This essay is an attempt at an amoral textual simulation. It accepts the contemporary as is and does not resist simulacra but embraces it. Any alternative view, in my view, is futile. It tries to resist cynicism for a positivist projection of, in the absence of a defined agenda or manifesto, where do we go from here?
Are We There Yet? A Roadmap of Where We Are and How We Got Here
Disneyland is constructed otherness, a deterrance machine constructed in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. It constructs a language for the unreal through its blatant artificiality.
This experience of the unreal is predicated on a binary logic executed through Disneyland's spatial boundaries: an inside versus an outside. Inside- a constructed fake- therefore, outside it, an implied real. From the parking lot to the interior, the contrast is stark.
By defining the unreal, it creates a contrast for everything else, that, by binary logic, thus becomes real. Disneyland is a simulation of the third order, i.e. it masks the absence of a profound reality. But Disneyland is no longer relevant in LA. It is a martyr to the total simulation and is now being deployed in other emerging countries. In China, for example, there are instances of "fake" Disneylands, the Shijingshan Amusement park: a third order simulation built atop an existing simulation. Proof that our simulacra is almost water-tight.
In this vein, Universal Studios is the next order of simulation: instead of blatant artificality, it is subterfuge. It extends the implication of the real (set up by Disneyland) and constructs a simulation of it. Citywalk by John Jerde simulates piazzas and urbanity by confusing fiction for fact. In its programmatic bombardment with ordinary: Panda Express, Pizza Hut and Budweiser beer, one equates outside life with the simulation. It sets the precedent for the authenticity of Rodeo Drive and The Grove.
The Grove: a fourth order simulation, that is aware of itself as a simulation. This self-awareness is a form of defined identity: identity that resists organic change and accident. The Grove looks the same today as it did 5 years ago and the Cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory tastes no different.
Its opposite, dingbats and hinterlands are the dissimlation: a reality with no perception of itself, and hence mutable to multiple intepretations and difference.
Venice Beach, for example, is halfway between caricature and simulation. As an ecology “that is a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants”, the Ferus Gallery and associated artists, in this case, John Baldessari, were an attempt at critical resistance. His techniques did have the effect of expanding the field of art toward more contemporary territories: through his use of automatic and almost disposable techniques that borrowed from the layman, it became an art that had to deal with its imminent demise.
Perhaps the showing of his work at the LACMA is a sign of its failure: its museumification signals its subsumption back into the dominant cultural hegemony, folded in through new apparatuses and tools of capital.
(whether the field of "art", or architecture for that matter, is even relevant today as an autonomous discipline and as an institution is another question. The recent appointment of Jeffrey Deitch as the new director of the MOCA suggests otherwise.)
(Three interesting works by Baldessari: Aligning Balls, 1972. Three Red Paintings, 1988. Crowd with Shape of Reason Missing, 1988)
Resistance is Futile. So Keep Calm and Carry On.
The accumulated efforts of our constructed simulations are not without cost: it has, through time, accrued extensive negative externalities. Slavoj Zizek, in Living in The End Times, framed them thus in four categories: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures.
The effects of this is, in his words, that "The global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point." This is the equivalent of a ringtone going off in the movie - a distraction that destroys the fragile believability of the simulation.
Exit Strategy #1: The Green Distraction and the Yellow Canary
Almost comically, however, the ecological crisis as a potential distraction is increasingly being folded into the simulation as well. For example, “green” features are fast becoming red-herrings to smooth over the political and social wrinkles of a building. (The waterless urinal trumpeted as “green feature” is typically a red-flag.)
The Squid Capusle project by LayerLA can, in this light, be read as an alternative that subverts this model.
"The work enacts climate change as a delicate drama of temperature and humidity. Separate weather systems are created within the various chambers, representing both wet and dry zones by means of fog, vapour, and condensation. Floating over the courtyard area, the Squid Capsule invites visitors to speculate about the physical and visual representations of our climate, as well as lounge around on its tentacles."
In opposition to the eternal present of the modernist gaze, the squid-capsule offers the participant a multi-sensorial experience that re-orients one's perception toward ever changing conditions of temperature, wetness and different lighting qualities.
For example, unlike the constructed mise en scene of the Farnsworth House, the Squid Capsule reverses the hierarchy between architecture and its environment. It becomes an affective proxy for its environment: a potential canary that draws attention to our ecology. If only it weren’t so pretty.
Exit Strategy #2: The Collective Individual and its Prostitution
Our current simulation model has also redefined the state of our relation to the various institutions, both economic and social. Suspending moral judgement, the recent financial crisis in Europe and the riots that ensued in greece over pensions is possibly symptomatic of two things:
1) That this new form of reified relations is not sustainable and resists equilibrium
or
2) That was the violent transition from the old social form to a newer one.
In the first fiction, political incantation, such as the Watergate scandal, or the recent Bernie Madoff Trial or the recent Goldman Sachs witch trial, is used to put out fires of dissent: the moral imposition upon capital soothes over injustices with the assurance that there is justice.
The truth it attempts to conceal is that capital is amoral: it was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates... its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality. The fact is, Bernie Madoff is the logical consequence of the system he operated within.
In the second, to extend Barthe's, the sign - in this case, the structural sign of how we define our social relations - becomes an empty signifier. But freedom is always temporary: it is a vaccuum that is quickly filled with new constraints. The ironic truth is, true freedom is about the choice to give up freedom by committing to things: people, causes, beliefs, life.
The first time (to my limited knowledge) this happened, it happened as tragedy: in the wake of 1970's Thatcherism, the sub-culture of punks tore a hole that was tragically co-opted: Anarchy in the UK comfortably plays stores to manufacture desire for pre-ripped jeans and pleather jackets: "rebellion" as ineffective masturbation.
The potential tragedy today is that this manufactured desire is a perverted form of hypnosis that is fast becoming spectral - omnipresent but ever evasive - through a rhizomatic system of marketing, a roman orgy of media tie-ins, viral marketing and celebrity plugs . In a mass media simulacra, the boundary between the "real/authentic" and the "imaginary/fake" becomes collapsed to the point where we are all voluntary prisoners of our own creation, ignorant that we are all voluntary prisoners of our own creation.
Secondhand Sureshots is an anticipatory model of how we may reclaim this true freedom. Through techniques of mash-up, it attempts to corrupt the puritanical narrative from within. It is a decoupling of the signifier from the signified.
A puritanical narrative is a linear history that is in itself a simulation of control that has traces of a moral superstructure which allows capital to function unfettered.
The model of freedom engendered in this is the Do-It-Yourself attitude toward a productive culture that claims its own autonomy. This emerging culture is reflected in the emergence of the Creative Commons, which becomes a platform for other avenues such as Instructables.com, Make Magazine, TheCreatorsProject, Vice Magazine and a plethora of alternative media whose ethos is based in hacker culture.
(the previous paper suggested that the Punks, in their direct opposition to the cultural mainstream, orchaestrated a cold-war scenario of mutual reliance.)
The positivist reading of this is that this system effectively resists subsumption because it is inherently free. But the logic of capital is malleable. Already, as is evidenced through Facebook and the recent posting of personal profile information online, we have become commodities of ourselves.
If It Ain’t Broke...
The future is uncertain and possibly dystopian. But beyond good and evil and moral presuppositions, what is more important is differance for a critical perspective. In a post-humous tweet from the Twitter profile of Marshall McLuhan, “Stop asking "Is this a good or bad thing?" and start asking "What's going on?"”.
After that, if it ain’t broke, break it. Because only then are we cautioned against hubris.