ESSAY
text by JEAN BAUDRILLARD
artwork by BEN ELLIOT
french sociologist and philosopher jean baudrillard (1929-2007) deeply influenced contemporary philosophy, literature, and even pop culture with his postmodern and radical theories
We are now governed not so much by growth as by growths. Ours is a society founded on proliferation, on growth which continues even though it cannot be measured against any clear goals. An excrescential society whose development is uncontrollable, occurring without regard for self-definition, where the accumulation of effects goes hand in hand with the disappearance of causes. The upshot is gross systemic congestion and malfunction caused by hypertelia — by an excess of functional imperatives, by a sort of saturation. There is no better analogy here than the metastatic process in cancer: a loss of the body’s organic ground rules such that a given group of cells is able to deploy its incoercible and murderous vitality, to…