In Baudrillard, reality and thought are one. I do not agree that hyperreality bears no relation to reality (6). The relation is evolutionary and I think Baudrillard would agree, to the extent that we do not get caught up in causal historicizing. Further, he distinguishes hyperreality to reality to point to the tendency of human thought and to trace its development. If not only to distinguish hyperreality from another mode of thinking, why not just call it reality if it is what is? Beyond this, it is difficult to criticize writing characterized by the fleeting, a writing that constantly points to neutrality and to disappearance. I both like and dislike (funny it should have this effect) his writing for his assumption that humanity is a large collective within which difference is eliminated. Moreover, even while he takes this perspective, he accounts for a conception of difference, as if no matter how homogenous humanity becomes, there is always “the trait of reversion—the single ironic smile that effaces the whole discourse” (163). My problem (because I can not criticize) takes root in his preoccupation with “the big picture,” with analyzing events in terms of the collective. The idea of death pervades his essays, but his writing is preoccupied with larger systems, with the collective, and with death as something that occurs in the realm of ideas. Therefore, I have difficulty determining how he understands the physical death of the individual body.
Baudrillard seems to account for death as imagined, as something the system (and power) confronts itself with in order to avoid it. He seems to assume that one’s understanding that the crowd is immortal should supersede one’s understanding (and one’s fear) of individual death. Does it follow that our understanding that we are the collective and not a distinguishable part of it should efface any fear of our individual death? While I agree that it is a preoccupation with origins and with ends (and I add to this: fear of the end) that leads to ideology, I notice Baudrillard refrains from moralizing on the effect of ideology. I could say his writing tempts the reader into ideological thought only to shake the reader out of it, but I would only be projecting my own ideological thinking onto his work. His vocabulary of metastasizing leukemia (32) to describe the human race begs the reader to blow the whistle of morality. However, Baudrillard, blurring determinism and freewill, questions the reader’s temptation to think of human beings in terms of redemption and “the fall.” My temptation is to assume that thinking in terms of binary, and thus divisiveness—the foundation of ideological systems—leads to suffering. Further, my temptation is to see war and suffering as “bad,” as things to be avoided, whereas, while Baudrillard is careful not to reason away suffering, he posits that these phenomena are manifestations of the system itself.
My feeling is that a society that perpetuates itself on the basis of fear is bound for destruction. Baudrillard would say this is itself an “imaginary of the end” (161). According to Baudrillard, this fear—nuclear deterrence, for example—is precisely what prevents our (self-)destruction. At the risk of being too bold in an interpretation of Baudrillard: perhaps divisiveness and fear are intrinsic to human thought and human hyperreality—part of our evolution—not something to struggle against or to overcome. The key may be in a confusion of our fear of ideological death and our fear of physical death. Perhaps in a more evolved human society, war amongst humans will be fought as in a game of chess, purely in the mind. After all, our mind and ideas are intrinsically linked to our physical experience. To some extent, they shape our realities, or hyperrealities. Our fear seems linked to our passion, which for the moment, may be our saving evolutionary adaptation.
