It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality - a process that ends in Integral Reality. What we have in virtuality is no longer a hinter world: the substitution of the world is total; this is the identical doubling of the world, its perfect mirroring, and the matter is settled by the pure and simple annihilation of symbolic substance. Even objective reality becomes a useless function, a kind of waste that is ever more difficult to exchange and circulate. We have moved, then, from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultra-reality that puts an end to both reality and illusion.

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil

'Consuelo Vanderbilt, who became the Duchess Of Marlborough upon her marriage in 1895, owned a dog collar and other elegant pearls' in pearls, A Natural History - American Museum Of Natural History And The Field Museum (2001)

‘Does reality exist? Are we in a real world?’ - this is the leitmotiv of our entire present culture. But it merely expresses the fact that we can no longer bear this world, which is so prey to reality, except by way of a radical denial. And this is logical: since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it has to be justified here and now in this one by lending itself force of reality, by purging itself of any illusion. But at the same time, by the very effect of this countertransference, the denial of the real as such grows.

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil

There is no objectivity. Nor any subjectivity either: a twofold illusion. Since consciousness is an integral part of the world and the world is an integral part of consciousness, I think it and it thinks me. One need only reflect that even if objects exist outside of us, we can know absolutely nothing of their objective reality. For things are given to us only through our representation. To believe that these representations and sensations are determined by external objects is a further representation.

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil