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1TABLE OF CONTENTS
2I. The Precession of Simulacra
3II. History: A Retro Scenario
4III. Holocaust
5IV. The China Syndrome
6V. Apocalypse Now
7VI. The Beaubourg Effect : Implosion and Deterrence
8VII. Hypermarked and Hypercommodity
9VIII. The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
10IX. Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising
11X. Clone Story
12XI. Holograms
13XII. Crash
14XIII. Simulacra and Science Fiction
15XIV. The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses
16XV. The Remainder
17XVI. The Spiraling Cadaver
18XVII. Value's Last Tango
19XVIII. On NihilismTHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA
20The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that
21there is none.
22The simulacrum is true.
23-Ecclesiastes
24If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire
25draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the
26Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though
27some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined
28abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning
29to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real
30through aging) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full
31circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.*1
32Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept.
33Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the
34generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no
35longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes
36the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must
37return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of
38the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the
39deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
40In fact, even inverted, Borges's fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire,
41perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators
42attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is
43no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the
44sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of
45abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm
46of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of
47representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers
48mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation
49whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of
50metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its
51concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the
52dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and
53memory banks, models of control - and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of
54times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself
55against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In
56fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a
57hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace
58without atmosphere.
59By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth,
60the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with theirartificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in
61that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all
62combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even
63parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an
64operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic,
65metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-
66circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself -
67such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated
68resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal
69henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and
70the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the
71simulated generation of differences.
72THE DIVINE IRREFERENCE OF IMAGES
73To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have
74what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more
75complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness
76can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness
77produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or
78dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is
79simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the
80"false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Is the simulator sick or not, given that he
81produces "true" symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill.
82Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness's henceforth
83undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be taken
84as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and
85medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "real" illnesses according to
86their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious manner at the borders of the
87principle of illness. As to psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom of the organic order to
88the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for "real" more real than the other - but
89why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the
90unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any old symptom of classical medicine?
91Dreams already are.
92Certainly, the psychiatrist purports that "for every form of mental alienation there is a
93particular order in the succession of symptoms of which the simulator is ignorant and in
94the absence of which the psychiatrist would not be deceived." This (which dates from
951865) in order to safeguard the principle of a truth at all costs and to escape the
96interrogation posed by simulation - the knowledge that truth, reference, objective cause
97have ceased to exist. Now, what can medicine do with what floats on either side of
98illness, on either side of health, with the duplication of illness in a discourse that is no
99longer either true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the duplication of the
100discourse of the unconscious in the discourse of simulation that can never again be
101unmasked, since it is not false either?*2
102What can the army do about simulators? Traditionally it unmasks them and punishesthem, according to a clear principle of identification. Today it can discharge a very good
103simulator as exactly equivalent to a "real" homosexual, a heart patient, or a madman.
104Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make
105the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" and the authentic
106symptom. "If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military
107psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack
108of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that
109classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks
110them, submerging the principle of truth.
111Beyond medicine and the army favored terrains of simulation, the question returns to
112religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "I forbade that there be any simulacra in the
113temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented." Indeed it can
114be. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied
115in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a
116visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their
117power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure
118and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
119millennial quarrel is still with us today.*3 This is precisely because they predicted this
120omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the
121conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that
122deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God
123himself was never anything but his own simulacrum - from this came their urge to
124destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or
125masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One
126can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the
127idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence
128not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra,
129forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must
130be exorcised at all costs.
131One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images,
132were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only
133saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God. On the other hand,
134one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous,
135because, in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images, they were
136already enacting his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations
137(which, perhaps, they already knew no longer represented anything, that they were purely
138a game, but that it was therein the great game lay - knowing also that it is dangerous to
139unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
140This was the approach of the Jesuits, who founded their politics on the virtual
141disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences -
142the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which now
143only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. Behind the
144baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.
145This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murderers ofthe real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine
146identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical
147power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith
148became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of
149meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee
150this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say
151can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes
152weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a
153simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an
154uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
155Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from
156the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is
157Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia
158of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the
159sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation
160attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation
161envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.
162Such would be the successive phases of the image:
163it is the reflection of a profound reality;
164it masks and denatures a profound reality;
165it masks the absence of a profound reality;
166it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
167it is its own pure simulacrum.
168In the first case, the image is a good appearance - representation is of the sacramental
169order. In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence. In the
170third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no
171longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.
172The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is
173nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy
174(to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of
175simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no
176longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial
177resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.
178When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a
179plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality - a plethora of truth, of secondary
180objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of
181the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken
182production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of
183material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us - a
184strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a
185strategy of deterrence.RAMSES, OR THE ROSY-COLORED RESURRECTION
186Ethnology brushed up against its paradoxical death in 1971, the day when the Philippine
187government decided to return the few dozen Tasaday who had just been discovered in the
188depths of the jungle, where they had lived for eight centuries without any contact with the
189rest of the species, to their primitive state, out of the reach of colonizers, tourists, and
190ethnologists. This at the suggestion of the anthropologists themselves, who were seeing
191the indigenous people disintegrate immediately upon contact, like mummies in the open
192air.
193In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge
194for being "discovered" and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.
195Doesn't all science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the
196evanescence of its object in its very apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal that the
197dead object exerts on it? Like Orpheus, it always turns around too soon, and, like
198Eurydice, its object falls back into Hades.
199It is against this hell of the paradox that the ethnologists wished to protect themselves by
200cordoning off the Tasaday with virgin forest. No one can touch them anymore: as in a
201mine the vein is closed down. Science loses precious capital there, but the object will be
202safe, lost to science, but intact in its "virginity." It is not a question of sacrifice (science
203never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous), but of the simulated sacrifice of its object
204in order to save its reality principle. The Tasaday, frozen in their natural element, will
205provide a perfect alibi, an eternal guarantee. Here begins an antiethnology that will never
206end and to which Jaulin, Castaneda, Clastres are various witnesses. In any case, the
207logical evolution of a science is to distance itself increasingly from its object, until it
208dispenses with it entirely: its autonomy is only rendered even more fantastic - it attains its
209pure form.
210The Indian thus returned to the ghetto, in the glass coffin of the virgin forest, again
211becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology. This
212model thus grants itself the luxury to incarnate itself beyond itself in the "brute" reality of
213these Indians it has entirely reinvented - Savages who are indebted to ethnology for still
214being Savages: what a turn of events, what a triumph for this science that seemed
215dedicated to their destruction!
216Of course, these savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected to
217death, they have become referential simulacra, and science itself has become pure
218simulation. The same holds true at Cruesot, at the level of the "open" museum where one
219museumified in situ, as "historical" witnesses of their period, entire working-class
220neighborhoods, living metallurgic zones, an entire culture, men, women, and children
221included - gestures, languages, customs fossilized alive as in a snapshot. The museum,
222instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everywhere now, like a dimension
223of life. Thus ethnology, rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science, will
224today, liberated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invisible,
225like an omnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum. We are all Tasadays,
226Indians who have again become what they were - simulacral Indians who at last proclaimthe universal truth of ethnology.
227We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology, or of
228antiethnology, which is nothing but the pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign
229of dead differences, and of the resurrection of differences. It is thus very naive to look for
230ethnology in the Savages or in some Third World - it is here, everywhere, in the
231metropolises, in the White community, in a world completely cataloged and analyzed,
232then artificially resurrected under the auspices of the real, in a world of simulation, of the
233hallucination of truth, of the blackmail of the real, of the murder of every symbolic form
234and of its hysterical, historical retrospection - a murder of which the Savages, noblesse
235oblige, were the first victims, but that for a long time has extended to all Western
236societies.
237But in the same breath ethnology grants us its only and final lesson, the secret that kills it
238(and which the Savages knew better than it did): the vengeance of the dead.
239The confinement of the scientific object is equal to the confinement of the mad and the
240dead. And just as all of society is irremediably contaminated by this mirror of madness
241that it has held up to itself, science can't help but die contaminated by the death of this
242object that is its inverse mirror. It is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects
243that invest it with depth, according to an unconscious reversion, which only gives a dead
244and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation.
245Nothing changes when society breaks the mirror of madness (abolishes the asylums,
246gives speech back to the insane, etc.) nor when science seems to break the mirror of its
247objectivity (effacing itself before its object, as in Castaneda, etc.) and to bend down
248before the "differences." The form produced by confinement is followed by an
249innumerable, diffracted, slowed-down mechanism. As ethnology collapses in its classical
250institution, it survives in an antiethnology whose task it is to reinject the difference
251fiction, the Savage fiction everywhere, to conceal that it is this world, ours, which has
252again become savage in its way, that is to say, which is devastated by difference and by
253death.
254In the same way, with the pretext of saving the original, one forbade visitors to enter the
255Lascaux caves, but an exact replica was constructed five hundred meters from it, so that
256everyone could see them (one glances through a peephole at the authentic cave, and then
257one visits the reconstituted whole). It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes
258is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer
259any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial.
260In the same way science and technology were recently mobilized to save the mummy of
261Ramses II, after it was left to rot for several dozen years in the depths of a museum. The
262West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order
263had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight and far from the light of
264day. Ramses does not signify anything for us, only the mummy is of an inestimable worth
265because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning. Our entire linear and
266accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view. To this end
267the pharaohs must be brought out of their tomb and the mummies out of their silence. Tothis end they must be exhumed and given military honors. They are prey to both science
268and worms. Only absolute secrecy assured them this millennial power - the mastery over
269putrefaction that signified the mastery of the complete cycle of exchanges with death. We
270only know how to place our science in service of repairing the mummy, that is to say
271restoring a visible order, whereas embalming was a mythical effort that strove to
272immortalize a hidden dimension.
273We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures
274us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them. Whence this historic
275scene of the reception of the mummy at the Orly airport. Why? Because Ramses was a
276great despotic and military figure? Certainly. But mostly because our culture dreams,
277behind this defunct power that it tries to annex, of an order that would have had nothing
278to do with it, and it dreams of it because it exterminated it by exhuming it as its own past.
279We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians,
280those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ. Thus, at the beginning
281of colonization, there was a moment of stupor and bewilderment before the very
282possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel. There were two possible
283responses: either admit that this Law was not universal, or exterminate the Indians to
284efface the evidence. In general, one contented oneself with converting them, or even
285simply discovering them, which would suffice to slowly exterminate them.
286Thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramses to ensure his extermination by
287museumification. Because mummies don't rot from worms: they die from being
288transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an
289order of history, science, and museums, our order, which no longer masters anything,
290which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and
291subsequently to try to revive it with science. Irreparable violence toward all secrets, the
292violence of a civilization without secrets, hatred of a whole civilization for its own
293foundation.
294And just as with ethnology, which plays at extricating itself from its object to better
295secure itself in its pure form, demuseumification is nothing but another spiral in
296artificiality. Witness the cloister of Saint-Michel de Cuxa, which one will repatriate at
297great cost from the Cloisters in New York to reinstall it in "its original site." And
298everyone is supposed to applaud this restitution (as they did "the experimental campaign
299to take back the sidewalks" on the Champs Elysees!). Well, if the exportation of the
300cornices was in effect an arbitrary act, if the Cloisters in New York are an artificial
301mosaic of all cultures (following a logic of the capitalist centralization of value), their
302reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links
303up with "reality" through a complete circumvolution.
304The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment, which at least
305fooled no one. Repatriating it is nothing but a supplementary subterfuge, acting as if
306nothing had happened and indulging in retrospective hallucination.
307In the same way, Americans flatter themselves for having brought the population of
308Indians back to pre-Conquest levels. One effaces everything and starts over. They evenflatter themselves for doing better, for exceeding the original number. This is presented
309as proof of the superiority of civilization: it will produce more Indians than they
310themselves were able to do. (With sinister derision, this overproduction is again a means
311of destroying them: for Indian culture, like all tribal culture, rests on the limitation of the
312group and the refusal of any "unlimited" increase, as can be seen in Ishi's case. In this
313way, their demographic "promotion" is just another step toward symbolic extermination.)
314Everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original - things are doubled by
315their own scenario. But this doubling does not signify, as it did traditionally, the
316imminence of their death - they are already purged of their death, and better than when
317they were alive; more cheerful, more authentic, in the light of their model, like the faces
318in funeral homes.
319THE HYPERREAL AND THE IMAGINARY
320Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a
321play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World, etc. This
322imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation. But what attracts the
323crowds the most is without a doubt the social microcosm, the religious, miniaturized
324pleasure of real America, of its constraints and joys. One parks outside and stands in line
325inside, one is altogether abandoned at the exit. The only phantasmagoria in this
326imaginary world lies in the tenderness and warmth of the crowd, and in the sufficient and
327excessive number of gadgets necessary to create the multitudinous effect. The contrast
328with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or,
329rather: inside, a whole panoply of gadgets magnetizes the crowd in directed flows -
330outside, solitude is directed at a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary
331coincidence (but this derives without a doubt from the enchantment inherent to this
332universe), this frozen, childlike world is found to have been conceived and realized by a
333man who is himself now cryogenized: Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection through
334an increase of 180 degrees centigrade.
335Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the
336morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the
337miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an
338ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace
339[Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American
340values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks
341something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the
342third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real"
343America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its
344entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary
345in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
346America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the
347order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality
348(ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
349reality principle.
350The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up inorder to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of
351this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to
352make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact
353that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come
354here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
355Disneyland is not the only one, however. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine
356World: Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the
357energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything
358but a network of incessant, unreal circulation - a city of incredible proportions but
359without space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as
360much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario
361and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system
362made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms.
363Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are
364elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the
365phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste
366product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. On a mental level,
367Disneyland is the prototype of this new function. But all the sexual, psychic, somatic
368recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no
369longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each
370other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc.
371Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste
372for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food,
373health food, yoga. Marshall Sahlins's idea that it is the economy of the market, and not of
374nature at all, that secretes penury, is verified, but at a secondary level: here, in the
375sophisticated confines of a triumphal market economy is reinvented a penury/sign, a
376penury/simulacrum, a simulated behavior of the underdeveloped (including the adoption
377of Marxist tenets) that, in the guise of ecology, of energy crises and the critique of
378capital, adds a final esoteric aureole to the triumph of an esoteric culture. Nevertheless,
379maybe a mental catastrophe, a mental implosion and involution without precedent lies in
380wait for a system of this kind, whose visible signs would be those of this strange obesity,
381or the incredible coexistence of the most bizarre theories and practices, which correspond
382to the improbable coalition of luxury, heaven, and money, to the improbable luxurious
383materialization of life and to undiscoverable contradictions.
384POLITICAL INCANTATION
385Watergate. The same scenario as in Disneyland (effect of the imaginary concealing that
386reality no more exists outside than inside the limits of the artificial perimeter): here the
387scandal effect hiding that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation
388(identical methods on the part of the CIA and of the Washington Post journalists). Same
389operation, tending to regenerate through scandal a moral and political principle, through
390the imaginary, a sinking reality principle.
391The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular
392succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was aprodigious operation of intoxication. A large dose of political morality reinjected on a
393world scale. One could say along with Bourdieu: "The essence of every relation of force
394is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates
395itself as such," understood as follows: capital, immoral and without scruples, can only
396function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality
397(through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital.
398This is what the journalists of the Washington Post did.
399But this would be nothing but the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu states it, he
400takes the "relation of force" for the truth of capitalist domination, and he himself
401denounces this relation of force as scandal - he is thus in the same deterministic and
402moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are. He does the same work of
403purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth in which the veritable symbolic
404violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all the relations of force, which
405are only its shifting and indifferent configuration in the moral and political consciences
406of men.
407All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of
408rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. Because these
409are the same, which can be thought of in another way: formerly one worked to
410dissimulate scandal - today one works to conceal that there is none.
411Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what
412everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a
413moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous
414cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality - that is what is
415scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the
416axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism. One
417imputes this thinking to the contract of capital, but it doesn't give a damn - it is a
418monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to
419control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary
420thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game.
421"Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc." - as if capital were
422linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of
423equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the
424social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token, no
425need for revolution: it suffices that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of
426exchange).
427Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a
428sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as
429such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but
430a challenge to take up according to symbolic law.
431MÖBIUS - SPIRALING NEGATIVETY
432Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries - a
433simulation of scandal for regenerative ends. In the film, this is embodied by the characterof "Deep Throat," who was said to be the eminence grise of the Republicans,
434manipulating the left-wing journalists in order to get rid of Nixon - and why not? All
435hypotheses are possible, but this one is superfluous: the Left itself does a perfectly good
436job, and spontaneously, of doing the work of the Right. Besides, it would be naive to see
437an embittered good conscience at work here. Because manipulation is a wavering
438causality in which positivity and negativity are engendered and overlap, in which there is
439no longer either an active or a passive. It is through the arbitrary cessation of this
440spiraling causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is through the
441simulation of a narrow, conventional field of perspective in which the premises and the
442consequences of an act or of an event can be calculated, that a political credibility can be
443maintained (and of course "objective" analysis, the struggle, etc.). If one envisions the
444entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical
445polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, all determination evaporates,
446every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been
447scattered in all directions.
448Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation,
449or a centrist mise-en-scène to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own
450failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public
451security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the
452objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. That is, we are
453in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an
454order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the
455models based on the merest fact - the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that
456of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have
457a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be
458engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit,
459this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more
460dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity, implosion of antagonistic poles), is what
461allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all true, in
462the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they
463derive, in a generalized cycle.
464The Communists attack the Socialist Party as if they wished to shatter the union of the
465Left. They give credence to the idea that these resistances would come from a more
466radical political need. In fact, it is because they no longer want power. But do they not
467want power at this juncture, one unfavorable to the Left in general, or unfavorable to
468them within the Union of the Left - or do they no longer want it, by definition? When
469Berlinguer declares: "There is no need to be afraid to see the Communists take power in
470Italy," it simultaneously signifies:
471-: that there is no need to be afraid, since the Communists, if they come to power, will
472change nothing of its fundamental capitalist mechanism;
473-: that there is no risk that they will ever come to power (because they don't want to) -
474and even if they occupy the seat of power, they will never exercise it except by proxy;
475-: that in fact, power, genuine power no longer exists, and thus there is no risk whoever
476seizes power or seizes it again;
477-: but further: I, Berlinguer, am not afraid to see the Communists take power in Italy -
478which may seem self-evident, but not as much as you might think, because-: it could mean the opposite (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am afraid to see the
479Communists take power (and there are good reasons for that, even for a Communist).
480All of this is simultaneously true. It is the secret of a discourse
481that is no longer simply ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the
482impossibility of a determined position of power, the impossibility of a determined
483discursive position. And this logic is neither that of one party nor of another. It traverses
484all discourses without them wanting it to.
485Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. The Möbius strip,
486if one divides it, results in a supplementary spiral without the reversibility of surfaces
487being resolved (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hell of simulation, which is
488no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning*4 -
489where even the condemned at Burgos are still a gift from Franco to Western democracy,
490which seizes the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humanism and whose indignant
491protest in turn consolidates Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against this
492foreign intervention? Where is the truth of all that, when such collusions admirably knot
493themselves together without the knowledge of their authors?
494Conjunction of the system and of its extreme alternative like the two sides of a curved
495mirror, a "vicious" curvature of a political space that is henceforth magnetized,
496circularized, reversibilized from the right to the left, a torsion that is like that of the evil
497spirit of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back on its own
498surface: transfinite? And is it not the same for desire and the libidinal space? Conjunction
499of desire and value, of desire and capital. Conjunction of desire and the law, the final
500pleasure as the metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so widely the order of the
501day): only capital takes pleasure, said Lyotard, before thinking that we now take pleasure
502in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze, an enigmatic reversal that
503brings desire "revolutionary in itself, and as if involuntarily, wanting what it wants," to
504desire its own repression and to invest in paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion
505that returns this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, the
506historical revolution.
507All the referentials combine their discourses in a circular, Möbian compulsion. Not so
508long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dissolved in the same
509type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history derived its power from violently
510opposing itself to that of nature, the discourse of desire to that of power - today they
511exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.
512It would take too long to traverse the entire range of the operational negativity of all
513those scenarios of deterrence, which, like Watergate, try to regenerate a moribund
514principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder - a sort of hormonal treatment
515through negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real through the
516imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression, proving
517work through striking, proving the system through crisis, and capital through revolution,
518as it is elsewhere (the Tasaday) of proving ethnology through the dispossession of its
519object - without taking into account:the proof of theater through antitheater;
520the proof of art through antiart;
521the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy;
522the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc.
523Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form.
524All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to
525attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own
526murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with
527some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political
528dimension. The others, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phantom attempts, to
529simulated murders. But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal
530that they were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also
531the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in
532order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.
533To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis,
534negativity, and antipower: this is the only solution - alibi of every power, of every
535institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and of its
536fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and of its already dead.
537THE STRATEGY OF THE REAL
538The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the
539impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no
540longer possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of hypersimulation or
541offensive simulation, that is posed here.
542For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not
543react more violently to a simulated holdup than to a real holdup. Because the latter does
544nothing but disturb the order of things, the right to property, whereas the former attacks
545the reality principle itself. Transgression and violence are less serious because they only
546contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it
547always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order
548themselves might be nothing but simulation.
549But the difficulty is proportional to the danger. How to feign a violation and put it to the
550test? Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated
551robbery? There is no "objective" difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a
552real robbery, the signs do not lean to one side or another. To the established order they
553are always of the order of the real.
554Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most
555trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the
556criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much
557commotion as possible - in short, remain close to the "truth," in order to test the reaction
558of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won't be able to do it: the network of
559artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman willreally fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will
560actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once
561again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any
562attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real - that is, to the established order
563itself, well before institutions and justice come into play.
564It is necessary to see in this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation the weight
565of an order that cannot see and conceive of anything but the real, because it cannot
566function anywhere else. The simulation of an offense, if it is established as such, will
567either be punished less severely (because it has no "consequences") or punished as an
568offense against the judicial system (for example if one sets in motion a police operation
569"for nothing") - but never as simulation since it is precisely as such that no equivalence
570with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is
571never admitted by power. How can the simulation of virtue be punished? However, as
572such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody renders submission and
573transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the
574difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it,
575because the law is a simulacrum of the second order, whereas simulation is of the third
576order, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond rational distinctions upon
577which the whole of the social and power depend. Thus, lacking the real, it is there that we
578must aim at order.
579This is certainly why order always opts for the real. When in doubt, it always prefers this
580hypothesis (as in the army one prefers to take the simulator for a real madman). But this
581becomes more and more difficult, because if it is practically impossible to isolate the
582process of simulation, through the force of inertia of the real that surrounds us, the
583opposite is also true (and this reversibility itself is part of the apparatus of simulation and
584the impotence of power): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real,
585or to prove the real.
586This is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation
587holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the
588media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. In short, where
589they function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and
590no longer at all to their "real" end. But this does not make them harmless. On the
591contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer with a specific content or end, but
592indefinitely refracted by each other (just like so-called historical events: strikes,
593demonstrations, crises, etc.),*5 it is in this sense that they cannot be controlled by an
594order that can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on causes and ends, a
595referential order that can only reign over the referential, a determined power that can only
596reign over a determined world, but that cannot do anything against this indefinite
597recurrence of simulation, against this nebula whose weight no longer obeys the laws of
598gravitation of the real, power itself ends by being dismantled in this space and becoming
599a simulation of power (disconnected from its ends and its objectives, and dedicated to the
600effects of power and mass simulation).
601The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real
602and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity ofthe economy and the finalities of production. To this end it prefers the discourse of crisis,
603but also, why not? that of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the
604ultimate slogan of power since in a nonreferential world, even the confusion of the reality
605principle and the principle of desire is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One
606remains among principles, and among those power is always in the right.
607Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective, they
608turn against power the deterrent that it used so well for such a long time. Because in the
609end, throughout its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every
610referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true
611and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange,
612the iron law of its power. Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction,
613disconnection, deterritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the reality
614principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value, all real
615equivalence of production and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unreality of the
616stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Well, today it is this same logic that is even
617more set against capital. And as soon as it wishes to combat this disastrous spiral by
618secreting a last glimmer of reality, on which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does
619nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation.
620As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and
621simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs.
622Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of
623signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social,
624economic, and political stakes. For power, it is a question of life and death. But it is too
625late.
626Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction
627of the real. The other production, that of values and commodities, that of the belle epoque
628of political economy, has for a long time had no specific meaning. What every society
629looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes
630it. That is why today this "material" production is that of the hyperreal itself. It retains all
631the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but
632its scaled-down refraction (thus hyper-realists fix a real from which all meaning and
633charm, all depth and energy of representation have vanished in a hallucinatory
634resemblance). Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the
635hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself.
636Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. And at
637the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for
638signs of power - a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. The whole
639world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And in the end
640the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power - obsession
641with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. When it has
642totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a
643haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the
644compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone
645else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power:this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that
646cannot terminate its mourning.
647With the extenuation of the political sphere, the president comes increasingly to resemble
648that Puppet of Power who is the head of primitive societies (Clastres).
649All previous presidents pay for and continue to pay for Kennedy's murder as if they were
650the ones who had suppressed it - which is true phantasmatically, if not in fact. They must
651efface this defect and this complicity with their simulated murder. Because, now it can
652only be simulated. Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed
653assassination attempts which, they were not staged, were at least perpetrated by
654simulation. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political, political
655substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film -
656curiously, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, all have this simian mug, the monkeys of power.
657Death is never an absolute criterion, but in this case it is significant: the era of James
658Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply because they
659had a mythic dimension that implies death (not for romantic reasons, but because of the
660fundamental principle of reversal and exchange) - this era is long gone. It is now the era
661of murder by simulation, of the generalized aesthetic of simulation, of the murder-alibi -
662the allegorical resurrection of death, which is only there to sanction the institution of
663power, without which it no longer has any substance or an autonomous reality.
664These staged presidential assassinations are revealing because they signal the status of all
665negativity in the West: political opposition, the "Left," critical discourse, etc. - a
666simulacral contrast through which power attempts to break the vicious circle of its
667nonexistence, of its fundamental irresponsibility, of its "suspension." Power floats like
668money, like language, like theory. Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom
669of the reality of power. If they become weak for one reason or another, power has no
670other recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them.
671It is in this way that the Spanish executions still serve as a stimulant to Western liberal
672democracy, to a dying system of democratic values. Fresh blood, but for how much
673longer? The deterioration of all power is irresistibly pursued: it is not so much the
674"revolutionary forces" that accelerate this process (often it is quite the opposite), it is the
675system itself that deploys against its own structures this violence that annuls all substance
676and all finality. One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and
677destroy it, because this system that is dying from being dispossessed of its death expects
678nothing but that from us: that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through
679the negative. End of revolutionary praxis, end of the dialectic. Curiously, Nixon, who
680was not even found worthy of dying at the hands of the most insignificant, chance,
681unbalanced person (and though it is perhaps true that presidents are assassinated by
682unbalanced types, this changes nothing: the leftist penchant for detecting a rightist
683conspiracy beneath this brings out a false problem - the function of bringing death to, or
684the prophecy, etc., against power has always been fulfilled, from primitive societies to
685the present, by demented people, crazy people, or neurotics, who nonetheless carry out a
686social function as fundamental as that of presidents), was nevertheless ritually put to
687death by Watergate. Watergate is still a mechanism for the ritual murder of power (theAmerican institution of the presidency is much more thrilling in this regard than the
688European: it surrounds itself with all the violence and vicissitudes of primitive powers, of
689savage rituals). But already impeachment is no longer assassination: it happens via the
690Constitution. Nixon has nevertheless arrived at the goal of which all power dreams: to be
691taken seriously enough, to constitute a mortal enough danger to the group to be one day
692relieved of his duties, denounced, and liquidated. Ford doesn't even have this opportunity
693anymore: a simulacrum of an already dead power, he can only accumulate against
694himself the signs of reversion through murder - in fact, he is immunized by his
695impotence, which infuriates him.
696In contrast to the primitive rite, which foresees the official and sacrificial death of the
697king (the king or the chief is nothing without the promise of his sacrifice), the modern
698political imaginary goes increasingly in the direction of delaying, of concealing for as
699long as possible, the death of the head of state. This obsession has accumulated since the
700era of revolutions and of charismatic leaders: Hitler, Franco, Mao, having no
701"legitimate" heirs, no filiation of power, see themselves forced to perpetuate themselves
702indefinitely - popular myth never wishes to believe them dead. The pharaohs already did
703this: it was always one and the same person who incarnated the successive pharaohs.
704Everything happens as if Mao or Franco had already died several times and had been
705replaced by his double. From a political point of view, that a head of state remains the
706same or is someone else doesn't strictly change anything, so long as they resemble each
707other. For a long time now a head of state - no matter which one - is nothing but the
708simulacrum of himself, and only that gives him the power and the quality to govern. No
709one would grant the least consent, the least devotion to a real person. It is to his double,
710he being always already dead, to which allegiance is given. This myth does nothing but
711translate the persistence, and at the same time the deception, of the necessity of the king's
712sacrificial death.
713We are still in the same boat: no society knows how to mourn the real, power, the social
714itself, which is implicated in the same loss. And it is through an artificial revitalization of
715all this that we try to escape this fact. This situation will no doubt end up giving rise to
716socialism. Through an unforeseen turn of events and via an irony that is no longer that of
717history, it is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death
718of God that religions emerge. A twisted advent, a perverse event, an unintelligible
719reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is in essence no longer present
720except to conceal that there is no more power. A simulation that can last indefinitely,
721because, as distinct from "true" power - which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation
722of force, a stake - it is nothing but the object of a social demand, and thus as the object of
723the law of supply and demand, it is no longer subject to violence and death. Completely
724purged of a political dimension, it, like any other commodity, is dependent on mass
725production and consumption. Its spark has disappeared, only the fiction of a political
726universe remains.
727The same holds true for work. The spark of production, the violence of its stakes no
728longer exist. The whole world still produces, and increasingly, but subtly work has
729become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisioned it but not in the same sense),
730the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the course ofeveryday life. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of a stake in the work process.*6
731Same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal that the real
732of work, the real of production, has disappeared. And the real of the strike as well, which
733is no longer a work stoppage, but its alternate pole in the ritual scansion of the social
734calendar. Everything occurs as if each person had, after declaring a strike, "occupied" his
735place and work station and recommenced production, as is the norm in a "self-managed"
736occupation, exactly in the same terms as before, all while declaring himself (and in
737virtually being) permanently on strike.
738This is not a dream out of science fiction: everywhere it is a question of doubling the
739process of work. And of a doubling of the process of going on strike - striking
740incorporated just as obsolescence is in objects, just as crisis is in production. So, there is
741no longer striking, nor work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else: a
742magic of work, a trompel'oeil, a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of
743production, a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social.
744It is no longer a question of the ideology of work - the traditional ethic that would
745obscure the "real" process of work and the "objective" process of exploitation - but of the
746scenario of work. In the same way, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power,
747but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a corruption of reality through
748signs; simulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and to its duplication through
749signs. It is always the goal of the ideological analysis to restore the objective process, it is
750always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
751This is why in the end power is so much in tune with ideological discourses and
752discourses on ideology, that is they are discourses of truth - always good for countering
753the mortal blows of simulation, even and especially if they are revolutionary.
754THE END OF THE PANOPTICON
755It is still to this ideology of lived experience - exhumation of the real in its fundamental
756banality, in its radical authenticity - that the American TV verite experiment attempted on
757the Loud family in 1971 refers: seven months of uninterrupted shooting, three hundred
758hours of nonstop broadcasting, without a script or a screenplay, the odyssey of a family,
759its dramas, its joys, its unexpected events, nonstop - in short, a "raw" historical
760document, and the "greatest television performance, comparable, on the scale of our day-
761to-day life, to the footage of our landing on the moon." It becomes more complicated
762because this family fell apart during the filming: a crisis erupted, the Louds separated,
763etc. Whence that insoluble controversy: was TV itself responsible? What would have
764happened if TV hadn't been there?
765More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren't there. The
766producer's triumph was to say: "They lived as if we were not there." An absurd,
767paradoxical formula - neither true nor false: Utopian. The "as if we were not there" being
768equal to "as if you were there." It is this Utopia, this paradox that fascinated the twenty
769million viewers, much more than did the "perverse" pleasure of violating someone's
770privacy. In the "verite" experience it is not a question of secrecy or perversion, but of a
771sort of frisson of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a frisson of vertiginous andphony exactitude, a frisson of simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of
772scale, of an excessive transparency. The pleasure of an excess of meaning, when the bar
773of the sign falls below the usual waterline of meaning: the nonsignifier is exalted by the
774camera angle. There one sees what the real never was (but "as if you were there"),
775without the distance that gives us perspectival space and depth vision (but "more real
776than nature"). Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the
777hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno, which is fascinating more on a
778metaphysical than on a sexual level.)
779Besides, this family was already hyperreal by the very nature of its selection: a typical
780ideal American family, California home, three garages, five children, assured social and
781professional status, decorative housewife, upper-middle-class standing. In a way it is this
782statistical perfection that dooms it to death. Ideal heroine of the American way of life, it
783is, as in ancient sacrifices, chosen in order to be glorified and to die beneath the flames of
784the medium, a modern fatum. Because heavenly fire no longer falls on corrupted cities, it
785is the camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to
786death. "The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of
787television, and to die by it," the director will say. Thus it is a question of a sacrificial
788process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to twenty million Americans. The liturgical
789drama of a mass society.
790TV verite. A term admirable in its ambiguity, does it refer to the truth of this family or to
791the truth of TV? In fact, it is TV that is the truth of the Louds, it is TV that is true, it is
792TV that renders true. Truth that is no longer the reflexive truth of the mirror, nor the
793perspectival truth of the panoptic system and of the gaze, but the manipulative truth of
794the test that sounds out and interrogates, of the laser that touches and pierces, of
795computer cards that retain your preferred sequences, of the genetic code that controls
796your combinations, of cells that inform your sensory universe. It is to this truth that the
797Loud family was subjected by the medium of TV, and in this sense it amounts to a death
798sentence (but is it still a question of truth?).
799End of the panoptic system. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze,
800and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. This still presupposes an
801objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. It is
802still, if not a system of confinement, at least a system of mapping. More subtly, but
803always externally, playing on the opposition of seeing and being seen, even if the
804panoptic focal point may be blind.
805Something else in regard to the Louds. "You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches
806you (live)," or again: "You are no longer listening to Don't Panic, it is Don't Panic that is
807listening to you" - a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and
808Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between
809the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission
810to the model, or to the gaze "YOU are the model!" "YOU are the majority!" Such is the
811watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the
812statistical operation, or with the medium, as in the Louds' operation. Such is the last stage
813of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of
814propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: "YOU are information,you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc." An
815about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of
816power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other
817side. No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or
818circular inflexion. No more violence or surveillance: only "information," secret virulence,
819chain reaction, slow implosion, and simulacra of spaces in which the effect of the real
820again comes into play.
821We are witnessing the end of perspectival and panoptic space (which remains a moral
822hypothesis bound up with all the classical analyses on the "objective" essence of power),
823and thus to the very abolition of the spectacular. Television, for example in the case of
824the Louds, is no longer a spectacular medium. We are no longer in the society of the
825spectacle, of which the situationists spoke, nor in the specific kinds of alienation and
826repression that it implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the
827confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan)*7 is the first great formula of this
828new era. There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused,
829and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it.
830Such a blending, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium,
831without the possibility of isolating the effects - spectralized, like these advertising laser
832sculptures in the empty space of the event filtered by the medium - dissolution of TV in
833life, dissolution of life in TV - indiscernible chemical solution: we are all Louds doomed
834not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and blackmail by the media and the models, but
835to their induction, to their infiltration, to their illegible violence.
836But one must watch out for the negative turn that discourse imposes: it is a question
837neither of disease nor of a viral infection. One must think instead of the media as if they
838were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the
839hyperreal, just as the other micromolecular code controls the passage from a
840representative sphere of meaning to the genetic one of the programmed signal.
841It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival,
842determinist mode, the "active," critical mode, the analytic mode - the distinction between
843cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the
844end and the means. It is in this sense that one can say: TV is watching us, TV alienates
845us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us ... In all this, one remains dependent on the
846analytical conception of the media, on an external active and effective agent, on
847"perspectival" information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the vanishing
848point.
849Now, one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the
850opposing poles of determination vanish, according to a nuclear contraction, retraction, of
851the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and
852effect, between subject and object: precisely the distance of meaning, the gap, the
853difference, the smallest possible gap (PPEP!),*8 irreducible under pain of reabsorption
854into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it,
855because it is itself a determined order.It is this gap that vanishes in the process of genetic coding, in which indeterminacy is not
856so much a question of molecular randomness as of the abolition, pure and simple, of the
857relation. In the process of molecular control, which "goes" from the DNA nucleus to the
858"substance" that it "informs," there is no longer the traversal of an effect, of an energy, of
859a determination, of a message. "Order, signal, impulse, message": all of these attempt to
860render the thing intelligible to us, but by analogy, retranscribing in terms of inscription,
861of a vector, of decoding, a dimension of which we know nothing - it is no longer even a
862"dimension," or perhaps it is the fourth (which is denned, however, in Einsteinian
863relativity by the absorption of the distinct poles of space and time). In fact, this whole
864process can only be understood in its negative form: nothing separates one pole from
865another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contraction of one over
866the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other:
867implosion - an absorption of the radiating mode of causality, of the differential mode of
868determination, with its positive and negative charge - an implosion of meaning. That is
869where simulation begins.
870Everywhere, in no matter what domain - political, biological, psychological, mediatized -
871in which the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained, one enters
872into simulation, and thus into absolute manipulation - not into passivity, but into the
873differentiation of the active and the passive. DNA realizes this aleatory reduction at the
874level of living matter. Television, in the case of the Louds, also reaches this indefinite
875limit in which, vis-à-vis TV, they are neither more nor less active or passive than a living
876substance is vis-a-vis its molecular code. Here and there, a single nebula whose simple
877elements are indecipherable, whose truth is indecipherable.
878THE ORBITAL AND THE NUCLEAR
879The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never
880anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself
881from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the
882trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media, of the violence without
883consequences that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory apparatus of all the
884choices that are made for us. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by
885neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the
886"strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that
887variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a
888simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being
889nothing but ephemeral scenarios, transforming the life left us into survival, into a stake
890without stakes - not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no
891value).
892It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives, it is deterrence
893that gives them leukemia. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real
894atomic clash is precluded - precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs.
895The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on
896the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy"
897are at stake), but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The whole
898originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.Deterrence precludes war - the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself
899is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is
900no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary
901structure of the annihilation of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take
902place. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication
903of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it
904is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal security system, a universal
905lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash
906(which was never in question, except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold
907war, when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at
908the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the
909general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance.
910Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists
911exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose
912fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction
913(without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital has a real
914referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence
915and potential conflicts around the world.
916What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal,
917"objective," threat, and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword, is the perfection of the best
918system of control that has ever existed. And the progressive satellization of the whole
919planet through this hypermodel of security.
920The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification does not distinguish
921between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control
922are elaborated, everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent,
923everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including
924war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social,
925and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every
926confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes
927them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic
928because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a
929puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of
930conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain.
931The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the
932space program was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to
933develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence." Because what, ultimately, is
934the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of
935satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellization of
936which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where nothing
937can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology,
938environment - nothing can be left to contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm -
939the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A
940universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness - it isthis very perfection that is fascinating. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to
941the event of Rinding on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be, rather,
942the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the
943programming and the technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the
944programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of
945probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear
946or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of
947violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and makes
948every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just
949watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws.
950Now, it is the same model of programmatic infallibility, of maximum security and
951deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fallout:
952the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of
953the social. Here as well, nothing will be left to chance, moreover this is the essence of
954socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now entered its accelerated
955phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but which for the
956moment is translated by an inverse, implosive, irreversible process: the generalized
957deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture,
958or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive
959transparency of mechanisms of information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not
960have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic
961superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors of a system of
962planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free - the whole
963world is satellized).*9
964Resist the evidence: in satellization, he who is satellized is not who one might think.
965Through the orbital inscription of a spatial object, it is the planet earth that becomes a
966satellite, it is the terrestrial principle of reality that becomes eccentric, hyperreal, and
967insignificant. Through the orbital instantiation of a system of control like peaceful
968coexistence, all the terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their autonomy. All
969energy, all events are absorbed by this eccentric gravitation, everything condenses and
970implodes toward the only micromodel of control (the orbital satellite), as conversely, in
971the other, biological, dimension, everything converges and implodes on the molecular
972micromodel of the genetic code. Between the two, in this forking of the nuclear and the
973genetic, in the simultaneous assumption of the two fundamental codes of deterrence,
974every principle of meaning is absorbed, every deployment of the real is impossible.
975The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking
976manner: the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of
977peaceful coexistence - the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and
978conversion to the Roman alphabet. The latter signifies the "orbital" instantiation of an
979abstract and modelized system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of
980style and writing will be reabsorbed. The satellization of language: the means for the
981Chinese to enter the system of peaceful coexistence, which is inscribed in their heavens
982at precisely the same time by the linkup of the two satellites. Orbital flight of the Big
983Two, neutralization and homogenization of everyone else on earth.Yet, despite this deterrence by the orbital power - the nuclear or molecular code - events
984continue at ground level, misfortunes are even more numerous, given the global process
985of the contiguity and simultaneity of data. But, subtly, they no longer have any meaning,
986they are no longer anything but the duplex effect of simulation at the summit. The best
987example can only be that of the war in Vietnam, because it took place at the intersection
988of a maximum historical and "revolutionary" stake, and of the installation of this
989deterrent authority. What meaning did this war have, and wasn't its unfolding a means of
990sealing the end of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era?
991Why did this war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by
992magic?
993Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no
994internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary
995strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal
996balance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred.
997Something else, then, took place. This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode
998of peaceful coexistence. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. The
999nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years, Chinas apprenticeship
1000to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strategy of revolution to one of shared
1001forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to political alternation in a
1002system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking - Washington relations):
1003this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled out of
1004Vietnam but won the war.
1005And the war ended "spontaneously" when this objective was achieved. That is why it was
1006deescalated, demobilized so easily.
1007This same reduction of forces can be seen on the field. The war lasted as long as elements
1008irreducible to a healthy politics and discipline of power, even a Communist one,
1009remained unliquidated. When at last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops
1010in the North and escaped that of the resistance, the war could stop: it had attained its
1011objective. The stake is thus that of a political relay. As soon as the Vietnamese had
1012proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion, one could let
1013them take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved
1014itself, it could be trusted. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of
1015"savage" and archaic precapitalist structures.
1016Same scenario in the Algerian war.
1017The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the
1018murderous antagonism of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life and death, which
1019is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this
1020kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global
1021stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else,
1022unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity
1023of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures,every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be
1024abolished, that is the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular
1025death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization
1026of the social - the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance,
1027Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries
1028(who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of reshaping and
1029domesticating social relations.
1030"The North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a scenario for liquidating the
1031American presence in the course of which, of course, one must save face."
1032This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their untenable character
1033must not conceal the fact that they were nothing but a simulacrum to enable the
1034Vietnamese to seem to countenance a compromise and for Nixon to make the Americans
1035swallow the withdrawal of their troops. The game was already won, nothing was
1036objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage.
1037The moralists of war, the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged:
1038the war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same,
1039and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in other wars. This objective
1040is always fulfilled, just like that of the charting of territories and of disciplinary sociality.
1041What no longer exists is the adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic
1042causes, the ideological seriousness of war. And also the reality of victory or defeat, war
1043being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances.
1044In any case, the pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today is beyond war
1045and peace, it is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent. "War is peace," said
1046Orwell. There also, the two differential poles implode into each other, or recycle one
1047another - a simultaneity of contradictions that is at once the parody and the end of every
1048dialectic. Thus one can completely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was finished
1049well before it started, that there was an end to war at the heart of the war itself, and that
1050perhaps it never started. Many other events (the oil crisis, etc.) never started, never
1051existed, except as artificial occurrences - abstract, ersatz, and as artifacts of history,
1052catastrophes and crises destined to maintain a historical investment under hypnosis. The
1053media and the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality,
1054of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts. All the events are to be read
1055backward, or one becomes aware (as with the Communists "in power" in Italy the retro,
1056posthumous rediscovery of the gulags and Soviet dissidents like the almost contemporary
1057discovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the lost "difference" of Savages) that all these
1058things arrived too late, with a history of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago
1059exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial effervescence of signs, that all
1060these events succeed each other without logic, in the most contradictory, complete
1061equivalence, in a profound indifference to their consequences (but this is because there
1062are none: they exhaust themselves in their spectacular promotion) - all "newsreel"
1063footage thus gives the sinister impression of kitsch, of retro and porno at the same time -
1064doubtless everyone knows this, and no one really accepts it. The reality of simulation is
1065unbearable - crueler than Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, which was still an attempt to create
1066a dramaturgy of life, the last gasp of an ideality of the body, of blood, of violence in asystem that was already taking it away, toward a reabsorption of all the stakes without a
1067trace of blood. For us the trick has been played. All dramaturgy, and even all real writing
1068of cruelty has disappeared. Simulation is the master, and we only have a right to the retro,
1069to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials. Everything still unfolds
1070around us, in the cold light of deterrence (including Artaud, who has the right like
1071everything else to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
1072This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an
1073accident - save in the interval when the "young" powers could be tempted to make a
1074nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the Americans did in Hiroshima - but precisely only they
1075had a right to this "use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be
1076deterred from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry into the atomic club, so
1077prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any
1078inclination toward violent intervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence
1079always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret
1080of the social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country by flicking a
1081switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole
1082myth of the total and revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means
1083are available - but alas precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the
1084whole process of deterrence.
1085It is thus perfectly probable that one day we will see nuclear powers export atomic
1086reactors, weapons, and bombs to every latitude. Control by threat will be replaced by the
1087more effective strategy of pacification through the bomb and through the possession of
1088the bomb. The "little" powers, believing that they are buying their independent striking
1089force, will buy the virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the
1090atomic reactors that we have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking out all
1091historical virulence, all risk of explosion. In this sense, the nuclear everywhere
1092inaugurates an accelerated process of implosion, it freezes everything around it, it
1093absorbs all living energy.
1094The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of
1095energy control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and
1096undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the
1097modern revolution. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze in their
1098own fire, they deter themselves. One can no longer imagine what project, what power,
1099what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a
1100system by its own forces, now neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive -
1101except for the possibility of an explosion toward the center, of an implosion where all
1102these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to
1103say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle toward a minimal point, of a reversion
1104of energies toward a minimal threshold).
1105* NOTES *
11061. Cf. J. Baudrillard, "L'ordre des simulacres" (The order of simulacra), in L'echange
1107symbolique et la mort (Symbolic exchange and death) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).2. A discourse that is itself not susceptible to being resolved in transference. It is the
1108entanglement of these two discourses that renders psychoanalysis interminable.
11093. Cf. M. Perniola, Icônes, visions, simulacres (Icons, visions, simulacra), 39.
11104. This does not necessarily result in despairing of meaning, but just as much in the
1111improvisation of meaning, of nonmeaning, of many simultaneous meanings that destroy
1112each other.
11135. Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a
1114disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently
1115comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films
1116in terms of their relation to an "objective" social crisis or even to an "objective" phantasm
1117of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in
1118contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script. (Cf. M.
1119Makarius, La stratégic de la catastrophe [The strategy of disaster], 115.)
11206. To this flagging investment in work corresponds a parallel decline in the investment in
1121consumption. Goodbye to use value or to the prestige of the automobile, goodbye
1122amorous discourses that neatly opposed the object of enjoyment to the object of work.
1123Another discourse takes hold that is a discourse of work on the object of consumption
1124aiming for an active, constraining, puritan reinvestment (use less gas, watch out for your
1125safety, you've gone over the speed limit, etc.) to which the characteristics of automobiles
1126pretend to adapt. Rediscovering a stake through the transposition of these two poles.
1127Work becomes the object of a need, the car becomes the object of work. There is no
1128better proof of the lack of differentiation among all the stakes. It is through the same
1129slippage between the "right" to vote and electoral "duty" that the divestment of the
1130political sphere is signaled.
11317. The medium/message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and
1132the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures that formed the
1133discursive organization of language, of all determined articulation of meaning reflecting
1134Jakobson's famous grid of functions. That discourse "circulates" is to be taken literally:
1135that is, it no longer goes from one point to another, but it traverses a cycle that without
1136distinction includes the positions of transmitter and receiver, now unlocatable as such.
1137Thus there is no instance of power, no instance of transmission - power is something that
1138circulates and whose source can no longer be located, a cycle in which the positions of
1139the dominator and the dominated are exchanged in an endless reversion that is also the
1140end of power in its classical definition. The circularization of power, of knowledge, of
1141discourse puts an end to any localization of instances and poles. In the psychoanalytic
1142interpretation itself, the "power" of the interpreter does not come from any outside
1143instance but from the interpreted himself. This changes everything, because one can
1144always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who
1145made you duke? The king. Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But
1146to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can well reply: You. Thus is
1147expressed, by an inverse simulation, the passage from the "analyzed" to the "analysand,"
1148from passive to active, which simply describes the spiraling effect of the shifting of
1149poles, the effect of circularity in which power is lost, is dissolved, is resolved in perfectmanipulation (it is no longer of the order of directive power and of the gaze, but of the
1150order of tactility and commutation). See also the state/family circularity assured by the
1151fluctuation and metastatic regulation of the images of the social and the private (J.
1152Donzelot, La police des/amilles [The policing of families]).
1153Impossible now to pose the famous question: "From what position do you speak?" -
1154"How do you know?" "From where do you get your power?" without hearing the
1155immediate response: "But it is of you (from you) that I speak" - meaning, it is you who
1156are speaking, you who know, you who are the power. Gigantic circumvolution,
1157circumlocution of the spoken word, which is equal to a blackmail with no end, to a
1158deterrence that cannot be appealed of the subject presumed to speak, leaving him without
1159a reply, because to the question that he poses one ineluctably replies: but you are the
1160answer, or: your question is already an answer, etc. - the whole strangulatory
1161sophistication of intercepting speech, of the forced confession in the guise of freedom of
1162expression, of trapping the subject in his own interrogation, of the precession of the reply
1163to the question (all the violence of interpretation lies there, as well as that of the
1164conscious or unconscious management of the "spoken word" [parole]).
1165This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles, this clever subterfuge, which
1166is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus, today, in every domain, the
1167secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power, in the assumption of all
1168words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time - all
1169of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democractic simulacrum,
1170which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the
1171source of power, and of power as emanation with power as representation. Anti-
1172Copernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous
1173sources of power and knowledge - everything comes from the people and everything
1174returns to them. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of
1175manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion
1176polls, begins to be put in place.
11778. PPEP is an acronym for smallest possible gap, or "plus petit écart possible."-TRANS.
11789. Paradox: all bombs are clean: their only pollution is the system of security and of
1179control they radiate as long as they don't explode.HISTORY: A RETRO SCENARIO
1180In a violent and contemporary period of history (let's say between the two world wars and
1181the cold war), it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. It is the golden age of
1182despotic and legendary resurrections. Myth, chased from the real by the violence of
1183history, finds refuge in cinema.
1184Today, it is history itself that invades the cinema according to the same scenario - the
1185historical stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neutralization, which is
1186dubbed peaceful coexistence on a global level, and pacified monotony on the quotidian
1187level - this history exorcised by a slowly or brutally congealing society celebrates its
1188resurrection in force on the screen, according to the same process that used to make lost
1189myths live again.
1190History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it
1191takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on
1192this "awareness of history on the part of cinema," as one congratulated oneself on the
1193"entrance of politics into the university." Same misunderstanding, same mystification.
1194The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics,
1195emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game
1196and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or
1197like social security in its time), that is, posthumous liberalization.
1198The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these
1199death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas
1200so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the
1201euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution - today one has the impression that
1202history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but
1203emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the
1204panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions - no longer so much because people believe
1205in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least
1206there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death
1207were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of
1208politics, this hemorrhage of values - it is in proportion to this distress that all content can
1209be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk - a controlling idea no
1210longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the
1211belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed
1212indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro
1213fascination. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism,
1214war, the period immediately following the war - the innumerable films that play on these
1215themes for us have a closer, more perverse, denser, more confused essence). One can
1216explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis).
1217This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the
1218sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object
1219intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is
1220not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery.
1221Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our"irreferential" era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro - a
1222coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political; it is naive to conclude that the
1223evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is
1224no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this
1225reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by
1226retro).*1
1227History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema, posthumously (the term historical has
1228undergone the same fate: a "historical" moment, monument, congress, figure are in this
1229way designated as fossils). Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only
1230as nostalgia for a lost referential.
1231This does not signify that history has never appeared in cinema as a powerful moment, as
1232a contemporary process, as insurrection and not as resurrection. In the "real" as in
1233cinema, there was history but there isn't any anymore. Today, the history that is "given
1234back" to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a
1235"historical real" than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real.
1236Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of
1237the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine
1238in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that
1239fundamentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance,
1240the empty form of representation. It is a question of life or death: these objects are no
1241longer either living or deadly. That is why they are so exact, so minute, frozen in the state
1242in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. All, but not only, those
1243historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the
1244Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President's Men, etc. One has the impression of it
1245being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a
1246combinatory culture (or McLuhanesque mosaic), of large photo-, kino-,
1247historicosynthesis machines, etc., rather than one of veritable films. Let's understand each
1248other: their quality is not in question. The problem is rather that in some sense we are left
1249completely indifferent. Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be
1250sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a
1251very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Just
1252a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the
1253psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when
1254one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist
1255restitution of 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also
1256doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is emerging
1257that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without
1258weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent
1259to cinema. Most of what we see today (the best) is already of this order. Barry Lyndon is
1260the best example: one never did better, one will never do better in ... in what? Not in
1261evoking, not even in evoking, in simulating. All the toxic radiation has been filtered, all
1262the ingredients are there, in precise doses, not a single error.
1263Cool, cold pleasure, not even aesthetic in the strict sense: functional pleasure, equational
1264pleasure, pleasure of machination. One only has to dream of Visconti (Guepard, Senso,
1265etc., which in certain respects make one think of Barry Lyndon) to grasp the difference,not only in style, but in the cinematographic act. In Visconti, there is meaning, history, a
1266sensual rhetoric, dead time, a passionate game, not only in the historical content, but in
1267the mise-en-scène. None of that in Kubrick, who manipulates his film like a chess player,
1268who makes an operational scenario of history. And this does not return to the old
1269opposition between the spirit of finesse and the spirit of geometry: that opposition still
1270comes from the game and the stakes of meaning, whereas we are entering an era of films
1271that in themselves no longer have meaning strictly speaking, an era of great synthesizing
1272machines of varying geometry.
1273Is there something of this already in Leone's Westerns? Maybe. All the registers slide in
1274that direction. Chinatown: it is the detective movie renamed by laser. It is not really a
1275question of perfection: technical perfection can be part of meaning, and in that case it is
1276neither retro nor hyperrealist, it is an effect of art. Here, technical perfection is an effect
1277of the model: it is one of the referential tactical values. In the absence of real syntax of
1278meaning, one has nothing but the tactical values of a group in which are admirably
1279combined, for example, the CIA as a mythological machine that does everything, Robert
1280Redford as polyvalent star, social relations as a necessary reference to history, technical
1281virtuosity as a necessary reference to cinema.
1282The cinema and its trajectory: from the most fantastic or mythical to the realistic and the
1283hyperrealistic.
1284The cinema in its current efforts is getting closer and closer, and with greater and greater
1285perfection, to the absolute real, in its banality, its veracity, in its naked obviousness, in its
1286boredom, and at the same time in its presumption, in its pretension to being the real, the
1287immediate, the unsignified, which is the craziest of undertakings (similarly,
1288functionalism's pretension to designating - design - the greatest degree of correspondence
1289between the object and its function, and its use value, is a truly absurd enterprise); no
1290culture has ever had toward its signs this naive and paranoid, puritan and terrorist vision.
1291Terrorism is always that of the real.
1292Concurrently with this effort toward an absolute correspondence with the real, cinema
1293also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself - and this is not contradictory: it
1294is the very definition of the hyperreal. Hypotyposis and specularity. Cinema plagiarizes
1295itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes the
1296silent film more perfectly than the original, etc.: all of this is logical, the cinema is
1297fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a
1298lost referent. The cinema and the imaginary (the novelistic, the mythical, unreality,
1299including the delirious use of its own technique) used to have a lively, dialectical, full,
1300dramatic relation. The relation that is being formed today between the cinema and the
1301real is an inverse, negative relation: it results from the loss of specificity of one and of the
1302other. The cold collage, the cool promiscuity, the asexual nuptials of two cold media that
1303evolve in an asymptotic line toward each other: the cinema attempting to abolish itself in
1304the cinematographic (or televised) hyperreal.
1305History is a strong myth, perhaps, along with the unconscious, the last great myth. It is a
1306myth that at once subtended the possibility of an "objective" enchainment of events andcauses and the possibility of a narrative enchainment of discourse. The age of history, if
1307one can call it that, is also the age of the novel. It is this fabulous character, the mythical
1308energy of an event or of a narrative, that today seems to be increasingly lost. Behind a
1309performative and demonstrative logic: the obsession with historical fidelity, with a
1310perfect rendering (as elsewhere the obsession with real time or with the minute
1311quotidianeity of Jeanne Hilmann doing the dishes), this negative and implacable fidelity
1312to the materiality of the past, to a particular scene of the past or of the present, to the
1313restitution of an absolute simulacrum of the past or the present, which was substituted for
1314all other value - we are all complicitous in this, and this is irreversible. Because cinema
1315itself contributed to the disappearance of history, and to the advent of the archive.
1316Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to
1317fixing it in its visible, "objective" form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it.
1318Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what
1319it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
1320* NOTE *
13211. Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which
1322no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political
1323manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the
1324masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be interpreted as the
1325"irrational" excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of
1326collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a "political
1327aesthetic of death" at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of
1328collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of
1329the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in
1330the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this
1331neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a
1332profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive
1333energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism's cruelty, its terror
1334is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which
1335deepened in the West, and it is a response to that.HOLOCAUST
1336Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of
1337memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any
1338case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting is still too
1339dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial
1340memories that efface the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This
1341artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination - but late, much too late for it to
1342be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially
1343through a medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and
1344extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps
1345themselves. One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas
1346chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and
1347the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in
1348this way - it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level.
1349Even the type of sociohistorical dimension that still remained forgotten in the form of
1350guilt, of shameful latency, of the not-said, no longer exists, because now "everyone
1351knows," everybody has trembled and bawled in the face of extermination - a sure sign
1352that "that" will never again occur. But what one exorcises in this way at little cost, and
1353for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced, because it has always been
1354in the midst of currently reproducing itself, and precisely in the very form in which one
1355pretends to denounce it, in the medium itself of this supposed exorcism: television. Same
1356process of forgetting, of liquidation, of extermination, same annihilation of memories and
1357of history, same inverse, implosive radiation, same absorption without an echo, same
1358black hole as Auschwitz. And one would like to have us believe that TV will lift the
1359weight of Auschwitz by making a collective awareness radiate, whereas television is its
1360perpetuation in another guise, this time no longer under the auspices of a site of
1361annihilation, but of a medium of deterrence.
1362What no one wants to understand is that Holocaust is primarily (and exclusively) an
1363event, or, rather, a televised object (fundamental rule of McLuhan's, which must not be
1364forgotten), that is to say, that one attempts to rekindle a cold historical event, tragic but
1365cold, the first major event of cold systems, of cooling systems, of systems of deterrence
1366and extermination that will then be deployed in other forms (including the cold war, etc.)
1367and in regard to cold masses (the Jews no longer even concerned with their own death,
1368and the eventually self-managed masses no longer even in revolt: deterred until death,
1369deterred from their very own death) to rekindle this cold event through a cold medium,
1370television, and for the masses who are themselves cold, who will only have the
1371opportunity for a tactile thrill and a posthumous emotion, a deterrent thrill as well, which
1372"vill make them spill into forgetting with a kind of good aesthetic conscience of the
1373catastrophe.
1374In order to rekindle all that, the whole political and pedagogical orchestration that came
1375from every direction to attempt to give meaning to the event (the televised event this
1376time) was not at all excessive. Panicked blackmailing around the possible consequence of
1377this broadcast on the imagination of children and others. All the pedagogues and socialworkers mobilized to filter the thing, as if there were some danger of infection in this
1378artificial resurrection! The danger was really rather the opposite: from the cold to the
1379cold, the social inertia of cold systems, of TV in particular. It was thus necessary that the
1380whole world mobilize itself to remake the social, a hot social, heated discussion, hence
1381communication, from the cold monster of extermination. One lacks stakes, investment,
1382history, speech. That is the fundamental problem. The objective is thus to produce them
1383at all cost, and this broadcast served this purpose: to capture the artificial heat of a dead
1384event to warm the dead body of the social. Whence the addition of the supplementary
1385medium to expand on the effect through feedback: immediate polls sanctioning the
1386massive effect of the broadcast, the collective impact of the message - whereas it is well
1387understood that the polls only verify the televisual success of the medium itself. But this
1388confusion will never be lifted. From there, it is necessary to speak of the cold light of
1389television, why it is harmless to the imagination (including that of children) because it no
1390longer carries any imaginary and this for the simple reason that it is no longer an image.
1391By contrast with the cinema, which is still blessed (but less and less so because more and
1392more contaminated by TV) with an intense imaginary - because the cinema is an image.
1393That is to say not only a screen and a visual form, but a myth, something that still retains
1394something of the double, of the phantasm, of the mirror, of the dream, etc. Nothing of any
1395of this in the "TV" image, which suggests nothing, which mesmerizes, which itself is
1396nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately
1397located in your head - you are the screen, and the TV watches you - it transistorizes all
1398the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape - a tape, not an image.THE CHINA SYNDROME
1399The fundamental stake is at the level of television and information. Just as the
1400extermination of the Jews disappeared behind the televised event Holocaust - the cold
1401medium of television having been simply substituted for the cold system of extermination
1402one believed to be exorcising through it - so The China Syndrome is a great example of
1403the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event which, itself, remains
1404improbable and in some sense imaginary.
1405Besides, the film shows this to be the case (without wanting to): that TV is present
1406precisely where it happens is not coincidental, it is the intrusion of TV into the reactor
1407that seems to give rise to the nuclear incident - because TV is like its anticipation and its
1408model in the everyday universe: telefission of the real and of the real world; because TV
1409and information in general are a form of catastrophe in the formal and topological sense
1410Rene Thorn gives the word: a radical qualitative change of a whole system. Or, rather,
1411TV and the nuclear are of the same nature: behind the "hot" and negentropic concepts of
1412energy and information, they have the same power of deterrence as cold systems do. TV
1413itself is also a nuclear process of chain reaction, but implosive: it cools and neutralizes
1414the meaning and the energy of events. Thus the nuclear, behind the presumed risk of
1415explosion, that is to say of hot catastrophe, conceals a long, cold catastrophe, the
1416universalization of a system of deterrence.
1417At the end of the film again comes the second massive intrusion of the press and of TV
1418that instigates the drama - the murder of the technical director by the Special Forces, a
1419drama that substitutes for the nuclear catastrophe that will not occur.
1420The homology of the nuclear and of television can be read directly in the images: nothing
1421resembles the control and telecommand headquarters of the nuclear power station more
1422than TV studios, and the nuclear consoles are combined with those of the recording and
1423broadcasting studios in the same imaginary. Thus everything takes place between these
1424two poles: of the other "center," that of the reactor, in principle the veritable heart of the
1425matter, we will know nothing; it, like the real, has vanished and become illegible, and is
1426at bottom unimportant in the film (when one attempts to suggest it to us, in its imminent
1427catastrophe, it does not work on the imaginary plane: the drama unfolds on the screens
1428and nowhere else).
1429Harrisburg,*1 Watergate, and Network: such is the trilogy of The China Syndrome - an
1430indissoluble trilogy in which one no longer knows which is the effect and which is the
1431symptom: the ideological argument (Watergate effect), isn't it nothing but the symptom
1432of the nuclear (Harrisburg effect) or of the computer science model (Network effect) - the
1433real (Harrisburg), isn't it nothing but the symptom of the imaginary (Network and China
1434Syndrome) or the opposite? Marvelous indifferentiation, ideal constellation of
1435simulation. Marvelous title, then, this China Syndrome, because the reversibility of
1436symptoms and their convergence in the same process constitute precisely what we call a
1437syndrome - that it is Chinese adds the poetic and intellectual quality of a conundrum or
1438supplication.Obsessive conjunction of The China Syndrome and Harrisburg. But is all that so
1439involuntary? Without positing magical links between the simulacrum and the real, it is
1440clear that the Syndrome is not a stranger to the "real" accident in Harrisburg, not
1441according to a causal logic, but according to the relations of contagion and silent analogy
1442that link the real to models and to simulacra: to television's induction of the nuclear into
1443the film corresponds, with a troubling obviousness, the film's induction of the nuclear
1444incident in Harrisburg. Strange precession of a film over the real, the most surprising that
1445was given us to witness: the real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum,
1446including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is essential from
1447the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself, in the image of the film, to
1448produce a simulation of catastrophe.
1449From there to reverse our logic and to see in The China Syndrome the veritable event and
1450in Harrisburg its simulacrum, there is only one step that must be cheerfully taken.
1451Because it is via the same logic that, in the film, nuclear reality arises from the television
1452effect, and that in "reality" Harrisburg arises from the China Syndrome cinema effect.
1453But The China Syndrome is also not the original prototype of Harrisburg, one is not the
1454simulacrum of which the other would be the real: there are only simulacra, and
1455Harrisburg is a sort of second-order simulation. There is certainly a chain reaction
1456somewhere, and we will perhaps die of it, but this chain reaction is never that of the
1457nuclear, it is that of simulacra and of the simulation where all the energy of the real is
1458effectively swallowed, no longer in a spectacular nuclear explosion, but in a secret and
1459continuous implosion, and that today perhaps takes a more deathly turn than that of all
1460the explosions that rock us.
1461Because an explosion is always a promise, it is our hope: note how much, in the film as
1462in Harrisburg, the whole world waits for something to blow up, for destruction to
1463announce itself and remove us from this unnameable panic, from this panic of deterrence
1464that it exercises in the invisible form of the nuclear. That the "heart" of the reactor at last
1465reveals its hot power of destruction, that it reassures us about the presence of energy,
1466albeit catastrophic, and bestows its spectacle on us. Because unhappiness is when there is
1467no nuclear spectacle, no spectacle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is over), and it is
1468for that reason that it is rejected - it would be perfectly accepted if it lent itself to
1469spectacle as previous forms of energy did. Parousia of catastrophe: substantial food for
1470our messianic libido.
1471But that is precisely what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the
1472explosion, but the implosion. No more energy in its spectacular and pathetic form - all
1473the romanticism of the explosion, which had so much charm, being at the same time that
1474of revolution - but the cold energy of the simulacrum and of its distillation in
1475homeopathic doses in the cold systems of information.
1476What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence?
1477Everyone decries it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the
1478logic of simulacra, it is no longer that of divine predestination, it is that of the precession
1479of models, but it is just as inexorable. And it is because of this that events no longer have
1480meaning: it is not that they are insignificant in themselves, it is that they were precededby the model, with which their processes only coincided. Thus it would have been
1481marvelous to repeat the script for The China Syndrome at Fessenheim, during the visit
1482offered to the journalists by the EDF (French Electric Company), to repeat on this
1483occasion the accident linked to the magic eye, to the provocative presence of the media.
1484Alas, nothing happened. And on the other hand yes! so powerful is the logic of simulacra:
1485a week after, the unions discovered fissures in the reactors. Miracle of contagions,
1486miracle of analogic chain reactions.
1487Thus, the essence of the film is not in any respect the Watergate effect in the person of
1488Jane Fonda, not in any respect TV as a means of exposing nuclear vices, but on the
1489contrary TV as the twin orbit and twin chain reaction of the nuclear one. Besides, just at
1490the end - and there the film is unrelenting in Regard to its own argument - when Jane
1491Fonda makes the truth explode directly (maximum Watergate effect), her image is
1492juxtaposed with what will inexorably follow it and efface it on the screen: a commercial
1493of some kind. The Network effect goes far beyond the Watergate effect and spreads
1494mysteriously into the Harrisburg effect, that is to say not into the nuclear threat, but into
1495the simulation of nuclear catastrophe.
1496So, it is simulation that is effective, never the real. The simulation of nuclear catastrophe
1497is the strategic result of this generic and universal undertaking of deterrence: accustoming
1498the people to the ideology and the discipline of absolute security - to the metaphysics of
1499fission and fissure. To this end the fissure must be a fiction. A real catastrophe would
1500delay things, it would constitute a retrograde incident, of the explosive kind (without
1501changing the course of things: did Hiroshima perceptibly delay, deter, the universal
1502process of deterrence?).
1503In the film, also, real fusion would be a bad argument: the film would regress to the level
1504of a disaster movie - weak by definition, because it means returning things to their pure
1505event. The China Syndrome, itself, finds its strength in filtering catastrophe, in the
1506distillation of the nuclear specter through the omnipresent hertzian relays of information.
1507It teaches us (once again without meaning to) that nuclear catastrophe does not occur, is
1508not meant to happen, in the real either, any more than the atomic clash was at the
1509dawning of the cold war. The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the
1510atomic clash. The atom and the nuclear are made to be disseminated for deterrent ends,
1511the power of catastrophe must, instead of stupidly exploding, be disseminated in
1512homeopathic, molecular doses, in the continuous reservoirs of information. Therein lies
1513the true contamination: never biological and radioactive, but, rather, a mental
1514destructuration through a mental strategy of catastrophe.
1515If one looks carefully, the film introduces us to this mental strategy, and in going further,
1516it even delivers a lesson diametrically opposed to that of Watergate: if every strategy
1517today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal
1518simulation of catastrophe, then the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to
1519make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which
1520Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cataclysms
1521unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned. Closer to us, this is
1522what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in
1523opposition to the invisible violence of security. Besides, therein lies terrorism'sambiguity.
1524* NOTE *
15251. The incident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, which will shortly follow the
1526release of the film.APOCALYPSE NOW
1527Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war - in this sense, it is the best
1528possible testimonial - with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same
1529monstrous candor . . . and the same success. The war as entrenchment, as technological
1530and psychedelic fantasy, the war as a succession of special effects, the war become film
1531even before being filmed. The war abolishes itself in its technological test, and for
1532Americans it was primarily that: a test site, a gigantic territory in which to test their arms,
1533their methods, their power. Coppola does nothing but that: test cinema's power of
1534intervention, test the impact of a cinema that has become an immeasurable machinery of
1535special effects. In this sense, his film is really the extension of the war through other
1536means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis. The war became film, the film
1537becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology.
1538The real war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland: without counting the
1539inspired irony of having forests and Phillipine villages napalmed to retrace the hell of
1540South Vietnam. One revisits everything through cinema and one begins again: the
1541Molochian joy of filming, the sacrificial joy of so many millions spent, of such a
1542holocaust of means, of so many misadventures, and the remarkable paranoia that from the
1543beginning conceived of this film as a historical, global event, in which, in the mind of the
1544creator, the war in Vietnam would have been nothing other than what it is, would not
1545fundamentally have existed - and it is necessary for us to believe in this: the war in
1546Vietnam "in itself" perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of
1547napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor
1548of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already
1549filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm,
1550which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.
1551No real distance, no critical sense, no desire for "raising consciousness" in relation to the
1552war: and in a sense this is the brutal quality of this film - not being rotten with the moral
1553psychology of war. Coppola can certainly deck out his helicopter captain in a ridiculous
1554hat of the light cavalry, and make him crush the Vietnamese village to the sound of
1555Wagner's music - those are not critical, distant signs, they are immersed in the machinery,
1556they are part of the special effect, and he himself makes movies in the same way, with the
1557same retro megalomania, and the same non-signifying furor, with the same clownish
1558effect in overdrive. But there it is, he hits us with that, it is there, it is bewildering, and
1559one can say to oneself: how is such a horror possible (not that of the war, but that of the
1560film strictly speaking)? But there is no answer, there is no possible verdict, and one can
1561even rejoice in this monstrous trick (exactly as with Wagner) - but one can always
1562retrieve a tiny little idea that is not nasty, that is not a value judgment, but that tells you
1563the war in Vietnam and this film are cut from the same cloth, that nothing separates them,
1564that this film is part of the war - if the Americans (seemingly) lost the other one, they
1565certainly won this one. Apocalypse Now is a global victory. Cinematographic power
1566equal and superior to that of the industrial and military complexes, equal or superior to
1567that of the Pentagon and of governments.
1568And all of a sudden, the film is not without interest: it retrospectively illuminates (noteven retrospectively, because the film is a phase of this war without end) what was
1569already crazy about this war, irrational in political terms: the Americans and the
1570Vietnamese are already reconciled, right after the end of the hostilities the Americans
1571offered economic aid, exactly as if they had annihilated the jungle and the towns, exactly
1572as they are making their film today. One has understood nothing, neither about the war
1573nor about cinema (at least the latter) if one has not grasped this lack of distinction that is
1574no longer either an ideological or a moral one, one of good and evil, but one of the
1575reversibility of both destruction and production, of the immanence of a thing in its very
1576revolution, of the organic metabolism of all the technologies, of the carpet of bombs in
1577the strip of film . . .THE BEAUBOURG EFFECT: IMPLOSION AND DETERRENCE
1578The Beaubourg effect, the Beaubourg machine, the Beaubourg thing - how to give it a
1579name? Enigma of this carcass of flux and signs, of networks and circuits - the final
1580impulse to translate a structure that no longer has a name, the structure of social relations
1581given over to superficial ventilation (animation, self-management, information, media)
1582and to an irreversibly deep implosion. Monument to the games of mass simulation, the
1583Pompidou Center functions as an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and
1584devouring it - a bit like the black monolith in 2001: insane convection of all the contents
1585that came there to be materialized, to be absorbed, and to be annihilated. All around, the
1586neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone - remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and
1587hygienic design - but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making
1588emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security,
1589pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the
1590protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the
1591territory - a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear
1592matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated,
1593which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of
1594deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful
1595coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger).
1596The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission,
1597political deterrence.
1598This said, the circulation of fluids is unequal. Ventilation, cooling, electrical networks -
1599the "traditional" fluids circulate there very well. Already the circulation of the human
1600flux is less assured (the archaic solution of escalators in plastic sleeves, one ought to be
1601aspirated, propelled, or something, but with a mobility that would be up to this baroque
1602theatricality of fluids that is the source of the originality of the carcass). As for the
1603material of the works, of objects, of books and the so-called polyvalent interior space,
1604these no longer circulate at all. It is the opposite of Roissy, where from a futurist center
1605of "spatial" design radiating toward "satellites," etc., one ends up completely flat in front
1606of . . . traditional airplanes. But the incoherence is the same. (What happened to money,
1607this other fluid, what happened to its mode of circulation, of emulsion, of fallout at
1608Beaubourg?)
1609Same contradiction even in the behavior of the personnel, assigned to the "polyvalent"
1610space and without a private work space. On their feet and mobile, the people affect a cool
1611demeanor, more supple, very contemporary, adapted to the "structure" of a "modern"
1612space. Seated in their corner, which is precisely not one, they exhaust themselves
1613secreting an artificial solitude, remaking their "bubble." Therein is also a great tactic of
1614deterrence: one condemns them to using all their energy in this individual defense.
1615Curiously, one thus finds the same contradiction that characterizes the Beaubourg thing:
1616a mobile exterior, commuting, cool and modern - an interior shriveled by the same old
1617values.
1618This space of deterrence, articulated on the ideology of visibility, of transparency, ofpolyvalency, of consensus and contact, and sanctioned by the blackmail to security, is
1619today, virtually, that of all social relations. All of social discourse is there, and on this
1620level as well as on that of the treatment of culture, Beaubourg flagrantly contradicts its
1621explicit objectives, a nice monument to our modernity. It is nice to think that the idea did
1622not come to some revolutionary spirit, but to the logicians of the established order,
1623deprived of all critical intelligence, and thus closer to the truth, capable, in their
1624obstinacy, of putting in place a machine that is fundamentally uncontrollable, that in its
1625very success escapes them, and that is the most exact reflection, even in its
1626contradictions, of the current state of things.
1627Certainly, all the cultural contents of Beaubourg are anachronistic, because only an
1628empty interior could correspond to this architectural envelope. The general impression
1629being that everything here has come out of a coma, that everything wants to be animation
1630and is only reanimation, and that this is good because culture is dead, a condition that
1631Beaubourg admirably retraces, but in a dishonest fashion, whereas one should have
1632triumphantly accepted this death and erected a monument or an anti-monument
1633equivalent to the phallic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. Monument to total
1634disconnection, to hyperreality and to the implosion of culture-achieved today for us in the
1635effect of transistorized circuits always threatened by a gigantic short circuit.
1636Beaubourg is already an imperial compression - figure of a culture already crushed by its
1637own weight - like moving automobiles suddenly frozen in a geometric solid. Like the cars
1638of Caesar, survivors of an ideal accident, no longer external, but internal to the metallic
1639and mechanical structure, and which would have produced tons of cubic scrap iron,
1640where the chaos of tubes, levers, frames, of metal and human flesh inside is tailored to
1641the geometric size of the smallest possible space - thus the culture of Beaubourg is
1642ground, twisted, cut up, and pressed into its smallest simple elements - a bundle of
1643defunct transmissions and metabolisms, frozen like a science-fiction mecanoid.
1644But instead of breaking and compressing all culture here in this carcass that in any case
1645has the appearance of a compression, instead of that, one exhibits Caesar there. One
1646exhibits Dubuffet and the counterculture, whose inverse simulation acts as a referential
1647for the defunct culture. In this carcass that could have served as a mausoleum to the
1648useless operationality of signs, one reexhibits Tinguely's ephemeral and autodestructive
1649machines under the sign of the eternity of culture. Thus one neutralizes everything
1650together: Tinguely is embalmed in the museal institution, Beaubourg falls back on its
1651supposed artistic contents.
1652Fortunately, this whole simulacrum of cultural values is annihilated in advance by the
1653external architecture.*1 Because this architecture, with its networks of tubes and the look
1654it has of being an expo or world's fair building, with its (calculated?) fragility deterring
1655any traditional mentality or monumentality, overtly proclaims that our time will never
1656again be that of duration, that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of
1657recycling, that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids. Our only culture in the end is that
1658of hydrocarbons, that of refining, cracking, breaking cultural molecules and of their
1659recombination into synthesized products. This, the Beaubourg Museum wishes to
1660conceal, but the Beaubourg cadaver proclaims. And this is what underlies the beauty of
1661the cadaver and the failure of the interior spaces. In any case, the very ideology of"cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the
1662polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained
1663and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. Nothing can be done about it. Too bad for the
1664masses, too bad for Beaubourg.
1665What should, then, have been placed in Beaubourg?
1666Nothing. The void that would have signified the disappearance of any culture of meaning
1667and aesthetic sentiment. But'this is still too romantic and destructive, this void would still
1668have had value as a masterpiece of anticulture.
1669Perhaps revolving strobe lights and gyroscopic lights, striating the space, for which the
1670crowd would have provided the moving base element?
1671In fact, Beaubourg illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself
1672on the alibi of the previous order. Here, a cadaver all in flux and surface connections
1673gives itself as content a traditional culture of depth. An order of prior simulacra (that of
1674meaning) furnishes the empty substance of a subsequent order, which, itself, no longer
1675even knows the distinction between signifier and signified, nor between form and
1676content.
1677The question: "What should have been placed in Beaubourg?" is thus absurd. It cannot be
1678answered because the topical distinction between interior and exterior should no longer
1679be posed. There lies our truth, the truth of Mobius-doubtless an unrealizable Utopia, but
1680which Beaubourg still points to as right, to the degree to which any of its contents is a
1681countermeaning and annihilated in advance by the form.
1682Yet-yet ... if you had to have something in Beaubourg - it should have been a labyrinth, a
1683combinatory, infinite library, an aleatory redistribution of destinies through games or
1684lotteries - in short, the universe of Borges - or even the circular Ruins: the slowed-down
1685enchainment of individuals dreamed up by each other (not a dreamworld Disneyland, a
1686laboratory of practical fiction). An experimentation with all the different processes of
1687representation: defraction, implosion, slow motion, aleatory linkage and decoupling - a
1688bit like at the Exploratorium in San Francisco or in the novels of Philip K. Dick - in short
1689a culture of simulation and of fascination, and not always one of production and meaning:
1690this is what might be proposed that would not be a miserable anticulture. Is it possible?
1691Not here, evidently. But this culture takes place elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. From
1692today, the only real cultural practice, that of the masses, ours (there is no longer a
1693difference), is a manipulative, aleatory practice, a labyrinthine practice of signs, and one
1694that no longer has any meaning.
1695In another way, however, it is not true that there is no coherence between form and
1696content at Beaubourg. It is true if one gives any credence to the official cultural project.
1697But exactly the opposite occurs there. Beaubourg is nothing but a huge effort to
1698transmute this famous traditional culture of meaning into the aleatory order of signs, into
1699an order of simulacra (the third) that is completely homogeneous with the flux and pipes
1700of the facade. And it is in order to prepare the masses for this new semiurgic order that
1701one brings them together here - with the opposite pretext of acculturating them tomeaning and depth.
1702One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a monument of cultural deterrence.
1703Within a museal scenario that only serves to keep up the humanist fiction of culture, it is
1704a veritable fashioning of the death of culture that takes place, and it is a veritable cultural
1705mourning for which the masses are joyously gathered.
1706And they throw themselves at it. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses
1707throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture which they have been
1708denied for centuries, but because they have for the first time the opportunity to massively
1709participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the end, they have always detested.
1710The misunderstanding is therefore complete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cultural
1711mystification of the masses. The masses, themselves, rush there to enjoy this execution,
1712this dismemberment, this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated,
1713including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. The masses rush toward
1714Beaubourg as they rush toward disaster sites, with the same irresistible elan. Better: they
1715are the disaster of Beaubourg. Their number, their stampede, their fascination, their itch
1716to see everything is objectively a deadly and catastrophic behavior for the whole
1717undertaking. Not only does their weight put the building in danger, but their adhesion,
1718their curiosity annihilates the very contents of this culture of animation. This rush can no
1719longer be measured against what was proposed as the cultural objective, it is its radical
1720negation, in both its excess and success. It is thus the masses who assume the role of
1721catastrophic agent in this structure of catastrophe, it is the masses themselves who put an
1722end to mass culture.
1723Circulating in the space of transparency, the masses are certainly converted into flux, but
1724at the same time, through their opacity and inertia, they put an end to this "polyvalent"
1725space. One invites the masses to participate, to simulate, to play with the models - they
1726go one better: they participate and manipulate so well that they efface all the meaning
1727one wants to give to the operation and put the very infrastructure of the edifice in danger.
1728Thus, always a sort of parody, a hypersimulation in response to cultural simulation,
1729transforms the masses, who should only be the livestock of culture, into the agents of the
1730execution of this culture, of which Beaubourg was only the shameful incarnation.
1731One must applaud this success of cultural deterrence. All the antiartists, leftists, and those
1732who hold culture in contempt have never even gotten close to approaching the
1733dissuassive efficacy of this monumental black hole that is Beaubourg. It is a truly
1734revolutionary operation, precisely because it is involuntary, insane and uncontrolled,
1735whereas any operation meant to put an end to culture only serves, as one knows, to
1736resurrect it.
1737To tell the truth, the only content of Beaubourg is the masses themselves, whom the
1738building treats like a converter, like a black box, or, in terms of input-output, just like a
1739refinery handles petroleum products or a flood of unprocessed material.
1740It has never been so clear that the content - here, culture, elsewhere, information or
1741commodities - is nothing but the phantom support for the operation of the medium itself,whose function is always to induce mass, to produce a homogeneous human and mental
1742flux. An immense to-and-fro movement similar to that of suburban commuters, absorbed
1743and ejected at fixed times by their workplace. And it is precisely work that is at issue here
1744- a work of testing, polling, and directed interrogation: the people come here to select
1745objects - responses to all the questions they might ask themselves, or rather they come
1746themselves in response to the functional and directed question that the objects constitute.
1747More than a chain of work it is thus a question of a programmatic discipline whose
1748constraints have been effaced behind a veneer of tolerance. Well beyond traditional
1749institutions of capital, the hypermarket, or the Beaubourg "hypermarket of culture," is
1750already the model of all future forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a
1751homogeneous space - time of all the dispersed functions of the body and of social life
1752(work, leisure, media culture), retranscription of all the contradictory currents in terms of
1753integrated circuits. Space-time of a whole operational simulation of social life.
1754For that, the mass of consumers must be equivalent or homologous to the mass of
1755products. It is the confrontation and the fusion of these two masses that occurs in the
1756hypermarket as it does at Beaubourg, and that makes of them something very different
1757from the traditional sites of culture (monuments, museums, galleries, libraries,
1758community arts centers, etc.). Here a critical mass beyond which the commodity becomes
1759hypercommodity and culture hyperculture, is elaborated - that is to say no longer linked
1760to distinct exchanges or determined needs, but to a kind of total descriptive universe, or
1761integrated circuit that implosion traverses through and through - incessant circulation of
1762choices, readings, references, marks, decoding. Here cultural objects, as elsewhere the
1763objects of consumption, have no other end than to maintain you in a state of mass
1764integration, of transistorized flux, of a magnetized molecule. It is what one comes to learn
1765in a hypermarket: hyperreality of the commodity - it is what one comes to learn at
1766Beaubourg: the hyperreality of culture.
1767Already with the traditional museum this cutting up, this regrouping, this interference of
1768all cultures, this unconditional aestheticization that constitutes the hyperreality of culture
1769begins, but the museum is still a memory. Never, as it did here, has culture lost its
1770memory in the service of stockpiling and functional redistribution. And this translates a
1771more general fact: that throughout the "civilized" world the construction of stockpiles of
1772objects has brought with it the complementary process of stockpiles of people - the line,
1773waiting, traffic jams, concentration, the camp. That is "mass production," not in the sense
1774of a massive production or for use by the masses, but the production of the masses. The
1775masses as the final product of all sociality, and, at the same time, as putting an end to
1776sociality, because these masses that one wants us to believe are the social, are on the
1777contrary the site of the implosion of the social. The masses are the increasingly dense
1778sphere in which the whole social comes to be imploded, and to be devoured in an
1779uninterrupted process of simulation.
1780Whence this concave mirror: it is from seeing the masses in the interior that the masses
1781will be tempted to rush in. Typical marketing method: the whole ideology of
1782transparency here takes on its meaning. Or again: it is in staging a reduced ideal model
1783that one hopes for an accelerated gravitation, an automatic agglutination of culture as an
1784automatic agglomeration of the masses. Same process: nuclear operation of a chain
1785reaction, or specular operation of white magic.Thus for the first time, Beaubourg is at the level of culture what the hypermarket is at the
1786level of the commodity: the perfect circulatory operator, the demonstration of anything
1787(commodity, culture, crowd, compressed air) through its own accelerated circulation.
1788But if the supply of objects brings along with it the stockpiling of men, the latent
1789violence in the supply of objects brings with it the inverse violence of men.
1790Every stock is violent, and there is a specific violence in any mass of men also, because
1791of the fact that it implodes - a violence proper to its gravitation, to its densification
1792around its own locus of inertia. The masses are a locus of inertia and through that a locus
1793of a completely new, inexplicable violence different from explosive violence.
1794Critical mass, implosive mass. Beyond thirty thousand it poses the risk of "bending" the
1795structure of Beaubourg. If the masses magnetized by the structure become a destructive
1796variable of the structure itself - if those who conceived of the project wanted this (but
1797how to hope for this?), if they thus programmed the chance of putting an end with one
1798blow to both architecture and culture - then Beaubourg constitutes the most audacious
1799object and the most successful happening of the century!
1800Make Beaubourg bend! New motto of a revolutionary order. Useless to set fire to it,
1801useless to contest it. Do it! It is the best way of destroying it. The success of Beaubourg is
1802no longer a mystery: the people go there for that, they throw themselves on this building,
1803whose fragility already breathes catastrophe, with the single goal of making it bend.
1804Certainly they obey the imperative of deterrence: one gives them an object to consume, a
1805culture to devour, an edifice to manipulate. But at the same time they expressly aim, and
1806without knowing it, at this annihilation. The onslaught is the only act the masses can
1807produce as such - a projectile mass that challenges the edifice of mass culture, that wittly
1808replies with its weight (that is to say with the characteristic most deprived of meaning,
1809the stupidest, the least cultural one they possess) to the challenge of culturality thrown at
1810it by Beaubourg. To the challenge of mass acculturation to a sterilized culture, the masses
1811respond with a destructive irruption, which is prolonged in a brutal manipulation. To
1812mental deterrence the masses respond with a direct physical deterrence. It is their own
1813challenge. Their ruse, which is to respond in the very terms by which they are solicited,
1814but beyond that, to respond to the simulation in which one imprisions them with an
1815enthusiastic social process that surpasses the objectives of the former and acts as a
1816destructive hypersimulation.*2
1817People have the desire to take everything, to pillage everything, to swallow everything, to
1818manipulate everything. Seeing, deciphering, learning does not touch them. The only
1819massive affect is that of manipulation. The organizers (and the artists and intellectuals)
1820are frightened by this uncontrollable watchfulness, because they never count on anything
1821but the apprenticeship of the masses to the spectacle of culture. They never count on this
1822active, destructive fascination, a brutal and original response to the gift of an
1823incomprehensible culture, an attraction that has all the characteristics of breaking and
1824entering and of the violation of a sanctuary.Beaubourg could have or should have disappeared the day after the inauguration,
1825dismantled and kidnapped by the crowd, which would have been the only possible
1826response to the absurd challenge of the transparency and democracy of culture - each
1827person taking away a fetishized bolt of this culture itself fetishized.
1828The people come to touch, they look as if they were touching, their gaze is only an aspect
1829of tactile manipulation. It is certainly a question of a tactile universe, no longer a visual
1830or discursive one, and the people are directly implicated in a process: to manipulate/to be
1831manipulated, to ventilate/to be ventilated, to circulate/to make circulate, which is no
1832longer of the order of representation, nor of distance, nor of reflection. It is something
1833that is part of panic, and of a world in panic.
1834Panic in slow motion, no external variable. It is the violence internal to a saturated
1835ensemble. Implosion.
1836Beaubourg cannot even burn, everything is foreseen. Fire, explosion, destruction are no
1837longer the imaginary alternative to this type of building. It is implosion that is the form of
1838abolishing the "quaternary" world, both cybernetic and combinatory.
1839Subversion, violent destruction is what corresponds to a mode of production. To a
1840universe of networks, of combinatory theory, and of flow correspond reversal and
1841implosion.
1842The same for institutions, the state, power, etc. The dream of seeing all that explode by
1843dint of contradictions is precisely nothing but a dream. What is produced in reality is that
1844the institutions implode of themselves, by dint of ramifications, feedback, overdeveloped
1845control circuits. Power implodes, this is its current mode of disappearance.
1846Such is the case for the city. Fires, war, plague, revolutions, criminal marginality,
1847catastrophes: the whole problematic of the anticity, of the negativity internal or external
1848to the city, has some archaic relation to its true mode of annihilation.
1849Even the scenario of the underground city - the Chinese version of the burial of structures
1850- is naive. The city does not repeat itself any longer according to a schema of
1851reproduction still dependent on the general schema of production, or according to a
1852schema of resemblance still dependent on a schema of representation. (That is how one
1853still restored after the Second World War.) The city no longer revives, even deep down -
1854it is remade starting from a sort of genetic code that makes it possible to repeat it
1855indefinitely starting with an accumulated cybernetic memory. Gone even the Borgesian
1856Utopia, of the map coextensive with the territory and doubling it in its entirety: today the
1857simulacrum no longer goes by way of the double and of duplication, but by way of
1858genetic miniaturization. End of representation and implosion, there also, of the whole
1859space in an infinitesimal memory, which forgets nothing, and which belongs to no one.
1860Simulation of an immanent, increasingly dense, irreversible order, one that is potentially
1861saturated and that will never again witness the liberating explosion.
1862We were a culture of liberating violence (rationality). Whether it be that of capital, of the
1863liberation of productive forces, of the irreversible extension of the field of reason and ofthe field of value, of the conquered and colonized space including the universal - whether
1864it be that of the revolution, which anticipates the future forms of the social and of the
1865energy of the social - the schema is the same: that of an expanding sphere, whether
1866through slow or violent phases, that of a liberated energy - the imaginary of radiation.
1867The violence that accompanies it is that of a wider world: it is that of production. This
1868violence is dialectical, energetic, cathartic. It is the one we have learned to analyze and
1869that is familiar to us: that which traces the paths of the social and which leads to the
1870saturation of the whole field of the social. It is a violence that is determined, analytical,
1871liberating.
1872A whole other violence appears today, which we no longer know how to analyze,
1873because it escapes the traditional schema of explosive violence: implosive violence that
1874no longer results from the extension of a system, but from its saturation and its retraction,
1875as is the case for physical stellar systems. A violence that follows an inordinate
1876densifkation of the social, the state of an overregulated system, a network (of knowledge,
1877information, power) that is overencumbered, and of a hypertrophic control investing all
1878the interstitial pathways.
1879This violence is unintelligible to us because our whole imaginary has as its axis the logic
1880of expanding systems. It is indecipherable because undetermined. Perhaps it no longer
1881even comes from the schema of indeterminacy. Because the aleatory models that have
1882taken over from classical models of determination and causality are not fundamentally
1883different. They translate the passage of defined systems of expansion to systems of
1884production and expansion on all levels - in a star or in a rhizome, it doesn't matter - all
1885the philosophies of the release of energy, of the irradiation of intensities and of the
1886molecularization of desire go in the same direction, that of a saturation as far as the
1887interstitial and the infinity of networks. The difference from the molar to the molecular is
1888only a modulation, the last perhaps, in the fundamental energetic process of expanding
1889systems.
1890Something else if we move from a millennial phase of the liberation and disconnection of
1891energies to a phase of implosion, after a kind of maximum radiation (see Bataille's
1892concepts of loss and expenditure in this sense, and the solar myth of an inexhaustible
1893radiation, on which he founds his sumptuary anthropology: it is the last explosive and
1894radiating myth of our philosophy, the last fire of artifice of a fundamentally general
1895economy, but this no longer has any meaning for us), to a phase of the reversion of the
1896social - gigantic reversion of a field once the point of saturation is reached. The stellar
1897systems also do not cease to exist once their radiating energy is dissipated: they implode
1898according to a process that is at first slow, and then progressively accelerates - they
1899contract at a fabulous speed, and become involutive systems, which absorb all the
1900surrounding energies, so that they become black holes where the world as we know it, as
1901radiation and indefinite energy potential, is abolished.
1902Perhaps the great metropolises - certainly these if this hypothesis has any meaning - have
1903become sites of implosion in this sense, sites of the absorption and reabsorption of the
1904social itself whose golden age, contemporaneous with the double concept of capital and
1905revolution, is doubtless past. The social involutes slowly or brutally, in a field of inertia,which already envelops the political. (The opposite energy?) One must stop oneself from
1906taking implosion for a negative process -inert, regressive - like the one language imposes
1907on us by exalting the opposite terms of evolution, of revolution. Implosion is a process
1908specific to incalculable consequences. May 1968 was without a doubt the first implosive
1909episode, that is to say contrary to its rewriting in terms of revolutionary prosopopeia, a
1910first violent reaction to the saturation of the social, a retraction, a challenge to the
1911hegemony of the social, in contradiction, moreover, to the ideology of the participants
1912themselves, who thought they were going further into the social - such is the imaginary
1913that still dominates us - and moreover a good part of the events of 1968 were still able to
1914come from that revolutionary dynamic and explosive violence, but something else began
1915at the same time there: the violent involution of the social, determined on that score, and
1916the consecutive and sudden implosion of power, in a brief moment of time, but that never
1917stopped afterward - fundamentally it is that which continues, the implosion, of the social,
1918of institutions, of power - and not at all an unlocatable revolutionary dynamic. On the
1919contrary, revolution itself, the idea of revolution also implodes, and this implosion carries
1920weightier consequences than the revolution itself.
1921Certainly, since 1968, and thanks to 1968, the social, like the desert, grows-participation,
1922management, generalized self-management, etc. - but at the same time it comes close in
1923multiple places, more numerous than in 1968, to its disaffection and to its total reversion.
1924Slow seism, intelligible to historical reason.
1925* NOTES *
19261. Still something else annihilates the cultural project of Beaubourg: the masses
1927themselves also flood in to take pleasure in it (we will return to this later).
19282. In relation to this critical mass, and to its radical understanding of Beaubourg, how
1929derisory seems the demonstration of the students from Vincennes the evening of its
1930inauguration!HYPERMARKET AND HYPERCOMMODITY
1931From thirty kilometers all around, the arrows point you toward these large triage centers
1932that are the hypermarkets, toward this hyperspace of the commodity where in many
1933regards a whole new sociality is elaborated. It remains to be seen how the hypermarket
1934centralizes and redistributes a whole region and population, how it concentrates and
1935rationalizes time, trajectories, practices - creating an immense to-and-fro movement
1936totally similar to that of suburban commuters, absorbed and ejected at fixed times by their
1937work place.
1938At the deepest level, another kind of work is at issue here, the work of acculturation, of
1939confrontation, of examination, of the social code, and of the verdict: people go there to
1940find and to select objects - responses to all the questions they may ask themselves; or,
1941rather, they themselves come in response to the functional and directed question that the
1942objects constitute. The objects are no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs
1943whose meaning and message one could decipher and appropriate for oneself, they are
1944tests, they are the ones that interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them, and the
1945answer is included in the question. Thus all the messages in the media function in a
1946similar fashion: neither information nor communication, but referendum, perpetual test,
1947circular response, verification of the code.
1948No relief, no perspective, no vanishing point where the gaze might risk losing itself, but a
1949total screen where, in their uninterrupted display, the billboards and the products
1950themselves act as equivalent and successive signs. There are employees who are
1951occupied solely in remaking the front of the stage, the surface display, where a previous
1952deletion by a consumer might have left some kind of a hole. The self-service also adds to
1953this absence of depth: the same homogeneous space, without mediation, brings together
1954men and things - a space of direct manipulation. But who manipulates whom?
1955Even repression is integrated as a sign in this universe of simulation. Repression become
1956deterrence is nothing but an extra sign in the universe of persuasion. The circuits of
1957surveillance cameras are themselves part of the decor of simulacra. A perfect surveillance
1958on all fronts would require a heavier and more sophisticated mechanism of control than
1959that of the store itself. It would not be profitable. It is thus an allusion to repression, a
1960"signal" of this order, that is put in place; this sign can thus coexist with all the others,
1961and even with the opposite imperative, for example those that huge billboards express by
1962inviting you to relax and to choose in complete serenity. These billboards, in fact,
1963observe and surveil you as well, or as badly, as the "policing" television. The latter looks
1964at you, you look at yourself in it, mixed with the others, it is the mirror without silvering
1965(tain) in the activity of consumption, a game of splitting in two and doubling that closes
1966this world on itself.
1967The hypermarket cannot be separated from the highways that surround and feed it, from
1968the parking lots blanketed in automobiles, from the computer terminal - further still, in
1969concentric circles - from the whole town as a total functional screen of activities. The
1970hypermarket resembles a giant montage factory, because, instead of being linked to the
1971chain of work by a continuous rational constraint, the agents (or the patients), mobile anddecentered, give the impression of passing through aleatory circuits from one point of the
1972chain to another. Schedules, selection, buying are aleatory as well, in contrast to work
1973practices. But it is still a question of a chain, of a programmatic discipline, whose taboos
1974are effaced beneath a veneer of tolerance, facility, and hyperreality. The hypermarket is
1975already, beyond the factory and traditional institutions of capital, the model of all future
1976forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a homogeneous space - time of all the
1977dispersed functions of the body, and of social life (work, leisure, food, hygiene,
1978transportation, media, culture); retranscription of the contradictory fluxes in terms of
1979integrated circuits; space - time of a whole operational simulation of social life, of a
1980whole structure of living and traffic.
1981A model of directed anticipation, the hypermarket (especially in the United States)
1982preexists the metropolitan area; it is what gives rise to metro areas, whereas the
1983traditional market was in the heart of a city, a place where the city and the country came
1984to rub elbows. The hypermarket is the expression of a whole lifestyle in which not only
1985the country but the town as well have disappeared to make room for "the metro area" - a
1986completely delimited functional urban zoning, of which the hypermarket is the
1987equivalent, the micromodel, on the level of consumption. But the role of the hypermarket
1988goes far beyond "consumption," and the objects no longer have a specific reality there:
1989what is primary is their serial, circular, spectacular arrangement - the future model of
1990social relations.
1991The "form" hypermarket can thus help us understand what is meant by the end of
1992modernity. The large cities have witnessed the birth, in about a century (1850-1950), of a
1993generation of large, "modern" stores (many carried this name in one way or another), but
1994this fundamental modernization, linked to that of transportation, did not overthrow the
1995urban structure. The cities remained cities, whereas the new cities are satellited by the
1996hypermarket or the shopping center, serviced by a programmed traffic network, and cease
1997being cities to become metropolitan areas. A new morphogenesis has appeared, which
1998comes from the cybernetic kind (that is to say, reproducing at the level of the territory, of
1999the home, of transit, the scenarios of molecular control that are those of the genetic code),
2000and whose form is nuclear and satellitic. The hypermarket as nucleus. The city, even a
2001modern one, no longer absorbs it. It is the hypermarket that establishes an orbit along
2002which suburbanizaiton moves. It functions as an implant for the new aggregates, as the
2003university or even the factory sometimes also does - no longer the nineteenth-century
2004factory nor the decentralized factory that, without breaking the orbit of the city, is
2005installed in the suburbs, but the montage factory, automated by electronic controls, that is
2006to say corresponding to a totally deterritorialized function and mode of work. With this
2007factory, as with the hypermarket or the new university, one is no longer dealing with
2008functions (commerce, work, knowledge, leisure) that are autonomized and displaced
2009(which still characterizes the "modern" unfolding of the city), but with a model of the
2010disintegration of functions, of the indeterminacy of functions, and of the disintegration of
2011the city itself, which is transplanted outside the city and treated as a hyperreal model, as
2012the nucleus of a metropolitan area based on synthesis that no longer has anything to do
2013with a city. Negative satellites of the city that translate the end of the city, even of the
2014modern city, as a determined, qualitative space, as an original synthesis of a society.
2015One could believe that this implantation corresponds to the rationalization of diversefunctions. But, in fact, from the moment a function becomes hyperspecialized to the point
2016of being capable of being projected from every element on the terrain "keys in hand," it
2017loses the finality proper to it and becomes something else altogether: a polyfunctional
2018nucleus, an ensemble of "black boxes" with multiple input-outputs, the locus of
2019convection and of destructuration. These factories and these universities are no longer
2020factories nor universities, and the hypermarkets no longer have the quality of a market.
2021Strange new objects of which the nuclear power station is without a doubt the absolute
2022model and from which radiates a kind of neutralization of the territory, a power of
2023deterrence that, behind the apparent function of these objects, without a doubt constitutes
2024their fundamental function: the hyperreality of functional nuclei that are no longer at all
2025functional. These new objects are the poles of simulation around which is elaborated, in
2026contrast to old train stations, factories, or traditional transportation networks, something
2027other than a "modernity": a hyperreality, a simultaneity of all the functions, without a
2028past, without a future, an operationality on every level. And doubtless also crises, or even
2029new catastrophes: May 1968 begins at Nanterre, and not at the Sorbonne, that is to say in
2030a place where, for the first time in France, the hyperfunctionalization "extra muros" of a
2031place of learning is equivalent to deterritorialization, to disaffection, to the loss of the
2032function and of the finality of knowledge in a programmed neofunctional whole. There, a
2033new, original violence was born in response to the orbital satellization of a model
2034(knowledge, culture) whose referential is lost.THE IMPLOSION OF MEANING IN THE MEDIA
2035We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
2036Consider three hypotheses.
2037Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the
2038brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and
2039content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. In this case, one
2040must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of
2041free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that
2042is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.).
2043Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational
2044model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly
2045speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional,
2046a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not
2047be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it
2048functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it
2049does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no
2050significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning.
2051Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the
2052two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or
2053that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving,
2054dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media.
2055The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held
2056opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages.
2057Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere
2058information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of
2059meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of
2060capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is
2061enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an
2062excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social - just as
2063consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and
2064irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all
2065complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the
2066credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing,
2067and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the
2068opposite occurs.
2069Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for
2070two reasons.
20711. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging
2072communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging ofmeaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective
2073interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through
2074speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is
2075invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening
2076dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of
2077the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything
2078but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the
2079negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the
2080brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical
2081loss of meaning.
2082It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the
2083simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to
2084short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that
2085calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a
2086circular process - that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of
2087communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished.
2088Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure - to
2089which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this
2090tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable
2091reality.
2092But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths
2093in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know
2094very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us,
2095corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system
2096encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to
2097deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth
2098exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of
2099critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of
2100the masses.
21012. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the
2102pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social.
2103Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state
2104dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1
2105Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the
2106implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the
2107implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be
2108analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences
2109of which have yet to be exhausted.
2110That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the
2111medium. Only the medium can make an event - whatever the contents, whether they are
2112conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios,antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did
2113not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to
2114manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the
2115medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive,
2116revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is - and this is where McLuhan's
2117formula leads, pushed to its limit - there is not only an implosion of the message in the
2118medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real,
2119the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even
2120the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.
2121Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put
2122in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of
2123the era of simulation (the medium is the message - the sender is the receiver - the
2124circularity of all poles - the end of panoptic and perspectival space - such is the alpha and
2125omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all
2126the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself
2127that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message that lends credibility to
2128the medium, that gives the medium its determined, distinct status as the intermediary of
2129communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state
2130characteristic of all our great systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose
2131efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real."
2132Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the
2133end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm
2134speaking particularly of electronic mass media) - that is, of a mediating power between
2135one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor
2136in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another,
2137the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of
2138distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real - thus the
2139impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from
2140one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in
2141the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must
2142envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is
2143useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through
2144form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is
2145indecipherable.
2146The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence
2147of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total
2148circularity of the model, of the implosion of the social in the masses, may seem
2149catastrophic and desperate. But this is only the case in light of the idealism that
2150dominates our whole view of information. We all live by a passionate idealism of
2151meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and,
2152from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us.
2153But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and
2154annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of accumulation, of productive finality,
2155imposed on us by the system. Etymologically, the term itself only signifies the curvature,the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon
2156of the event," to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that
2157has meaning for us - but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for
2158the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilistic day of reckoning, such
2159as it functions in our contemporary imaginary.
2160Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the
2161implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the masses, which
2162result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social.
2163What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of the masses to
2164meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) - the challenge to
2165meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative
2166efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge.
2167Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media:
2168do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informée]
2169masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all
2170the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in
2171"Requiem for the Media," I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an
2172irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This absence of a
2173response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a
2174counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power. What then?
2175Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they
2176on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on
2177meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it
2178the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media
2179make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the
2180exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete
2181ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves
2182terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on
2183this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a good
2184use of the media - there is none). The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they
2185manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle
2186for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system,
2187according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic - and it is exactly like this. There is
2188no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic
2189resolution.
2190With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble
2191double bind - exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children
2192are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects,
2193responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert,
2194obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory
2195demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he
2196opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total
2197claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinatelyand efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness,
2198hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more
2199objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and
2200viewed as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom,
2201emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable
2202and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all
2203the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning - precisely
2204the practices of the masses - that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and
2205passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the
2206constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not
2207respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating
2208ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding,
2209speaking, participating, playing the game - a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as
2210serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression
2211and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this
2212strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still
2213confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system
2214is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic
2215resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word - or of the
2216hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of
2217refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning
2218to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without
2219absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it
2220was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails.
2221To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on
2222liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the
2223word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects
2224and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose
2225imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of
2226speech.
2227* NOTE *
22281. Here we have not spoken of information except in the social register of
2229communication. But it would be enthralling to consider this hypothesis even within the
2230parameters of cybernetic information theory. There also, the fundamental thesis calls for
2231this information to be synonymous with negentropy with the resistance to entropy, with
2232an excess of meaning and organization. But it would be useful to posit the opposite
2233hypothesis: INFORMATION = ENTROPY. For example: the information or knowledge
2234that can be obtained about a system or an event is already a form of the neutralization and
2235entropy of this system (to be extended to science in general, and to the social sciences
2236and humanities in particular). Information in which an event is reflected or broadcast is
2237already a degradedform of this event. Do not hesitate to analyze the media's intervention
2238in May 1968 in these terms. The extension of the student action permitted the general
2239strike, but the latter was precisely a black box that neutralized the original virulence of
2240the movement. Amplification was itself a mortal trap and not a positive extension. One
2241should be wary of the universalization of struggles through information. One should bewary of solidarity campaigns at every level, of this simultaneously electronic and worldly
2242solidarity. Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of
2243the system.ABSOLUTE ADVERTISING, GROUND-ZERO ADVERTISING
2244Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into
2245that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in
2246advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten.
2247Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification,
2248degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of
2249energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a
2250future, without the possiblity of metamorphosis, has power over all the others. All current
2251forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein. Not
2252necessarily advertising itself, the kind that is produced as such - but the form of
2253advertising, that of a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual
2254(all the modalities are confused therein, but in an attenuated, agitated mode). More
2255generally, the form of advertising is one in which all particular contents are annulled at
2256the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other, whereas what is inherent
2257to "weighty" enunciations, to articulated forms of meaning (or of style) is that they
2258cannot be translated into each other, any more than the rules of a game can be.
2259This long movement toward translatability and thus toward a complete combinatorial,
2260which is that of the superficial transparency of everything, of their absolute advertising
2261(of which professional advertising is, once again, only an episodic form), can be read in
2262the vicissitudes of propaganda.
2263The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and
2264the market crash of 1929. Both languages of the masses, issuing from the mass
2265production of ideas, or commodities, their registers, separate at first, progressively
2266converge. Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of
2267political men and parties with their "trademark image." Propaganda approaches
2268advertising as it would the vehicular model of the only great and veritable idea-force of
2269this competing society, the commodity and the mark. This convergence defines a society-
2270ours-in which there is no longer any difference between the economic and the political,
2271because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore
2272where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized. That is to say
2273dissolved as a specific power (as an historical mode of social contradiction), resolute,
2274absorbed in a language without contradictions, like a dream, because traversed by purely
2275superficial intensities.
2276A subsequent stage is crossed once the very language of the social, after that of the
2277political, becomes confused with this fascinating solicitation of an agitated language,
2278once the social turns itself into advertising, turns itself over to the popular vote by trying
2279to impose its trademark image. From the historical destiny that it was, the social itself fell
2280to the level of a "collective enterprise" securing its publicity on every level. See what
2281surplus value of the social each advertisement tries to produce: werben werben (advertise
2282advertise) - the solicitation of the social everywhere, present on walls, in the hot and
2283bloodless voices of female radio announcers, in the accents of the sound track and in the
2284multiple tonalities of the image track that is played everywhere before our eyes. A
2285sociality everywhere present, an absolute sociality finally realized in absolute advertising
2286- that is to say, also totally dissolved, a vestige of sociality hallucinated on all the walls inthe simplified form of a demand of the social that is immediately met by the echo of
2287advertising. The social as a script, whose bewildered audience we are.
2288Thus the form of advertising has imposed itself and developed at the expense of all the
2289other languages as an increasingly neutral, equivalent rhetoric, without affects, as an
2290"asyntactic nebula," Yves Stourdze would say, which envelops us from every side (and
2291which at the same time eliminates the hotly controversial problem of "belief" and
2292efficacy: it does not offer signifieds in which to invest, it offers a simplified equivalence
2293of all the formerly distinctive signs, and deters them with this very equivalence). This
2294defines the limits of advertising's current power and the conditions of its disappearance,
2295since today advertising is no longer a stake, it has both "entered into our customs" and at
2296the same time escaped the social and moral dramaturgy that it still represented twenty
2297years ago.
2298It is not that people no longer believe in it or that they have accepted it as routine. It is
2299that if its fascination once lay in its power to simplify all languages, today this power is
2300stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more
2301functional: the languages of computer science. The sequence model, the sound track, and
2302the image track that advertising, along with the other big media, offers us - the model of
2303the combinatory, equal distribution of all discourses that it proposes - this still rhetorical
2304continuum of sounds, signs, signals, slogans that it erects as a total environment is largely
2305overtaken, precisely in its function of simulation, by the magnetic tape, by the electronic
2306continuum that is in the process of being silhouetted against the horizon of the end of this
2307century. Microprocessing, digitality, cybernetic languages go much further in the
2308direction of the absolute simplification of processes than advertising did on its humble -
2309still imaginary and spectacular-level. And it is because these systems go further that
2310today they polarize the fascination that formerly devolved on advertising. It is
2311information, in the sense of data processing, that will put an end to, that is already putting
2312an end to the reign of advertising. That is what inspires fear, and what is thrilling. The
2313"thrill" of advertising has been displaced onto computers and onto the miniaturization of
2314everyday life by computer science.
2315The anticipatory illustration of this transformation was Philip K. Dick's papula - that
2316transistorized advertising implant, a sort of broadcasting leech, an electronic parasite that
2317attaches itself to the body and that is very hard to get rid of. But the papula is still an
2318intermediary form: it is already a kind of incorporated prosthesis, but it still incessantly
2319repeats advertising messages. A hybrid, then, but a prefiguration of the psychotropic and
2320dataprocessing networks of the automatic piloting of individuals, next to which the
2321"conditioning" by advertising looks like a delightful change in fortune.
2322Currently, the most interesting aspect of advertising is its disappearance, its dilution as a
2323specific form, or even as a medium. Advertising is no longer (was it ever?) a means of
2324communication or of information. Or else it is overtaken by the madness specific to
2325overdeveloped systems, that of voting for itself at each moment, and thus of parodying
2326itself. If at a given moment, the commodity was its own publicity (there was no other)
2327today publicity has become its own commodity. It is confused with itself (and the
2328eroticism with which it ridiculously cloaks itself is nothing but the autoerotic index of a
2329system that does nothing but designate itself - whence the absurdity of seeing in it an"alienation" of the female body).
2330As a medium become its own message (which makes it so that now there is a demand for
2331advertising in and of itself, and that thus the question of "believing" in it or not is no
2332longer even posed), advertising is completely in unison with the social, whose historical
2333necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social: a
2334demand that the social function like a business, a group of services, a mode of living or of
2335survival (the social must be saved just as nature must be preserved: the social is our
2336niche) - whereas formerly it was a sort of revolution in its very project. This is certainly
2337lost: the social has lost precisely this power of illusion, it has fallen into the register of
2338supply and demand, just as work has passed from being a force antagonistic to capital to
2339the simple status of employment, that is to say of goods (eventually rare) and services
2340just like the others. One can thus create advertising for work, the joy of finding work, just
2341as one will be able to create advertising for the social. And, today, true advertising lies
2342therein: in the design of the social, in the exaltation of the social in all its forms, in the
2343fierce, obstinate reminder of a social, the need for which makes itself rudely felt.
2344Folkloric dances in the metro, innumerable campaigns for security, the slogan "tomorrow
2345I work" accompanied by a smile formerly reserved for leisure time, and the advertising
2346sequence for the election to the Prud-hommes (an industrial tribunal): "I don't let anyone
2347choose for me" - an Ubuesque slogan, one that rang so spectacularly falsely, with a
2348mocking liberty, that of proving the social while denying it. It is not by chance that
2349advertising, after having, for a long time, carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic
2350kind, fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, "I buy, I consume, I take
2351pleasure," today repeats in other forms, "I vote, I participate, I am present, I am
2352concerned" - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public
2353signification.
2354The opposite panic: one knows that the social can be dissolved in a panic reaction, an
2355uncontrollable chain reaction. But it can also be dissolved in the opposite reaction, a
2356chain reaction of inertia, each microuniverse saturated, autoregulated, computerized,
2357isolated in automatic pilot. Advertising is the prefiguration of this: the first manifestation
2358of an uninterrupted thread of signs, like ticker tape - each isolated in its inertia.
2359Disaffected, but saturated. Desensitized, but ready to crack. It is in such a universe that
2360what Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength, that the following being
2361to appear: fractal objects, fractal forms, fault zones that follow saturation, and thus a
2362process of massive rejection, of the abreaction or stupor of a society purely transparent to
2363itself. Like the signs in advertising, one is geared down, one becomes transparent or
2364uncountable, one becomes diaphanous or rhizomic to escape the point of inertia - one is
2365placed in orbit, one is plugged in, one is satellized, one is archived - paths cross: there is
2366the sound track, the image track, just as in life there is the work track, the leisure track,
2367the transport track, etc., all enveloped in the advertising track. Everywhere there are three
2368or four paths, and you are at the crossroads. Superficial saturation and fascination.
2369Because fascination remains. One need only look at Las Vegas, the absolute advertising
2370city (of the 1950s, of the crazy years of advertising, which has retained the charm of that
2371era, today retro in some sense, because advertising is secretly condemned by the
2372programmatic logic that will give rise to very different cities). When one sees Las Vegasrise whole from the desert in the radiance of advertising at dusk, and return to the desert
2373when dawn breaks, one sees that advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls,
2374it is what effaces the walls, effaces the streets, the facades, and all the architecture,
2375effaces any support and any depth, and that it is this liquidation, this reabsorption of
2376everything into the surface (whatever signs circulate there) that plunges us into this
2377stupefied, hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else, and that is
2378the empty and inescapable form of seduction.
2379Language allows itself to be dragged along by its double, and joins the best to the worst
2380for a phantom of rationality whose formula is "Everyone must believe in it." Such is the
2381message of what unites us.
2382- J. L. Bouttes, Le destructeur d'intensites (The Destroyer of Intensities)
2383Advertising, therefore, like information: destroyer of intensities, accelerator of inertia.
2384See how all the artifices of meaning and of nonmeaning are repeated in it with lassitude,
2385like all the procedures, all the mechanisms of the language of communication (the
2386function of contact: you understand me? Are you looking at me? It will speak! - the
2387referential function, the poetic function even, the allusion, the irony, the game of words,
2388the unconscious), how all of that is staged exactly like sex in pornography, that is to say
2389without any faith, with the same tired obscenity. That is why, now, it is useless to analyze
2390advertising as language, because something else is happening there: a doubling of
2391language (and also of images), to which neither linguistics nor semiology correspond,
2392because they function on the veritable operation of meaning, without the slightest
2393suspicion of this caricatural exorbitance of all the functions of language, this opening
2394onto an immense field of the mockery of signs, "consumed" as one says in their mockery,
2395for their mockery and the collective spectacle of their game without stakes - just as porno
2396is a hypertrophied fiction of sex consumed in its mockery, for its mockery, a collective
2397spectacle of the inanity of sex in its baroque assumption (it was the baroque that invented
2398this triumphal mockery of stucco, fixing the disappearance of the religious in the orgasm
2399of statues).
2400Where is the golden age of the advertising project? The exaltation of an object by an
2401image, the exaltation of buying and of consumption through the sumptuary spending of
2402advertising? Whatever the subjugation of publicity to the management of capital (but this
2403aspect of the question - that of the social and economic impact of publicity - always
2404remains unresolved and fundamentally insoluble), it always had more than a subjugated
2405function, it was a mirror held out to the universe of political economy and of the
2406commodity, it was for a moment their glorious imaginary, that of a torn-up world, but an
2407expanding one. But the universe of the commodity is no longer this one: it is a world both
2408saturated and in involution. In one blow, it lost both its triumphal imaginary, and, from
2409the mirror stage, it passed in some sense to the stage of mourning.
2410There is no longer a staging of the commodity: there is only its obscene and empty form.
2411And advertising is the illustration of this saturated and empty form.
2412That is why advertising no longer has a territory. Its recoverable forms no longer haveany meaning. The Forum des Halles, for example, is a gigantic advertising unit - an
2413operation of publicitude. It is not the advertising of a particular person, of any firm, the
2414Forum also does not have the status of a veritable mall or architectural whole, any more
2415than Beaubourg is, in the end, a cultural center: these strange objects, these supergadgets
2416simply demonstrate that our social monumentality has become advertising. And it is
2417something like the Forum that best illustrates what advertising has become, what the
2418public domain has become.
2419The commodity is buried, like information is in archives, like archives are in bunkers,
2420like missiles are in atomic silos.
2421Gone the happy and displayed commodity, now that it flees the sun, and suddenly it is
2422like a man who has lost his shadow. Thus the Forum des Halles closely resembles a
2423funeral home - the funereal luxury of a commodity buried, transparent, in a black sun.
2424Sarcophagus of the commodity.
2425Everything there is sepulchral - white, black, salmon marble. A bunker-case-in deep,
2426snobbish, dull black-mineral underground space. Total absence of fluids; there is no
2427longer even a liquid gadget like the veil of water at Parly 2,*1 which at least fooled the
2428eye - here not even an amusing subterfuge, only pretentious mourning is staged. (The
2429only amusing idea in the whole thing is precisely the human and his shadow who walk in
2430trompe l'oeil on the vertical dais of concrete: a gigantic, beautiful gray, open-air canvas,
2431serving as a frame to the trompe l'oeil, this wall lives without having wished to, in
2432contrast to the family vault of haute couture and pret-a-porter that constitutes the Forum.
2433This shadow is beautiful because it is an allusion in contrast to the inferior world that has
2434lost its shadow.)
2435All that one could hope for, once this sacred space was opened to the public, and for fear
2436that pollution, as in the Lascaux caves, cause it to deteriorate irremediably (think of the
2437waves of people from the RER) ,*2 was that it be immediately closed off to circulation
2438and covered with a definitive shroud in order to keep this testimony to a civilization that
2439has arrived, after having passed the stage of the apogee, at the stage of the hypogee, of
2440the commodity, intact. There is a fresco here that traces the long route traversed, starting
2441with the man of Tautavel passing through Marx and Einstein to arrive at Dorothee Bis . .
2442.Why not save this fresco from decomposition? Later the speleologists will rediscover it,
2443at the same time that they discover a culture that chose to bury itself in order to
2444definitively escape its own shadow, to bury its seductions and its artifices as if it were
2445already consecrating them to another world.
2446* NOTES *
24471. Parly 2 is a mall that was built in the 1970s on the outskirts of Paris.-TRANS.
24482. The RER is a high-speed, underground commuter train.-TRANS.CLONE STORY
2449Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest.
2450But the double is precisely not a prosthesis: it is an imaginary figure, which, just like the
2451soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so
2452that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again, which haunts the
2453subject like a subtle and always averted death. This is not always the case, however:
2454when the double materializes, when it becomes visible, it signifies imminent death.
2455In other words, the imaginary power and wealth of the double - the one in which the
2456strangeness and at the same time the intimacy of the subject to itself are played out
2457(heimlich/ unheimlich) - rests on its immateriality, on the fact that it is and remains a
2458phantasm. Everyone can dream, and must have dreamed his whole life, of a perfect
2459duplication or multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams,
2460and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into the real. The same is true of
2461the (primal) scene of seduction: it only functions when it is phantasmed, reremembered,
2462never real. It belonged to our era to wish to exorcise this phantasm like the others, that is
2463to say to want to realize, materialize it in flesh and bone and, in a completely contrary
2464way, to change the game of the double from a subtle exchange of death with the Other
2465into the eternity of the Same.
2466Clones. Cloning. Human cuttings ad infinitum, each individual cell of an organism
2467capable of again becoming the matrix of an identical individual. In the United States, a
2468child was born a few months ago like a geranium: from cuttings. The first clone child (the
2469lineage of an individual via vegetal multiplication). The first born from a single cell of a
2470single individual, his "father," the sole progenitor, of which he would be the exact
2471replica, the perfect twin, the double.*1
2472Dream of an eternal twining substituted for sexual procreation that is linked to death.
2473Cellular dream of scissiparity, the purest form of parentage, because it finally allows one
2474to do without the other, to go from the same to the same (one still has to use the uterus of
2475a woman, and a pitted ovum, but this support is ephemeral, and in any case anonymous: a
2476female prosthesis could replace it). Monocellular Utopia which, by way of genetics,
2477allows complex beings to achieve the destiny of protozoas.
2478What, if not a death drive, would push sexed beings to regress to a form of reproduction
2479prior to sexuation (besides, isn't it this form of scissiparity, this reproduction and
2480proliferation through pure contiguity that is for us, in the depths of our imaginary, death
2481and the death drive - what denies sexuality and wants to annihilate it, sexuality being the
2482carrier of life, that is to say of a critical and mortal form of reproduction?) and that, at the
2483same time, would push them metaphysically to deny all alterity, all alteration of the Same
2484in order to aim solely for the perpetuation of an identity, a transparency of the genetic
2485inscription no longer even subject to the vicissitudes of procreation?
2486Let's leave the death drive aside. Is it a question of the phantasm of auto-genesis? No,
2487because such a fantasy still passes through the figures of the mother and the father, sexed
2488parental figures that the subject can dream of effacing by substituting himself for them,but without denying the symbolic structure of procreation at all: becoming one's own
2489child is still being someone's child. Whereas cloning radically abolishe's the Mother, but
2490also the Father, the intertwining of their genes, the imbrication of their differences, but
2491above all the joint act that is procreation. The cloner does not beget himself: he sprouts
2492from each of his segments. One can speculate on the wealth of each of these vegetal
2493branchings that in effect resolve all oedipal sexuality in the service of "nonhuman" sex,
2494of sex through immediate contiguity and reduction - it is still the case that it is no longer
2495a question of the fantasy of auto-genesis. The Father and the Mother have disappeared,
2496not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called
2497code. No more mother, no more father: a matrix. And it is the matrix, that of the genetic
2498code, that now infinitely "gives birth" based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory
2499sexuality.
2500The subject is also gone, since identical duplication puts an end to his division. The
2501mirror stage is abolished in cloning, or rather it is parodied therein in a monstruous
2502fashion. Cloning also retains nothing, and for the same reason, of the immemorial and
2503narcissistic dream of the subject's projection into his ideal alter ego, since this projection
2504still passes through an image: the one in the mirror, in which the subject is alienated in
2505order to find himself again, or the one, seductive and mortal, in which the subject sees
2506himself in order to die there. None of this occurs in cloning. No more medium, no more
2507image - any more than an industrial object is the mirror of the identical one that succeeds
2508it in the series. One is never the ideal or mortal mirage of the other, they can only be
2509added to each other, and if they can only be added, it means that they are not sexually
2510engendered and know nothing of death.
2511It is no longer even a question of being twins, since Gemini or Twins possess a specific
2512property, a particular and sacred fascination of the Two, of what is two together, and
2513never was one. Whereas cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same: I + I + I + I, etc.
2514Neither child, nor twin, nor narcissistic reflection, the clone is the materialization of the
2515double by genetic means, that is to say the abolition of all alterity and of any imaginary.
2516Which is combined with the economy of sexuality. Delirious apotheosis of a productive
2517technology.
2518A segment has no need of imaginary mediation in order to reproduce itself, any more
2519than the earthworm needs earth: each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a
2520whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO. Just as
2521each fragment of a hologram can again become the matrix of the complete hologram: the
2522information remains whole, with perhaps somewhat less definition, in each of the
2523dispersed fragments of the hologram.
2524This is how one puts an end to totality. If all information can be found in each of its parts,
2525the whole loses its meaning. It is also the end of the body, of this singularity called body,
2526whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells, that it is an
2527indivisible configuration, to which its sexuation is witness (paradox: cloning will
2528fabricate sexed beings in perpetuity, since they are similar to their model, whereas
2529thereby sex becomes useless - but precisely sex is not a function, it is what makes a body
2530a body, it is what exceeds all the parts, all the diverse functions of this body). Sex (ordeath: in this sense it is the same thing) is what exceeds all information that can be
2531collected on a body. Well, where is all this information collected? In the genetic formula.
2532This is why it must necessarily want to forge a path of autonomous reproduction,
2533independent of sexuality and of death.
2534Already, biophysioanatomical science, by dissecting the body into organs and functions,
2535begins the process of the analytic decomposition of the body, and micromolecular
2536genetics is nothing but the logical consequence, though at a much higher level of
2537abstraction and simulation - at the nuclear level of the command cell, at the direct level of
2538the genetic code, around which this whole phantasmagoria is organized.
2539From a functional and mechanistic point of view, each organ is still only a partial and
2540differentiated prosthesis: already simulation, but "traditional." From the point of view of
2541cybernetics and computer science, it is the smallest undifferentiated element, each cell of
2542a body becomes an "embryonic" prosthesis of this body. It is the genetic formula
2543inscribed in each cell that becomes the veritable modern prosthesis of all bodies. If the
2544prosthesis is commonly an artifact that supplements a failing organ, or the instrumental
2545extension of a body, then the DN A molecule, which contains all information relative to a
2546body, is the prosthesis par excellence, the one that will allow for the indefinite extension
2547of this body by the body itself - this body itself being nothing but the indefinite series of
2548its prostheses.
2549A cybernetic prosthesis infinitely more subtle and still more artificial than any
2550mechanical prosthesis. Because the genetic code is not "natural": just as every abstract
2551and autonomized part of a whole becomes an artificial prosthesis that alters this whole by
2552substituting itself for it (pro-thesis: this is the etymological meaning), one can say that the
2553genetic code, where the whole of a being is supposedly condensed because all the
2554"information" of this being would be imprisoned there (there lies the incredible violence
2555of genetic simulation) is an artifact, an operational prosthesis, an abstract matrix, from
2556which will be able to emerge, no longer even through reproduction, but through pure and
2557simple renewal, identical beings assigned to the same controls.
2558My genetic patrimony was fixed once and for all when a certain spermatozoa
2559encountered a certain ovum. This heritage contains the recipe for all the biochemical
2560processes that realized me and ensure my functioning. A copy of this recipe is inscribed
2561in each of the dozens of millions of cells that constitute me today. Each of these cells
2562knows how to manufacture me; before being a cell of my liver or of my blood, it is a cell
2563of me. It is thus theoretically possible to manufacture an individual identical to me
2564starting with one of these cells. (Professor A. Jacquard)
2565Cloning is thus the last stage of the history and modeling of the body, the one at which,
2566reduced to its abstract and genetic formula, the individual is destined to serial
2567propagation. It is necessary to revisit what Walter Benjamin said of the work of art in the
2568age of its mechanical reproducibility. What is lost in the work that is serially reproduced,
2569is its aura, its singular quality of the here and now, its aesthetic form (it had already lost
2570its ritual form, in its aesthetic quality), and, according to Benjamin, it takes on, in itsineluctable destiny of reproduction, a political form. What is lost is the original, which
2571only a history itself nostalgic and retrospective can reconstitute as "authentic." The most
2572advanced, the most modern form of this development, which Benjamin described in
2573cinema, photography, and contemporary mass media, is one in which the original no
2574longer even exists, since things are conceived from the beginning as a function of their
2575unlimited reproduction.
2576This is what happens to us with cloning, no longer only at the level of messages, but at
2577the level of individuals. In fact this is what happens to the body when it ceases to be
2578conceived as anything but a message, as a stockpile of information and of messages, as
2579fodder for data processing. Thus nothing is opposed to the body being serially reproduced
2580in the same way Benjamin describes the reproduction of industrial objects and the images
2581of the mass media. There is a precession of reproduction over production, a precession of
2582the genetic model over all possible bodies. It is the irruption of technology that controls
2583this reversal, of a technology that Benjamin was already describing, in its total
2584consequences, as a total medium, but one still of the industrial age - a gigantic prosthesis
2585that controlled the generation of objects and identical images, in which nothing could be
2586differentiated any longer from anything else - but still without imagining the current
2587sophistication of this technology, which renders the generation of identical beings
2588possible, though there is no possibility of a return to an original being. The prostheses of
2589the industrial age are still external, exotechnical, those that we know have been
2590subdivided and internalized: esotechnical. We are in the age of soft technologies - genetic
2591and mental software.
2592As long as the prostheses of the old industrial golden age were mechanical, they still
2593returned to the body in order to modify its image - conversely, they themselves were
2594metabolized in the imaginary and this technological metabolism was also part of the
2595image of the body. But when one reaches a point of no return (deadend) in simulation,
2596that is to say when the prosthesis goes deeper, is interiorized in, infiltrates the anonymous
2597and micro-molecular heart of the body, as soon as it is imposed on the body itself as the
2598"original" model, burning all the previous symbolic circuits, the only possible body the
2599immutable repetition of the prosthesis, then it is the end of the body, of its history, and of
2600its vicissitudes. The individual is no longer anything but a cancerous metastasis of its
2601base formula. All the individuals produced through cloning individual X, are they
2602anything other than a cancerous metastasis - the proliferation of the same cell such as
2603occurs with cancer? There is a narrow relation between the key concept of the genetic
2604code and the pathology of cancer: the code designates the smallest simple element, the
2605minimal formula to which an entire individual can be reduced, and in such a way that he
2606can only reproduce himself identically to himself. Cancer designates a proliferation ad
2607infinitum of a base cell without taking into consideration the organic laws of the whole. It
2608is the same thing with cloning: nothing opposes itself any longer to the renewal of the
2609Same, to the unchecked proliferation of a single matrix. Formerly, sexed reproduction
2610still stood in opposition to this, today one can finally isolate the genetic matrix of
2611identity, and one will be able to eliminate all the differential vicissitudes that once
2612constituted the aleatory charm of individuals.
2613If all cells are conceived primarily as a receptacle of the same genetic formula - not only
2614all the identical individuals, but all the cells of the same individual - what are they but thecancerous extension of this base formula? The metastasis that began with industrial
2615objects ends with cellular organization. It is useless to ask oneself if cancer is an illness
2616of the capitalist age. It is in effect the illness that controls all contemporary pathology,
2617because it is the very form of the virulence of the code: an exacerbated redundancy of the
2618same signals, an exacerbated redundancy of the same cells.
2619The stage of the body changes in the course of an irreversible technological
2620"progression": from tanning in the sun, which already corresponds to an artificial use of
2621the natural medium, that is to say to making it a prosthesis of the body (itself becoming a
2622simulated body, but where lies the truth of the body?) - to domestic tanning with an
2623iodine lamp (yet another good old mechanical technique) - to tanning with pills and
2624hormones (chemical and ingested prosthesis) - and finally to tanning by intervening in
2625the genetic formula (an incomparably more advanced stage, but a prosthesis nonetheless,
2626that is, it is simply definitively integrated, it no longer even passes through either the
2627surface or the orifices of the body), one passes by different bodies. It is the schema of the
2628whole that is metamorphosed. The traditional prosthesis, which serves to repair a failing
2629organ, changes nothing in the general model of the body. Organ transplants are still of
2630this order. But what should be said of mental modeling via psychotropic agents and
2631drugs? It is the stage of the body that is changed by them. The psychotropic body is a
2632body modeled "from the inside," no longer passing through the per-spectival space of
2633representation, of the mirror, and of discourse. A silent, mental, already molecular (and
2634no longer specular) body, a body metabolized directly, without the mediation of the act or
2635the gaze, an immanent body, without alterity without a mise en scéne, without
2636transcendence, a body consecrated to the implosive metabolism of cerebral, endocrinal
2637flows, a sensory, but not sensible, body because it is connected only to its internal
2638terminals, and not to objects of perception (the reason why one can enclose it in a
2639"white," blank sensoriality - disconnecting it from its own sensorial extremities, without
2640touching the world that surrounds it, suffices), a body already homogeneous, at this stage
2641of plastic tactility, of mental malleability, of psychotropism at every level, already close
2642to nuclear and genetic manipulation, that is to say to the absolute loss of the image,
2643bodies that cannot be represented, either to others or to themselves, bodies enucleated of
2644their being and of their meaning by being transfigured into a genetic formula or through
2645biochemical instability: point of no return, apotheosis of a technology that has itself
2646become interstitial and molecular.
2647* NOTES *
2648One must take into account that cancerous proliferation is also a silent disobedience of
2649the injunctions of the genetic code. Cancer, if it fits with the logic of a nuclear/computer
2650science vision of human beings, is also its monstrous excrescence and negation, because
2651it leads to total disinformation and to disaggregation. "Revolutionary" pathology of
2652organic abandonment, Richard Pinhas would say, in Fictions ("Notes synoptiques a
2653propos d'un mal mysterieux" [Synoptic notes on a mysterious illness]). Entropic delirium
2654of organisms, resisting the negentropy of informational systems. (It is the same
2655conjunction as that of the masses vis-a-vis structured social formations: the masses are
2656also cancerous metastases outside any social organicity.)
2657The same ambiguity is operative in cloning: it is at once the triumph of a controllinghypothesis, that of the code and of genetic information, and an eccentric distortion that
2658destroys its coherence. Besides, it is probable (but this is left to a future story) that even
2659the "clonic twin" will never be identical to its progenitor, will never be the same, if only
2660because it will have had another before it. It will never be "just like what the genetic code
2661in itself would have changed it to." Millions of interferences will make of it, despite
2662everything, a different being, who will have the very same blue eyes of its father, which
2663is not new. And the cloning experiment will at least have the advantage of demonstrating
2664the radical impossibility of mastering a process simply by mastering information and the
2665code. Note: A version of this essay with a different ending appeared under the title "The
2666Hell of the Same" in Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme
2667Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London and New York: Verso, 1993).-TRANS.
2668I. Cf. D. Rorvik, A son image: La copie d'un homme (In his image: The copy of a man)
2669(Paris: Grasset, 1978).HOLOGRAMS
2670It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues - ever since Narcissus bent over his
2671spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration
2672of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this
2673power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself immaterially in the
2674beyond. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond:
2675the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and
2676talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its
2677charm will be lost.
2678The TV studio transforms you into holographic characters: one has the impression of
2679being materialized in space by the light of projectors, like translucid characters who pass
2680through the masses (that of millions of TV viewers) exactly as your real hand passes
2681through the unreal hologram without encountering any resistance - but not without
2682consequences: having passed through the hologram has rendered your hand unreal as
2683well.
2684The hallucination is total and truly fascinating once the hologram is projected in front of
2685the plaque, so that nothing separates you from it (or else the effect remains photo- or
2686cinematographic). This is also characteristic of trompe l'oeil, in contrast to painting:
2687instead of a field as a vanishing point for the eye, you are in a reversed depth, which
2688transforms you into a vanishing point . . . The relief must leap out at you just as a tram
2689car and a chess game would. This said, which type of objects or forms will be
2690"hologenic" remains to be discovered since the hologram is no more destined to produce
2691three-dimensional cinema than cinema was destined to reproduce theater, or photography
2692was to take up the contents of painting.
2693In the hologram, it is the imaginary aura of the double that is mercilessly tracked, just as
2694it is in the history of clones. Similitude is a dream and must remain one, in order for a
2695modicum of illusion and a stage of the imaginary to exist. One must never pass over to
2696the side of the real, the side of the exact resemblance of the world to itself, of the subject
2697to itself. Because then the image disappears. One must never pass over to the side of the
2698double, because then the dual relation disappears, and with it all seduction. Well, with the
2699hologram, as with the clone, it is the opposite temptation, and the opposite fascination, of
2700the end of illusion, the stage, the secret through the materialized projection of all
2701available information on the subject, through materialized transparency.
2702After the fantasy of seeing oneself (the mirror, the photograph) comes that of being able
2703to circle around oneself, finally and especially of traversing oneself, of passing through
2704one's own spectral body - and any holographed object is initially the luminous ectoplasm
2705of your own body. But this is in some sense the end of the aesthetic and the triumph of
2706the medium, exactly as in stereo-phonia, which, at its most sophisticated limits, neatly
2707puts an end to the charm and the intelligence of music.
2708The hologram simply does not have the intelligence of trompe l'oeil, which is one of
2709seduction, of always proceeding, according to the rules of appearances, through allusionto and ellipsis of presence. It veers, on the contrary, into fascination, which is that of
2710passing to the side of the double. If, according to Mach, the universe is that of which
2711there is no double, no equivalent in the mirror, then with the hologram we are already
2712virtually in another universe: which is nothing but the mirrored equivalent of this one.
2713But which universe is this one?
2714The hologram, the one of which we have always already dreamed (but these are only
2715poor bricolages of it) gives us the feeling, the vertigo of passing to the other side of our
2716own body, to the side of the double, luminous clone, or dead twin that is never born in
2717our place, and watches over us by anticipation.
2718The hologram, perfect image and end of the imaginary. Or rather, it is no longer an image
2719at all - the real medium is the laser, concentrated light, quintessentialized, which is no
2720longer a visible or reflexive light, but an abstract light of simulation. Laser/scalpel. A
2721luminous surgery whose function here is that of the double: one operates on you to
2722remove the double as one would operate to remove a tumor. The double that hid in the
2723depths of you (of your body, of your unconscious?) and whose secret form fed precisely
2724your imaginary, on the condition of remaining secret, is extracted by laser, is synthesized
2725and materialized before you, just as it is possible for you to pass through and beyond it. A
2726historical moment: the hologram is now part of this "subliminal comfort" that is our
2727destiny, of this happiness now consecrated to the mental simulacrum and to the
2728environmental fable of special effects. (The social, the social phantasmagoria, is now
2729nothing but a special effect, obtained by the design of participating networks converging
2730in emptiness under the spectral image of collective happiness.)
2731Three-dimensionality of the simulacrum - why would the simulacrum with three
2732dimensions be closer to the real than the one with two dimensions? It claims to be, but
2733paradoxically, it has the opposite effect: to render us sensitive to the fourth dimension as
2734a hidden truth, a secret dimension of everything, which suddenly takes on all the force of
2735evidence. The closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum (and this is true of
2736objects, but also of figures of art or of models of social or psychological relations), the
2737more evident it becomes (or rather to the evil spirit of incredulity that inhabits us, more
2738evil still than the evil spirit of simulation) how everything escapes representation, escapes
2739its own double and its resemblance. In short, there is no real: the third dimension is only
2740the imaginary of a two-dimensional world, the fourth that of a three-dimensional universe
2741. . . Escalation in the production of a real that is more and more real through the addition
2742of successive dimensions. But, on the other hand, exaltation of the opposite movement:
2743only what plays with one less dimension is true, is truly seductive.
2744In any case, there is no escape from this race to the real and to realistic hallucination
2745since, when an object is exactly like another, it is not exactly like it, it is a bit more exact.
2746There is never similitude, any more than there is exactitude. What is exact is already too
2747exact, what is exact is only what approaches the truth without trying. It is somewhat of
2748the same paradoxical order as the formula that says that as soon as two billiard balls roll
2749toward each other, the first touches the other before the second, or, rather, one touches
2750the other before being touched. Which indicates that there is not even the possibility of
2751simultaneity in the order of time, and in the same way no similitude possible in the order
2752of figures. Nothing resembles itself, and holographic reproduction, like all fantasies ofthe exact synthesis or resurrection of the real (this also goes for scientific
2753experimentation), is already no longer real, is already hyperreal. It thus never has
2754reproductive (truth) value, but always already simulation value. Not an exact, but a
2755transgressive truth, that is to say already on the other side of the truth. What happens on
2756the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the
2757true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects certainly, and sacrileges, much more
2758destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power of
2759the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real. This is perhaps why
2760twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was
2761equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning. Any
2762classification or signification, any modality of meaning can thus be destroyed simply by
2763logically being elevated to the nth power - pushed to its limit, it is as if all truth
2764swallowed its own criteria of truth as one "swallows one's birth certificate" and lost all its
2765meaning. Thus the weight of the world, or the universe, can eventually be calculated in
2766exact terms, but initially it appears absurd, because it no longer has a reference, or a
2767mirror in which it can come to be reflected - this totalization, which is practically
2768equivalent to that of all the dimensions of the real in its hyperreal double, or to that of all
2769the information on an individual in his genetic double (clone), renders it immediately
2770pataphysical. The universe itself, taken globally, is what cannot be represented, what
2771does not have a possible complement in the mirror, what has no equivalence in meaning
2772(it is as absurd to give it a meaning, a weight of meaning, as to give it weight at all).
2773Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon, they are
2774partial objects, partial effects of the mirror and of equivalence. All doubling, all
2775generalization, all passage to the limit, all holographic extension (the fancy of
2776exhaustively taking account of this universe) makes them surface in their mockery.
2777Viewed at this angle, even the exact sciences come dangerously close to pataphysics.
2778Because they depend in some way on the hologram and on the objectivist whim of the
2779deconstruction and exact reconstruction of the world (in its smallest terms) founded on a
2780tenacious and naive faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves. The real, the
2781real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in
2782a mirror - and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of the real - and any
2783attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will inevitably miss its object,
2784because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not
2785resemble itself) - this hidden face where the object crumbles, its secret. The holographic
2786attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there.CRASH
2787From a classical (even cybernetic) perspective, technology is an extension of the body. It
2788is the functional sophistication of a human organism that permits it to be equal to nature
2789and to invest triumphally in nature. From Marx to McLuhan, the same functionalist
2790vision of machines and language: they are relays, extensions, media mediators of nature
2791ideally destined to become the organic body of man. In this "rational" perspective the
2792body itself is nothing but a medium.
2793On the other hand, in the apocalyptic and baroque version of Crash*1 technology is the
2794mortal deconstruction of the body - no longer a functional medium, but the extension of
2795death - the dismemberment and cutting to pieces, not in the pejorative illusion of a lost
2796unity of the subject (which is still the horizon of psychoanalysis), but in the explosive
2797vision of a body delivered to "symbolic wounds," of a body confused with technology in
2798its violating and violent dimension, in the savage and continual surgery that violence
2799exercises: incisions, excisions, scarifications, the chasms of the body, of which the sexual
2800wounds and pleasures of the body are only a particular case (and mechanical servitude in
2801work, its pacified caricature) - a body without organs or pleasure of the organs, entirely
2802subjected to the mark, to cutting, to the technical scar - under the shining sign of a
2803sexuality without a referential and without limits.
2804Her mutilation and death became a coronation of her image at the hands of a colliding
2805technology, a celebration of her individual limbs and facial planes, gestures and skin
2806tones. Each of the spectators at the accident site would carry away an image of the
2807violent transformation of this woman, of the complex of wounds that fused together her
2808own sexuality and the hard technology of the automobile. Each of them would join his
2809own imagination, the tender membranes of his mucous surfaces, his grooves of erectile
2810tissue, to the wounds of this minor actresss through the medium of his own motorcar,
2811touching them as he drove in a medley of stylized postures. Each would place his lips on
2812those bleeding apertures, lay his own nasal septum against the lesions of her left hand,
2813press his eyelids against the exposed tendon of her forefinger, the dorsal surface of his
2814erect penis against the ruptured lateral walls of her vagina. The automobile crash had
2815made possible the final and longed-for union of the actress and the members of her
2816audience. (Pp. 189-90)
2817Technology is never grasped except in the (automobile) accident, that is to say in the
2818violence done to technology itself and in the violence done to the body. It is the same:
2819any shock, any blow, any impact, all the metallurgy of the accident can be read in the
2820semiurgy of the body - neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of
2821contusions, scars, mutilations, wounds that are so many new sexual organs opened on the
2822body. In this way, gathering the body as labor in the order of production is opposed to the
2823dispersion of the body as anagram in the order of mutilation. Goodbye "erogeneous
2824zones": everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex. But above all (as
2825in primitive initiation tortures, which are not ours), the whole body becomes a sign to
2826offer itself to the exchange of bodily signs. Body and technology diffracting theirbewildered signs through each other. Carnal abstraction and design.
2827No affect behind all that, no psychology, no flux or desire, no libido or death drive.
2828Naturally, death is implicated in an unlimited exploration of the possible violence done to
2829the body, but this is never, as in sadism or masochism, with an express and perverse aim
2830of violence, a distortion of meaning and of sex (in relation to what?). No repressed
2831unconscious (affects or representations), except in a second reading that would still
2832reinject a forced meaning, based on the psychoanalytic model. The non-meaning, the
2833savagery, of this mixture of the body and of technology is immanent, it is the immediate
2834reversion of one to the other, and from this results a sexuality without precedent - a sort
2835of potential vertigo linked to the pure inscription of the empty signs of this body.
2836Symbolic ritual of incision and marks, like the graffiti on New York subways.
2837Another point in common: it is no longer a question, in Crash, of accidental signs that
2838would only appear at the margins of the system. The Accident is no longer this interstitial
2839bricolage that it still is in the highway accident - the residual bricolage of the death drive
2840for the new leisure classes. The car is not the appendix of a domestic, immobile universe,
2841there is no longer a private and domestic universe, there are only incessant figures of
2842circulation, and the Accident is everywhere, the elementary, irreversible figure, the
2843banality of the anomaly of death. It is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no
2844longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured
2845the Rule. It is no longer even the "accursed share," the one conceded to destiny by the
2846system itself, and included in its general reckoning. Everything is reversed. It is the
2847Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life. And
2848the automobile, the magnetic sphere of the automobile, which ends by investing the entire
2849universe with its tunnels, highways, toboggans, exchangers, its mobile dwelling as
2850universal prototype, is nothing but the immense metaphor of life.
2851Dysfunction is no longer possible in a universe of the accident - therefore no perversion
2852is either. The Accident, like death, is no longer of the order of the neurotic, the repressed,
2853the residual or the transgressive, it is the instigator of a new mode of nonperverse
2854pleasure (contrary to the author himself, who speaks in the introduction of a new perverse
2855logic, one must resist the moral temptation of reading Crash as perversion), of a strategic
2856organization of life that starts from death. Death, wounds, mutilations are no longer
2857metaphors of castration, exactly the opposite - not even the opposite. Only the fetishistic
2858metaphor is perverse, seduction via the model, via the interposed fetish, or via the
2859medium of language. Here, death and sex are read on the same level as the body, without
2860phantasms, without metaphor, without sentences - different from the Machine of The
2861Penal Colony, where the body in its wounds is still only the support of a textual
2862inscription. Thus one, Kafka's machine, is still puritan, repressive, "a signifying
2863machine" Deleuze would say, whereas the technology in Crash is shining, seductive, or
2864dull and innocent. Seductive because denuded of meaning, and because it is the simple
2865mirror of torn-up bodies. And Vaughan's body is in its turn the mirror of bent chrome, of
2866crumpled fenders, of sheet iron stained with sperm. Bodies and technology combined,
2867seduced, inextricable.
2868As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neonsign over the portico flared across these grainy photographs of appalling injuries: the
2869breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles, the partial mamoplasties . . .
2870nipples sectioned by manufacturers' dashboard medallions; injuries to male and female
2871genitalia caused by steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection . . . A succession
2872of photographs of mutilated penises, sectioned vulvas and crushed testicles passed
2873through the flaring light as Vaughan stood by the girl filling-station attendant at the rear
2874of the car, jocularly talking to her about her body. In several of the photographs the
2875source of the wound was indicated by a detail of that portion of the car which had caused
2876the injury: beside a casualty ward photograph of a bifurcated penis was an inset of a
2877handbrake unit; above a close-up of a massively bruised vulva was a steering-wheel boss
2878and its manufacturer's medallion. These unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body
2879and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules, units in a new currency of
2880pain and desire. (P. 134)
2881Each mark, each trace, each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination, like the
2882scarifications of savages, which are always a vehement response to the absence of the
2883body. Only the wounded body exists symbolically - for itself and for others - "sexual
2884desire" is never anything but the possiblity bodies have of combining and exchanging
2885their signs. Now, the few natural orifices to which one usually attaches sex and sexual
2886activities are nothing next to all the possible wounds, all the artificial orifices (but why
2887"artificial"?), all the breaches through which the body is reversibilized and, like certain
2888topological spaces, no longer knows either interior nor exterior. Sex as we know it is
2889nothing but a minute and specialized definition of all the symbolic and sacrificial
2890practices to which a body can open itself, no longer though nature, but through artifice,
2891through the simulacrum, through the accident. Sex is nothing but this rarefaction of a
2892drive called desire on previously prepared zones. It is largely overtaken by the fan of
2893symbolic wounds, which is in some sense the ana-grammatization of sex on the whole
2894length of the body - but now precisely, it is no longer sex, it is something else, sex, itself,
2895is nothing but the inscription of a privileged signifier and some secondary marks -
2896nothing next to the exchange of all the signs and wounds of which the body is capable.
2897The savages knew how to use the whole body to this end, in tattooing, torture, initiation -
2898sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most
2899significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and
2900realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character (including in orgasm).
2901As the car travelled for the first time at twenty miles an hour Vaughan drew his fingers
2902from the girl's vulva and anus, rotated his hips and inserted his penis in her vagina.
2903Headlamps flared above us as the stream of cars moved up the slope of the overpass. In
2904the rear-view mirror I could still see Vaughan and the girl, their bodies lit by the car
2905behind, reflected in the black trunk of the Lincoln and a hundred points of the interior
2906trim. In the chromium ashtray I saw the girl's left breast and erect nipple. In the vinyl
2907window gutter I saw deformed sections of Vaughan's thighs and her abdomen forming a
2908bizarre anatomical junction. Vaughan lifted the young woman astride him, his penis
2909entering her vagina again. In a triptych of images reflected in the speedometer, the clock
2910and revolution counter, the sexual act between Vaughan and this young woman took
2911place in the hooded grottoes of these luminescent dials, moderated by the surging needle
2912of the speedometer. The jutting carapace of the instrument panel and the stylizedsculpture of the steering column shroud reflected a dozen images of her rising and falling
2913buttocks. As I propelled the car at fifty miles an hour along the open deck of the overpass
2914Vaughan arched his back and lifted the young woman into the full glare of the headlamps
2915behind us. Her sharp breasts flashed within the chromium and glass cage of the speeding
2916car. Vaughan's strongpelvic spasms coincided with the thudding passage of the lamp
2917standards anchored in the overpass at hundred-yard intervals. As each one approached his
2918hips kicked into the girl, driving his penis into her vagina, his hands splaying her
2919buttocks to reveal her anus as the yellow light filled the car. (R 143)
2920Here, all the erotic terms are technical. No ass, no dick, no cunt but: the anus, the rectum,
2921the vulva, the penis, coitus. No slang, that is to say no intimacy of sexual violence, but a
2922functional language: the adequation of chrome and mucous as of one form to another.
2923The same goes for the correspondence of death and sex: it is more as if they are covered
2924together in a sort of technical superdesign than articulated according to pleasure. Besides,
2925it is not a question of orgasm, but of pure and simple discharge. And the coitus and sperm
2926that traverse the book have no more sensual value than the filigree of wounds has violent
2927meaning, even metaphorically speaking. They are nothing but signatures - in the final
2928scene, X imprints the car wrecks with his sperm.
2929Pleasure (whether perverse or not) was always mediated by a technical apparatus, by a
2930mechanism of real objects but more often of phantasms - it always implies an
2931intermediary manipulation of scenes or gadgets. Here, pleasure is only orgasm, that is to
2932say, confused on the same wave length with the violence of the technical apparatus, and
2933homogenized by the only technique, one summed up by a single object: the automobile.
2934We had entered an immense traffic jam. From the junction of the motorway and Western
2935Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles,
2936windshields bleaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western
2937suburbs of London. Brake-lights flared in the evening air, glowing in the huge pool of
2938cellulosed bodies. Vaughan sat with one arm out of the passenger window. He slapped
2939the door impatiently, pounding the panel with his fist. To our right the high wall of a
2940double-decker airline coach formed a cliff of faces. The passengers at the windows
2941resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium. The
2942enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit
2943around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.
2944(P. 151)
2945Around me, down the entire length of Western Avenue, along both ramps of the flyover,
2946stretched an immense congestion of traffic held up by the accident. Standing at the centre
2947of this paralysed hurricane, I felt completely at ease, as if my obsessions with the
2948endlessly multiplying vehicles had at last been relieved. (P. 156)
2949Yet in Crash, another dimension is inseparable from the confused ones of technology and
2950of sex (united in a work of death that is never a work of mourning): it is that of the
2951photograph and of cinema. The shining and saturated surface of traffic and of theaccident is without depth, but it is always doubled in Vaughan's camera lens. The lens
2952stockpiles and hoards accident photos like dossiers. The general repetition of the crucial
2953event that it foments (his automobile death and the simultaneous death of the star in a
2954collision with Elizabeth Taylor, a crash meticulously simulated and refined over a period
2955of months) occurs outside a cinematographic take. This universe would be nothing
2956without this hyperreal disconnection. Only the doubling, the unfolding of the visual
2957medium in the second degree can produce the fusion of technology, sex, and death. But
2958in fact, the photograph here is not a medium nor is it of the order of representation. It is
2959not a question of a "supplementary" abstraction of the image, nor of a spectacular
2960compulsion, and Vaughan's position is never that of the voyeur or the pervert. The
2961photographic film (like transistorized music in automobiles and apartments) is part of the
2962universal, hyperreal, metallized, and corporeal layer of traffic and flows. The photo is no
2963more of a medium than technology or the body - all are simultaneous in a universe where
2964the anticipation of the event coincides with its reproduction, indeed with its "real"
2965production. No more temporal depth either - just like the past, the future ceases to exist in
2966turn. In fact, it is the eye of the camera that is substituted for time, just as it is for any
2967other depth, that of affect, space, language. It is not another dimension, it simply signfies
2968that this universe is without secrets.
2969The mannequin rider sat well back, the onrushing air lifting his chin. His hands were
2970shackled to the handlebars like a kamikaze pilot's. His long thorax was plastered with
2971metering devices. In front of him, their expressions equally vacant, the family of four
2972mannequins sat in their vehicle. Their faces were marked with cryptic symbols.
2973A harsh whipping noise came toward us, the sound of the metering coils skating along
2974the grass beside the rail. There was a violent metallic explosion as the motorcycle struck
2975the front of the saloon car. The two vehicles veered sideways towards the line of startled
2976spectators. I regained my balance, involuntarily holding Vaughan's shoulder, as the
2977motorcycle and its driver sailed over the bonnet of the car and struck the windshield, then
2978careened across the roof in a black mass of fragments. The car plunged ten feet back on
2979its hawsers. It came to rest astride the rails. The bonnet, windshield and roof had been
2980crushed by the impact. Inside the cabin, the lopsided family lurched across each other,
2981the decapitated torso of the front-seat woman passenger embedded in the fractured
2982windshield . . . Shavings of fibreglass from its face and shoulders speckled the glass
2983around the test car like silver snow, a death confetti. Helen Remington held my arm. She
2984smiled at me, nodding encouragingly as if urging a child across some mental hurdle. "We
2985can have a look at it again on the Ampex. They're showing it in slow-motion." (Pp. 124-
298625)
2987In Crash, everything is hyperfunctional, since traffic and accident, technology and death,
2988sex and simulation are like a single, large synchronous machine. It is the same universe
2989as that of the hypermarket, where the commodity becomes "hypercom-modity," that is to
2990say itself always already captured, and the whole atmosphere with it, in the incessant
2991figures of traffic. But at the same time, the functionalism of Crash devours its own
2992rationality, because it does not know dysfunction. It is a radical functionalism that
2993reaches its paradoxical limits and burns them. At once it again becomes an indefinable,therefore fascinating, object. Neither good nor bad: ambivalent. Like death or fashion, it
2994becomes all of a sudden an object at the crossroads, whereas good old functionalism,
2995even contested, no longer is at all - that is to say, it becomes a path leading more quickly
2996than the main road, or leading where the main road does not lead or, better yet, and to
2997parody Littre in a pataphysical mode, "a path leading nowhere, but leading there faster
2998than the others."
2999This is what distinguishes Crash from all science fiction or almost all, which most of the
3000time still revolves around the old couple function/dysfunction, which it projects in the
3001future along the same lines of force and the same finalities that are those of the normal
3002universe. There fiction surpasses reality (or the opposite), but according to the same rules
3003of the game. In Crash, no more fiction or reality, it is hyperreality that abolishes both.
3004Not even a critical regression is possible. This mutating and commutating world of
3005simulation and death, this violently sexed world, but one without desire, full of violated
3006and violent bodies, as if neutralized, this chromatic world and metallic intensity, but one
3007void of sensuality, hypertechnology without finality - is it good or bad? We will never
3008know. It is simply fascinating, though this fascination does not imply a value judgement.
3009There lies the miracle of Crash. Nowhere does this moral gaze surface - the critical
3010judgment that is still part of the functionality of the old world. Crash is hypercriticism
3011(there also in contrast to its author who, in the introduction, speaks of the "warning
3012against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to
3013us from the margins of the technological landscape"*2). Few books, few films reach this
3014resolution of all finality or critical negativity, this dull splendor of banality or of violence.
3015Nashville, Clockwork Orange.
3016After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of
3017simulation, the one with which we will all now be concerned - a symbolic universe, but
3018one which, through a sort of reversal of the mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete,
3019car, erotic machinery), appears as if traversed by an intense force of initiation.
3020The last of the amublances drove away, its siren wailing. The spectators returned to their
3021cars, or climbed the embankment to the break in the wire fence. An adolescent girl in a
3022denim suit walked past us, her young man with an arm around her waist. He held her
3023right breast with the back of his hand, stroking her nipple with his knuckles. They
3024stepped into a beach buggy slashed with pennants and yellow paint and drove off, horn
3025hooting eccentrically. A burly man in a truck-driver's jacket helped his wife up the
3026embankment, a hand on her buttocks. This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were
3027members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities
3028with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist
3029we had observed with the most unlikely partners. (R 157)
3030* NOTES *
30311. J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973).
30322. This introduction first appeared in the French edition published in Paris by Clamann-
3033Levy in 1974.-TRANS.SIMULACRA AND SCIENCE FICTION
3034Three orders of simulacra:
3035simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit,
3036that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of
3037nature made in God's image;
3038simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization
3039by the machine and in the whole system of production - a Promethean aim of a
3040continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire
3041belongs to the Utopias related to this order of simulacra);
3042simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game - total
3043operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.
3044To the first category belongs the imaginary of the Utopia. To the second corresponds
3045science fiction, strictly speaking. To the third corresponds - is there an imaginary that
3046might correspond to this order? The most likely answer is that the good old imaginary of
3047science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in
3048fiction but in theory as well). The same wavering and indeterminate fate puts an end to
3049science fiction - but also to theory, as specific genres.
3050There is no real, there is no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when
3051this distance, including that between the real and the imaginary, tends to abolish itself, to
3052be reabsorbed on behalf of the model? Well, from one order of simulacra to another, the
3053tendency is certainly toward the reabsorption of this distance, of this gap that leaves room
3054for an ideal or critical projection.
3055This projection is maximized in the Utopian, in which a transcendent sphere, a radically
3056different universe takes form (the romantic dream is still the individualized form of
3057Utopia, in which transcendence is outlined in depth, even in unconscious structures, but
3058in any case the dissociation from the real world is maximized, the island of Utopia stands
3059opposed to the continent of the real).
3060This projection is greatly reduced in science fiction: it is most often nothing other than an
3061unbounded projection of the real world of production, but it is not qualitatively different
3062from it. Mechanical or energetic extensions, speed, and power increase to the nth power,
3063but the schemas and the scenarios are those of mechanics, metallurgy, etc. Projected
3064hypostasis of the robot. (To the limited universe of the preindustrial era, Utopia opposed
3065an ideal, alternative universe. To the potentially infinite universe of production, science
3066fiction adds the multiplication of its own possibilities.)
3067This projection is totally reabsorbed in the implosive era of models. The models no
3068longer constitute either transcendence or projection, they no longer constitute the
3069imaginary in relation to the real, they are themselves an anticipation of the real, and thus
3070leave no room for any sort of fictional anticipation - they are immanent, and thus leave noroom for any kind of imaginary transcendence. The field opened is that of simulation in
3071the cybernetic sense, that is, of the manipulation of these models at every level
3072(scenarios, the setting up of simulated situations, etc.) but then nothing distinguishes this
3073operation from the operation itself and the gestation of the real: there is no more fiction.
3074Reality could go beyond fiction: that was the surest sign of the possibility of an ever-
3075increasing imaginary. But the real cannot surpass the model - it is nothing but its alibi.
3076The imaginary was the alibi of the real, in a world dominated by the reality principle.
3077Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the
3078principle of simulation. And, paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true Utopia
3079- but a Utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as
3080one would dream of a lost object.
3081Perhaps science fiction from the cybernetic and hyperreal era can only exhaust itself, in
3082its artificial resurrection of "historical" worlds, can only try to reconstruct in vitro, down
3083to the smallest details, the perimeters of a prior world, the events, the people, the
3084ideologies of the past, emptied of meaning, of their original process, but hallucinatory
3085with retrospective truth. Thus in Simulacra by Philip K. Dick, the war of Secession.
3086Gigantic hologram in three dimensions, in which fiction will never again be a mirror held
3087toward the future, but a desperate rehallucination of the past.
3088We can no longer imagine any other universe: the grace of transcendence was taken away
3089from us in that respect too. Classical science fiction was that of an expanding universe,
3090besides, it forged its path in the narratives of spatial exploration, counterparts to the more
3091terrestrial forms of exploration and colonization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
3092There is no relationship of cause and effect there: it is not because terrestrial space today
3093is virtually coded, mapped, registered, saturated, has thus in a sense closed up again in
3094universalizing itself - a universal market, not only of merchandise, but of values, signs,
3095models, leaving no room for the imaginary - it is not exactly because of this that the
3096exploratory universe (technical, mental, cosmic) of science fiction has also ceased to
3097function. But the two are narrowly linked, and they are two versions of the same general
3098process of implosion that follows the gigantic process of explosion and expansion
3099characteristic of past centuries. When a system reaches its own limits and becomes
3100saturated, a reversal is produced - something else takes place, in the imaginary as well.
3101Until now we have always had a reserve of the imaginary - now the coefficient of reality
3102is proportional to the reserve of the imaginary that gives it its specific weight. This is also
3103true of geographic and spatial exploration: when there is no longer any virgin territory,
3104and thus one available to the imaginary, when the map covers the whole territory,
3105something like the principle of reality disappears. In this way, the conquest of space
3106constitutes an irreversible crossing toward the loss of the terrestrial referential. There is a
3107hemorrhaging of reality as an internal coherence of a limited universe, once the limits of
3108this universe recede into infinity. The conquest of space that follows that of the planet is
3109equal to derealizing (dematerializing) human space, or to transferring it into a hyperreal
3110of simulation. Witness this two-bedroom/kitchen/shower put into orbit, raised to a spatial
3111power (one could say) with the most recent lunar module. The every-dayness of the
3112terrestrial habitat itself elevated to the rank of cosmic value, hypostatized in space - thesatellization of the real in the transcendence of space - it is the end of metaphysics, the
3113end of the phantasm, the end of science fiction - the era of hyper-reality begins.
3114From then onward, something must change: the projection, the extrapolation, the sort of
3115pantographic excess that constituted the charm of science fiction are all impossible. It is
3116no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of
3117the real. The process will, rather, be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations,
3118models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the
3119banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has
3120disappeared from our life. Hallucination of the real, of lived experience, of the quotidian,
3121but reconstituted, sometimes down to disquietingly strange details, reconstituted as an
3122animal or vegetal reserve, brought to light with a transparent precision, but without
3123substance, derealized in advance, hyperrealized.
3124In this way, science fiction would no longer be a romantic expansion with all the freedom
3125and naivete that the charm of discovery gave it, but, quite the contrary, it would evolve
3126implosively in the very image of our current conception of the universe, attempting to
3127revitalize, reactualize, requotidianize fragments of simulation, fragments of this universal
3128simulation that have become for us the so-called real world.
3129Where would the works be that would meet, here and now, this situational inversion, this
3130situational reversion? Obviously the short stories of Philip K. Dick "gravitate" in this
3131space, if one can use that word (but that is precisely what one can't really do any more,
3132because this new universe is "antigravitational," or if it still gravitates, it is around the
3133hole of the real, around the hole of the imaginary). One does not see an alternative
3134cosmos, a cosmic folklore or exoticism, or a galactic prowess there - one is from the start
3135in a total simulation, without origin, immanent, without a past, without a future, a
3136diffusion of all coordinates (mental, temporal, spatial, signaletic) - it is not about a
3137parallel universe, a double universe, or even a possible universe - neither possible,
3138impossible, neither real nor unreal: hyperreal - it is a universe of simulation, which is
3139something else altogether. And not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra -
3140science fiction has always done so, but it played on the double, on doubling or
3141redoubling, either artificial or imaginary, whereas here the double has disappeared, there
3142is no longer a double, one is always already in the other world, which is no longer an
3143other, without a mirror, a projection, or a Utopia that can reflect it - simulation is
3144insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority - we will no longer even
3145pass through to "the other side of mirror," that was still the golden age of transcendence.
3146Perhaps a still more convincing example would be that of Ballard and of his evolution
3147from the first very "phantasmagoric" short stories, poetic, dreamlike, disorienting, up to
3148Crash, which is without a doubt (more than IGH or Concrete Island) the current model of
3149this science fiction that is no longer one. Crash is our world, nothing in it is "invented":
3150everything in it is hyper-functional, both the circulation and the accident, technique and
3151death, sex and photographic lens, everything in it is like a giant, synchronous, simulated
3152machine: that is to say the acceleration of our own models, of all models that surround us,
3153blended and hyperoperational in the void. This is what distinguishes Crash from almost
3154all science fiction, which mostly still revolves around the old (mechanical and
3155mechanistic) couple function/ dysfunction, which it projects into the future along thesame lines of force and the same finalities that are those of the "normal" universe. Fiction
3156in that universe might surpass reality (or the opposite: that is more subtle) but it still
3157plays by the same rules. In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality anymore - hyper-
3158reality abolishes both. It is there that our contemporary science fiction, if there is one,
3159exists. "Jack Barron or Eternity", some passages from "Everyone to Zanzibar".
3160In fact, science fiction in this sense is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the
3161circulation of models, here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.
3162It can emerge in its crude state, from the inertia itself of the operational world. What
3163writer of science fiction would have "imagined" (but precisely it can no longer be
3164"imagined") this "reality" of East German factories - simulacra, factories that reemploy
3165all the unemployed to fill all the roles and all the posts of the traditional production
3166process but that don't produce anything, whose activity is consumed in a game of orders,
3167of competition, of writing, of bookkeeping, between one factory and another, inside a
3168vast network? All material production is redoubled in the void (one of these simulacra
3169factories even "really" failed, putting its own unemployed out of work a second time).
3170That is simulation: not that the factories are fake, but precisely that they are real,
3171hyperreal, and that because of this they return all "real" production, that of "serious"
3172factories, to the same hyperreality. What is fascinating here is not the opposition between
3173real factories and fake factories, but on the contrary the lack of distinction between the
3174two, the fact that all the rest of production has no greater referent or deeper finality than
3175this "simulacra!" business. It is this hyperreal indifference that constitutes the real
3176"science-fictional" quality of this episode. And one can see that it is not necessary to
3177invent it: it is there, emerging from a world without secrets, without depth.
3178Without a doubt, the most difficult thing today, in the complex universe of science
3179fiction, is to unravel what still complies (and a large part still does) with the imaginary of
3180the second order, of the productive/projective order, and what already comes from this
3181vagueness of the imaginary, of this uncertainty proper to the third order of simulation.
3182Thus one can clearly mark the difference between the mechanical robot machines,
3183characteristic of the second order, and the cybernetic machines, computers, etc., that, in
3184their governing principle, depend on the third order. But one order can certainly
3185contaminate another, and the computer can certainly function as a mechanical
3186supermachine, a superrobot, a superpower machine, exposing the productive genie of the
3187simulacra of the second order: the computer does not come into play as a process of
3188simulation, and it still bears witness to the reflexes of a finalized universe (including
3189ambivalence and revolt, like the computer from 2001 or Shalmanezer in Everyone to
3190Zanzibar).
3191Between the operatic (the theatrical status of theatrical and fantastical machinery, the
3192"grand opera" of technique) that corresponds to the first order, the operative (the
3193industrial, productive status, productive of power and energy) that corresponds to the
3194second order, and the operational (the cybernetic, aleatory, uncertain status of
3195"metatechnique") that corresponds to the third order, all interference can still be produced
3196today at the level of science fiction. But only the last order can still truly interest us.THE ANIMALS: TERRITORY AND METAMORPHOSES
3197What did the torturers of the Inquisition want? The admission of evil, of the principle of
3198evil. It was necessary to make the accused say that he was not guilty except by accident,
3199through the incidence of the principle of Evil in the divine order. Thus confession
3200restored a reassuring causality, and torture, and the extermination of evil through torture,
3201were nothing but the triumphal coronation (neither sadistic nor expiatory) of the fact of
3202having produced Evil as cause. Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered all of
3203divine creation suspect. In the same way, when we use and abuse animals in laboratories,
3204in rockets, with experimental ferocity in the name of science, what confession are we
3205seeking to extort from them from beneath the scalpel and the electrodes?
3206Precisely the admission of a principle of objectivity of which science is never certain, of
3207which it secretly despairs. Animals must be made to say that they are not animals, that
3208bestiality, savagery - with what these terms imply of unintelligibility, radical strangeness
3209to reason - do not exist, but on the contrary the most bestial behaviors, the most singular,
3210the most abnormal are resolved in science, in physiological mechanisms, in cerebral
3211connections, etc. Bestiality, and its principle of uncertainty, must be killed in animals.
3212Experimentation is thus not a means to an end, it is a contemporary challenge and torture.
3213It does not found an intelligibility, it extorts a confession from science as previously one
3214extorted a profession of faith. A confession whose apparent distances - illness, madness,
3215bestiality - are nothing but a provisional crack in the transparency of causality. This
3216proof, as before that of divine reason, must be continually redone and everywhere redone
3217- in this sense we are all animals, and laboratory animals, whom one continually tests in
3218order to extort their reflex behaviors, which are like so many confessions of rationality in
3219the final moment. Everywhere bestiality must yield to reflex animality, exorcising an
3220order of the indecipherable, of the savage, of which, precisely in their silence, animals
3221have remained the incarnation for us.
3222Animals have thus preceded us on the path of liberal extermination. All the aspects of the
3223modern treatment of animals retrace the vicissitudes of the manipulation of humans, from
3224experimentation to industrial pressure in breeding.
3225Gathered at a convention in Lyons, European veterinarians became concerned about the
3226diseases and psychological troubles that develop in industrial breeding farms.
3227-Science and the Future, July 1973
3228Rabbits develop a morbid anxiety, they become coprophagous and sterile. The rabbit is
3229"anxious," "maladapted" from birth, so it seems. Greater sensitivity to infections, to
3230parasites. The antibodies lose their efficacy, the females become sterile. Spontaneously,
3231if one can say so, mortality increases.
3232The hysteria of chickens infects the whole group, a "psychic" collective tension that can
3233reach a critical threshold: all the animals begin to fly and scream in all directions. Thecrisis over, there is a collapse, general terror, the animals take refuge in the corner, mute
3234and as if paralyzed. At the first shock, the crisis begins again. It can last several weeks.
3235One attempted to give them tranquilizers . . .
3236Cannibalism on the part of pigs. The animals wound themselves. The calves begin to lick
3237everything that surrounds them, sometimes even unto death.
3238"It is certainly necessary to establish that bred animals suffer psychically... A zoo
3239psychiatry becomes necessary... A psychic life of frustration represents an obstacle to
3240normal development."
3241Darkness, red light, gadgets, tranquilizers, nothing works. In birds there is a hierarchy of
3242access to food - the pecking order. In these conditions of overpopulation, the last in the
3243order is never able to get to the food. One thus wished to break the pecking order and
3244democratize access to food through another system of distribution. Failure: the
3245destruction of this symbolic order brings along with it total confusion for the birds, and a
3246chronic instability. Good example of absurdity: one knows the analogous ravages of good
3247democratic intentions in tribal societies.
3248Animals somatize! Extraordinary discovery! Cancers, gastric ulcers, myocardial
3249infarction in mice, pigs, chickens!
3250In conclusion, the author says, it certainly seems that the only remedy is space - "a bit
3251more space, and a lot of the problems observed would disappear." In any case, "the fate
3252of these animals would become less miserable." He is thus satisfied with this conference:
3253"The current concern about the fate of bred animals is witness, once again, to the alliance
3254of the morality and the meaning of a well - understood interest." "One cannot simply do
3255whatever one wants with nature." The problems having become serious enough to
3256damage the profitability of business, this drop in profitability may lead the breeders to
3257return the animals to more normal living conditions. "In order to be raised in a healthy
3258manner, it is now necessary to be always concerned with the mental equilibrium of the
3259animals." And he foresees the time when one will send animals, like people, to the
3260country, to restore their mental equilibrium.
3261One has never said better how much "humanism," "normality," "quality of life" were
3262nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability. The parallel between these animals sick from
3263surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration, from the scientific
3264organization of work and assembly - line factories is illuminating. In the latter case as
3265well, the capitalist "breeders" were led to a revision that was destructive of the mode of
3266exploitation, innovating and reinventing the "quality of work," the "enrichment of tasks,"
3267discovering the "human" sciences and the "psycho-sociological" dimension of the
3268factory. Only the inevitability of death renders the example of the animals more shocking
3269still than that of men on an assembly line.
3270Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other
3271possible defiance, except suicide. All the anomalies described are suicidal. These
3272resistances are a failure of industrial reason (drop in profits), but also one senses that they
3273run counter to the logical reasoning of the specialists. In the logic of reflex behaviors andof the animal - machine, in rational logic, these anomalies are not qualifiable. One will
3274therefore bestow on animals a psychic life, an irrational and derailed psychic life, given
3275over to liberal and humanist therapy, without the final objective ever having changed:
3276death.
3277With ingenuity, one thus discovers, like a new and unexplored scientific field, the
3278psychic life of the animal as soon as he is revealed to be maladapted to the death one is
3279preparing for him. In the same way one rediscovers psychology, sociology, the sexuality
3280of prisoners as soon as it becomes impossible to purely and simply incarcerate them.*1
3281One discovers that the prisoner needs liberty, sexuality, "normalcy" to withstand prison,
3282just as industrially bred animals need a certain "quality of life" to die within the norm.
3283And nothing about this is contradictory. The worker also needs responsibility, self-
3284management in order to better respond to the imperative of production. Everyone needs a
3285psychic life to adapt. There is no other reason for the arrival of the psychic life, conscious
3286or unconscious. And its golden age, which still continues, will have coincided with the
3287impossibility of a rational socialization in every domain. Never would the humanities or
3288psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his
3289"rational" behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can
3290extend ad infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the
3291workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals),
3292according to the strict law of equivalences:
3293so much caloric energy and time = so much work power such an infraction = such an
3294equivalent punishment so much food = optimal weight and industrial death.
3295Everything is blocked, so psychic life, the mental, neurosis, the psychosocial, etc. are
3296born, not at all in order to break this delirious equation, but to restore the principle of
3297mutually agreed upon equivalences.
3298Beasts of burden, they had to work for man. Beasts of demand, they are summoned to
3299respond to the interrogation of science.*2 Beasts of consumption, they have become the
3300meat of industry. Beasts of somatization, they are now made to speak the "psy" language,
3301to answer for their psychic life and the misdeeds of their unconscious. Everything has
3302happened to them that has happened to us. Our destiny has never been separated from
3303theirs, and this is a sort of bitter revenge on Human Reason, which has become used to
3304upholding the absolute privilege of the Human over the Bestial.
3305Besides, animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism
3306progressed. A logic parallel to that of racism. An objective animal "reign" has only
3307existed since Man has existed. It would take too long to redo the genealogy of their
3308respective statuses, but the abyss that separates them today, the one that permits us to
3309send beasts, in our place, to respond to the terrifying universes of space and laboratories,
3310the one that permits the liquidation of species even as they are archived as specimens in
3311the African reserves or in the hell of zoos - since there is no more room for them in our
3312culture than there is for the dead - the whole covered by a racist sentimentality (baby
3313seals, Brigitte Bardot), this abyss that separates them follows domestication, just as true
3314racism follows slavery.Once animals had a more sacred, more divine character than men. There is not even a
3315reign of the "human" in primitive societies, and for a long time the animal order has been
3316the order of reference. Only the animal is worth being sacrificed, as a god, the sacrifice of
3317man only comes afterward, according to a degraded order. Men qualify only by their
3318affiliation to the animal: the Bororos "are" macaws. This is not of the prelogical or
3319psychoanalytic order - nor of the mental order of classification, to which Levi-Strauss
3320reduced the animal effigy (even if it is still fabulous that animals served as a language,
3321this was also part of their divinity)-no, this signifies that Bororos and macaws are part of
3322a cycle, and that the figure of the cycle excludes any division of species, any of the
3323distinctive oppositions upon which we live. The structural opposition is diabolic, it
3324divides and confronts distinct identities: such is the division of the Human, which throws
3325beasts into the Inhuman - the cycle, itself, is symbolic: it abolishes the positions in a
3326reversible enchainment - in this sense, the Bororos "are" macaws, in the same way that
3327the Canaque say the dead walk among the living. (Does Deleuze envision something like
3328that in his becoming-animal and when he says "Be the rose panther!"?)
3329Whatever it may be, animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial
3330nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation,
3331as opposed to an experimental dissection. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation,
3332as opposed to industrial breeding. One only has to look at the status of animals in peasant
3333society. And the status of domestication, which presupposes land, a clan, a system of
3334parentage of which the animals are a part, must not be confused with the status of the
3335domestic pet - the only type of animals that are left to us outside reserves and breeding
3336stations - dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, all packed together in the affection of their master.
3337The trajectory animals have followed, from divine sacrifice to dog cemeteries with
3338atmospheric music, from sacred defiance to ecological sentimentality, speaks loudly
3339enough of the vulgarization of the status of man himself - it once again describes an
3340unexpected reciprocity between the two.
3341In particular, our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we
3342hold them. It is proportional to this disdain. It is in proportion to being relegated to
3343irresponsibility, to the inhuman, that the animal becomes worthy of the human ritual of
3344affection and protection, just as the child does in direct proportion to being relegated to a
3345status of innocence and childishness. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded
3346form of bestiality, the racist commiseration, in which we ridiculously cloak animals to the
3347point of rendering them sentimental themselves.
3348Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle
3349Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to
3350them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be
3351guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this
3352basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish
3353them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them, worse: that
3354we have made of them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of our justice, but
3355only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but
3356only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery.
3357It is the reabsorption of all violence in regard to them that today forms the monstrosity ofbeasts. The violence of sacrifice, which is one of "intimacy" (Bataille), has been
3358succeeded by the sentimental or experimental violence that is one of distance.
3359Monstrosity has changed in meaning. The original monstrosity of the beast, object of
3360terror and fascination, but never negative, always ambivalent, object of exchange also
3361and of metaphor, in sacrifice, in mythology, in the heraldic bestiary, and even in our
3362dreams and our phantasms - this monstrosity, rich in every threat and every
3363metamorphosis, one that is secretly resolved in the living culture of men, and that is a
3364form of alliance, has been exchanged for a spectacular monstrosity: that of King Kong
3365wrenched from his jungle and transformed into a music-hall star. Formerly, the cultural
3366hero annihilated the beast, the dragon, the monster - and from the spilt blood plants, men,
3367culture were born; today, it is the beast King Kong who comes to sack our industrial
3368metropolises, who comes to liberate us from our culture, a culture dead from having
3369purged itself of all real monstrosity and from having broken its pact with it (which was
3370expressed in the film by the primitive gift of the woman). The profound seduction of the
3371film comes from this inversion of meaning: all inhumanity has gone over to the side of
3372men, all humanity has gone over to the side of captive bestiality, and to the respective
3373seduction of man and of beast, monstrous seduction of one order by the other, the human
3374and the bestial. Kong dies for having renewed, through seduction, this possibility of the
3375metamorphosis of one reign into another, this incestuous promiscuity between beasts and
3376men (though one that is never realized, except in a symbolic and ritual mode).
3377In the end, the progression that the beast followed is not different form that of madness
3378and childhood, of sex or negritude. A logic of exclusion, of reclusion, of discrimination
3379and necessarily, in return, a logic of reversion, reversible violence that makes it so that all
3380of society finally aligns itself on the axioms of madness, of childhood, of sexuality, and
3381of inferior races (purged, it must be said, of the radical interrogation to which, from the
3382very heart of their exclusion, they lent importance). The convergence of processes of
3383civilization is astounding. Animals, like the dead, and so many others, have followed this
3384uninterrupted process of annexation through extermination, which consists of liquidation,
3385then of making the extinct species speak, of making them present the confession of their
3386disappearance. Making animals speak, as one has made the insane, children, sex
3387(Foucault) speak. This is even deluded in regard to animals, whose principle of
3388uncertainty, which they have caused to weigh on men since the rupture in their alliance
3389with men, resides in the fact that they do not speak.
3390The challenge of madness has historically been met by the hypothesis of the unconscious.
3391The Unconscious is this logistical mechanism that permits us to think madness (and more
3392generally all strange and anomalous formations) in a system of meaning opened to
3393nonmeaning, which will make room for the terrors of the nonsensical, now intelligible
3394under the auspices of a certain discourse: psychic life, drive, repression, etc. The mad
3395were the ones who forced us to the hypothesis of the unconscious, but we are the ones in
3396return who have trapped them there. Because if, initially, the Unconscious seems to turn
3397against Reason and to bring to it a radical subversion, if it still seems charged with the
3398potential of the rupture of madness, later it turns against madness, because it is what
3399enables madness to be annexed to a reason more universal than classical reason.
3400The mad, once mute, today are heard by everyone; one has found the grid on which tocollect their once absurd and indecipherable messages. Children speak, to the adult
3401universe they are no longer those simultaneously strange and insignificant beings -
3402children signify, they have become significant - not through some sort of "liberation" of
3403their speech, but because adult reason has given itself the most subtle means to avert the
3404threat of their silence. The primitives also are heard, one seeks them out, one listens to
3405them, they are no longer beasts. Levi-Strauss pointed out that their mental structures were
3406the same as ours, psychoanalysis rallied them to Oedipus, and to the libido - all of our
3407codes functioned well, and they responded to them. One had buried them under silence,
3408one buries them beneath speech, "different" speech certainly, but beneath the word of the
3409day, "difference," as formerly one did beneath the unity of Reason; let us not be misled
3410by this, it is the same order that is advancing. The imperialism of reason, neoimperialism
3411of difference.
3412What is essential is that nothing escape the empire of meaning, the sharing of meaning.
3413Certainly, behind all that, nothing speaks to us, neither the mad, nor the dead, nor
3414children, nor savages, and fundamentally we know nothing of them, but what is essential
3415is that Reason save face, and that everything escape silence.
3416They, the animals, do not speak. In a universe of increasing speech, of the constraint to
3417confess and to speak, only they remain mute, and for this reason they seem to retreat far
3418from us, behind the horizon of truth. But it is what makes us intimate with them. It is not
3419the ecological problem of their survival that is important, but still and always that of their
3420silence. In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled
3421under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily
3422on our organization of meaning.
3423Certainly, one makes them speak, and with all means, some more innocent than others.
3424They spoke the moral discourse of man in fables. They supported structural discourse in
3425the theory of totemism. Every day they deliver their "objective" - anatomical,
3426physiological, genetic - message in laboratories. They served in turns as metaphors for
3427virtue and vice, as an energetic and ecological model, as a mechanical and formal model
3428in bionics, as a phantasmatic register for the unconscious and, lastly, as a model for the
3429absolute deterritorialization of desire in Deleuze's "becoming-animal" (paradoxical: to
3430take the animal as a model of deterritorialization when he is the territorial being par
3431excellence).
3432In all this - metaphor, guinea pig, model, allegory (without forgetting their alimentary
3433"use value") - animals maintain a compulsory discourse. Nowhere do they really speak,
3434because they only furnish the responses one asks for. It is their way of sending the
3435Human back to his circular codes, behind which their silence analyzes us.
3436One never escapes the reversion that follows any kind of exclusion. Refusing reason to
3437madmen leads sooner or later to dismantling the bases of this reason - the mad take
3438revenge in some way. Refusing animals the unconscious, repression, the symbolic
3439(confused with language) is, one can hope, sooner or later (in a sort of disconnection
3440subsequent to that of madness and of the unconscious) to put in question once again the
3441validity of these concepts, just as they govern and distinguish us today. Because, if
3442formerly the privilege of Man was founded on the monopoly of consciousness, today it isfounded on the monopoly of the unconscious.
3443Animals have no unconscious, this is well known. Without a doubt, they dream, but this
3444is a conjecture of a bioelectrical order, and they lack language, which alone gives
3445meaning to the dream by inscribing it in the symbolic order. We can fantasize about
3446them, project our fantasies on them and think we are sharing this mise-en-scéne. But this
3447is comfortable for us - in fact animals are not intelligible to us either under the regime of
3448consciousness or under that of the unconscious. Therefore, it is not a question of forcing
3449them to it, but just the opposite of seeing in what way they put in question this very
3450hypothesis of the unconscious, and to what other hypothesis they force us. Such is the
3451meaning, or the non-meaning of their silence.
3452Such was the silence of madmen that it forced us to the hypothesis of the unconscious -
3453such is the resistance of animals that it forces us to change hypotheses. For if to us they
3454are and will remain unintelligible, yet we live in some kind of understanding with them.
3455And if we live in this way, under the sign of a general ecology where in a sort of
3456planetary niche, which is only the enlarged dimension of the Platonic cave, the ghosts of
3457animals and the natural elements would come to rub against the shadow of men who
3458survived the political economy - no, our profound understanding with beasts, even on the
3459road to disappearance, is placed under the conjugated sign, opposite in appearance, of
3460metamorphosis and of territory.
3461Nothing seems more fixed in the perpetuation of the species than animals, but yet they
3462are for us the image of metamorphosis, of all possible metamorphoses. Nothing more
3463errant, more nomadic in appearance than animals, and yet their law is that of the territory.
3464*3 But one must push aside all the countermeanings on this notion of territory. It is not at
3465all the enlarged relation of a subject or of a group to its own space, a sort of organic right
3466to private property of the individual, of the clan or of the species - such is the phantasm
3467of psychology and of sociology extended to all of ecology - nor this sort of vital function,
3468of an environmental bubble where the whole system of needs is summed up.*4 A
3469territory is also not a space, with what this term implies for us about liberty and
3470appropriation. Neither instinct, nor need, nor structure (be it "cultural" and "behavioral"),
3471the notion of territory is also opposed in some way to that of the unconscious. The
3472unconscious is a "buried," repressed, and indefinitely subdivided structure. The territory
3473is open and circumscribed. The unconscious is the site of the indefinite repetition of
3474subjective repression and fantasies. The territory is the site of a completed cycle of
3475parentage and exchanges - without a subject, but without exception: animal and vegetal
3476cycle, cycle of goods and wealth, cycle of parentage and the species, cycle of women and
3477ritual - there is no subject and everything is exchanged. The obligations are absolute
3478therein - total reversibility - but no one knows death there, since all is metamorphosed.
3479Neither subject, nor death, nor unconscious, nor repression, since nothing stops the
3480enchainment of forms.
3481Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an
3482unconscious since they lost a territory. At once territories and metamorphoses have been
3483taken from them - the unconscious is the individual structure of mourning in which this
3484loss is incessantly, hopelessly replayed - animals are the nostalgia for it. The question
3485that they raise for us would thus be this one: don't we live now and already, beyond theeffects of the linearity and the accumulation of reason, beyond the effects of the
3486conscious and unconscious, according to this brute, symbolic mode, of indefinite cycling
3487and reversion over a finite space? And beyond the ideal schema that is that of our culture,
3488of all culture maybe, of the accumulation of energy, and of the final liberation, don't we
3489dream of implosion rather than of explosion, of metamorphosis rather than energy, of
3490obligation and ritual defiance rather than of liberty, of the territorial cycle rather than of .
3491. . But the animals do not ask questions. They are silent.
3492* NOTES *
34931. Thus, in Texas, four hundred men and one hundred women experiment with the
3494sweetest penitentiary in the world. A child was born there last June and there were only
3495three escapes in two years. The men and women take their meals together and get
3496together outside of group therapy sessions. Each prisoner possesses the only key to his
3497individual room. Couples are able to be alone in the empty rooms. To this day, thirty-five
3498prisoners have escaped, but for the most part they have returned of their own accord.
34992. In French, betes de somme means beasts of burden. Baudrillard plays with the word
3500somme in the phrase that follows: "Betes de sommation, elles sont sommees de repondre
3501a l'interrogatoire de la science," and in the use of the word consommation in the
3502following phrase.-TRANS.
35033. That animals wander is a myth, and the current representation of the unconscious and
3504of desire as erratic and nomadic belongs to the same "order. Animals have never
3505wandered, were never deterritorialized. A whole liberatory phantasmagoria is drawn in
3506opposition to the constraints of modern society, a representation of nature and of beasts
3507as savagery, as the freedom to "fulfill all needs," today "of realizing all his desires" -
3508because modern Rousseauism has taken the form of the indeterminacy of drive, of the
3509wandering of desire and of the nomadism of infinitude - but it is the same mystique of
3510unleashed, noncoded forces with no finality other than their own eruption.
3511Now, free, virgin nature, without limits or territories, where each wanders at will, never
3512existed, except in the imaginary of the dominant order, of which this nature is the
3513equivalent mirror. We project (nature, desire, animality, rhizome . . . ) the very schema of
3514deterritorialization that is that of the economic system and of capital as ideal savagery.
3515Liberty is nowhere but in capital, it is what produced it, it is what deepens it. There is
3516thus an exact correlation between the social legislation of value (urban, industrial,
3517repressive, etc.) and the imaginary savagery one places in opposition to it: they are both
3518"deterritorialized" and in each other's image. Moreover, the radicality of "desire," one
3519sees this in current theories, increases at the same rate as civilized abstraction, not at all
3520antagonistically, but absolutely according to the same movement, that of the same form
3521always more decoded, more decentered, "freer," which simultaneously envelops our real
3522and our imaginary. Nature, liberty, desire, etc., do not even express a dream the opposite
3523of capital, they directly translate the progress or the ravages of this culture, they even
3524anticipate it, because they dream of total deterritorialization where the system never
3525imposes anything but what is relative: the demand of "liberty" is never anything but
3526going further than the system, but in the same direction.Neither the beasts nor the savages know "nature" in our way: they only know territories,
3527limited, marked, which are spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.
35284. Thus, Henri Laborit refuses the interpretation of territory in terms of instinct or private
3529property: "One has never brought forth as evidence, either in the hypothalamus or
3530elsewhere, either a cellular group or neural pathways that are differentiated in relation to
3531the notion of territory... No territorial center seems to exist... It is not useful to appeal to a
3532particular instinct" - but it is useful to do so in order to better return it to a functionality
3533of needs extended to include cultural behaviors, which today is the vulgate common to
3534economics, psychology, sociology, etc.: "The territory thus becomes the space necessary
3535to the realization of the act of bestowing, the vital space... The bubble, the territory thus
3536represent the morsel of space in immediate contact with the organism, the one in which it
3537'opens' its thermodynamic exchanges in order to maintain its own structure... With the
3538growing interdependence of human individuals, with the promiscuity that characterizes
3539the great modern cities, the individual bubble has shrunk considerably..." Spatial,
3540functional, homeostatic conception. As if the stake of a group or of a man, even of an
3541animal, were the equilibrium of his bubble and the homeostasis of his exchanges, internal
3542and external!THE REMAINDER
3543When everything is taken away, nothing is left.
3544This is false.
3545The equation of everything and nothing, the subtraction of the remainder, is totally false.
3546It is not that there is no remainder. But this remainder never has an autonomous reality,
3547nor its own place: it is what partition, circumscription, exclusion designate... what else? It
3548is through the subtraction of the remainder that reality is founded and gathers strength...
3549what else?
3550What is strange is precisely that there is no opposing term in a binary opposition: one can
3551say the right/the left, the same/the other, the majority/the minority, the crazy/the normal,
3552etc. - but the remainder/ ? Nothing on the other side of the slash.
3553"The sum and the remainder," the addition and the remainder, the operation and the
3554remainder are not distinctive oppositions.
3555And yet, what is on the other side of the remainder exists, it is even the marked term, the
3556powerful moment, the privileged element in this strangely asymmetrical opposition, in
3557this structure that is not one. But this marked term has no name. It is anonymous, it is
3558unstable and without definition. Positive, but only the negative gives it the force of
3559reality. In a strict sense, it cannot be defined except as the remainder of the remainder.
3560Thus the remainder refers to much more than a clear division in two localized terms, to a
3561turning and reversible structure, an always imminent structure of reversion, in which one
3562never knows which is the remainder of the other. In no other structure can one create this
3563reversion, or this mise-en-abyme: the masculine is not the feminine of the feminine, the
3564normal is not the crazy of the crazy, the right is not the left of the left, etc. Perhaps only
3565in the mirror can the question be posed: which, the real or the image, is the reflection of
3566the other? In this sense one can speak of the remainder as a mirror, or of the mirror of the
3567remainder. It is that in both cases the line of structural demarcation, the line of the
3568sharing of meaning, has become a wavering one, it is that meaning (most literally: the
3569possibility of going from one point to another according to a vector determined by the
3570respective position of the terms) no longer exists. There is no longer a respective position
3571- the real disappearing to make room for an image, more real than the real, and
3572conversely - the remainder disappearing from the assigned location to resurface inside
3573out, in what it was the remainder of, etc.
3574The same is true of the social. Who can say if the remainder of the social is the residue of
3575the nonsocialized, or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder, the gigantic waste
3576product... of what else? Of a process, which even if it were to completely disappear and
3577had no name except the social would nevertheless only be its remainder. The residue can
3578be completely at the level of the real. When a system has absorbed everything, when one
3579has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the remainderand becomes the remainder.
3580Witness the "Society" column of Le Monde, in which paradoxically, only immigrants,
3581delinquents, women, etc. appear - everything that has not been socialized, "social" cases
3582analogous to pathological cases. Pockets to be reabsorbed, segments that the "social"
3583isolates as it grows. Designated as "residual" at the horizon of the social, they enter its
3584jurisdiction in this way and are destined to find their place in an enlarged sociality. It is
3585for this remainder that the social machine is recharged and finds new energy. But what
3586happens when everything is sponged up, when everything is socialized? Then the
3587machine stops, the dynamic is reversed, and it is the whole social system that becomes
3588residue. As the social in its progression eliminates all the residue, it itself becomes
3589residual. In designating residual categories as "Society," the social designates itself as a
3590remainder.
3591The impossibility of determining what is the remainder of the other characterizes the
3592phase of simulation and the death throes of distinctive systems, a phase when everything
3593becomes a remainder and a residual. Inversely, the disappearance of the fatidic and
3594structural slash that isolated the rest of ??? and that now permits each term to be the
3595remainder of the other term characterizes a phase of reversibility during which there is
3596"virtually" no more remainder. The two propositions are simultaneously "true" and are
3597not mutually exclusive. They are themselves reversible.
3598Another aspect as surprising as the absence of an opposing term: the remainder makes
3599you laugh. Any discussion on this theme unleashes the same language games, the same
3600ambiguity, and the same obscenity as do discussions of sex or death. Sex and death are
3601the great themes recognized for unleashing ambivalence and laughter. But the remainder
3602is the third, and perhaps the only one, the two others amounting to this as to the very
3603figure of reversibility. For why does one laugh? One only laughs at the reversibility of
3604things, and sex and death are eminently reversible figures. It is because the stake is
3605always reversible between masculine and feminine, between life and death, that one
3606laughs at sex and death. How much more, then, at the remainder, which does not even
3607have an opposing term, which by itself traverses the whole cycle, and runs infinitely after
3608its own slash, after its own double, like Peter Schlemihl after his shadow?*l The
3609remainder is obscene, because it is reversible and is exchanged for itself. It is obscene
3610and makes one laugh, as only the lack of distinction between masculine and feminine, the
3611lack of distinction between life and death makes one laugh, deeply laugh.
3612Today, the remainder has become the weighty term. It is on the remainder that a new
3613intelligibility is founded. End of a certain logic of distinctive oppositions, in which the
3614weak term played the role of the residual term. Today, everything is inverted.
3615Psychoanalysis itself is the first great theorization of residues (lapses, dreams, etc.). It is
3616no longer a political economy of production that directs us, but an economic politics of
3617reproduction, of recycling-ecology and pollution-a political economy of the remainder.
3618All normality sees itself today in the light of madness, which was nothing but its
3619insignificant remainder. Privilege of all the remainders, in all domains, of the not - said,
3620the feminine, the crazy, the marginal, of excrement and waste in art, etc. But this is still
3621nothing but a sort of inversion of the structure, of the return of the repressed as a
3622powerful moment, of the return of the remainder as surplus of meaning, as excess (butexcess is not formally different from the remainder, and the problem of the squandering
3623of excess in Bataille is not different from that of the reabsorption of remainders in a
3624political economy of calculation and penury, only the philosophies are different), of a
3625higher order of meaning starting with the remainder. The secret of all the "liberations"
3626that play on the hidden energies on the other side of the slash.
3627Now we are faced with a much more original situation: not that of the pure and simple
3628inversion and promotion of remainders, but that of an instability in every structure and
3629every opposition that makes it so that there is no longer even a remainder, due to the fact
3630that the remainder is everywhere, and by playing with the slash, it annuls itself as such.
3631It is not when one has taken everything away that nothing is left, rather, nothing is left
3632when things are unceasingly shifted and addition itself no longer has any meaning.
3633Birth is residual if it is not symbolically revisited through initiation.
3634Death is residual if it is not resolved in mourning, in the collective celebration of
3635mourning.
3636Value is residual if it is not reabsorbed and volitalized in the cycle of exchanges.
3637Sexuality is residual once it becomes the production of sexual relations.
3638The social itself is residual once it becomes a production of "social relations."
3639All of the real is residual, and everything that is residual is destined to repeat itself
3640indefinitely in phantasms.
3641All accumulation is nothing but a remainder, and the accumulation of remainders, in the
3642sense that it is a rupture of alliance, and in the linear infinity of accumulation and
3643calculation, in the linear infinity of production, compensates for the energy and value that
3644used to be accomplished in the cycle of alliance. Now, what traverses a cycle is
3645completely realized, whereas in the dimension of the infinite, everything that is below the
3646line of the infinite, below the line of eternity (this stockpile of time that itself is also, as
3647with any stockpile, a rupture of alliances), all of that is nothing but the remainder.
3648Accumulation is nothing but the remainder, and repression is nothing but its inverse and
3649asymmetrical form. It is on the stockpile of repressed affects and representations that our
3650new alliance is based.
3651But when everything is repressed, nothing is anymore. We are not far from this absolute
3652point of repression where the stockpiles are themselves undone, where the stockpiles of
3653phantasms collapse. The whole imaginary of the stockpile, of energy, and of what
3654remains of it, comes to us from repression. When repression reaches a point of critical
3655saturation where its presence is put in question, then energy will no longer be available to
3656be liberated, spent, economized, produced: it is the concept of energy itself that will be
3657volatilized of its own accord.Today the remainder, the energies left us, the restitution and the conservation of
3658remainders, is the crucial problem of humanity. It is insoluble in and of itself. All new
3659freed or spent energy will leave a new remainder. All desire, all libidinal energy, will
3660produce a new repression. What is surprising in this, given that energy itself is not
3661conceived except in the movement that stockpiles and liberates it, that represses it and
3662"produces" it, that is to say in the figure of the remainder and its double?
3663One must push at the insane consumption of energy in order to exterminate its concept.
3664One must push at maximal repression in order to exterminate its concept. Once the last
3665liter of energy has been consumed (by the last ecologist), once the last indigenous person
3666has been analyzed (by the last ethnologist), once the ultimate commodity has been
3667produced by the last "work force," then one will realize that this gigantic spiral of energy
3668and production, of repression and the unconscious, thanks to which one has managed to
3669enclose everything in an entropic and catastrophic equation, that all this is in effect
3670nothing but a metaphysics of the remainder, and it will suddenly be resolved in all its
3671effects.
3672* NOTE *
36731. The allusion to Peter Schlemihl, the Man Who Lost His Shadow, is not accidental.
3674Since the shadow, like the image in the mirror (in The Student from Prague), is a
3675remainder par excellence, something that can "fall" from the body, just like hair,
3676excrement, or nail clippings to which it "is" compared in all archaic magic. But they are
3677also, one knows, "metaphors" of the soul, of breath, of Being, of essence, of what
3678profoundly gives meaning to the subject. Without an image or without a shadow, the
3679body becomes a transparent nothing, it is itself nothing but a remainder. It is the
3680diaphanous substance that remains once the shadow is gone. There is no more reality: it
3681is the shadow that has carried all reality away with it (thus in The Student from Prague,
3682the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero - classic
3683sequence of fantastic tales - see also The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen). Thus the
3684body can be nothing but the waste product of its own residue, the fallout of its own
3685fallout. Only the order said to be real permits privileging the body as reference. But
3686nothing in the symbolic order permits betting on the primacy of one or the other (of the
3687body or the shadow). And it is this reversion of the shadow onto the body, this fallout of
3688the essential, by the terms of the essential, under the rubric of the insignificant, this
3689incessant defeat of meaning before what remains of it, be they nail clippings or the "objet
3690petit a," that creates the charm, the beauty, and the disquieting strangeness of these
3691stories.THE SPIRALING CADAVER
3692The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and
3693employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge.
3694Strictly speaking, there is no longer even any power: it is also in ruins. Whence the
3695impossibility of the return of the fires of 1968: of the return of putting in question
3696knowledge versus power itself - the explosive contradiction of knowledge and power (or
3697the revelation of their collusion, which comes to the same thing) in the university, and, at
3698the same time, through symbolic (rather than political) contagion in the whole
3699institutional and social order. Why sociologists? marked this shift: the impasse of
3700knowledge, the vertigo of nonknowledge (that is to say at once the absurdity and the
3701impossibility of accumulating value in the order of knowledge) turns like an absolute
3702weapon against power itself, in order to dismantle it according to the same vertiginous
3703scenario of dispossession. This is the May 1968 effect. Today it cannot be achieved since
3704power itself, after knowledge, has taken off, has become ungraspable - has dispossessed
3705itself. In a now uncertain institution, without knowledge content, without a power
3706structure (except for an archaic feudalism that turns a simulacrum of a machine whose
3707destiny escapes it and whose survival is as artificial as that of barracks and theaters),
3708offensive irruption is impossible. Only what precipitates rotting, by accentuating the
3709parodic, simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power, has meaning.
3710A strike has exactly the opposite effect. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university:
3711the fiction of an ascension on everyone's part to a culture that is unlocatable, and that no
3712longer has meaning. This ideal is substituted for the operation of the university as its
3713critical alternative, as its therapy. This fiction still dreams of a permanency and
3714democracy of knowledge. Besides, everywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the
3715justice of the Left that reinjects an idea of justice, the necessity of logic and social morals
3716into a rotten apparatus that is coming undone, which is losing all conscience of its
3717legitimacy and renounces functioning almost of its own volition. It is the Left that secrets
3718and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left
3719believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts
3720an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the
3721objectives of the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the
3722wheels of capital in order to lay seige to them one day: from private property to the small
3723business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois
3724culture, justice at the university - everything that is disappearing, that the system itself, in
3725its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be
3726conserved.
3727Whence the paradoxical but necessary inversion of all the terms of political analysis.
3728Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows
3729fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a
3730certain age, it therefore has only to select - it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other
3731means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is
3732ready to award them to everybody; why this provocative politics, if not in order tocrystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection, work, diplomas, etc.), on an already dead
3733and rotting referential?
3734By rotting, the university can still do a lot of damage (rotting is a symbolic mechanism -
3735not political but symbolic, therefore subversive for us). But for this to be the case it is
3736necessary to start with this very rotting, and not to dream of resurrection. It is necessary
3737to transform this rotting into a violent process, into violent death, through mockery and
3738defiance, through a multiplied simulation that would offer the ritual of the death of the
3739university as a model of decomposition to the whole of society, a contagious model of the
3740disaffection of a whole social structure, where death would finally make its ravages,
3741which the strike tries desperately to avert, in complicity with the system, but succeeds, on
3742top of it all, only in transforming the university into a slow death, a delay that is not even
3743the possible site of a subversion, of an offensive reversion.
3744That is what the events of May 1968 produced. At a less advanced point in the process of
3745the liquefaction of the university and of culture, the students, far from wishing to save the
3746furniture (revive the lost object, in an ideal mode), retorted by confronting power with the
3747challenge of the total, immediate death of the institution, the challenge of a
3748deterritorialization even more intense than the one that came from the system, and by
3749summoning power to respond to this total derailment of the institution of knowledge, to
3750this total lack of a need to gather in a given place, this death desired in the end - not the
3751crisis of the university, that is not a challenge, on the contrary, it is the game of the
3752system, but the death of the university - to that challenge, power has not been able to
3753respond, except by its own dissolution in return (only for a moment maybe, but we saw
3754it).
3755The barricades of 10 May seemed defensive and to be defending a territory: the Latin
3756Quarter, old boutique. But this is not true: behind this facade, it was the dead university,
3757the dead culture whose challenge they were launching at power, and their own eventual
3758death at the same time - a transformation into immediate sacrifice, which was only the
3759long-term operation of the system itself: the liquidation of culture and of knowledge.
3760They were not there to save the Sorbonne, but to brandish its cadaver in the face of the
3761others, just as black people in Watts and in Detroit brandished the ruins of their
3762neighborhoods to which they had themselves set fire.
3763What can one brandish today? No longer even the ruins of knowledge, of culture - the
3764ruins themselves are defunct. We know it, we have mourned Nanterre for seven years.
37651968 is dead, repeatable only as a phantasm of mourning. What would be the equivalent
3766in symbolic violence (that is to say beyond the political) would be the same operation
3767that caused nonknowledge, the rotting of knowledge to come up against power - no
3768longer discovering this fabulous energy on the same level at all, but on the superior
3769spiral: causing nonpower, the rotting of power to come up against - against what
3770precisely? There lies the problem. It is perhaps insoluble. Power is being lost, power has
3771been lost. All around us there are nothing but dummies of power, but the mechanical
3772illusion of power still rules the social order, behind which grows the absent, illegible,
3773terror of control, the terror of a definitive code, of which we are the minuscule terminals.
3774Attacking representation no longer has much meaning either. One senses quite clearly,
3775for the same reason, that all student conflicts (as is the case, more broadly, on the level ofglobal society) around the representation, the delegation of power are no longer anything
3776but phantom vicissitudes that yet still manage, out of despair, to occupy the forefront of
3777the stage. Through I don't know what Mobius effect, representation itself has also turned
3778in on itself, and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time,
3779ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation, where from the beginning no one
3780is represented nor representative of anything any more, where all that is accumulated is
3781deaccumulated at the same time, where even the axiological, directive, and salvageable
3782phantasm of power has disappeared. A universe that is still incomprehensible,
3783unrecognizable, to us, a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates, which
3784are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and history, violently
3785resist. Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We
3786are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are
3787concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without
3788origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will
3789need to fight - without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination.
3790Because one must not refuse the intense fascination that emanates from this liquefaction
3791of all power, of all axes of value, of all axiology, politics included. This spectacle, which
3792is at once that of the death throes and the apogee of capital, surpasses by far that of the
3793commodity described by the situationists. This spectacle is our essential force. We are no
3794longer in a relation toward capital of uncertain or victorious forces, but in a political one,
3795that is the phantasm of revolution. We are in a relation of defiance, of seduction, and of
3796death toward this universe that is no longer one, precisely because all axiality that
3797escapes it. The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium - liquidating without shame
3798the law of profit, surplus value, productive finalities, structures of power, and finding at
3799the end of its process the profound immorality (but also the seduction) of primitive rituals
3800of destruction, this very challenge must be raised to an insanely higher level. Capital, like
3801value, is irresponsible, irreversible, ineluctable. Only to value is capital capable of
3802offering a fantastic spectacle of its decomposition - only the phantom of value still floats
3803over the desert of the classical structures of capital, just as the phantom of religion floats
3804over a world now long desacralized, just as the phantom of knowledge floats over the
3805university. It is up to us to again become the nomads of this desert, but disengaged from
3806the mechanical illusion of value. We will live in this world, which for us has all the
3807disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living
3808phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has
3809made of us - because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand - the jungle of signs
3810is equal to that of the forests - the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature - only the
3811vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which
3812value buries value - leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as
3813Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over
3814the sand.
3815What can one make of all this in the political order? Very little.
3816But we also have to fight against the profound fascination exerted on us by the death
3817throes of capital, against the staging by capital of its own death, when we are really the
3818ones in our final hours. To leave it the initiative of its own death, is to leave it all the
3819privileges of revolution. Surrounded by the simulacrum of value and by the phantom of
3820capital and of power, we are much more disarmed and impotent than when surrounded bythe law of value and of the commodity, since the system has revealed itself capable of
3821integrating its own death and since we are relieved of the responsibility for this death,
3822and thus of the stake of our own life. This supreme ruse of the system, that of the
3823simulacrum of its death, through which it maintains us in life by having liquidated
3824through absorption all possible negativity, only a superior ruse can stop. Challenge or
3825imaginary science, only a pataphysics of simulacra can can remove us from the system's
3826strategy of simulation and the impasse of death in which it imprisons us.VALUE'S LAST TANGO
3827Where nothing is in its place, lies disorder
3828Where in the desired place there is nothing, lies order
3829-Brecht
3830Panic on the part of university administrators at the idea that diplomas will be awarded
3831without a "real"-work counterpart, without an equivalence in knowledge. This panic is
3832not that of political subversion, it is that of seeing value become dissociated from its
3833contents and begin to function alone, according to its very form. The values of the
3834university (diplomas, etc.) will proliferate and continue to circulate, a bit like floating
3835capital or Eurodollars, they will spiral without referential criteria, completely devalorized
3836in the end, but that is unimportant: their circulation alone is enough to create a social
3837horizon of value, and the ghostly presence of the phantom value will only be greater,
3838even when its reference point (its use value, its exchange value, the academic "work
3839force" that the university recoops) is lost. Terror of value without equivalence.
3840This situation only appears to be new. It is so for those who still think that a real process
3841of work takes place in the university, and who invest their lived experience, their
3842neuroses, their raison d'être in it. The exchange of signs (of knowledge, of culture) in the
3843university, between "teachers" and "taught" has for some time been nothing but a doubled
3844collusion of bitterness and indifference (the indifference of signs that brings with it the
3845disaffection of social and human relations), a doubled simulacrum of a psychodrama (that
3846of a demand hot with shame, presence, oedipal exchange, with pedagogical incest that
3847strives to substitute itself for the lost exchange of work and knowledge). In this sense the
3848university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value, and those
3849who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work, the true
3850desperation of nonwork, of nonknowledge. Because current generations still dream of
3851reading, of learning, of competing, but their heart isn't in it - as a whole, the ascetic
3852cultural mentality has run body and possessions together. This is why the strike no longer
3853means anything.*l
3854It is also why we were trapped, we trapped ourselves, after 1968, into giving diplomas to
3855everybody. Subversion? Not at all. Once again, we were the promoters of the advanced
3856form, of the pure form of value: diplomas without work. The system does not want any
3857more diplomas, but it wants that - operational values in the void - and we were the ones
3858who inaugurated it, with the illusion of doing the opposite.
3859The students' distress at having diplomas conferred on them for no work complements
3860and is equal to that of the teachers. It is more secret and more insidious than the
3861traditional anguish of failure or of receiving worthless diplomas. No-risk insurance on the
3862diploma - which empties the vicissitudes of knowledge and selection of content - is hard
3863to bear. Also it must be complicated by either a benefit - alibi, a simulacrum of work
3864exchanged against a simulacrum of a diploma, or by a form of aggression (the teacher
3865called on to give the course, or treated as the automatic distributor) or by rancor, so that
3866at least something will still take place that resembles a "real" relation. But nothing works.
3867Even the domestic squabbles between teachers and students, which today make up a greatpart of their exchanges, are nothing but the recollection of, and a kind of nostalgia for a
3868violence or a complicity that heretofore made them enemies or united them around a
3869stake of knowledge or a political stake.
3870The "hard law of value," the "law set in stone" - when it abandons us, what sadness, what
3871panic! This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods,
3872because they revive something of the violence necessary to life - whether suffered or
3873inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the
3874violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good! It is clear, luminous,
3875the relations of force, contradictions, exploitation, repression! This is lacking today, and
3876the need for it makes itself felt. The teacher's reinvestment of his power through "free
3877speech," the self-management of the group and other modern nonsense - it is still all a
3878game, for example, in the university (but the entire political sphere is articulated in the
3879same way). No one is fooled. Simply in order to escape profound disillusionment, to
3880escape the catastrophe brought on by the loss of roles, statutes, responsibilities, and the
3881incredible demagoguery that is deployed through them, it is necessary to recreate the
3882professor either as a mannequin of power and knowledge, or to invest him with a
3883modicum of legitimacy derived from the ultra-Left - if not the situation is intolerable for
3884everyone. It is based on this compromise - artificial figuration of the teacher, equivocal
3885complicity on the part of the student - it is based on this phantom scenario of pedagogy
3886that things continue and this time can last indefinitely. Because there is an end to value
3887and to work, there is none to the simulacrum of value and of work. The universe of
3888simulation is transreal and transfmite: no test of reality will come to put an end to it -
3889except the total collapse and slippage of the terrain, which remains our most foolish hope.
3890* Note *
38911. Moreover, contemporary strikes naturally take on the same qualities as work: the same
3892suspension, the same weight, the same absence of objectives, the same allergy to
3893decisions, the same turning round of power, the same mourning of energy, the same
3894undefined circularity in todays strike as in yesterday's work, the same situation in the
3895counterinstitution as in the institution: the contagion grows, the circle is closed - after that
3896it will be necessary to emerge elsewhere. Or, rather, the opposite: take this impasse itself
3897as the basic situation, turn the indecision and the absence of an objective into an
3898offensive situation, a strategy. In searching at any price to wrench oneself from this
3899mortal situation, from this mental anorexia of the university, the students do nothing but
3900breathe energy again into an institution long since in a coma; it is forced survival, it is the
3901medicine of desperation that is practiced today on both institutions and individuals, and
3902that everywhere is the sign of the same incapacity to confront death. "One must push
3903what is collapsing," said Nietzsche.ON NIHILISM
3904Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end
3905of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a
3906metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be
3907taken from this death. Today's nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense
3908more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this
3909transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory
3910that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so - the
3911great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated
3912transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization
3913of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no
3914longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.
3915The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation, into the malefic, not even
3916malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely
3917realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence. From the
3918active, violent phantasm, from the phantasm of the myth and the stage that it also was,
3919historically, it has passed into the transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things.
3920What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where
3921nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake?
3922We are in a new, and without a doubt insoluble, position in relation to prior forms of
3923nihilism:
3924Romanticism is its first great manifestation: it, along with the Enlightenment's
3925Revolution, corresponds to the destruction of the order of appearances.
3926Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation,
3927which corresponds to the destruction of the order of meaning.
3928The first is still an aesthetic form of nihilism (dandyism), the second, a political,
3929historical, and metaphysical form (terrorism).
3930These two forms no longer concern us except in part, or not at all. The nihilism of
3931transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the
3932extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from
3933the last nuances of an apocalypse. There is no longer an apocalypse (only aleatory
3934terrorism still tries to reflect it, but it is certainly no longer political, and it only has one
3935mode of manifestation left that is at the same time a mode of disappearance: the media -
3936now the media are not a stage where something is played, they are a strip, a track, a
3937perforated map of which we are no longer even spectators: receivers). The apocalypse is
3938finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of
3939indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an
3940aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so - all that remains, is the fascination for
3941desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us.
3942Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and todialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence,
3943it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of
3944disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general
3945situation in an era of involuntary transparency.
3946I am a nihilist.
3947I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and
3948of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history,
3949criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution
3950of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the
3951disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of
3952history.
3953I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth
3954century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of
3955meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is
3956killed by meaning.
3957The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no
3958therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized
3959process of indifferentiation.
3960The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact,
3961nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary
3962of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).*1
3963Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing
3964over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the
3965level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and
3966four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no
3967matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it
3968assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows.
3969Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth
3970of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of
3971inertia.
3972A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if
3973one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in
3974excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own
3975end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same
3976direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie.
3977Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) -
3978is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge
3979of speed on inertia.
3980The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia throughacceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and
3981all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality.
3982It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is
3983fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is
3984nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems
3985up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist.
3986If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode
3987of production, then I am a nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of
3988Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the
3989real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth,
3990it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike,
3991aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism -
3992that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial,
3993dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and
3994nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance.
3995The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and
3996Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of
3997the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But
3998more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy
3999attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this
4000melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent
4001forms that surround us. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion.
4002It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer
4003nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction,
4004the passion of resentment (ressentiment).*2 No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality
4005of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information.
4006Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the
4007mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all
4008melancholic.
4009Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the
4010hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the
4011same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.
4012Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic.
4013Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice
4014revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend
4015cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad
4016daylight.
4017This, only terrorism can do.
4018It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a
4019whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power andpleasure of the master.
4020The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its
4021reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this
4022reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected
4023stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.
4024If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical
4025trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer
4026through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with
4027their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.
4028But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there
4029were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the
4030terrorist, still had meaning.
4031But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of
4032radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself
4033also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies
4034it, into indifference.
4035In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the
4036Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is
4037the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated
4038form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither
4039phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a
4040ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other
4041terrorism, that of the system.
4042There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of
4043adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what
4044do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be
4045annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences
4046(and of theories without consequences).
4047There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is
4048mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in
4049order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal,
4050invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.
4051This is where seduction begins.
4052* NOTES *
40531. There are cultures that have no imaginary except of their origin and have no imaginary
4054of their end. There are those that are obsessed by both... Two other types of figures are
4055possible... Having no imaginary except of the end (our culture, nihilistic). No longer
4056having any imaginary, neither of the origin nor of the end (that which is coming,aleatory).
40572. Cf. Nietzsche's use of the word "ressentiment" throughout Thus Spoke Zaralhustra.-
4058TRANS.
4059~ The End ~