Appearance and Disappearance

Definition

The mode of appearance and disappearance is, for Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies (1983), the fundamental alternative to the modern mode of production. "Today, after having staked everything on the mode of production and having exhausted its illusion, we are faced with a mode of appearance and disappearance while no longer possessing any ceremonial mastery." Against a world of causes, meanings, and lasting objects, Baudrillard poses a world of pure events: "Our fundamental destiny is not to exist and survive, as we think: it is to appear and disappear. That alone seduces and fascinates us." The "secret" of things is that they "are in advance of the unfolding of their causes" — "When things go faster than their causes, they have the time to appear, to occur as appearances before even becoming real… It's then that they keep their power of seduction." This is the logic of the magician's trick and Paracelsus's rose: "every real is ready, indeed, immediately inclined to disappear." The mode requires ceremony (the regulated control of appearance/disappearance) and seduction (detour from the will to meaning): "To make the lady vanish you have to seduce her… To revive the rose, it is enough to seduce it." The concept is Baudrillard's most explicit bid for a post-productive ontology — one the wiki's weak architecture, event-space, and aesthetics of disappearance materials should be read against. See destiny, seduction, ceremony-of-the-world, the-secret, reversibility.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "Our fundamental destiny… is to appear and disappear"; "the precession of the effects over their very causes"; the Paracelsus/illusionist fables (1983).
• Paul Virilio — the "aesthetics of disappearance" as the wiki's neighbouring theory of the terminal mode.
• Georges Perec — the infra-ordinary and the "mode of appearance" at the scale of the everyday (the wiki's cousin material).
• Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Alphonse Allais (not yet paged) — the tellers of Baudrillard's fables of reversible appearance.

Related Concepts

• Destiny — the precession of effects over causes is destiny's definition.
• Seduction — the power that detours things from the will to reality.
• The Ceremony of the World — the regulated mastery of appearance and disappearance.
• The Secret — what is preserved in the mode of appearance.
• Reversibility — appearance/disappearance is the reversible cycle.
• Aesthetics of Disappearance — Virilio's parallel in the wiki.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "The Fatal, or, Reversible Imminence," "The Illusionist and the Rose of Paracelsus," "The Ceremony of the World": "Our fundamental destiny… is to appear and disappear"; the precession of effects; the magician and Paracelsus.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the nihilism of transparency as the "mode of disappearance."
• The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio 1991) — the parallel theory.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Can the "mode of appearance and disappearance" be built or designed, or is it available only to magic, ceremony, and writing? Baudrillard says the traditional arts "kept something of ceremony"; the wiki's design material should ask whether they can.
• The concept makes speed (things overtaking their causes) the condition of appearance. Is this the same as Virilio's dromology, or its poetic inversion?