Baudrillard contends that the difference between reality and representation has collapsed, leaving us in a ‘hyperreality’ that is always and only a simulacrum.
Curiously, he seems not only to acknowledge the inevitability of this development, but to celebrate it. The cultural, in its widest sense, has reached a qualitatively new stage in which the very realm of meaning and signification has disappeared. We live in “the age of events without consequences” in which the ‘real’ only survives as formal category, and this, he imagines, is welcomed.
“Why should we think that people want to disavow their daily lives in order to search for an alternative? On the contrary, they want to make a destiny of it...to ratify monotony by a grander monotony.” If there should be any ‘resistance’, his prescription for that is similar to that of Deleuze, who would prompt society to become more schizophrenic. That is, it consists wholly in what is granted by the system: “You want us to consume — O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose.” This is the radical strategy he names ‘hyperconformity’.
This most extreme of the postmodern theorists, now himself a top-selling cultural object, has referred to the “ominous emptiness of all discourse,” apparently unaware of the phrase as an apt reference to his own vacuities.
And in case you haven't been paying attention there is a distinct lack of consequentialism floating around right now.
Spaghettification will do that to you. I date it from a year or so ago - late 2025 for sure.
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