HUM 300 First Week Lecture
First week “Lecture” (don’t worry, they won’t all be this long) (do read all this thing, though, trust me)
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It seems appropriate to write a bit about the stuff you're reading in week one. Basically, this will explain the entire class, not just the first week’s readings. Neat, right?
Note taking
First, if you feel a bit lost when you finish the reading and log onto the discussion board, try taking notes! If you’re already taking notes, try taking different notes!
That’s not a mean comment, it’s a legitimate strategy. If your method isn’t working, try another method. There are a lot.
First, just to make things easy on yourself, you should probably be taking notes by hand instead of digitally. Multiple studies have found that retention is higher for learners who take notes by hand when compared to digital note-taking of all sorts, from laptop typing to Evernote. Here’s a link to an article about one such recent study.
Try sketch notes! You don’t have to be a good artist to sketch things in this method. Proponents of sketch notes claim that the method allows note-takers to remember things better than if they wrote alone. That’s not substantiated by any evidence-based studies yet. It’s most likely that sketch-noting forces the learner to “translate” that information, at least when the learner decides which pieces of information are important enough for pictures.
Metanarrative and Postmodernism
The metanarrative technique is very important to postmodernism as an art form. Basically, that’s a narrative about narrative. Basically, fiction doesn’t actually have to make sense. Most fiction just pretends it does.
I told you this week’s “lecture” would get theoretical. So. We tend to think of statements as being either true or false. However, there is a third state – the hypothetical. If you say “I may go to the store later” and then stay at home watching Netflix and eating string cheese, you didn’t lie, right? But you didn’t go to the store, so the statement wasn’t true. It was a hypothetical.
You probably already understood that. But here’s the thing: fiction is all hypothetical. The statements in a story are neither true nor false. They are true within the fiction, but they’re not about things that happened in objective reality (more on that later). So when we read, we’re vividly hallucinating people and places that have never existed. But you know more about the characters in the things you’ve read than some people who really exist.
What’s real, anyway?
Here’s a street address: Cíferská 4893/8, 919 35 Hrnčiarovce nad Parnou, Slovakia. It leads to a residential area. That means someone lives there. What can you tell your friends about the person who lives there? Probably not much. Maybe one of you has visited this address, I don’t know. But probably not. That house and that person exist in objective reality, but you know nothing about them.
Now, what’s the address for Santa Claus? It’s the North Pole, of course. What does Santa do all year? What does he do on Christmas? What does he look like? Is he married? Does he like animals?
You probably answered all those questions. You probably also agree that there’s no Santa Claus up at the North Pole. But here’s the thing – you knew more about a person who doesn’t exist than you did about a person who absolutely exists. That’s because objective reality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
We don’t interact with objective reality. We interact with our ideas about it. That sounds weird. Think of it this way: can you think of anything that’s ever happened to you that you didn’t mediate through your mind? That is, has your mind ever been uninvolved in your life? Probably not. There were points at which your mind didn’t exist, and, functionally, you didn’t exist. Philosophically, our identities are made up of the stories we tell about ourselves. So the things you remember and the things you forget are all that exist of your life. So your life is functionally as fictional as Santa’s. That means Santa has a certain amount of reality, even though he’s fictional.
Here’s another way to think about it: the 19th century psychologist William James wrote a book about religious experiences. He was frequently in the room when people saw angels and demons. He didn’t see those things. What James concluded is that despite the lack of evidence for the objective reality of those angels and demons, they are real experiences to those who see them. If you take a psychedelic and hallucinate something weird, you still had the experience. The experience was real, even though the subject of the experience wasn’t.
This seems like it’s getting weird. It may be weirder.
Baudrillard is simpler than you think
And that leads us to Baudrillard. Ever see The Matrix? Ever notice the Baudrillard references? Probably not, but they’re in there. The Wachowski sisters overtly referenced Baudrillard, because they were cribbing from his work on the simulation. Makes sense, right? That’s what that movie’s about. Well, it’s also an allegory of the experience of gender transition, but that’s beside the point.
Here’s the simulation and simulacra broken down as simply as I’m able to think about it: we don’t live in the real world. We all live inside our own thoughts about the world, because everything is mediated by our thoughts. So if you run into a tree and your friend runs into the same tree, you’ve both had completely different experiences, because you think about things differently.
Ever come out of a movie theater and you just can’t understand what your friend is saying about the movie? It’s like you saw two different features! Well, you did. Art, like all of experience, is something that happens between the objective reality and the observer. Consciousness, like art, is a nebulous thing and we can’t really identify where the hell it’s happening.
A lot of people resist Baudrillard’s basic idea, because it seems to invalidate experience. I once had a student angrily “disprove” Baudrillard’s idea by saying he was hit in the back of the head with a beer bottle once, and he didn’t think about that. He still passed out. So, ha!
Of course, he only knew it was a beer bottle because someone told him afterwards, he only knew he’d passed out because he had the experience of waking up again, and the results pressed in on him constantly for the next day or so because he had pain that he surely noticed and thought about. So that doesn’t really work. It proves Baudrillard’s point that our experience is mediated by our minds. Which, you know, is sort of self-evident when you put it that way.
Why didn’t Baudrillard? Well, the generation of scholars that Baudrillard was in (which included Lyotard and Derrida, among others) tried to get at fundamental issues of thinking. But they had to do so in writing, which is a mediation of a mediation of a mediation. In other words, it’s using the weird stuff to try to describe the weird stuff. It’s like trying to look at your own eyeball.
Huh? Well, you think, you talk, you write. Each of those things is, to some degree, an approximation of the one that came before it. That’s oversimplifying one of the most complex issues in the history of human thought, you understand, but it works for us. So, when Baudrillard writes complicated sentences, he’s trying to explain something that’s actually even more complicated than it was before, because now he’s writing about it. The act of writing about it makes a new perception of the thing.
Robert Anton Wilson coined the term “reality tunnel” to describe the way we function in the world. We’re all in reality, but we each have our own tunnel we’re walking through. We can’t really intersect with others’ tunnels, and our tunnel isn’t everything in the world. But we never know anything outside it.
Jeez. That’s plenty. Basically, postmodernism is about the core problems of life – what do things mean, how do they mean those things, how do we share that meaning with others, and what does that matter anyway?