Analysis of Baudrillard's The Vital Illusion
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Contact the author. Spring, 2002. It's time to break out your dictionary and thesaurus, as sociologist Jean Baudrillard illustrates his paranoid and insightful view of the future in The Vital Illusion. The author discusses everything from how cloning terminates sex and death to how the end of the millenium will cause an end to society as we know it. An essentialist critic of postmodernism, Baudrillard views the computer screen as the fourth horseman of a Marxian apocalypse. His arguments of veracity and candor have much validity despite the fact that he argues from the opinion that the whole world is divorced from reality and that our postmodern world is no longer real, but only a simulation of the real. Throughout the book, the author chooses to make his points in the context of cloning, a new technology in this book's time (1981) that recently has grabbed media attention yet again. Describing what cloning leads to as a "cancerous metastasis" of the original model, Baudrillard paints a prophetic picture where sexual reproduction is not part of society and where clones are exactly the same. He leads to the conclusion that there will be no double, no mirror, but an endless 1+1+1+1 repeat. Baudrillard suggests that cloning will lead to repetitions of individuals. This is probably not the case, in my opinion. First of all, it is unlikely that humans will need or want to have genetic replicas of themselves when sexual reproduction is easier, less expensive, and still passes on the parents' genes. Furthermore, even though the old nature versus nurture argument has not been entirely settled, it remains obvious that nurture, environment, and experience create an individual and that genetics do not determine everything. So even if genetically identical individuals were produced, they would not be copies of each other. Another area that Baudrillard looks at is technology, where he views the emergence of new technology as cancerous in that they will eliminate human contact. For instance, in videoconferencing, there is only an alternating presence of one person and the other, whereas, in a real face to face encounter, there is a complex relation, in which each person is an actor at once both present and absent. “What happens when everything has been realized in modernity, when everything is virtually given?” Baudrillard insightfully asks. The question is crucial: Where does one go from there? That is one primary problem that technological dependence causes. In my opinion, Baudrillard hits the nail on the head when it comes to the dependence on technology in modern culture. Half of knowledge is finding it, and when we are dependent upon technology to find all of our answers for us, then “nothing moves anywhere from cause to effect.” With an end to technology comes a certain responsibility; Baudrillard wants us to live as humans instead of as robots. He seeks a responsible, educated populace with a high work ethic. In the current system we have built, per the sociologist, there is a “strong probability that systems will be undone by their systematicity.” Competition and survival of the fittest are what make us human. Eliminate these essentials and the whole point of humanity is erased. With technology comes dependence and with dependence comes lack of competition. Much of what Baudrillard has said resonates with me, but his presentation is too advanced for many of the audiences that he could reach. His language is too linguistic, his thoughts are too scattered, and his presentation is too presumptuous for the work to be a success. There is a great value in his research, but his presentation needs some work. He has painted himself to be a radical revolutionary – too radical even for my tastes. If he is too radical even for some radicals, one must question whether or not his goal is being attained in his compilation. Perhaps Baudrillard is afraid in the same way as those ancient adversaries of the autopsy. But, unfortunately (because I don’t want to agree with such a cynical idealist), I have to agree with much – though certainly not all – of what he wrote in The Vital Illusion. Baudrillard, like myself, has a fear that the observation of the workings of the human body, and the manipulation thereof, will result in the dissolution of the human spirit. He questions the media and technology, posing important questions regarding their validity. If not Baudrillard to pose these vital questions, then who? |
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