Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Parallel Existence

What if every normal existence concealed a successful simulation? Not a perverse or romantic one, but a simulation that was perfectly banal - a parallel existence which did not intersect with the other(from time to time, however, the parallel lines meet and catastrophe ensues). Baudrillard

3 comments:

J C said...

okay, I'll comment you turds!

what if. I have a guy in winnipeg named scott who looks exactly like me. it's fooled people, but we never hang out, probably because chaos would ensue.

I think what Jean refers to here is the shadow of us that exists. It follows us around and exists but never really controls or interacts with us, but is us. another world perhaps?

or perhaps another life that is yours, but maybe it is always in a different place, moving as you do, but elsewhere. sort of like the double. there's an artist named Francois Brunelle from Montreal who finds people that are look-a-likes, but are unrelated by blood. the likenesses are startling.

but it also makes me think of Sarah Anne Johnson's, Thorneycroft's, and KC Adams work, the diaroma's they create are alternate realities, and in some cases depict the unreal or fantasy, but pictorialize what might exist.

I dunno. anyone else care about this duality or what?

Anonymous said...

Ive checked it out from the outside before. Like suddenly realizing you're sitting in a theatre when before you actually thought you were INSIDE the movie.

But it's pretty intense. And impossible to aproximate the expereince through any means but metaphor.

Like a fish imagining what it's like to live outside the water.

Quitmoanez said...

There is no inside or outside, you ARE it, no in or out, just being.

Baudrillard does a very good job in mystifying or making alot of mumbo jumbo out of what is otherwise the greatest mistake Western philosophy ever made, viz. thinking that there is something dual in this nature.

My goodness, the basic (equally flawed) religious tenet of this mess doesn't even conform to this, meaning that at least the predominant dogma recognises a 3-fold logic, or what I would rather call a 3-fold ontology (i.e., the trinity).

In the end, I think all we have here is speculation, as it is difficult if not impossible for us to grasp the dynamic nature of reality, or something that is clearly more than the ranges or delimitations we use to describe it (i.e., the material limits of our perception).

Surely we are foolhearty in thinking that the limits we encounter or create are actually any better or worse a representation of the world than those of a worm.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that Baudrillard is the potential demon-child of a two-fold logic that has clearly failed (surely Baudrillard recognises the latter), helping to f-ck us up by giving us the license to separate ourselves from the world (I am man and this is earth, otherwise the great dual), and thus helping us to feel comfortable in discussions of things like parallel realities, when in fact, whatever potential reality there is, or potential realities there may be, we are responsible for all of them, especially the one we live (in) now.

Ha!

That just came out!

:)

And to answer Baudrillard's question of what if there was a concealed successful simulation that maybe would sometimes mix and destoy each other:

Well Baudri, there isn't.

Get back to work.