The Vital Illusion by Jean Baudrillard

Author:Jean Baudrillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, SOC026000, Social Science/Sociology/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2001-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

In the past the virtual was intended to become actual: actuality was its destination. Today the function of the virtual is to proscribe the actual. Virtual history is here in place of real history; the information-replica stands for, stands in for, the definitive absence of that real history. Hence our lack of responsibility—both individual and collective—since we are already, by virtue of information, beyond the event, which has not taken place.

We might speak here of a kind of “event strike,” to use Macedonio Fernandez’s expression. What does this mean? That the work of history is over. That the work of mourning is beginning. That the system of information has been substituted for that of history and is starting to produce events in the same way that Capital is starting to produce Work. Just as labor, under these circumstances, no longer has any significance of its own, the event produced by information has no historical meaning of its own.

This is the point where we enter the transhistorical or transpolitical—that is to say, the sphere where events do not really take place precisely because they are produced and broadcast “in real time,” where they have no meaning because they can have all possible meanings. We have, therefore, to grasp them now not politically but transpolitically—that is to say, at the point where they become lost in the void of information. The sphere of information is like a space where, after events are deprived of their meaning, they receive an artificial gravity, where, after being flash-frozen politically and historically, they are restaged transpolitically, in real—that is to say, perfectly virtual—time. We might speak in the same way of the transeconomic sphere—in other words, the sphere where classical economics gets lost in the void of speculation, just as History gets lost in the void of information.

But, in the end, perhaps we have to frame all these problems in terms other than the obsolete ones of alienation and the fatal destiny of the subject. And it is precisely the Ubuesque side of this technological outgrowth, of this proliferating obscenity and obesity, of this unbridled virtuality, which induces us to do so. Our situation is a wholly pataphysical one—that is to say, everything around us has passed beyond its own limits, has moved beyond the laws of physics and metaphysics. Now, pataphysics is ironic, and the hypothesis that suggests itself here is that, at the same time that things have reached a state of paroxysm, they have also reached a state of parody.

Might we advance the hypothesis—beyond the heroic stage, beyond the critical stage—of an ironic stage of technology, an ironic stage of history, an ironic stage of value? This would at last free us from the Heideggerian vision of technology as the effectuation and final stage of metaphysics; it would free us from all retrospective nostalgia for being, and we would have, instead, a gigantic, objectively ironic vision of the entire scientific and technological process that would not be too far removed from the radical snobbery, the post-historical Japanese snobbery Kojève spoke of.

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