Our Enigmatic World
Several days ago I offered a short quote from Baudrillard in an email to several friends. The objection was made that I had not given a context to ease understanding of the admittedly obscure lines. Once again here is an excerpt from Baudrillard’s essay Radical Thought. Added context would not make his words more understandable. As Baudrillard notes the glitch happens to be in our habitual ways of thought, the ruts left behind by the conventions of our education, the unquestioned assumptions of our culture. We learned by the example of others that consciousness is a picture book of reality. The default is: “what you see, is what you get.” Baudrillard suggests that “what you see” is something else entirely, by no means an echo of reality. What I see before me, this glowing LCD screen, and everything else in the room is a post processing product of my mind, a frenetic paste-up from the basement storage if you will. My and your humanity resides, — in the resistance, the challenge afforded by critical acceptance of these objective- illusions. Difference, resistance, conflict is key, – not a group-sing of kumbaya.
Belief, especially the religious variety, are superfluous to survival according to Baudrillard. Our world, such as it is, is the arena in which we must survive. And the inevitable friction arises from many editions, the many possible worlds… Why that’s “par for the course.”
Please forgive the metaphor…
The most powerful instinct of man
is to be in conflict with truth and with the real.
It is not true that in order to live
one has to believe in one’s own existence.
There is no necessity for that.
No matter what, our consciousness is never the echo
of our own reality, of an existence set in “real time.”
But rather, it is an echo in “delayed time,”
the screen of the dispersion of the subject and its identity
-only in our sleep, our unconscious, and in our death
are we identical to ourselves.
Consciousness which is totally different from belief
is more spontaneously the result of a challenge to reality,
the result of accepting objective illusion
rather than objective reality.
This challenge is more vital to our survival
and to the human species than the belief in reality and in existence
which always refers to spiritual consolations
pertaining to another world.
Our world is such as it is,
but that does not make it more real in any respect.
—Jean Baudrillard Radical Thought, pub. 1995
The essay Radical Thought may be obtained as a pdf CLICK HERE.
