This is what Jean Baudrillard writes: “Everyone can dream …of a perfect duplication or multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams, and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into the real.” * Among those who seek to make copies of humans are the molecular archaeologists who reconstruct the bodily forms of our long-lost cousins, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. The latest attempt by Liran Carmel and David Gokhman and colleagues at Hebrew University in Jerusalem involved taking the pinkie bone of a Denisovan girl and turning it into a recognizable face.**
I know what you’re doing right now. You’re looking at your little finger and asking yourself, “Do I really look like that?” But no, this isn’t a joke. Using DNA hypermethylation to infer gene downregulation and making comparisons with chimps and Neanderthals reconstructed through similar processes, the researchers think they have a pretty good idea of what the girl looked like.
So, is Baudrillard making a valid point? Before we had this reconstruction, we could dream of what the Denisovan girl looked like and what her kind of human looked like in general. Of course, we have the same limitations that our own diversity imposes on making copies: Some of us are tall, some short, some thin, some porky, etc. Maybe some distant day, some geneticist or molecular archaeologist will find your pinkie and reconstruct what you “might have” looked like. As that future construction comes into reality, will it destroy what you once were?
With all reconstructions, whether they are events or people, the simulacra take on their own reality. I submit that any historical reconstruction has a character of its own that cannot be a dream “forced,” to use Baudrillard’s term, “into the real.” All history is revisionist. The attempts today to rewrite history are as all historical reconstructions have been: Simulacra in the historian’s image, a reflection of a world contemporary with the historian. And that’s unfortunate, but it is the way of the world. Every generation rewrites history in its own image.
Whether or not the Denisovan girl’s image is what she looked like is irrelevant. We have a general idea that she and her relatives had a wider jaw than we, that her fingers might have been longer on average than ours, and that her brow was slanted à laNeanderthals skulls. But look around at your contemporaries. Can you make the generalizations into the “real” when there are so many different versions of us? You probably say, “No.” But someone in our future will make a model, and that model will acquire a reality of its own, a character that some members of a generation hence would recognize, but that you wouldn’t.
But what of “history in the making,” the process of recording something that one contemporary to the event witnesses? Well, now we butt our heads up against the problem of observation and bias. Various dubious accounts of events and people circulate over the Web, in magazines and newspapers, and at parties. In all accounts, the process involves some modifier. Choosing one adjective over another can make the difference in the telling and also in the level that the simulacra represent truthfully the person or event. Modifiers? That’s just the way we are. I can think of many examples, but a glaring one was the description of the OJ Simpson trial that gripped the American public as it was daily broadcast on national TV. The twentieth-century trial was called “the trial of the century.” And I think that however tragic were the circumstances that led to that trial (the deaths of two people, Simpson’s ex-wife and Ronald Goldman), the Nuremburg trials had to take precedence as the “trial of the century.” Given the short memories and the lack of historical education that permeate the masses, it’s understandable that trials like that of Rudolph Sacco and Vanzetti (1921), Hauptmann (1935), and those Nuremburg trials (1945, 46) had by the 1990s faded from the culture.
And if we watch TV and read newspapers today, we find ourselves in what I call Contemporary Revisionism. Reporting appears to be based primarily on political agendas. So, if in some distant future, someone attempts to reconstruct you, as Liran Carmel and David Gokhman have reconstructed the Denisovan girl, will the people of the time say, “Oh! So that’s what she looked like and that’s what she did. It’s a wonder that her kind survived as long as they did. Hmmn. And we learned all that just from looking at her little finger.”
The next time you read any news story or watch its TV version, look for or listen for the adjectives. They shape how we see the current world, and if they survive as a record, they will shape how the future world views us. Every reporter with an agenda looks only at a pinkie finger and writes the holistic simulacrum.
*Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 95.
**Price, Michael. Ancient DNA puts a face on the mysterious Denisovans, extinct cousins of Neanderthals. Science. September 19, 2019. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/ancient-dna-puts-face-mysterious-denisovans-extinct-cousins-neanderthals also https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/mysterious-human-ancestor-gets-face-body/ Accessed September 19, 2019.
Original article in Cell. Vol. 179:1, pp. 180-192. September 19, 2019. PDF at https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2819%2930954-7
I know what you’re doing right now. You’re looking at your little finger and asking yourself, “Do I really look like that?” But no, this isn’t a joke. Using DNA hypermethylation to infer gene downregulation and making comparisons with chimps and Neanderthals reconstructed through similar processes, the researchers think they have a pretty good idea of what the girl looked like.
So, is Baudrillard making a valid point? Before we had this reconstruction, we could dream of what the Denisovan girl looked like and what her kind of human looked like in general. Of course, we have the same limitations that our own diversity imposes on making copies: Some of us are tall, some short, some thin, some porky, etc. Maybe some distant day, some geneticist or molecular archaeologist will find your pinkie and reconstruct what you “might have” looked like. As that future construction comes into reality, will it destroy what you once were?
With all reconstructions, whether they are events or people, the simulacra take on their own reality. I submit that any historical reconstruction has a character of its own that cannot be a dream “forced,” to use Baudrillard’s term, “into the real.” All history is revisionist. The attempts today to rewrite history are as all historical reconstructions have been: Simulacra in the historian’s image, a reflection of a world contemporary with the historian. And that’s unfortunate, but it is the way of the world. Every generation rewrites history in its own image.
Whether or not the Denisovan girl’s image is what she looked like is irrelevant. We have a general idea that she and her relatives had a wider jaw than we, that her fingers might have been longer on average than ours, and that her brow was slanted à laNeanderthals skulls. But look around at your contemporaries. Can you make the generalizations into the “real” when there are so many different versions of us? You probably say, “No.” But someone in our future will make a model, and that model will acquire a reality of its own, a character that some members of a generation hence would recognize, but that you wouldn’t.
But what of “history in the making,” the process of recording something that one contemporary to the event witnesses? Well, now we butt our heads up against the problem of observation and bias. Various dubious accounts of events and people circulate over the Web, in magazines and newspapers, and at parties. In all accounts, the process involves some modifier. Choosing one adjective over another can make the difference in the telling and also in the level that the simulacra represent truthfully the person or event. Modifiers? That’s just the way we are. I can think of many examples, but a glaring one was the description of the OJ Simpson trial that gripped the American public as it was daily broadcast on national TV. The twentieth-century trial was called “the trial of the century.” And I think that however tragic were the circumstances that led to that trial (the deaths of two people, Simpson’s ex-wife and Ronald Goldman), the Nuremburg trials had to take precedence as the “trial of the century.” Given the short memories and the lack of historical education that permeate the masses, it’s understandable that trials like that of Rudolph Sacco and Vanzetti (1921), Hauptmann (1935), and those Nuremburg trials (1945, 46) had by the 1990s faded from the culture.
And if we watch TV and read newspapers today, we find ourselves in what I call Contemporary Revisionism. Reporting appears to be based primarily on political agendas. So, if in some distant future, someone attempts to reconstruct you, as Liran Carmel and David Gokhman have reconstructed the Denisovan girl, will the people of the time say, “Oh! So that’s what she looked like and that’s what she did. It’s a wonder that her kind survived as long as they did. Hmmn. And we learned all that just from looking at her little finger.”
The next time you read any news story or watch its TV version, look for or listen for the adjectives. They shape how we see the current world, and if they survive as a record, they will shape how the future world views us. Every reporter with an agenda looks only at a pinkie finger and writes the holistic simulacrum.
*Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 95.
**Price, Michael. Ancient DNA puts a face on the mysterious Denisovans, extinct cousins of Neanderthals. Science. September 19, 2019. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/ancient-dna-puts-face-mysterious-denisovans-extinct-cousins-neanderthals also https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/mysterious-human-ancestor-gets-face-body/ Accessed September 19, 2019.
Original article in Cell. Vol. 179:1, pp. 180-192. September 19, 2019. PDF at https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2819%2930954-7
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