Hulver's site || Comments || All in all, you're just another rivet in the wall

hyperreality is not as bad as it was by Alan Crowe (4.00 / 2) #12 Mon May 26, 2008 at 06:37:18 PM EST

Medieval Christianity makes a good example of a simulacrum.

There is no God, Christianity is false, but this hinders the historian in his efforts to understand medieval Europe. "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none." The historian can ask: why did they believe this crap, why didn't they just shrug it off? This slows the historian down. His colleague, who believes it himself, can more easily work his way into the medieval mindset and make sense of the evidence that has survived to our time.

When the priest turns the communion wafer into the body of Christ, it has gone way beyond dressing up and pretending. If you try to understand it as dressing up and playing pretend the medieval period will not make sense. The fact that nothing happens to the wafer is concealed; there is a new 'truth' to which you must assent if you are to get inside the heads of congregation.

The medieval congregation lived in a hyperreal world of heaven, hell, purgatory, blasphemy, piety, orthodoxy and heresy. It is all very real. Commit heresy and the Inquisition will come for you. Repent and be forgiven. Persist and perish in flames. People played these games for real because they were for real.

Today one can read Chomsky on how consent is manufactured and notice that he is caught up in his fairy tale of wicked capitalists and good socialists. The people who commoditise our discontent and sell it back to us on DVD are wage slaves who grovel for cash and do exactly what we pay them to do. Unlike the people of 1000 years ago we can see through the cracks in our hyperreality.

This explanation by Scrymarch (4.00 / 1) #13 Tue May 27, 2008 at 10:26:59 AM EST

... reminds me of the old Turkey City Lexicon term "consensus reality", which I've found useful from time to time.
_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}
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I don't think it's quite the same thing by R Mutt (4.00 / 1) #14 Tue May 27, 2008 at 11:04:03 AM EST

In the religious medieval worldview there was still an objective reality, that exists whether you believe in it or not, is the same reality encountered by everybody, and cannot be changed by observing it.

Whereas in hyperreality nothing is absolute. If people start believing or fantasising something, then that becomes just as real as anything else.

Just having a different idea of what the objective reality constitutes, is not the same as rejecting objective reality altogether.

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: Ungroundedness of mediated world view by Alan Crowe (2.00 / 0) #15 Wed May 28, 2008 at 01:44:02 PM EST

If you accept mainstream media reporting uncritically you end up with an ungrounded world view. You still take it as objective reality.
Worse, one has to deal with the fact that many people do accept mainstream media reporting uncritically so the reports, if not facts about subject matter, are important facts in themselves.
Go back 1000 years, substitute priest and bible for mainstream media, and the problem of an ungrounded `reality' that is given force and substance by mass belief seems just the same.

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