Seagull Books (2009)
I.
Every day, one reads of yet another plant or animal facing extinction, or of natural resources rapidly being depleted [a].
But extinction, of course, is a natural phenomenon; just as the exhaustion of reserves is a physical process, whereas disappearance - at least in the sense that Baudrillard uses the term with reference to human beings - is something very different.
For Baudrillard, just as reality vanishes into the virtual, man disappears as a result of his own idealistic transformation of the world:
"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." [b]
II.
Whilst our mode of disappearance may perhaps be an art, nevertheless the modern transformation of the world into something that can be unambiguously known, was accomplished via science and technology.
It's one of those ironic things that just as we create a world of value and meaning for ourselves, a world over which we can exercise mastery with our minds and our machines, we set the stage for our own disappearance.
"But doubtless we have to go back even further - as far as concepts and language. By representing things to ourselves, by naming them and conceptualising them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality." [11]
Things - objects - do not like to be dragged into the light and subject to human analysis; it is their nature to withdraw into ontological darkness and thus retain a reality that always exceeds their relations to other objects (including us) [c].
The moment a thing is identified - "the moment representation and concepts take hold of it" [12] - that's the precise moment when it begins to lose its volcanic vitalism and begins its disappearance.
Just as, on the other hand, the moment concepts or ideas (but also fantasies, dreams, and desires) achieve their realisation, the game is up and they begin to dissolve before your very eyes. That's why one should be careful of what one wishes for ...
III.
One should also be careful not to achieve one's full potential.
For despite what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his followers teach, "what is proper to human beings is not to realise all their possibilities" [15], but, rather, recognise their limitations, celebrate their imperfections, and hold on to those negative traits that we need to exist as mortals (only God doesn't cast a shadow).
Self-actualisation - driven by "an impulse to go as far as possible" [19] in the expression of all one's power and potential - may promise a type of immortality, but this extreme endeavour results ultimately in the "virtual disappearance of the human species" [19].
In other words, the dream of defeating death and becoming immortal results in a fate that is arguably worse than death.
IV.
Having said that, Baudrillard at this point makes a sort of U-turn and suggests we might, after all, conceive of disappearance differently: "as a singular event and the object of a specific desire, the desire to no longer be there, which is not negative at all" [21].
In staging our own disappearance as a material art (beyond aesthetics), we might be able to "see what the world looks like in our absence [...] or to see, beyond the end, beyond the subject, beyond all meaning, beyond the horizon of disappearance, if there is still an occurrence of the world, an unprogrammed appearance of things" [21] [d].
In other words, is it possible to see the world as it is and not as the real world (which is only ever a world of representation)?
It's an interesting question ... Perhaps one that only those artists who know how to "play on their disappearance, make use of it as a living form, exploit it by excess" [22] will find the answer to [e].
The trick, ultimately, is "to disappear before dying and instead of dying" [25]; not to artificially survive.
V.
This is important: "nothing just vanishes; of everything that disappears there remain traces" [25] (my italics).
Think of the Cheshire Cat, for example, "whose grin still hovers in the air after the rest of him has vanished" [25]. Or think of God - he's been dead for ages, but, his shadow, as Nietzsche says, will still be seen for thousands of years (and I wonder if mankind will ever have done with his judgement) [f].
Baudrillard writes:
"We may thus suppose that everything that disappears - institutions, values, prohibitions, ideologies, even ideas - continues to lead a clandestine existence and exert an occult influence, as was said of the ancient gods who, in the Christian era, assumed the form of demons. Everything that disappears seeps back into our lives in infinitesimal doses, often more dangerous than the visible authority that ruled over us."
That's true: we are masters at internalising everything and allowing the invisible souls of the dear departed to find a home within us; the dead they do not die and, ultimately, nothing ever disappears.
Notes
[a] The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently has over 47,000 species on their Red
List of Threatened Species: click here.
The United Nations Environment Programme produced a 2024 report on the manner in which the global economy is consuming ever more natural resources, at an ever faster rate: click here.
[b] Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, trans. Chris Turner, with images by Alain Willaume (Seagull Books, 2009), p. 9. Future page references to this book will be given in the post itself.
This text - one of the last that Baudrillard wrote before his death in March 2007 - was originally published in French as Pourquoi tout n'a-t-il pas déjà disparu? (L'Herne, 2007).
When I first read this little book fifteen years ago I wasn't sure I understood it. In fact, I'm not sure I correctly understand it even now, so readers are advised that the notes assembled here may give a mistaken interpretation of (or false gloss to) Baudrillard's thinking.
[c] Graham Harman has discussed this at great length and in great detail in his work; see, for example, his 2018 book Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books).
I have discussed this book in a post dated 24 March 2018: click here. And for another post discussing Harman's philosophy, click here.
[d] Later on, Baudrillard writes: "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?" [52].
One thinks of Rupert Birkin's dream of a post-human world of nothing but grass and the odd hare sitting up in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920).
[e] Baudrillard remains sceptical about the role that art will play. He writes:
"Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance - not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice [...] It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it as disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and [...] continues in its trajectory in a vegetative state." [22]
The same, of course, might be said of politics today.
[f] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §108.
Part 2 of this post (sections VI-XII) can be read by clicking here.
