Sunday, October 4, 2009

Captain Outrageous, 10/4

I find the topic of reality and truth hard to deal with. There's always a truth and a reality beyond what we know. I feel that our lives have such a large majority of it spent "looking" that it is hard for us to "see". I only just realized this and it makes perfect sense. We are a technological generation: ipods, cell phones, high definition TV, 3D movies so on and so forth. We spend so much time plugged into the views of others that the view of reality can’t be anything but hard to come by. Reality is constructed for us on a continuous basis. How often do we take the time to thinking critically about what we’ve just seen on TV or in a movie? Maybe we consider the characters, the plot, but we never consider the universe we’ve been put into or who is behind it. I understand that is what we do in this class but doesn’t it seem like it should go further? The concepts that we cover in this class go beyond their general classifications and examples, this is reality. Wait. I think so. The reality is that reality is blurred. The truth is that there is no truth, truthfully. What does it MEAN when a TV show or a movie says “BASED ON REAL LIFE EVENTS” or “BASED ON A TRUE STORY” ? What does it MEAN when something is reviewed as “realistic” or the most “truthful” telling of a story? According to who?! Here’s the truth about reality and the reality about the truth: Its a big fat stinky onion. It makes you cry, it goes bad when its left out for too long, but most importantly, its made of lots and lots of layers. Its hard to work through the tears to peel it apart.

2 comments:

CMC300 said...

First of all good job conveying you point strongly despite the shorter length of the post - you discuss the roles of truth and reality very critically, which is good! Think about how your take on the truth relates to Zizek's aspects on it, do you think they relate or not? I like how you question truth - it's something that we all figure we know, but you're right we don't! I guess it all comes down to ideology and how we look at something when finding truth. You claim that truth is a purely subjective phenomenon, and yet I ask you the following: is truth in fact partially opinion? think of the Zizek reading - does this notion of subjective truths mean that our speak is deprived of the malignant property of truth?

:)

CMC300 said...

P.s I like your onion metaphor! :)