Book review: Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?

Today I am going to post the first of what I hope will be a major part of my blog; reviews (this will be a great way to force me to read/watch more). And what a better way to start than with some quick philosophy; Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?’

In one of his final texts before his death in 2007, in this piece, Baudrillard tackles the question of disappearance. For those who don’t know him, Baudrillard was a French post-modernist/post-structuralist philosopher. I hadn’t read much of his work before this text, but having read it now, I am definitely going to go and look for more.

First, to start off with the basics of reading this Baudrillard text. Unlike many philosophers (who I tend to try and read as much as possible), there is some ease in reading this text. In many ways, this piece feels like a short novel in the way it’s written, which makes it an ease to read. The text is only 70 pages long, and is mixed with images (which I am still trying to decipher) and is quick and easy to read. In fact, it is so enjoyable, that I read it twice. But you also have to be careful in reading this – it sometimes is a little too easy, meaning you can skip over the actual ideas. I gained so much more from this from the second reading than the first.

As I said, in this piece, Baudrillard deals with the issue of disappearance, or more importantly, why haven’t we all already disappeared?

What on Earth does that mean? He explains:

It’s a question of disappearance, not exhaustion, extinction or extermination. The exhaustion of resources, the extinction of species – these are physical processes or natural phenomena. And that’s the whole difference. The human species is doubtless the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Nature’s law. Perhaps even an art of disappearance.

To understand disappearance, Baudrillard first poses that we need to look at reality. Through understanding how we define what is real, we can understand how things disappear. However, it is also in the way that we understand reality that we create disappearance.

If we look closely, we see that 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–that is to say that it begins, in Hannah Arendt’s words, with the invention of an Archimedian point outside the world…by which the natural world is definitively alienated.

Baudrillard argues that in understanding reality in this form, understanding it from the point in which we transform the world, we have begun its process of disappearance. Through creating a reality that is connected to the virtual and the scientific, we have created a world in which we, as ‘natural beings’ have created our own disappearance.

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. We see, too, that it is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural about it.

In other words, humans have created their own disappearance by creating our own technological world – one that is beyond humans. We have seen our own demise, as it may be described, in creating a species that is technical, scientific, virtual…

And even once we’ve moved towards this scientific world, we continue to create more disappearance. Just look at one of the major foci of the Baudrillard’s piece – the image. Baudrillard argues that the digitalisation of the image has created the disappearance of the photograph, and in turn the disappearance of the object. With us now able to digitally construct images, we have ended the ‘singular presence’ of the object. Think about it this way: digitisation has meant we can create any object we want in the virtual world, meaning that the presence of the real object has disappeared.

Put together that sounds like a terrible fate – a species that has disappeared. But in reality, Baudrillard points out, disappearance is something we fantasise about – it is something within our bones.

Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning – this is what fascinates us.

Baudrillard explains something similar when talking about the image.

Behind every image something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination…

And that is where the potential tragedy, but the deep meaning for thought, comes of Baudrillard’s work. If we have already disappeared, has the very fascination in disappearance – the thing that keeps us going – disappeared with us? If there is no longer mystery behind the image – if it is just a digital reconstruction – has the fascination behind photography disappeared, hence eliminating the art itself? Alternatively, if we have mastered our universe, and obtained all knowledge and truth, have we gotten rid of the reason for being – that fascination about what we do now know, and that which has disappeared?