The Reality Overload: The Modern World's Assault on the Imaginal Realm

by Annie Le Brun

A powerful critique of the increasing mechanization and homogenization of modern life

• Shows how the constant force-feeding of too much information dispossesses us of our deepest connections

• Describes a link between the destruction of the environment with the assault on our individuality, creativity, and ability to think for ourselves

What underlies the many problems of the modern world--from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual--is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanization and homogenization of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.

Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.

Genres: Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2004

About the author

Annie Le Brun a participé aux dernières années du mouvement surréaliste. Parallèlement à des poèmes réunis dans Ombre pour ombre, elle a publié des essais, dont Les Châteaux de la subversion (1982) et Soudain un bloc d’abîme, Sade (1986) en introduction à l’oeuvre de celui-ci, avant de concevoir l’exposition « Sade, Attaquer le soleil » au musée d’Orsay (2014). Menant une réfl exion sur la poésie à travers Appel d’air (1988) ou Si rien avait une forme, ce serait cela (2010), elle s’est livrée à une analyse critique de ce temps dans Du trop de réalité (Stock, 2000). Ce qui n’a pas de prix peut en être considéré comme la suite.

Reviews

[Ollie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very academic collection of essays that suffers slightly under translation from the French into the English. Nevertheless, it's packed with ideas and polemics on how the dissemination of GMO foods in our world is not unrelated to the information explosion we are going through. In a nutshell, Annie Le Brun's theory is that an attack on our imagination (led by globalisation and French Theory, mostly) has left us incapable of standing up against corporate interests (such as the ones behind the replacement of our food supplies with GMOs.)

I could relate to Brun's views on art: she believes that the excess of information we are under has eroded our courage to stand up and say "this is shit". Our culture wants us to believe everything now has equal weight, everything is subjective. You just have to walk through any museum to see this in the way curators add equal weight to a Picasso and a Damien Hirst. She reserves her final essay for an attack on the French theoreticians from the postmodern school of thinking who opened this door and allowed this disaster to happen. (I imagine Annie Le Brun would get along swimmingly with Camille Paglia). Elsewhere in the book she critics the bodies of Olympic athletes and bodybuilders (non-erotic and only meant for "repetitions"), deforestation, the breakdown of language, and much more.

I couldn't possibly do justice to her book and all the ideas in it. Suffice to say that it's an urgent call to arms for what remains of our world, for us to stand up against changes that are being imposed on us without our consent. If only we could find the strength to disconnect from the reality overload...

[Matko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh man, I just couldn’t. Reading Annie Le Brun’s book was too similar to listening to bunch of hipsters on a movie festival. It’s not about cynicism, it’s about constant nagging and hate combined with “everything is shit” attitude. Gone are the days of Marquis de Sade and 19th/early 20th century poets, gone is the passion from prose/poesy, gone is the irrational from life – HOW CAN WE EVER LIVE, OH NOE. Bitch, please.

I cannot be but irritated. Heard too many similar arguments and neither of them made sense once you gave them benefit of a doubt. It’s no wonder Le Brun despises deconstruction (and an entire post-structuralist “movement”). Deconstruction effectively disenchants everything she holds dear and somehow important. It’s hard to put de Sade on the throne of anything once you start picking it apart. And it’s not that it cannot be picked apart but doing so means, according to Le Brun, being too rational and that is a big no-no which leads to death and destruction of high and mighty culture which supposedly existed yet somehow we forgotten all about it.

“The Reality Overload” has its valid points. Especially when it speaks about overabundance of ‘artists’ and academic ‘trends’ which rely heavily on a disfigured notion of a metaphor. These things are noticeable to anyone who dabbles within the ‘cultural field’ which has indeed become something of a laughing matter (reasons are clear – too many academic degrees from the fields of art and social sciences are being ‘produced’ every year and these people have to ‘validate’ their existence somehow). Le Brun uses this to illustrate her concept of a Reality Overload and all would be well if it weren’t for the thing that illustrations work, but the concept does not. It’s hard to take it to heart when you cherry pick arguments supporting it.

Let’s work with it for a bit. According to Le Brun Reality Overload becomes obvious with overabundance of information. Overabundance of information, together with discursive strategies, leads to an inevitable degradation of quality caused by degradation of an ability to think critically. Everything is the same and, because of that, everything is identical. The thing that stands up needs to be cut down so that it doesn’t mess up finely tuned mechanism of cultural (re)production. Passion - creative, erotic, inventive, imaginational – is banished from this world because its products can’t be rationalized, typified and reproduced. Stroke of genius is something that doesn’t have a formula (Hollywood learned this long time ago though they are still trying to find a formula for hit/cult movie).

One can debate about these concepts and the logic that ties them together. Though some things stand up as obvious upon closer scrutiny of Le Brun’s text. One of them is the fear i.e. fear of the future. Annie Le Brun doesn’t know how to move within the internet era so she disqualifies it as alien, almost castrating mechanism that somehow prevents us from accessing our imaginative minds. Connectability is a big enemy in her mind though she fails to take notice of gigantic potential of the new era. What is De Sade without readers? Let’s concur that he really is some gargantuan figure in cultural history, yet without people drawn into his world he is nothing but a lone and forgotten weirdo who died a long time ago. Connectability is nothing but a tool to make de Sade more accessible to the world.

Amongst other things two more deserve comment. Le Brun antagonizes mechanics of cultural reproduction. ‘They’ force us, ‘they’ create, ‘they’ brainwash – all these mystical ‘them’ obviously have some godlike powers which prevents us from forming our own opinions, thoughts and aesthetic systems. By feeding us with tons of garbage, somehow it is implied that we’re not able to pick them apart? Yes, twenty years ago if you had only one cinema in your hometown you were usually force fed Hollywood garbage. Today? Hello world of torrents, hello world of Vatican library accessible online, hello everything we as a civilization ever made. Pick your own way around it. I personally find this beautiful. Not that we’re not castrated by this, we’re empowered more than ever to build our own worlds, more alien than De Sade could ever imagine.

Le Brun tries to show degradation of imagination and passion by a nice, cherry-picking, move. She uses it to ‘disqualify’ contemporary erotic literature as nothing more than a mechanical reproduction of words. While doing so, so willfully choses to forget about an entire world of books that are not ‘mere reproduction of words’. It’s the same logic that was prominent in attacks on any form of pop-culture. By showing the worst examples you’re to show metonymy. Bad part means that an entire thing is wrong. By disqualifying, I don’t know, Call of Duty as a money grabbing, non-inventive, mechanical programming you’re failing to notice an entire world of beautifully creative indie games which show skill, imagination, love and passion, all of the things that supposedly disappeared from our world.

Le Brun is pissed off at ‘official culture’ and much of what she’s saying is true. Yet, ‘official culture’ is nothing – that’s the whole beauty of dreaded ‘connectable man’ – it’s a non-place from which Le Brun cannot avert her gaze. If she would only look elsewhere, she would manage to see everything she think is gone.