The Philosophy Hammer: Philosophy, Economics, Politics and Psychology Tested with a Hammer

175: Jean Baudrillard VII:
Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?
Summary by: Jeff McLaren

We humans have developed a new unique art of disappearing that is unconnected to “physical processes or natural phenomena.” Where other species may disappear, their disappearance, their extinction, would be due to exhaustion of resources and/or extermination—but this is not our disappearance; this is not our fate.

For Baudrillard “the real world begins, in the modern age, with the decision to transform the world, and to do so by means of science, analytical knowledge and the implementation of technology”. In other words the real world begins when we start to see the world as a separate from us, when we hold ourselves to be outside it and start to look at it like a specimen, a puzzle, or a tool. “[t]he real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at the very same time as it begins to exist.” In one sense language has always been doing this by naming things but the scientific revolution raised this to an unlimited degree. When something is named it is set apart from everything else; it gets a new reality. In some cases the new named reality begins to vanish the moment it is named (for example “class” and “globalization”). “Thus the real vanishes into the concept. But what is even more paradoxical is the exactly opposite movement by which concepts and ideas…vanish into their very fulfillment. When, thanks to the very deployment of a limitless technology, both mental and material human beings are capable of fulfilling all their potentialities and, as a consequence, disappear, giving way to an artificial world that expels them from it, to an integral performance that is, in a sense, the highest stage of materialism.” Consider that machines and technology can fulfill their potentiality but that we humans can never fulfill our potentiality – we are too complex and conflicted; it is part of our human condition. The deployment of technology is potentially infinite but the expansion of human potential is not likely to be. Therefore the trajectory of technology’s potential and human potential cross paths—at which point humans will be totally superfluous. “Thus, the modern world…driven on by the work of the negative, by the engine of contradiction, became…another world in which things no longer even need their opposites in order to exist….It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human…is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built in obsolescence, of the human race’s fulfillment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge.” There is nothing natural about this phase of human evolution. Our modern desire to go to limitless learning, deployment of technology, and power is bringing about our disappearance. “Which irresistibly brings to mind apoptosis, that process by which a cell is pre-programmed to die”.
There is some hope: “disappearance may be conceived differently: as a singular event and the object of a specific desire, the desire no longer to be there, which is not negative at all. Quite to the contrary, disappearance may be the desire to see what the world looks like in our absence (photography) or to see, beyond the end, beyond the subject, beyond all meaning, beyond the horizon of disappearance…an unprogrammed appearance of things. A domain of pure appearance, of the world as it is (and not of the real world, which is only ever the world of representation), which can emerge only from the disappearance, of all the added values.” Here lies a hint of a different strategy, an “art of disappearance,” which entails the “dissolution of values, of the real, of ideologies, of ultimate ends.” This art is a self-defense and a playing with these things.
This great disappearance takes the form “of the division of the subject to infinity, of a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality.” Whenever a part of who we are (such as our will, freedom, religion, art, etc.) simply just merges with how things are going then those things that make us who we are become superfluous. So, if your will is the will of the people or of the time or of the general course of events then your will has in this sense disappeared. Another example: “a religion which accommodates to the world, which attunes itself to the (political, social…) would, become superfluous.” The same applies to anything that fits reality rather than confronts reality. “One might argue, alternatively that there have been some positive disappearances: of violence, threats, illness or death, but we know that everything repressed or eliminated in this way results in a malign, viral infiltration of the social and individual body.”

Disappearing, just like appearing, is neither good nor bad. It is a fact of all things that live; it ought to have its proper dignity and impact.

“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination.” This is one sense in which the real disappears. Nominally the fascination is thought to be with the real that disappears but Baudrillard asks us to consider if the fascination might be with the disappearance itself rather than the real – like in a disappearing magic trick. From this new perspective, disappearance could still be viewed as a curse but the possibility opens up to view it as a happy retreat.

One of the best examples of the systematic disappearance of reality is in the move from the chemical/mechanical photograph to the digital/electronic image. “[T]he invention of the technical image in all its forms is our last great invention in the unremitting quest for an ‘objective’ reality, an objective truth to be mirrored to us by technology…It would seem that the mirror has got caught up in the game and has transformed everything into a virtual, digital, computerized, numerical ‘reality’—the destiny of the image being merely the tiny detail of this anthropological revolution.”

ON THE HEGEMONIC AND THE DIGITAL…

No human has ever achieved their full potential because everyone could have done better in at least one part of their lives. It is, however, part of technology’s character to fulfill and exhaust its full potential. The deployment of technology improves on and expands our human potential. While it may be that there is a limitless capacity to improve and deploy technology, it seems that human potential cannot be limitlessly increased. “At the end of this irresistible process, leading to a perfectly objective universe, which is…the supreme stage of reality, there is no subject any longer; there is no one there to see it. That world no longer has need of us, nor of our representation. And there is, indeed, no longer any possible representation of it.”

This is a new hegemony that we are driving to. One based on the “objectivity” of technological function. The move from a traditional photograph, produced in the world by human hands to a digital image “that comes straight out of the screen and becomes submerged in the mass of all the other images from screens. It is of the order of flow, and is a prisoner to the automatic operations of the camera. When calculation and the digital win out over form, when software wins out over the eye, can we still speak of photography?”

Where a photograph took material, care, and time to develop, a digital image is immaterial, whimsical, and instant. “It is the world and our vision of the world that is changed by this.” The traditional, grounded, human centric world is giving way to the new, ephemeral, techno-centric world.

The notion that digitalization “liberates” the real world and the photographic image is absurd. Digitalization confines (to the parameters of technology), makes predictable (within the bounds of software), and cheapens (by infinite replicability) all it touches. The photograph is “just one tiny example of what is happening on a massive scale in all fields—particularly in the fields of thought, concepts, language and representation. The same destiny of digitization looms over the world of the mind and the whole range of thought.”

“The—gigantic—illusion is to confuse thought with a proliferation of calculation….what is totally wrongheaded is to see the brain as a receiver, a synaptic terminal, a screen for brain imagery in real time….once you model the brain on computers, seeing it as a super machine in the image of other digital machines, then the brain and (virtual) reality simply interface, operate in a loop with, or mirror, each other in accordance with a single programme—the whole resulting in what we call Artificial Intelligence”.

In summary, “hegemony is nothing other than the reabsorption of any negativity in human affairs, the reduction to the simplest unitary formula, the formula to which there is no alternative, 0/1—pure difference of potential, into which the aim is to have all conflicts vanish digitally”.