'The Real' Is In Crisis

I remember this summer I was out walking with a friend of mine and I popped into a shop to buy a drink. It was a Cherry Coke. Suddenly he said to me, "You like cherry flavoured things, don't you?"

"What makes you say that?" I replied.

"Well, you have apple and cherry juice at home, your favourite cake is black forest gateaux and your favourite yoghurt is black cherry. And now you're buying a Cherry Coke."

I smiled and was amused by this thing which I had never noticed about myself before. "What's funny is," I replied, "that I like cherry flavoured things, but I don't like cherries."

This particular anecdote is a perfect allegory for exactly why the real is in crisis. My experience of the flavour of cherry is far removed from what a real cherry tastes like, to such an extent that I actually prefer the synthesised, simulated taste of a cherry to experiencing the fruit itself.

It's not a new idea – in fact, I'm a fan of Baudrillard's theories on the real and Zizek's interrogations of what we consider real or not. Pop culture has become a hall of mirrors with no exterior point of reference – everything is a copy of that which is already in its sphere of reference. Our culture has become a machine that recycles images of the past and reflects them back through the hyper-real visors of modern life, often mirroring some unseen angle or a glinting facet that wasn’t obvious before. Perhaps in its re-use, it inadvertently creates an immediacy of novelty that the youth grab on to and ride until the mechanics of the zeitgeist crank up once again and another postmodern pastiche is created to satiate the need for the next best thing.

We will watch a film looking to simulate feelings of fear, happiness or heartbreak because it echoes a semblance of the real emotion without the risk of having to go through the pain of experiencing it. We watch theatre and we are twice removed from the emotions: the actors act it and we simulate inside ourselves the emotions that the actors are themselves simulating.

So why is it that we lend such veracity to photography? In mainstream media, the photograph is used as undeniable proof that an event has occurred – for instance in movies like Blow-Up or Bladerunner – but the photograph is seen as inferior to the film's much grander narrative. The fact is that photography as a document has always been questioned and I think that this particular media has never claimed to be representative, but is admired for it's ability to capture what is there and reflect it back to the viewer in a new, objectified light.

The reason we enjoy photography is exactly because it defies the real; it is an intervention on the real. It defies what we should expect of the document by extending time, compressing past and present. It not only displays what is, but also what has been. It is tinged with both nostalgia and surprise, sadness and beauty. When we look at the image we want it to be more than what it is – to surpass what we know to be real.

The most alarming thing about the photograph is not that it does not represent the real, but – in this culture of consumption and consumerism – the still image has replaced the real. It has become our point of reference – an aspiration. When we dance, we dance in a series of poses and gestures that – when frozen – would make the perfect image. When someone pulls out a camera, we become amateur composers – we pose, we arrange objects into a small scene, we look directly at the lens and click because we want people to believe that the image we have composed is our reality.

And we do believe. We comment on Facebook, Flickr or Instagram about how 'hot' something is when we know that the perspective, pose and pout of the photo is completely staged.

Yet there is this argument of 'authenticity', to which I have to ask what is authentic? What is left in this world that has a shred of 'authenticity' left in it? Unless, we are demanding that authenticity is an authentic reproduction of what is a simulated reality in the first instance.

We have come to adore simulation. The real is in crisis because 'reality' has warped into something else entirely.