“Ultimately, science has never stopped churning out a reassuring scenario in which the world is being progressively deciphered by the advances of reason. This was the hypothesis with which we ‘discovered’ the world, atoms, molecules, particles, viruses, and so forth. But no one has ever advanced the hypothesis that things may discover us at the same time we discover them, and that there is a dual relationship in discovery. This is because we do no see the object in its originality. We see it as passive, as waiting to be discovered - a bit like America being discovered by the Spaniards. But things are not like that. When the subject discovers the object - whether the object is viruses or primitive societies - the converse, and never innocent, discovery is also made: the discovery of the subject by the object. Today they say science no longer ‘discovers’ its object, but ‘invents’ it. We should say, then, that the object, too, does more than just ‘discover’ us; it invents us purely and simply - it thinks us. It seems that we have victoriously wrenched the object from its peaceful state, from its indifference and the secrecy which enshrouded it. But today, before our very eyes, the enigmatic nature of the world is rousing itself, resolved to struggle to retain its mystery. Knowledge is a duel. And the duel between subject and object brings with it the subject’s loss of sovereignty, making the object itself the horizon of disappearance.”

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Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (1999)