The Hyperreal

Science fiction and fantasy film aficionados know the power of computer generated graphics. By manipulating the code, almost anything you can imagine can be produced as an image that approaches the look of the real without being real. The logic gates and language programs not only capture and re/present our experience–they can even fabricate novel experiences as the product of a programmer’s imagination as opposed to those that are naturally occurring.

Companies like Image Metrics have already pushed the envelope to such an extreme that many see imaging technology on the verge of passing what is called the ‘Graphics Turing Test’ which means that a person placed in a virtual world environment would not be able to tell it apart from reality. When viewed in HD, their ‘Emily’ avatar has fooled large numbers of people into considering that she is real even though the images on the video are entirely computer generated. Today, we are faced with the astonishing prospect that what we see and hear could be artificial objects that have no corresponding real world equivalents.

How is it possible that the feminine left could ascend above the masculine right? In our mindscape, this entails the logico-linguistic processing that senses whole images and renders them as a myriad of pixels. Make the pixels small enough and they disappear below our threshold of perception. What remains is a seamless image. The unbroken continuity of this image pretends to deny the existence of its parts. An unpixelated photograph passes for analogue photo-realism. The re/mediated information stands at the same level, or is of equal ‘stature’ with the original.

In our Edenic drama, Adom/Adam undergoes a ‘self-othering’ surgery whereby he has to first separate himself from Chava/Eve (thereby acknowledging her independent existence) and then meet and marry her. He thereby recognizes the other as himself. Eventually, the feeling of ‘oneself as another’ turns full circle and the other returns to the self.

Translated into our cognitive science context, the ‘self’ or identity of an experience derives from our intuition (chochmah) about it. By placing it in conceptual containers, by enabling its descent into our understanding (binah), alterations are made. The conceptual ‘languages’ of the mind are metaphorical. Yet, if they are sufficiently fine-tuned, the metaphor can ferry meaning back to its source. The garment can reflect the body that it clothes. Even more radically, the fairytale of ‘emperor clothes’ (which meant the emperor who had no clothes) can be shown in the converse whereby the clothes have no emperor. The left hemispherically animated layers mask the fact that no deep reality on the right hemisphere hides underneath.

Jean Baudrillard has diagnosed this condition with his invention of the term ‘hyperreal.’ In essence, Baudrillard is saying that the territory will be reconfigured depending on what I draw on the map rather than the other way around. The mastery is not of the metaphor but the mastery by the metaphor–a metaphor deployed to govern reality. The feminine thus ascends over the masculine.

Where in the Torah do we see this Messianic future? There is nothing like a good rematch–especially when you don’t like the outcome of the first game. The Arizal teaches that the primordial pair of Adom/Adam and Chava/Eve undergo reincarnation as the souls of Avraham (Abraham) and Sarah. While Avraham is considered to be a superlative prophet and spiritual giant, the sages nevertheless attribute even greater prophetic status to Sarah. They are not an even pairing. Sarah is clearly the superior of the two as evidenced by God’s instructing Avraham (Genesis 21:12): “Regarding all the Sarah tells you, listen to her voice….” In our context, this would be like saying that a level of left-brained understanding exceeds the capacities of right-brained intuition.

Throughout the course of history, we must endure the diminished stature of the metaphor. Chava/Eve cedes to Adom/Adam. Moreover, if we are to conceive of a metaphor, our left brain must first be fertilized by the right brain. In his work Shaarei Emunah (pp.108-9), the Mittler Rebbe (the second Rebbe in the Chabad tradition) explains that in the future this will be somewhat reversed. While Kabbalah and Chassidic philosophy cite examples of how a single insemination of intuitive content could produce a multitude of ‘metaphoric’ pregnancies, the causal order still works from right to left. What the Mittler Rebbe introduces here is a prospect for a complete causal reversal wherein the left brain conceives on its own and even shapes what can be intuited or visualized by the right brain.

This future can be best described with two verses according to the Mittler Rebbe. The first of these is found in the Proverbs (12:4) where it states that “the woman of valor is crown of her husband.” Since all husbands may be likened to the prototypical husband–Adom/Adam–it follows that the head is no longer the highest signifying aspect of the body. While ‘head’ is the mind (or in our earlier explanation, it was the head within the head or the mind within the mind, the right hemisphere faculty of intuition or chochmah), it is the crown that is placed atop the head, framing it. It is as if to say that metaphors frame our conscious mind or give definition to our intuition. The crown also acts as an image of will. The crown of the king represents the will of the king. Volition or intentionality directs the workings of the mind as a whole. This newly elected ‘executive function’ installs the left over the right.

The second verse that the Mittler Rebbe would have us ponder comes from Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah 31:21): “For God has created something new in the world – that a woman will court a man.” The kabbalists explain this as a reference to various mystical feminine levels. Among these is the faculty of understanding (binah). The intuited content that once pursued a feminine vessel to express it as metaphor now exchanges dominant roles. The metaphor courts the intuited experience. She is asking him to marry her. The virtual solicits and establishes a connection to the real. We could even say that the virtual will one day transcend the real, realize the real, establish the real. The world that becomes a dream cycles through to a dream becoming the world.

In the literal wording of the verse, it actually says ‘a woman will surround the man.’ The real will be wrapped in a virtual reality envelope. The signifier will engender the signified, rather than naming it after the fact (once its created). Our logico-linguistic power is showing evermore capacity to create, and in doing so it affords us a taste of a promised future where we, like God, will create with words that first issue in the mind and then transform the world.

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