Encounter with the Real

Wikileaks.

A point that is often discussed in psychoanalysis coming out of Freud and his notion of consciousness as a protective shell that protects the self from reality and later taken up by Lacan and then his bastard ideological son, Zizek, is that the real, reality is too powerful, too strong to be encountered in it's true form. We must then create fictions around ourselves in order to survive. Zizek then takes this idea a little further from it's Freudian and Lacanian interpreted origins and writies that it is the virtual, the fictions, that have become the read. That we cannot even encounter our own illusions for they have become the real. We continue to wrap ourselves in illusions that we cannot see. Thus, he often says, he looks for the reality in the virtual. That the virtual shows reality.

Herein lies Wikileaks. Wikileaks, that strange and hated website created by the even stranger and even more hated Julian Assange. Wikileaks, legally or not, though probably not, began to leaks documents, private and confidental documents to the press regarding first some atrocities and friendly fire incidents in the middle east and much more recently private cable messages from the US to it's embassies. What these documents released include:
-Sarkozy is a slightly neurotic, image obsessed man with an entourage and tendencies to autocracy
-Saudi Arabia funds terror and it a major destabilizing force in the middle east
-The US and Canada have a strained friendship
-Fears about China.
-Direction to state department official to gather low level information of other diplomats.

Yikes. This news is both revelatory and shocking.

No, no it isn't.

For anyone who has ever read a newspaper and followed the course of events in these countries or read a spy novel, this news is by any means very du jour. Saudi Arabia is a dangerous nation that funds extremist with one hand while shunning it publicly. It is a country that is held together with religious beliefs despite a huge disparity in income. Canada and the US have many dividing points. China holds most of the US debt. Sarkozy, is well, Sarkozy. Diplomats have always spied on each other. That is the name of the game.

Thus what we have is another encounter with the real. The most shocking thing about the releases is that we know the truth. Everyone knew the truth, but no one "knew" the truth. The shallow surface of politics upon which the news channels floated and diplomancy worked has been revealed to the world. There are games which we thought occured that have been confirmed to us all.

At last, we have encountered the real. The under belly has been shown to us.

Or has it?

Funny, that this encounter with the real was brought to us through virtual means. It took virtual reality to leak this message to the public to expose the real. Then the new programs got a hold of it and started to investigate and show us more. But what did they show us? Words and documents that have never appeared in print, only as hacked bits of bytes from sources who we do not know. Where is the virtual now? Baudrillard once wrote about the speed of technology when he said that the virtual would outpace the events themselves, that the news would arrive before the events even occurred. Is that what we have here? We have been shown the truth, but is it really the truth? Have we been shown anything, or is this yet another virtual reality within a fiction within a fiction, a Borgesian maze with many rabbit holes with no exits.