin, and the language was allowed to die. With this, vernaculars proliferated, and would end up having the above effect on building national linguistic boundaries.

    McLuhan finishes the book by telling us that print "is a delirium. It is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing its assumptions upon every level of consciousness. But for us in the 1960's, print has much of the quaint receding character of the movie and the railway train." But that the modern technologies of TV and radio will not be possible to fully understand until their era has passed. "A few decades hence it will be easy to describe the revolution in human perception and motivation that resulted from beholding the new mosaic mesh of the TV image. Today it is futile to discuss it at all."

Miscellaneous:

• I guess I've got to read some Harold Innis because McLuhan is obsessed with him. He says stuff like, "The present volume to this point [400 pages in] might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis" LOL.