After Borges and Baudrillard

My aim here is to connect philosophical threads toward a coming future to consider what our next philosophical crisis will be.

Inch by inch the world is getting filled to capacity. Borges, in his time, wrote a parable about the simulation of a map so large it covered the entirety of the empire at a one-to-one scale. This metaphor of the simulation was adequate to describe the crumbling facade of the decline of empires of the modern era. Then, Baudrillard adapted this metaphor to apply to the postmodern era - reality had become the map, and was fraying away leaving the simulation in its wake. With reality gone, the simulation descends into a confusing mess of simulacra. In our time, reality is now reproducible and indistinguishable from the original. We have no access to Reality, because each facade of the postmodern world hides even deeper levels of the facade. There is no baseline. In Borges's parable, only in the deserts did some of the map remain. For us, only in the deserts does some of Reality remain.

Now, the deserts are overflowing, and the ground itself is fraying. Breaking apart and pulling into a void beyond human understanding. Nature is less natural than the concrete monuments to it's past that commemorate the commemorations of the multiplicity of time. The future holds for us an inevitable fissure in the simulacra and simulations that we swim in, which eventually must collapse. What will emerge is not a world newly in touch with an invigorated sense of Reality. Instead, the nostalgia for what has been lost and the confusion and fear of the chaos of an ungilded world will send us spiraling into projects to recover the frayed simulacra. The New World, the post-postmodern world, ought to be termed the Refabrication.

In our postmodern world, we see the collapse of meaning. There are many kinds of movements aimed at recovering meaning, or creating oases of meaning. The inevitable collapse of the simulacra will lead to movements to recover what semblance of meaning the simulacra held for many. This will be the epitome of nihilism - the loss of meaning stemming from the death of a facade, and the search to regain the facade which holds no meaning anchored in Reality.

Imagine Schopenhauer's Veil of Maya surrounded in a gilded computerized skein projecting an infinite number of photoshopped images onto the Veil. The Veil begins to take the form of the images projected upon it. At some point, collectively for us, the Veil becomes those images. When the system that produces the images suddenly falls into crisis, so does the fundamental construction of the Veil. It will be a cataclysmic event similar to when the Mayans found their Gods destroyed during the Inquisition.

At all costs, the skein must be rebuilt. However, without the connection between the ironically original simulacra to the present, a new simulacra will emerge with no origin. Frightful and exhilarating, people will have to navigate the map covering an empire that is covered in a thick indecipherable fog.

There will be a thick nothingness oozing from frantic minds trying to recreate something that was doomed from its inception. At the center of this convulsion will be the remnants of the total communication that is sweeping through our culture like a storm now. As the private domain continues to melt into the public now, the struggle to adjust to the loss will be immeasurable for a culture locked into an extreme co-dependency on others for self-knowledge. The coming battle will be a battle for a reemergent self against a further reinforced total environment of the public domain. The challenge will largely be an internal struggle, as the continued loss of the private makes it more and more difficult to isolate one's self and create, in an intellectual sense, a new reality. People will be highly at risk of falling into all forms of totalitarianism - especially related to capital.

Now, however, we sit upon a tall precipice perched over the coming days. Each year we experience more the sweeping confusion at the continued loss of relevance between our markers of meaning and their origins. When the retro movements of retro movements of retro movements devolve into their lowest common denominators - sex and consumption - a growing hunger will be reinvigorated to act (as Thoreau acted against the Industrial Revolution). The question will be, "how?"

Society will continue to generate models to demonstrate how to cope, but it will only reinforce itself as it does already. It will not satisfy the masses, but as with Christianity - many will be dedicated toward holding onto its power as the power wanes. The battle will settle into individual grounds, and the large cultural issues we deal with now related to globalization, international justice, civil rights, and so forth will not be at the forefront of our problems. It will be a much simpler issue of identity:

What are we? Who am I? How do I make decisions about who I am and want to be, coming out of this cultural context?

Many of the problems we have now (and have always had) will continue to exist, but navigating through the meaning and significance of cultural markers will be of a practical matter nearly impossible. The fundamental problem of finding the self will take on new challenges beyond what we have now. We understand that we have a past and what the meanings of it are now, and to a much lesser degree of what it meant to those we refer back to. Generally, we aren't too well aware of what that past really entails, but we have enough cultural sense to find ways to navigate through it. There will be a day, when the distance between past, context, and self is so great that we'll feel the deluge of symbols washing over us. As the previous Classical and Neoclassical movements revisited a past to create meaning for today, we will try to do that again, but without access to context. We will have to find a new way.