"Follow-Up" #1

ILLUSION

[from Baudrillard's The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, (Berg English edition, 2005) 84-85]

   "We must have a sense of this illusion of the Virtual somewhere, since, at the same time as we plunge into this machinery and its superficial abysses, it is as though we viewed it as theatre. Just as we view our news coverage as theatre.
   Of the news coverage we are the hostages, but we also treat it as spectacle, without regard for its credibility. A latent credultiy and derision prevent us being totally in the grip of the information media.
   It isn't critical consciousness that causes us to distance ourselves from it in this way, but the reflex of no longer wanting to play the game.
...
   It would be best, then, to pose all these problems in terms other than those of alienation and the unhappy destiny of the subject (which is where all critical analysis ends up).
   The unlimited extension of the Virtual itself  pushes towards something like pataphysics ... pre-eminently ironic science, corresponding to a state in which things reach a pitch that is simultaneously paroxystic and parodic.
...
   At the heart of this artificial reality, this Virtual Reality, this irony is perhaps all we have left of the original illusion, which at least preserves us from any temptation to one day possess the truth."