Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy,
post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going
generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The
ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has
rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual
bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness,
multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean,
Marxo-Freudian age... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the
crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.
- Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference,
puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and
aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of
the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream
of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.
- Jean Baudrillard, America
But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is
simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself
in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the
visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?
This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is
still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of
simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man,
and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down
God never existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacra - from
this came their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these
images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been
no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But
their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal
anything at all.
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
