Screened Out by Jean Baudrillard

Author:Jean Baudrillard
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Popular Culture, Social Science
ISBN: 9781859846605
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2002-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

The Double Extermination

Today we do not think the virtual, the virtual thinks us. And to us this elusive transparency, which separates us definitively from the real, is as unintelligible as is the window pane to the fly which bangs against it without understanding what separates it from the outside world. The fly cannot even imagine what is setting this limit on its space. Similarly, we cannot even imagine how much the virtual – as though running ahead of us – has already transformed all the representations we have of the world. We cannot imagine this, for it is the particularity of the virtual that it puts an end not just to reality, but to the imagining of the real, the political and the social; not just to the reality of time, but to the imagining of the past and the future (this is what is known, in a kind of black humour, as ‘real time’). So we are far from having understood that information’s entry on the scene spelt an end to the unfolding of history, that the coming of artificial intelligence spelt an end to thought, etc. The illusion we still harbour about all these traditional categories – including our illusion of ‘opening ourselves up to the virtual’, as if it were a real extension of all potentialities – is the illusion of the fly unflaggingly banging up against the window pane. For we still believe in the reality of the virtual, whereas the virtual has already virtually scrambled all the pathways of thought. To shed a little light on this confusion, I shall take the most delicate example – most delicate precisely because it arises out of the most horrifying, unintelligible event in our modern history: the holocaust and those who deny it. The holocaust denial proposition is, in itself, absurd. This is so obvious that the crucial question becomes: why is there any need to plead the truth against the holocaust-deniers? Why can the question of the existence of the gas chambers even be raised? In other ages it never could have been. Those who contest holocaust denial never ask themselves why such denial is possible; they content themselves with vehement indignation. Now, the very fact of having to defend the historical reality of the gas chambers as a moral cause, of having to defend ‘reality’ in general by a kind of political commitment, attests sufficiently to the change in register which has occurred where historical truth is concerned, and to the ways in which objectivity has been disrupted.

Where the holocaust-deniers are plainly absurd and wrong is when they themselves espouse realism and contest the objective, historical reality of the holocaust. In historical time, the event took place and the evidence is there. But we are no longer in historical time; we are now in real time, and in real time there is no longer any evidence of anything whatever. The holocaust will never be verified in real time. Holocaust denial is, therefore, absurd in its own

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