Cultural Imagery, karate kicks and Matrix

I have been thinking... There is no doubt we are living in a world of Simulacra, as accentuated by the radical philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Nothing more is original, we've lost the authentic forms and began living in a world of thousands of copies, which in fact are copies of copies. This, quite accurately was the idea of Plato as conveyed by the metaphor of his "cave". We are living in a cave and are observing some phantoms, shadows of the reality outside on the wall. Shapes that cast the shadows are not visible to us in their original form, we are not able to reach outside for them and see the real ones. This seems to be a modern philosopher's bullshit, but in fact - it isn't. Let's take a deeper look.

The shadows have permeated our entire universe in a sense that we can no longer be sure when we are able to see a "real" thing. Let's consider words of dr Collado Rodrigues, a professor at my university: "the simulacra have found its way to the popular culture and we could easily consider the movie "Shrek" a part of it". When we watch a scene of the princess performing "matrix-type kick" (sort of hanging in the air for a couple of seconds until really kicking shit out of somebody.) This obvious reference brings us to "The Matrix", but even in Wachowski brothers' "The Matrix" the idea of such kick is not genuine, because it is derived from old Nintendo karate games, where you could use your character to perform such kick witch delayed impact to make it more powerful. So far, so good.

But we till haven't touched the real thing. The Nintendo kick is also a simulacrum and only represents what people could see in old karate pulp eastern movies, where actors like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or even Chuck Norris fought in dance-like manner with thousands of enemies, defeating every single one of them.

Yet, we are still in the world of simulacra. The movie karate kicking is nowhere close to what real life fight is about. It is supposed to imitate authentic fight, but it isn't in a littlest bit dead on. In reality, when you fight with twenty opponents, they don't just calmly come one by one to get beaten when the rest of them are waiting. It is just impossible. Thus "Shrek", "The Matrix", "Nintendo", and eastern karate films are just examples we are living among copies of reality.

The man who expressed the same idea in a more accessible way was William Gibson the modern cyberpunk writer in his short story "The Gernsback Continuum," (the short story is available on the internet at http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt) taken from "Burning Chrome." He was the one who observed the link between architectural debris of 21st century and our own semiotic phantoms. The semiotic phantoms are all the things we have never seen in their genuine form, but function quite naturally in our universe. These are such things as aliens or UFO's that were never really seen by any of us, but somehow we all seem to have the general idea how they could look like.

The short story apparently has its title after Hugo Gernsback (presumably he also gave name to the famous science fiction award Hugo) who in the early twentieth century used to be an editor of pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and shaped his contemporary America's visions of the future to come. Amazing covers of his magazines were just examples of the common illness that spread among people of America.

Every one of us continues living in his own familiar continuum, where Derrida's signifiers take their form and stay such until the end of our lives. Where does it all come from? The answer is simple - semiotic phantoms (or: ghosts) come from bad media (Gibson, 33). The bad media can exorcise our reception of reality and ensoul us with the phantoms. In "The Gernsback Continuum" the protagonists evidently loses contact with artifacts of his reality and everything he sees are examples of a kind of surrogate reality of 1980's. This is the world permeated by Art Deco (refers to a style that featured bold shapes, zigzag and geometric elements, vivid colors, and artificial materials; the movement was popular in the mid-twenties and lasted through the 1930s) and the Streamlined Moderne, which in fact have their origins in the science-fiction pulp of 1930's and 1940's or 50's.

What is the point of all of it? We cannot make assumptions of reality unless we step out of our own continuums of places, values, images, texts and contexts. But it seems virtually impossible.