Baudrillard uses the metaphor "earthquake" 
to describe a "form of catastrophy" which 
according to him is typical of our times.
The play of destruction and resurrection 
("volcanic eruption") will be replaced by the 
blasting apart of almost inseparable things, the 
cracked surface shifting, changing, drifting apart.
Baudrillard: "This all serves to acquaint us
with the horizontal age of sensations without 
consequences, where the last act is staged 
almost like a parody by Nature itself."

---

Jean Baudrillard

THE SEISMIC ORDER

The seismic order is the future. It constitutes the congenital order of catastrophy in the age of simulation (I don't know why) - an unfathomable and bottomless form of the crevice the rupture and the crack, the order of bursting and brittle objects; the order by which immense masses of earth and entire regions slide over the other, producing violent surface tremors. We are no longer taken aback by the destructive lava: a fire-spitting mouth covering the earth and bringing with it punishment and purification.

Here, it is not the Flood that is being referred to, but rather a primal catastrophy as the beginning of the world: to be exact the great, legendary and mythical orders which are forever monopolizing our attention. The explosion which culminated as an order (principle) in the frenzy following the nuclear catastrophy, appears to have more to do with the present (conversely it also backed up the myth of the Big Bang als being the origin of the universe). The earthquake, the seismic order has, one could say, a more modern and more topical nature confirming yet again that catastrophies adapt themselves to their relevant cultural order. Cities also distinguish themselves through a certain order of catastrophy relative to them, constituting in each case the keen fascination of the city in question. For New York it is King-Kong, black-out and the vertical bombardment. Towering inferno. Los Angeles represents a horizontal break and the gliding away of California into the Pacific. Earthquake.

Today we are confronted with an order which is even closer to mind: it belongs to the system of fissions and immediate diffusion; comparable to a system of waves, a spasmodic order and direct (polar) reversal. The sky no longer falls on our heads, but the ground is now slipping away from under our feet.