The Vital Illusion

Rating:
Summary: Use your Illusions (part one)
Review: Although it is illuminating to peruse the range of philosophic thought throughout the ages, from pre-Socratic ponderings to Kant's analytical deconstructions, I cannot help but find many of these famed thinkers to be more interesting as _historical thought_ rather than paradigm-paths to set one's foot upon. Such is the price of time, of evolving cultural consciousness. Thinkers of the past are intimately tied to the world as it existed then; their procedures and puzzles grow and gel into the vast soup of the hyper-spun mind-verse, annexed and assimilated like so much else-; whereas, in this accelerated, pre-apocalyptic era, the crow caw of the post-postmodern ("meta" squared) philosopher addresses, to the forward-thinking inclination, the challenges party-crashing their way into the 21st century, the horrific changes already in embryonic phase...

French harbinger Jean Baudrillard is among my favorites of the current era's post-post prophets, the unflinching eye and unwavering cry to detail the vertigo of the so-called 'hyper-real.' Baudrillard isn't the easiest read: the good professor seems to prefer oblique allusion over clear-cut definition, in both idea and grammatical usage: an effective stratagem for expressing the nightmarish quagmire of the impending future, with all of its possible ramifications, but rarely something to breeze through at the bedside. In The Vital Illusion, however, Baudrillard (or, perhaps, his translator) has set his syntax to a more digestible format, and only occasionaly do these essays slip into metaspake-insinuation. Thankfully, the content of the book itself is not affected; indeed, this more straightforward approach lends a subtle dynamism to the ideas expressed.

The essays, in brief:

1. The Final Solution: Here Baudrillard casts to us, scions of the 21st century, the snake-eyes dice-roll of ultimate conformity: the chilling concept of living in "the Hell of the Same." As science strives toward the seductive apple of immortality, its juicy flesh of *primal desire* will be devoured and irrevocably transformed, via cloning and genetic refinement, into a frightening husk of its original promise, the metaphorical allure stripped clean, the remains w/out nourishment or natural constituent. With the eventual dominance of the 'artificial continuum,' the human element will be subsumed in turn, the core motivational urges of sex and death eradicated by their very obsoleteness, all original thought and spiritual cognizance reduced in turn to a cold white tunnel-vision, the zero-essence of widespread cultural monothought.

Worse, the blind arrow of this post-modern scientific drive exterminates the raw and the flaw of evolution for the controlled security of moderated, non-trauma sub-being: the clone: a fearsome involution. The key motivation here appears to be a surrealistic *suicide-drive* -- the collective unease at our historical prominence and ever-expanding ability: our subsequent subconscious _need_ to 'ready ourselves' for the impending, inevitable catastrophe resultant of this era's technological excesses. Thus, the Final Solution: sacrificing the whole diversity of specie, and indeed the fertile loam of the earth itself, for the Pandora's Box of limitless experimentation, a grand scale kamikaze wet-dream--; via commodity, cancerous replication, clone-reproduction and the causality therein, Nietzche's "human, all too human" factor erodes before the immortal-coil ambition, and Baudrillard warns that the consequential artificial hegemony will transform mankind into a mere genetic simulation of life -- "the Hell of the Same," ad infinitum... and ironically, our only remedy will be the survival-mechanistic *resistance* that both propels and retards human advancement.

2. The Millennium: Our philosopher endeavors, in a rather round about sort of way, to express how time has been mapped: our past by nostalgic reminisce and sentimental bias; our present in the glaring symbol-fractures of liquid quartz crystal; and our future...ah, the future...predicted and devoured accordingly, with all "current events" anticipated and presented with bare resemblance to the actual occurrence -- the event itself overhyped and saturated to the point of non-entity. Baudrillard also addresses the unfortunate mass confusion that even now pervades the knowledge-explosion of the mediaverse: how the loss of "utopia" and ideological theism has jeopardized the *vital illusion* of structure, shipwrecking the common man upon the unkind shores of nihilism. Alas, the cynical result (a mental entropy in and of itself) has already [irrevocably?] infected the mainstream herd mentality of both the "real" and its cyberspace equivalent.

In this new millennium, as the simulacra outstrips the original in replication/expansion, increasingly *clone-like* symbols -- of religion, commodity, etc. -- emerge to the forefront: and the original intent of these icons are diluted/raped and/or mutated into strange monstrosities of blind belief... A (very prominent) past example: the Nazis corrupting and in turn stigmatizing the hakenkreuz swastika of Hindu cosmology, transforming a powerful symbol of cyclical movement into a brand of hatred, genocide, and reactionary fear.

3. The Murder of the Real: Finally Baudrillard settles back into the comfort-zone of post-modernism, indulging in the safety net of metaspeak to detail a very un-safe concept: that the 'Real' is not only dead, it has vanished completely: the 'rules' terminated before the law of 'higher' realms (the virtual, for one, with all its criminal possibility & sterile generalization of humanistic motifs); all ideological structure hopelessly corrupted & replicated to the abstract point of having almost no resemblance with its original intent; language melted down to the base-communication of keyboard strokes and emoticon glyphs. The 'murder' is that of human *conception*, slain before eruptive expansion: there is simply too much -Real- to assimilate! It no longer can be catalogued and calculated; chaos has begun to rule. Shiva is on the dance-floor, folks, and Baudrillard suggests it might be better to slip on our suede shoes and boogie down to the beat, to celebrate disappearance and obsolescence as an artistic form, rather than succumb to the black-hearted ruin of spiritual capitulation. Shape chaos! We all do it anyway, to a greater or lesser extent...

...and so forth. Even if you don't agree with this bleak vision of the future, Baudrillard at least gives us entertaining concepts to introduce at the next dinner-party. Shake up the routine of endless pop-culture riffing, corrupt the small-talk routines! The crow's caw is never welcome, but neither can it be truly *ignored*.

Rating:
Summary: A Vital Voice in an Illusive World
Review: For those who are familiar with Baudrillard, being told that the Real is being murdered before our very eyes will come as no surprise. After all, let's be fair; Jean Baudrillard has been saying the same thing for quite some time now, and you shouldn't expect any surprises here. You've heard it before, in "The Transparency of Evil," "Simulacra and Simulation," "The Perfect Crime," et cetera.

Still, if before his position was characterized by what we might call a sort of nostalgia, now it would seem to be panic. You get the impression that Baudrillard suddenly realized that he may actually be right, and that this being the case, he may need to be understood by more than just his cult following and a few academics. The prose is uncharacteristically clear for Baudrillard, and although this may be in part because the selections are part of a series of lectures, one gets the impression that there is more to it. He wants to be understood.

At times, one cannot help but be reminded of Sci/Fi by the likes of Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard. It is hard not to think of the latter's novel "High Rise," for example, when Baudrillard asks apropos of cloning, "Have we come...to the same point at which animal species, when they reach a critical saturation point, automatically switch over to a kind of collective suicide?". That is, is cloning really, despite appearances, a symptom of what Freud called the Death Drive?

This is great cultural commentary. Thought-provoking and unsettling. For those of you who are new to Baudrillard, but were fascinated by "The Matrix," this book might be a great place to start investigating some of the possibilities that film suggests. As for those who, like me, know just enough Baudrillard to be dangerous (to themselves mostly), this might just be the most accessible thing by him in English that you've read so far.

4 Stars for content. 5 stars for presentation.