2
" 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. He is motivated and counter-motivated in the same movement. There is no need for psychology or psychoanalysis or, indeed, any human science for this. These sciences exist only to reconcile the irreconcilable. As a consequence, human beings do always both what they need to for their model to succeed and all that is necessary for it to fail. Here again, there's no need of any weakening or perversion or death drive. It is from their primal duality that human beings derive this antagonistic energy. This is the normal human being and everything that sets about reconciling him with himself and finding a solution to the questions raised above is of the order of superstition and mystifIcation. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
4
" 4. Which gives rise to the truly mysterious question: how does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? And how can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it - not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? There is, however, a corollary to this: what is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnera-bility to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves ('rogue events', terrorism, but also the pictures from Abu Ghraib, etc.)? "
― Jean Baudrillard , Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
5
" THE GREAT DISAPPEARANCE IS NOT, then, simply that of the virtual transmutation of things, of the mise en abyme of reality, but that of the diversion of the subject to infinity, of a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality. 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. This is the analysis Cardinal Ratzinger (the Pope) himself made of religion: a religion which accommodates to the world, which attunes itself to the (politcal, social) world, becomes superfluous. It is for the same reason — because it became increasingly merged with objective banality — that art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
7
" For this really is the last straw, this aspiration to clear the way, with the digital, for the integral image, free from any real-world constraints. And we would not be forcing the analogy if we extended this same revolution to human beings in general, free now, thanks to this digital intelligence, to operate within an integral individuality, free from all history and subjective constraints ...
At the end-point of this rise of the machine, in which all human intelligence is encapsulated- a machine which is now assured of total autonomy as a result- it is clear that mankind exists only at the cost of its own death. It becomes immortal only by paying the price of its technological disappearance, of its inscription in the digital order (the mental diaspora of the networks). "
― Jean Baudrillard , Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
12
" But this is no longer a photograph and, liter-ally speaking, it is no longer even an image. These shots may be said, rather, to be part of the murder of the image. That murder is being perpetrated continually by all the images that accumulate in series, in 'thematic' sequences, which illustrate the same event ad nauseam, which think they are accumulating, but are, in fact, cancelling each other out, till they reach the zero degree of information.
There is a violence done to the world in this way, but there is also a violence done to the image, to the sovereignty of images. Now, an image has to be sovereign; it has to have its own symbolic space. If they are living images- 'aesthetic' quality is not at issue here- they ensure the existence of that symbolic space by eliminating an infinite number of other spaces from it. There is a perpetual rivalry between (true) images. But it is exactly the opposite today with the digital, where the parade of images resembles the sequencing of the genome. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
