Meditations: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

Careful readers may have picked up on the reference in the title of my previous post, which is a subtle nod to one of my favorite books by French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. “Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?” was Baudrillard’s final publication before he passed away in 2007.

This short essay was assigned reading in grad school. I mean, this was an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media, how could it not?

Baudrillard is a pretty easy read. His works have been expertly translated and I find them enjoyable and relaxing “meditations” on subjects that I care about. This particular book is nicely packaged with images by Alain Willaume.

I’ve never been completely sure what the book is really about. I think he is suggesting that we humans destroy everything we create, but not in the way we normally think of it. Instead, he is talking about the idea that the process of analysis of anything causes the thing being analyzed to somehow “disappear,” or maybe move from the real world to some virtualized version of it. He writes about the disappearance of anything man made, thoughts, ideas, forms, being removed from our reality as soon as we look at them.

I really love the part where he goes into how viewing the world through screens has accelerated this process. We used to take photographs through a viewfinder, and even that viewfinder caused us to augment our reality, but now with screen based devices, and always thinking of the world viewed through a screen, we’ve become even more removed, virtualized and transformed.

I think my favorite part of the book is in the first few pages where he mentions how our world, us, and everything we’ve created can be thought of as one big project. It’s because of our unique ability to intellectualize and have complex thoughts within our subconscious that we somehow decided to create things, and transform our reality into something we want vs. something we just experienced. Baudrillard suggests that the “real world” began as soon as we began to transform it though science, knowledge and technology. And so, there exists a paradox between the creation of the real world vs. its disappearance, which happens simultaneously. Noodle baked.

This idea has sat with me for years. I’ve come back to it over and over because I think it gets at the core of our humanity and raises the question of why in such a simple and profound way.

If you like short meditations on the world we live in paired with discussions about virtual reality and media, I highly recommend this book. It’s a nice Tuesday morning read, while sipping some coffee, before heading into your work-from-home, virtual reality office.