LARP Politics and Hyperreality

”LARP comes after farce”

paul-sutherland-larp-politics-and

LARPing (Live Action Roleplay) is normally associated with cosplay communities, but in this article, LARPing is used as a tool to understand the current political landscape.

“LARP politics are politics with low stakes buy-in that one can put on like a costume, just to see if it fits. LARP politics are politics which are not fundamentally connected to self-identity because of an underlying belief that they aren’t real and can’t affect change. Furthermore, LARPing, as a phenomenon belonging to Baudrillard’s third order of the image, serves to reinforce the otherwise porous boundary between image and reality. As a mode of engagement in hyperreality, LARPing is a simulation that masks the absence of the real.”

The idea of wearing an ideology, embodying it is deeply compelling and reminiscent of some of the themes we look at in this course… You get to really feel the contradictions, failings, successes, of an ideology by embodying it.

However the risk present here is the low-commitment nature of the engagement with real world politics. The flattening and aestheticization of politics is especially dangerous now. LARPing is real, but detached at the same time. And when LARPing crashes headfirst into reality… the results are often strange and unpleasant (Jan 6th).

There’s also what I’m gonna call “copes,” which is what happens when one becomes way too invested in their framework and suddenly, instead of sussing out these contradictions, failings, successes, use cases and sewing them all together into one big patchwork sequence of ideas… one will find ways to bridge the contradictions.

leo wuz here >:)