THEORY: Jean Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies

As I read Baudrillard, in my mind, I kept going back to the following passage in Virilio's foreword:

Let us now accept Valéry’s postulate: if consciousness exists only for accidents and if things now operate only “outside of” consciousness, the loss of consciousness of the accident, and of the major disaster, would amount not just to thoughtlessness, but to madness—the madness of voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions (I am thinking in particular of genetic engineering and the biotechnologies). This is a situation which would be akin to the sudden reversal of philosophy into its opposite. It would be akin to the birth of a philanoia—literally: a love of madness. A love of radical mindlessness, in which the insane character of our acts would not only cease to worry us consciously, but would delight and captivate us. (Virilio)

I see this same logic of the consciousness of the accident in Virilio in Baudrillard's explanation of the effects' monopoly on the cause in casual reasoning when he takes Virilio's logic one step further--into an actual representation of the "voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions" (Virilio) in the indifferent (but conscious) object. This consciousness of the object as object is fascinating to me, especially in relation to the inanimate object. In particular, I can't seem to get the image of the detached eye out of my mind in Baudrillard's anecdote. I tried to figure out what it was about the image that was so disturbing, and I came to the conclusion that it wasn't so much about the horror of language being stripped of metaphor and being taken literally (152) but more so about the collective history of social conventions that pack into the motivations that created that literal object. The detached eye seems beside the point in relation to the stories that give its moment of representation so much power (so much consciousness). And I think that this is really what consciousness means in the realm of the object--it doesn't literally speak to us, but it has the power to tell us something true and real about ourselves. This truth is revealed through the object as a secret, as something seductive because it is always out of reach, something that we want to know but are afraid to have realized in tangible form. This, of course, relates to the narrative focus we are taking from for our Contrast instructions. We have the disaster as a sign (not literal, but given meaning through abstraction, as if the abstraction reduces the blow of a direct hit at the same time it creates it) and a narrative structure to work with. Perhaps Baudrillard is giving us the space to understand the logic of how they fit together and how to do something with this fatal space.

Baudrillard writes about a sort of regressive collapse of representation that ends up exceeding its former 'mass.' In the context of electracy, we are to think of this excess of representation that brings the object or experience to us through history as "sending" process.  We experience the past in the present through this sending in the image of all the components parts it is comprised of through history; much in the same way that the stories in narratives are sending the collective history of their past in the framework of the present through the space of interaction between the characters and the objects they interact with. This idea, when you really think about it, is mind boggling because you can never capture all the trails of associations.