“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.” – Jean Baudrillard
“Is it live or is it Memorex…?” Things have changed a great deal since the advertising slogan for the recording tape company Memorex was created. We live in a digital, MP3, Bluetooth kinda world. Reality is no longer what it “used” to be.
How do these changes affect a Cartomancer who uses cards much like their cartographer kindred design maps? What happens when as the French philosopher Baudrillard suggested ” maps replace territories?”
Of course, most fortune tellers being linear readers perhaps prefer straight-forward highway markers as directions to a destination. It is not the job of a fortune teller to help a client “juggle” decisions, that responsibility falls on the shoulders of the diviner. However, what do left or right; up or down; even diagonal movements across any chessboard mean when the entire territory it occupies is itself unreal- a picture of a picture, a copy of a copy?
No matter! The mind in this era of hyperreality is light years beyond the border towns of analogy. If the eye can see the sign, cognition gives temporal life to even the weakest apparition or signal and we proceed, coasting on fumes – taking signs for substance, maps for territory and illusion for reality in the dystopian half-light of the Marketplace- which being the only light available appears to some as bright as the Sun.
Notes:
Simulacra – (singular) from the Latin means a likeness, or representation. Simulacrum (plural) are copies of things which no longer have an original (or never had one to begin with).