Text: Jean Baudrillard - Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?
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.
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.
The moment a thing is named, the moment representation and concept take hold of it, it the moment when it begins to lose its energy – with the risk that it will become a truth or impose itself as ideology. It is when a thing is beginning to disappear that the concept appears.
That world is perfectly objective there is no one left to see it. Having become purely operational, it no longer has need of our representation. Indeed, there is no longer is any possible representation of it.
The human race would have left reality and history behind, where any distinction between the true and the false would have disappeared, ect.
But 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.
There are here the first fruits of an art of disappearance, of another strategy. The dissolution of values, of the real, of ideologies, of ultimate ends.
At any rate, nothing just vanishes: of everything that disappears there remain traces. The problem is what remains when everything has disappeared.
We might say, at a pinch, that consciousness (the will, freedom) is everywhere; it merges with the course of things and as a result, becomes superfluous.
Behind every images, something gas disappeared.
The destiny of the images being exemplary – for the 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 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 images being merely the tiny detail of this anthropological revolution.
The world no longer has need of us, nor of our representation. And there is, indeed, no longer any possible representation of it.
THE VIOLENCE DONE TO THE IMAGE
The ultimate violence done to the image it the violence of the cgi – computer generated image – which emerges ex nihilo from numerical calculation and the computer. This puts an end even to the imagining of the image, to its fundamental ‘illusion’ since, in computer generation, the referent no longer exist and there is no place even for the real to ‘take place’, being immediately produced as Virtual Reality.
The photographic act, this moment of disappearance of both the subject and the object in the same instantaneous confrontation – the shutter release abolishing the world and the gaze for a moment, a syncope, a petite mort that triggers the machine performance of the images – disappears in digital, numerical processing.
All leads inevitably to the death of photography as an original medium, with the analogue image it is the essence of photography that disappears.
What distinguishes the analogue image is that it is the place where a form of disappears, of distance, of ‘freezing’ of the world plays itself out.
Whereas, in the digital images, or, more generally, the cgi, there is no negative any longer, no ‘time lapse’. Nothing dies or disappears there.
The world producing itself as radical illusion, as pure trace, without simulation, without human intervention and, above all, not as truth, for, if there is one supreme product of human mind, that product is truth and objective reality.
The opposite perspective would be photography in its pure abstraction – cose mentale – envisioning an already photographed world in one’s head – without there being and need of materialize it in actual shots – by imagining the world precisely as the lens transforms it.
From fake photos of the dying Diana to studio-manufactured TV reports, the immediate live shot, taken at an irrevocable moment, is past and gone – last glimmer of actuality in a virtual dimension where images no longer have the slightest connection with time.
In the past, in the days of the ‘real world’, so the speak, photography was, as Barthes argued, witness to an insuperable absence, to something that has been present once and for all time. For its part, the digital photo is in real time and bears witness to something that did not take place, but whose absence signified nothing.
In this digital liberalization of the photographic act, in this impersonal process in which the medium itself generates mass-produced images, with no other intercession but the technical, we can see serially in its consummate form.
The images is there at the same time as the scene.
The time of emergence, failing which it is merely a random segment of the universal pixellization, which no longer has anything to do with the gaze, nor with the play of negative, the play of distance.
Fundamentally, the NORMAL human being always lives in a state of dependency or counter-dependency; he is dependent on his model (whatever it may be: model of action, social or imaginary project), but, at the same time, permanently challenging that model.
The ABNORMAL individual today is the one who now lives only in a unilateral positive adherence to what he is or what he does. Total subjection and adjustment (the perfectly normalized being).
If subjective irony disappears – and it disappears in the play of the digital – the irony becomes objective. Or it becomes silence.
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.
And that is where the potential tragedy, but the deep meaning for thought, comes of Baudrillard’s work. If we have already disappeared – 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 the reason for being – that fascination about what we do now know, and that which has disappeared?
Reference:
http://themoonbat.com/2012/12/13/book-review-why-hasnt-everything-already-disappeared/
http://tedhiebert.net/classes/bisia450/books/Baudrillard_WhyHasn%27tEverything.pdf