{"id":118,"date":"2008-09-12T10:12:27","date_gmt":"2008-09-12T14:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/?p=118"},"modified":"2008-09-12T10:12:27","modified_gmt":"2008-09-12T14:12:27","slug":"is-experience-always-%e2%80%98mediated%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/archives\/118","title":{"rendered":"Is Experience Always \u2018Mediated\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although in many respects I’m ready to leave White Noise<\/em> behind me, there are still so many nooks and crannies of this novel that still invite exploration, especially after reading the essays this week by John Drow and John Duvall. One thing we did not talk about in our Thursday discussion, although it was definitely related to the themes we touched on, is how both of these essayists focused on the “most photographed barn” in the country in the novel.\u00a0 Both DeLillo’s novel and the two essayists (on pages 422 and 444, respectively) explored how the obsessive public recording of the image of the barn demonstrated that the “representation” had become the substitute for the experience itself. In White Noise<\/em>, we are told that Jack and Murray take a road trip to see the barn and discover that “All the people had cameras” (12). “No one sees the barn,” Murray tells Jack (not unlike the image of the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa that we looked at earlier in the semester).\u00a0 In other words, no one was there to see it or to experience it; they were there simply to mediate<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

I have so often had that uneasy feeling when I am in a place that is photographed frequently that I and the people around me are not really “in the moment” or genuinely experiencing the scene, artifact, building, etc. Are we just having a quick look and then spending the rest of our time framing the photo opportunity?\u00a0 Do a little experiment: Watch how long it takes for someone to “take in” a scene before he or she lifts up the camera and starts to snap away. Maybe five seconds? It’s a little scary.\u00a0 Sometimes I deliberately will not bring a camera to an event or a family outing for precisely that reason; I don’t want to focus my energies on recording the experience; I simply want to experience the experience (duh).\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet…the camera or the camcorder is not the enemy, either. A photograph from the perfect day with my husband and his brother and wife in the South of France way back in the 1980s, the hiking trip to the Lake District of England, the day my daughter won a gold medal in the collegiate rowing championships (and yes, I photographed them, here<\/a> and here<\/a>), is only a slice of<\/em> the experience.\u00a0 The photographic image, or even a video, is a memory of the event; it evokes a wave of feelings and its own narrative.\u00a0 But, I would argue, it is never the substitute<\/em> for the event or the experience. Thus, I would push back a little on Baudrillard’s notion that the representation becomes a stand-in for the real (“The Precession of Simulacrum,”\u00a0Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel<\/em>, 95).\u00a0 Our memories of an event or a defining moment in our lives (I think of the birth of my two children, for example), the feelings of immense love and joy and satisfaction, are NOT a copy of a copy or a download of a “script”; they are inside our heads and are at the core of our being, imprinted in a fundamental way that requires no mediation.<\/p>\n

Indeed, my best memories of birthdays and holidays and countless school concerts, wrestling matches, track meets, rowing regattas, and family vacations are rarely the stuff we accumulated or the photos and videos we took; they are of the indefinable and inexpressible emotions generated by a real experience<\/em> that are hard-wired into my psyche. There may be plenty of Hollywood interpretations and TV dramatizations of exactly these kinds of events, but those mediations\u00a0nevertheless\u00a0remain to me largely irrelevant. Perhaps Baudrillard’s essay expresses well what it is to be a consumer, especially an unthinking and manipulated one, in our advertising- and media-driven society, but, I would argue, it falls short of what it is to be human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although in many respects I’m ready to leave White Noise behind me, there are still so many nooks and crannies of this novel that still invite exploration, especially after reading the essays this week by John Drow and John Duvall. One thing we did not talk about in our Thursday discussion, although it was definitely … Continue reading Is Experience Always \u2018Mediated\u2019?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[31,28,29,30],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1","tag-baudrillard","tag-mediatization","tag-mediatized","tag-simulacrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}