(Re)presenting Mimesis – sisemiM gnitneserp(eR)

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Nov 25, 2004

Baudrillard asks us to say:

I am real, this is real, the world is real, and nobody laughs. But say: this is a simulacrum, you are only a simulacrum, this war is a simulacrum, and everybody bursts out laughing. With a condescending and yellow laughter, or perhaps a convulsive one, as if it was a childish joke or an obscene invitation. Anything which belongs to the order of simulacrum is obscene or forbidden, similar to that which belongs to sex or death. However, our belief in reality and evidence is far more obscene. Truth is what should be laughed at. One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.

Here Baudrillard identifies one of the key themes of postmodernism: its break with, or perhaps its acknowledgement of a lack of a universal reality. According to him, the simulacrum is a sign for the real that substitutes for the real itself. The result is what he calls the 'hyperreal'. For Baudrillard, the shift from the real to the hyperreal occurs when representation gives way to simulation. He could contend that we are situated on the verge of such an occasion, illustrated by the emerging presence of a virtual world. Baudrillard believes there can be no representation, since "simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum." Baudrillard's claim that simulacra are signifiers without referents, Barthes's and Foucault's challenge to authorial intentions in literature and art, Haraway's discourse on cyborg culture, and Lyotard's refusal to acknowledge any metanarratives or 'grands recits' that shape social values all exemplify the postmodern tendency to contest and attack 'the real'. One may ask how can postmodernist online writings perform mimesis if, as the aforementioned theorists argue, there is no universal reality to represent?

Contemporary theories describe a redefinition of poetics as if "mimesis were dead and done with." A current preoccupation with reality shows that representations of reality and the politics of representing are very much alive. One such instance of the preoccupation with the politics of representation was in 1991 when Mattel courted controversy after making Barbie say things like: "I love shopping," "meet me at the mall," and "math class is tough." The American Society of University Women led protests demanding that Teen Talk Barbie be taken off the shelves arguing that Barbie's language promoted an unrealistic and negative role-model for girls. More recently in 2002 Barbie's friend Midge was also taken off the shelves by Wal-Mart because she became pregnant, reflecting what protestors argued were unrealistic teenage tendencies. The Wellness Resource Centre at Vanderbilt University has constructed a "life-size" Barbie hoping to "force people to see what an unrealistic image young girls have as their ideal model." Resolute for realistic representations of women, the RAWA, in 1998 severely denounced the "Islamic Movement of Taliban for its unrealistic attitude towards women. Such puppets of Pakistan, USA and Saudi Arabia", the RAWA insisted, "are interpreting the holy religion of Islam wrongly and defame it." The crux of representing reality is not so much the perceived impossibility to do so or the accompanying negative associations of universality. The key to this postmodern lock is to explode notions of a reductive and universalising account of art mirroring reality to unlock a postmodern mimesis concerned with continually becoming individual experiences. Judging from the following hyperfictions, a postmodern mimesis may aim to represent a snippet of an individual life and thought, an internal and authoritative reality, not a universal and essentialising external exemplar. At stake is reconceptualisation of a postmodern mimesis which recognises its limits thereby gesturing towards the difficulty and embedded paradoxes in representing the unspeakability of subjective human existence.

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