The Vital Illusion

Jean Baudrillard

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780231506328
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Aren't we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world. What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time and history? What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality? In The Vital Illusion —as always—Baudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions.

Baudrillard considers how human cloning—as well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identities—heralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation. In this day and age when everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, and genetically and neurologically managed, humanity shows itself unable to brave its own diversity, preferring instead to regress to the pathological eternity of self-replicating cells. By reverting to our viral origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it.

Next, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium. He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the year 2000 could never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future. For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second on its way to zero is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses. In closing, Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual. In a world of copies and clones in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality. Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace: "The corps(e) of the Real—if there is any—has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found."

Peppered with Baudrillard's signature counterintuitive moves, prophetic visions, and dark humor, The Vital Illusion exposes the contradictions that guide our contemporary culture and rule our lives.

1

THE FINAL SOLUTION: CLONING BEYOND THE HUMAN AND INHUMAN

The question concerning cloning is the question of immortality. We all want immortality. It is our ultimate fantasy, a fantasy that is also at work in all of our modern sciences and technologies—at work, for example, in the deep freeze of cryonic suspension and in cloning in all its manifestations.

The most notorious example of cryonic suspension is—naturally—Walt Disney, but he, at least, being destined for resurrection, is said to have been frozen whole, in his “integrity.” There are more anomalous situations today. Nowadays, in Phoenix, Arizona (the predestined site for Resurrection), only the heads are frozen, because it’s from the cells of the brain—regarded as the nucleus of individual being—that researchers hope to reconstitute the deceased in their bodily wholeness. (One can’t help but wonder why they don’t, in that case, simply preserve a single cell or a DNA molecule.)

To complement these heads without bodies: On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, headless frogs and mice are being cloned in private laboratories, in preparation for the cloning of headless human bodies that will serve as reservoirs for organ donation. Why bodies without heads? As the head is considered the site of consciousness, it is thought that bodies with heads would pose ethical and psychological problems. Better simply to manufacture acephalic creatures whose organs could be freely harvested, because such creatures would not compete with—or invoke too closely—the original human beings.

These, then, are the experimental and artificial forms of cloning—not including Dolly, of course, and the rest of her kind. But spontaneous cloning, and in fact spontaneous immortality, can also be found in nature, at the heart of our cells.

Ordinarily, a cell is destined to divide a certain number of times and then to die. If, in the course of its division, something happens to perturb this process—for example, an alteration in the gene that prevents tumors or in the mechanisms governing cellular apoptosis—then the cell becomes cancerous. It forgets to die; it forgets how to die. It goes on to clone itself again and again, making thousands of identical copies of itself, thus forming a tumor. Normally the subject dies as a result, and the cancerous cells die with him or her. But in the case of Henrietta Lacks, the tumor cells sampled from her body were cultured in a laboratory and will continue to proliferate endlessly. They constitute so remarkable and virulent a specimen that they have been circulated throughout the world and even sent into space, on board the U.S. satellite Discoverer 17. So it is that the disseminated body of Henrietta Lacks, cloned at the molecular level, makes its immortal rounds.

There is something occulted inside us: our death. But something else is hidden there, lying in wait for us within each of our cells: the forgetting of death. In our cells our immortality lies in wait for us. It’s common to speak of the struggle of life against death, but there is an inverse peril. And we must struggle against the possibility that we will not die. At the slightest hesitation in the fight for death—a fight for division, for sex, for alterity, and so for death—living beings become once again indivisible, identical to one another—and immortal.

Contrary to everything that seems obvious and “natural,” nature’s first creatures were immortal. It was only by obtaining the power to die, by dint of constant struggle, that we became the living beings we are today. Blindly we dream of overcoming death through immortality, when all the time immortality is the most horrific of possible fates. Encoded in the earliest life of our cells, this fate is now reappearing on our horizons, so to speak, with the advent of cloning. (The death drive, according to Freud, is precisely this nostalgia for a state before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one another. Absolute death is not the end of the individual human being; rather, it is a regression toward a state of minimal differentiation among living beings, of a pure repetition of identical beings.)

The evolution of the biosphere is what drives immortal beings to become mortal ones. They move, little by little, from the absolute continuity found in the subdivision of the same—in bacteria—toward the possibility of birth and death. Next, the egg becomes fertilized by a sperm and specialized sex cells make their appearance. The resulting entity is no longer a copy of either one of the pair that engendered it; rather, it is a new and singular combination. There is a shift from pure and simple reproduction to procreation: the first two will die for the first time, and the third for the first time will be born. We reach the stage of beings that are sexed, differentiated, and mortal. The earlier order of the virus—of immortal beings—is perpetuated, but henceforward this world of deathless things is contained inside the world of the mortals. In evolutionary terms, the victory goes to beings that are mortal and distinct from one another: the victory goes to us.

But the game isn’t over yet, and reversion is always possible. It can be found not only in the viral revolt of our cells but also in the enormous enterprise we living beings ourselves undertake today: a project to reconstruct a homogeneous and uniformly consistent universe—an artificial continuum this time—that unfolds within a technological and mechanical medium, extending over our vast information network, where we are in the process of building a perfect clone, an identical copy of our world, a virtual artifact that opens up the prospect of endless reproduction.

We are in the process of reactivating this pathological immortality, the immortality of the cancer cell, both at the individual level and at the level of the species as a whole. This is the revenge taken on mortal and sexed beings by immortal and undifferentiated life forms. This is what could be called the final solution.

After the great revolution in the evolutionary process—the advent of sex and death—we have the great involution: it aims, through cloning and many other techniques, to liberate us from sex and death. Where once living creatures strove, over millions of years, to pull themselves free of this kind of incest and primitive entropy, we are now, through scientific advances themselves, in the process of recreating precisely these conditions. We are actively working at the “dis-information” of our species through the nullification of differences.

Here we must pose the question of the destination of the scientific project. We must consider the possibility that the very “progress” of science in fact does not follow a line, but a curve—a twisted or hairpin curve that turns back toward total involution. And we must ask if this final solution toward which we unconsciously work is not the secret destination of nature, as well as of all our efforts. This throws a fairly harsh light on everything we still, today, persist in regarding as a positive evolution, as a step forward.

The sexual revolution—the real one, the only one—is the advent of sexuality in the evolution of living things, of a duality that puts an end to perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same. In this, the sexual revolution is also the revolution of death. It is the revolution of death, as opposed to the infinite survival of the same. The inverse movement we are describing here is an involutionary movement of the species, a retreat from the revolution of sex and death, a massive revisionist movement in the evolution of living things.

From this point of view, “sexual liberation” is thoroughly ambivalent. Though sexual liberation seems at first to be in keeping with the sexual revolution of which it is the final, positive, and definitive moment, it seems, upon further analysis, to have ambiguous repercussions. In the end these repercussions may be completely opposed to the goals of the sexual revolution itself.

The first phase of sexual liberation involves the dissociation of sexual activity from procreation through the pill and other contraceptive devices—a transformation with enormous consequences. The second phase, which we are beginning to enter now, is the dissociation of reproduction from sex. First, sex was liberated from reproduction; today it is reproduction that is liberated from sex, through asexual, biotechnological modes of reproduction such as artificial insemination or full body cloning. This is also a liberation, though antithetical to the first. We’ve been sexually liberated, and now we will find ourselves liberated from sex—that is, virtually relieved of the sexual function. Among the clones (and among human beings soon enough), sex, as a result of this automatic means of reproduction, becomes extraneous, a useless function. Thus sexual liberation, the so-called crowning achievement of the evolution of sexed forms of life, marks, in its final consequences, the end of the sexual revolution. It is the same ambiguity that troubles science. The calculated benefits both of sexual liberation and of the scientific revolution are inextricably bound up with with their negative countereffects.

And death? Entwined as it is with sex, it must eventually suffer the same fate. There is, in effect, a liberation from death that parallels liberation from sex. As we have dissociated reproduction from sex, so we try to dissociate life from death. To save and promote life and life only, and to render death an obsolete function one can do without, as, in the case of artificial reproduction, we can do without sex.

So death, as a fatal or symbolic event, must be erased. Death must be included only as virtual reality, as an option or changeable setting in the living being’s operating system. This is a reprogramming that proceeds along the lines of the virtualization of sex, the “cybersex” that waits for us in the future, as a sort of ontological “attraction.” All these useless functions—sex, thought, death—will be redesigned, redesignated as leisure activities. And human beings, henceforth useless, might themselves be preserved as a kind of ontological “attraction.” This could be another aspect of what Hegel has called the moving life of what is dead. Death, once a vital function, could thus become a luxury, a diversion. In future modes of civilization, from which death will have been eliminated, clones of the future may well pay for the luxury of dying and become mortal once again in simulation: cyberdeath.

A sort of anticipation of cloning can be found in ...