The prophet of our desert
Unsurprisingly, my favourite take on Baudrillard's death comes from k-punk:
He was certainly melancholic, but what he mourned was not a lost reality but what he variously termed the illusory, symbolic exchange, the seductive. Reality disappeared at the same moment that art and artifice were eliminated. Deprived of its heightened reflection, extension and hyperbolization in myth, art and ritual, reality cannot sustain itself. It is the very quest to access reality in itself, without illusion, that generates the hyperreal implosion. Here, as Baudrillard long ago realised, reality TV is exemplary. Film an unscripted scene and you might not have art, but you do not have reality either. You have reality's uncanny double, its excrescence: simulation, precisely.
He was certainly melancholic, but what he mourned was not a lost reality but what he variously termed the illusory, symbolic exchange, the seductive. Reality disappeared at the same moment that art and artifice were eliminated. Deprived of its heightened reflection, extension and hyperbolization in myth, art and ritual, reality cannot sustain itself. It is the very quest to access reality in itself, without illusion, that generates the hyperreal implosion. Here, as Baudrillard long ago realised, reality TV is exemplary. Film an unscripted scene and you might not have art, but you do not have reality either. You have reality's uncanny double, its excrescence: simulation, precisely.
