5.0 out of 5 stars
A Baudrillard Classic, January 19, 2012
At the time of his death, Baudrillard was accused of being "a comedian of ideas." Such nonsense is easily believed by those who never bother to actually read him, and "Impossible Exchange," one of his best books, easily dispels such media-microwaved packaging.
In "Impossible Exchange," Baudrillard discusses the 'revenge of the immortals,' and points out that the earliest lifeforms on earth, such as viruses and bacteria, and presently today with cancer cells which are really cells that forget to die, life began with immortal beings that did not die pre-programmed biological death (bacteria are theoretically immortal). Likewise, he says that with modern technology the immortals are having their revenge upon us, the beings who displaced them with the invention of sex and death, two things that allowed us to triumph over them. However, in technology, with the pill, sex is liberated from reproduction; but with artificial insemination and biological cloning, reproduction becomes liberated from the sex act, which now becomes useless. Hence, through genetic cloning we are returning to the asexual reproduction of the bacterial immortals and are thus regressing, losing defining traits that make us human.
In the next chapter on "Useless Functions," he points out that once something is virtualized, it becomes useless. Thus, when language is digitized, it becomes useless. When computers are all that is needed for production, work becomes useless. When communication is virtualized, the Other becomes useless. When the only thing needed to reproduce the species is cloning, sex becomes useless. The Real did not die a natural death, but simply disappeared and now we have only the vestiges of it.
Whatever is displaced by virtuality, however, returns in destructive form. Time, replaced by Real Time, takes revenge in the form of Y2K millenarianism. Nature reduced to an energy source takes revenge as natural catastrophes. The displaced Other returns in the destructive form of ethnic cleansing and racial genocide.
And so on. Pages and pages of sheer brilliance. If you want to read one of Baudrillard's best books, then by all means, this one's not a bad place to start.
--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" (McFarland Books, 2011) and "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons" (Praeger, 2010)
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