Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Welcome to the Desert of the Real  

(SA 2024)

 

 

This photo, taken yesterday whilst approaching Liverpool Street Station by train, is an interesting study of old and new London; one in which, as the Irish poet and playwright Síomón Solomon pointed out, the recently erected skyscrapers look like a mirage [1], or as if superimposed upon the reality of an older landscape. 

 

I suppose we might refer to this as capitalist unrealism; or perhaps say after Morpheus: Welcome to the desert of the real ... [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A mirage is a naturally-occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays bend via refraction to produce a displaced image of actual objects. Unlike a hallucination - and conveniently for the purposes of this post - a mirage can thus be captured on camera.

 

[2] This line, delivered by the character Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) in the 1999 film The Matrix (dir. the Wachowskis), is a paraphrase of Jean Baudrillard writing in Simulacra and Simulation (1983). It is also the title of a book by Slavoj Žižek (2002).