A few minutes ago a friend mentioned in passing that he intends to be absent from Starbucks for a few days. He plans to be on a cruise in the Caribbean, out of the country, anticipating the inauguration of the Trump administration on January 20th.

Coincidentally I happened to be reading this text at the time I heard the information from him. A text written in the 1990s illuminates, lends a rationale for one choosing to be away on a timely cruise.

Also I was reminded of a time when film was the technology at hand, involving a negative, and the friction/resistance of the chemical process of developing, negative to print. The link to “the real” was palpable, a friction of time, of process, of reasoned consideration. Friction equals traction.

But, – the times have changed, to use a hackneyed phrase.

Nothing is news
if it does not pass through
that horizon of the virtual,
that hysteria of the virtual
-not in the psychological sense,
but in the sense of a compulsion
for what is presented,
in all bad faith,
as real to be consumed as unreal.

Photographic or cinematic images
still pass through the negative stage
(and that of projection),
whereas the TV image, the video image,
digital and synthetic,
are images without a negative,
and hence without negativity
and without reference.

They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end
to all negativity,
and thus to all reference to the real,
or to events.

At a stroke,

the contagion of images,
engendering themselves without reference
to a real
or an imaginary,
itself becomes virtually without limits,
and this limitless engendering
produces
information as catastrophe.

Is an image which refers only to itself still an image?
…that image
raises the problem
of its indifference to the world,
and thus of our indifference to it
-which is a political problem.

When television becomes
the strategic space of the event,
it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference…

The real object is wiped out
by news
-not merely alienated,
but abolished.

All that remains of it
are traces
on a monitoring screen.

The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard, trans. by Chris Turner, page 56, pub. 1994