text/simulacra/SimulacraTheBook.txt

Simulacra and Simulation
By
Jean Bau­drillard
Trans­lated by
Sheila Faria Glaser
Dig­i­tized by
Czer­wona­maupa
Ann Arbor
The Uni­ver­sity
of Michi­gan
Press
Contents
    • The Precession of Simulacra
    • History: A Retro Scenario
    • Holocaust
    • The China Syndrome
    • Apocalypse Now
    • The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
    • Hypermarket and Hypercommodity
    • The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
    • Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising
    • Clone Story
    • Holograms
    • Crash
    • Simulacra and Science Fiction
    • The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses
    • The Remainder
    • The Spiraling Cadaver
    • Value’s Last Tango
    • On Nihilism
The Precession of Simulacra
The sim­u­lacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.
The sim­u­lacrum is true.
—Eccle­si­astes
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the car­tog­ra­phers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up cov­er­ing the ter­ri­tory exactly (the decline of the Empire wit­nesses the fray­ing of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still dis­cernible in the deserts—the meta­phys­i­cal beauty of this ruined abstrac­tion tes­ti­fy­ing to a pride equal to the Empire and rot­ting like a car­cass, return­ing to the sub­stance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being con­fused with the real through aging)—as the most beau­ti­ful alle­gory of sim­u­la­tion, this fable has now come full circle for us, and pos­sesses noth­ing but the dis­crete charm of second-order sim­u­lacra.1
Today abstrac­tion is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the con­cept. Sim­u­la­tion is no longer that of a ter­ri­tory, a ref­er­en­tial being, or a sub­stance. It is the gen­er­a­tion by models of a real with­out origin or real­ity: a hyper­real. The ter­ri­tory no longer pre­cedes the map, nor does it sur­vive it. It is nev­er­the­less the map that pre­cedes the ter­ri­tory—pre­ces­sion of sim­u­lacra—that engen­ders the ter­ri­tory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the ter­ri­tory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose ves­tiges per­sist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
In fact, even inverted, Borges’s fable is unus­able. Only the alle­gory of the Empire, per­haps, remains. Because it is with this same impe­ri­al­ism that present-day sim­u­la­tors attempt to make the real, all of the real, coin­cide with their models of sim­u­la­tion. But it is no longer a ques­tion of either maps or ter­ri­to­ries. Some­thing has dis­ap­peared: the sov­er­eign dif­fer­ence, between one and the other, that con­sti­tuted the charm of abstrac­tion. Because it is dif­fer­ence that con­sti­tutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the ter­ri­tory, the magic of the con­cept and the charm of the real. This imag­i­nary of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, which simul­ta­ne­ously cul­mi­nates in and is engulfed by the car­tog­ra­pher’s mad project of the ideal coex­ten­siv­ity of map and ter­ri­tory, dis­ap­pears in the sim­u­la­tion whose oper­a­tion is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all spec­u­lar or dis­cur­sive. It is all of meta­physics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appear­ances, of the real and its con­cept. No more imag­i­nary coex­ten­siv­ity: it is genetic minia­tur­iza­tion that is the dimen­sion of sim­u­la­tion. The real is pro­duced from minia­tur­ized cells, matri­ces, and memory banks, models of con­trol—and it can be repro­duced an indef­i­nite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be ratio­nal, because it no longer mea­sures itself against either an ideal or neg­a­tive instance. It is no longer any­thing but oper­a­tional. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imag­i­nary envelops it any­more. It is a hyper­real, pro­duced from a radi­at­ing syn­the­sis of com­bi­na­tory models in a hyper­space with­out atmos­phere.
By cross­ing into a space whose cur­va­ture is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of sim­u­la­tion is inau­gu­rated by a liq­ui­da­tion of all ref­er­en­tials—worse: with their arti­fi­cial res­ur­rec­tion in the sys­tems of signs, a mate­rial more mal­leable than mean­ing, in that it lends itself to all sys­tems of equiv­a­lences, to all binary oppo­si­tions, to all com­bi­na­tory alge­bra. It is no longer a ques­tion of imi­ta­tion, nor dupli­ca­tion, nor even parody. It is a ques­tion of sub­sti­tut­ing the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an oper­a­tion of deter­ring every real process via its oper­a­tional double, a pro­gram­matic, metastable, per­fectly descrip­tive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-cir­cuits all its vicis­si­tudes. Never again will the real have the chance to pro­duce itself such is the vital func­tion of the model in a system of death, or rather of antic­i­pated res­ur­rec­tion, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyper­real hence­forth shel­tered from the imag­i­nary, and from any dis­tinc­tion between the real and the imag­i­nary, leav­ing room only for the orbital recur­rence of models and for the sim­u­lated gen­er­a­tion of dif­fer­ences.
The Divine Irreference of Images
To dis­sim­u­late is to pre­tend not to have what one has. To sim­u­late is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a pres­ence, the other an absence. But it is more com­pli­cated than that because sim­u­lat­ing is not pre­tend­ing: “Who­ever fakes an ill­ness can simply stay in bed and make every­one believe he is ill. Who­ever sim­u­lates an ill­ness pro­duces in him­self some of the symp­toms” (Littré). There­fore, pre­tend­ing, or dis­sim­u­lat­ing, leaves the prin­ci­ple of real­ity intact: the dif­fer­ence is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas sim­u­la­tion threat­ens the dif­fer­ence between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imag­i­nary.” Is the sim­u­la­tor sick or not, given that he pro­duces “true” symp­toms? Objec­tively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psy­chol­ogy and medicine stop at this point, fore­stalled by the ill­ness’s hence­forth undis­cov­er­able truth. For if any symp­tom can be “pro­duced,” and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every ill­ness can be con­sid­ered as sim­u­lat­able and sim­u­lated, and medicine loses its mean­ing since it only knows how to treat “real” ill­nesses accord­ing to their objec­tive causes. Psy­cho­so­mat­ics evolves in a dubi­ous manner at the bor­ders of the prin­ci­ple of ill­ness. As to psy­cho­anal­y­sis, it trans­fers the symp­tom of the organic order to the uncon­scious order: the latter is new and taken for “real” more real than the other—but why would sim­u­la­tion be at the gates of the uncon­scious? Why couldn’t the “work” of the uncon­scious be “pro­duced” in the same way as any old symp­tom of clas­si­cal medicine? Dreams already are.
Cer­tainly, the psy­chi­a­trist pur­ports that “for every form of mental alien­ation there is a par­tic­u­lar order in the suc­ces­sion of symp­toms of which the sim­u­la­tor is igno­rant and in the absence of which the psy­chi­a­trist would not be deceived.” This (which dates from 1865) in order to safe­guard the prin­ci­ple of a truth at all costs and to escape the inter­ro­ga­tion posed by sim­u­la­tion—the knowl­edge that truth, ref­er­ence, objec­tive cause have ceased to exist. Now, what can medicine do with what floats on either side of ill­ness, on either side of health, with the dupli­ca­tion of ill­ness in a dis­course that is no longer either true or false? What can psy­cho­anal­y­sis do with the dupli­ca­tion of the dis­course of the uncon­scious in the dis­course of sim­u­la­tion that can never again be unmasked, since it is not false either?2
What can the army do about sim­u­la­tors? Tra­di­tion­ally it unmasks them and pun­ishes them, accord­ing to a clear prin­ci­ple of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Today it can dis­charge a very good sim­u­la­tor as exactly equiv­a­lent to a “real” homo­sex­ual, a heart patient, or a madman. Even mil­i­tary psy­chol­ogy draws back from Carte­sian cer­tain­ties and hes­i­tates to make the dis­tinc­tion between true and false, between the “pro­duced” and the authen­tic symp­tom. “If he is this good at acting crazy, it’s because he is.” Nor is mil­i­tary psy­chol­ogy mis­taken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people sim­u­late, and this lack of dis­tinc­tion is the worst kind of sub­ver­sion.
It is against this lack of dis­tinc­tion that clas­si­cal reason armed itself in all its cat­e­gories. But it is what today again out­flanks them, sub­merg­ing the prin­ci­ple of truth.
Beyond medicine and the army favored ter­rains of sim­u­la­tion, the ques­tion returns to reli­gion and the sim­u­lacrum of divin­ity: “I for­bade that there be any sim­u­lacra in the tem­ples because the divin­ity that ani­mates nature can never be rep­re­sented.” Indeed it can be. But what becomes of the divin­ity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is mul­ti­plied in sim­u­lacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incar­nated in images as a vis­i­ble the­ol­ogy? Or does it volatilize itself in the sim­u­lacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fas­ci­na­tion—the vis­i­ble machin­ery of icons sub­sti­tuted for the pure and intel­li­gi­ble Idea of God? This is pre­cisely what was feared by Icon­o­clasts, whose mil­len­nial quar­rel is still with us today.3 This is pre­cisely because they pre­dicted this omnipo­tence of sim­u­lacra, the fac­ulty sim­u­lacra have of effac­ing God from the con­science of man, and the destruc­tive, anni­hi­lat­ing truth that they allow to appear—that deep down God never existed, that only the sim­u­lacrum ever existed, even that God him­self was never any­thing but his own sim­u­lacrum—from this came their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfus­cated or masked the Pla­tonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of dis­torted truth. But their meta­phys­i­cal despair came from the idea that the image didn’t con­ceal any­thing at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an orig­i­nal model would have made them, but per­fect sim­u­lacra, for­ever radi­ant with their own fas­ci­na­tion. Thus this death of the divine ref­er­en­tial must be exor­cised at all costs.
One can see that the icon­o­clasts, whom one accuses of dis­dain­ing and negat­ing images, were those who accorded them their true value, in con­trast to the icono­laters who only saw reflec­tions in them and were con­tent to ven­er­ate a fil­i­gree God. On the other hand, one can say that the icon wor­shipers were the most modern minds, the most adven­tur­ous, because, in the guise of having God become appar­ent in the mirror of images, they were already enact­ing his death and his dis­ap­pear­ance in the epiphany of his rep­re­sen­ta­tions (which, per­haps, they already knew no longer rep­re­sented any­thing, that they were purely a game, but that it was therein the great game lay—know­ing also that it is dan­ger­ous to unmask images, since they dis­sim­u­late the fact that there is noth­ing behind them).
This was the approach of the Jesuits, who founded their pol­i­tics on the vir­tual dis­ap­pear­ance of God and on the worldly and spec­tac­u­lar manip­u­la­tion of con­sciences—the evanes­cence of God in the epiphany of power—the end of tran­scen­dence, which now only serves as an alibi for a strat­egy alto­gether free of influ­ences and signs. Behind the baro­que­ness of images hides the émi­nence grise of pol­i­tics.
This way the stake will always have been the mur­der­ous power of images, mur­der­ers of the real, mur­der­ers of their own model, as the Byzan­tine icons could be those of divine iden­tity. To this mur­der­ous power is opposed that of rep­re­sen­ta­tions as a dialec­ti­cal power, the vis­i­ble and intel­li­gi­ble medi­a­tion of the Real. All West­ern faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on rep­re­sen­ta­tion: that a sign could refer to the depth of mean­ing, that a sign could be exchanged for mean­ing and that some­thing could guar­an­tee this exchange—God of course. But what if God him­self can be sim­u­lated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that con­sti­tute faith? Then the whole system becomes weight­less, it is no longer itself any­thing but a gigan­tic sim­u­lacrum—not unreal, but a sim­u­lacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an unin­ter­rupted cir­cuit with­out ref­er­ence or cir­cum­fer­ence.
Such is sim­u­la­tion, inso­far as it is opposed to rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Rep­re­sen­ta­tion stems from the prin­ci­ple of the equiv­a­lence of the sign and of the real (even if this equiv­a­lence is utopian, it is a fun­da­men­tal axiom). Sim­u­la­tion, on the con­trary, stems from the utopia of the prin­ci­ple of equiv­a­lence, from the rad­i­cal nega­tion of the sign as value, from the sign as the rever­sion and death sen­tence of every ref­er­ence. Whereas rep­re­sen­ta­tion attempts to absorb sim­u­la­tion by inter­pret­ing it as a false rep­re­sen­ta­tion, sim­u­la­tion envelops the whole edi­fice of rep­re­sen­ta­tion itself as a sim­u­lacrum.
Such would be the suc­ces­sive phases of the image:
    • it is the reflection of a profound reality;
    • it masks and denatures a profound reality;
    • it masks the absence of a profound reality;
    • it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appear­ance—rep­re­sen­ta­tion is of the sacra­men­tal order. In the second, it is an evil appear­ance—it is of the order of malef­i­cence. In the third, it plays at being an appear­ance—it is of the order of sor­cery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appear­ances, but of sim­u­la­tion.
The tran­si­tion from signs that dis­sim­u­late some­thing to signs that dis­sim­u­late that there is noth­ing marks a deci­sive turn­ing point. The first reflects a the­ol­ogy of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ide­ol­ogy still belongs). The second inau­gu­rates the era of sim­u­lacra and of sim­u­la­tion, in which there is no longer a God to rec­og­nize his own, no longer a Last Judg­ment to sep­a­rate the false from the true, the real from its arti­fi­cial res­ur­rec­tion, as every­thing is already dead and res­ur­rected in advance.
When the real is no longer what it was, nos­tal­gia assumes its full mean­ing. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of real­ity—a plethora of truth, of sec­ondary objec­tiv­ity, and authen­tic­ity. Esca­la­tion of the true, of lived expe­ri­ence, res­ur­rec­tion of the fig­u­ra­tive where the object and sub­stance have dis­ap­peared. Panic-stricken pro­duc­tion of the real and of the ref­er­en­tial, par­al­lel to and greater than the panic of mate­rial pro­duc­tion: this is how sim­u­la­tion appears in the phase that con­cerns us—a strat­egy of the real, of the neo­real and the hyper­real that every­where is the double of a strat­egy of deter­rence.
Ramses, or the Rosy-Colored Resurrection
Eth­nol­ogy brushed up against its para­dox­i­cal death in 1971, the day when the Philip­pine gov­ern­ment decided to return the few dozen Tasa­day who had just been dis­cov­ered in the depths of the jungle, where they had lived for eight cen­turies with­out any con­tact with the rest of the species, to their prim­i­tive state, out of the reach of col­o­niz­ers, tourists, and eth­nol­o­gists. This at the sug­ges­tion of the anthro­pol­o­gists them­selves, who were seeing the indige­nous people dis­in­te­grate imme­di­ately upon con­tact, like mum­mies in the open air.
In order for eth­nol­ogy to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being “dis­cov­ered” and with its death defies the sci­ence that wants to grasp it.
Doesn’t all sci­ence live on this para­dox­i­cal slope to which it is doomed by the evanes­cence of its object in its very appre­hen­sion, and by the piti­less rever­sal that the dead object exerts on it? Like Orpheus, it always turns around too soon, and, like Eury­dice, its object falls back into Hades.
It is against this hell of the para­dox that the eth­nol­o­gists wished to pro­tect them­selves by cor­don­ing off the Tasa­day with virgin forest. No one can touch them any­more: as in a mine the vein is closed down. Sci­ence loses pre­cious cap­i­tal there, but the object will be safe, lost to sci­ence, but intact in its “vir­gin­ity.” It is not a ques­tion of sac­ri­fice (sci­ence never sac­ri­fices itself, it is always mur­der­ous), but of the sim­u­lated sac­ri­fice of its object in order to save its real­ity prin­ci­ple. The Tasa­day, frozen in their nat­u­ral ele­ment, will pro­vide a per­fect alibi, an eter­nal guar­an­tee. Here begins an anti­eth­nol­ogy that will never end and to which Jaulin, Cas­taneda, Clas­tres are var­i­ous wit­nesses. In any case, the log­i­cal evo­lu­tion of a sci­ence is to dis­tance itself increas­ingly from its object, until it dis­penses with it entirely: its auton­omy is only ren­dered even more fan­tas­tic—it attains its pure form.
The Indian thus returned to the ghetto, in the glass coffin of the virgin forest, again becomes the model of sim­u­la­tion of all the pos­si­ble Indi­ans from before eth­nol­ogy. This model thus grants itself the luxury to incar­nate itself beyond itself in the “brute” real­ity of these Indi­ans it has entirely rein­vented—Sav­ages who are indebted to eth­nol­ogy for still being Sav­ages: what a turn of events, what a tri­umph for this sci­ence that seemed ded­i­cated to their destruc­tion!
Of course, these sav­ages are post­hu­mous: frozen, cryo­g­e­nized, ster­il­ized, pro­tected to death, they have become ref­er­en­tial sim­u­lacra, and sci­ence itself has become pure sim­u­la­tion. The same holds true at Crue­sot, at the level of the “open” museum where one muse­u­mi­fied in situ, as “his­tor­i­cal” wit­nesses of their period, entire work­ing-class neigh­bor­hoods, living met­al­lur­gic zones, an entire cul­ture, men, women, and chil­dren included—ges­tures, lan­guages, cus­toms fos­silized alive as in a snap­shot. The museum, instead of being cir­cum­scribed as a geo­met­ric site, is every­where now, like a dimen­sion of life. Thus eth­nol­ogy, rather than cir­cum­scrib­ing itself as an objec­tive sci­ence, will today, lib­er­ated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invis­i­ble, like an omnipresent fourth dimen­sion, that of the sim­u­lacrum. We are all Tasa­days, Indi­ans who have again become what they were—sim­u­lacral Indi­ans who at last pro­claim the uni­ver­sal truth of eth­nol­ogy.
We have all become living spec­i­mens in the spec­tral light of eth­nol­ogy, or of anti­eth­nol­ogy, which is noth­ing but the pure form of tri­umphal eth­nol­ogy, under the sign of dead dif­fer­ences, and of the res­ur­rec­tion of dif­fer­ences. It is thus very naive to look for eth­nol­ogy in the Sav­ages or in some Third World—it is here, every­where, in the metrop­o­lises, in the White com­mu­nity, in a world com­pletely cat­a­loged and ana­lyzed, then arti­fi­cially res­ur­rected under the aus­pices of the real, in a world of sim­u­la­tion, of the hal­lu­ci­na­tion of truth, of the black­mail of the real, of the murder of every sym­bolic form and of its hys­ter­i­cal, his­tor­i­cal ret­ro­spec­tion—a murder of which the Sav­ages, noblesse oblige, were the first vic­tims, but that for a long time has extended to all West­ern soci­eties.
But in the same breath eth­nol­ogy grants us its only and final lesson, the secret that kills it (and which the Sav­ages knew better than it did): the vengeance of the dead.
The con­fine­ment of the sci­en­tific object is equal to the con­fine­ment of the mad and the dead. And just as all of soci­ety is irre­me­di­a­bly con­tam­i­nated by this mirror of mad­ness that it has held up to itself, sci­ence can’t help but die con­tam­i­nated by the death of this object that is its inverse mirror. It is sci­ence that mas­ters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth, accord­ing to an uncon­scious rever­sion, which only gives a dead and cir­cu­lar response to a dead and cir­cu­lar inter­ro­ga­tion.
Noth­ing changes when soci­ety breaks the mirror of mad­ness (abol­ishes the asy­lums, gives speech back to the insane, etc.) nor when sci­ence seems to break the mirror of its objec­tiv­ity (effac­ing itself before its object, as in Cas­taneda, etc.) and to bend down before the “dif­fer­ences.” The form pro­duced by con­fine­ment is fol­lowed by an innu­mer­able, diffracted, slowed-down mech­a­nism. As eth­nol­ogy col­lapses in its clas­si­cal insti­tu­tion, it sur­vives in an anti­eth­nol­ogy whose task it is to rein­ject the dif­fer­ence fic­tion, the Savage fic­tion every­where, to con­ceal that it is this world, ours, which has again become savage in its way, that is to say, which is dev­as­tated by dif­fer­ence and by death.
In the same way, with the pre­text of saving the orig­i­nal, one for­bade vis­i­tors to enter the Las­caux caves, but an exact replica was con­structed five hun­dred meters from it, so that every­one could see them (one glances through a peep­hole at the authen­tic cave, and then one visits the recon­sti­tuted whole). It is pos­si­ble that the memory of the orig­i­nal grot­toes is itself stamped in the minds of future gen­er­a­tions, but from now on there is no longer any dif­fer­ence: the dupli­ca­tion suf­fices to render both arti­fi­cial.
In the same way sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy were recently mobi­lized to save the mummy of Ramses II, after it was left to rot for sev­eral dozen years in the depths of a museum. The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the sym­bolic order had been able to con­serve for forty cen­turies, but out of sight and far from the light of day. Ramses does not sig­nify any­thing for us, only the mummy is of an ines­timable worth because it is what guar­an­tees that accu­mu­la­tion has mean­ing. Our entire linear and accu­mu­la­tive cul­ture col­lapses if we cannot stock­pile the past in plain view. To this end the pharaohs must be brought out of their tomb and the mum­mies out of their silence. To this end they must be exhumed and given mil­i­tary honors. They are prey to both sci­ence and worms. Only abso­lute secrecy assured them this mil­len­nial power—the mas­tery over putre­fac­tion that sig­ni­fied the mas­tery of the com­plete cycle of exchanges with death. We only know how to place our sci­ence in ser­vice of repair­ing the mummy, that is to say restor­ing a vis­i­ble order, whereas embalm­ing was a myth­i­cal effort that strove to immor­tal­ize a hidden dimen­sion.
We require a vis­i­ble past, a vis­i­ble con­tin­uum, a vis­i­ble myth of origin, which reas­sures us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them. Whence this his­toric scene of the recep­tion of the mummy at the Orly air­port. Why? Because Ramses was a great despotic and mil­i­tary figure? Cer­tainly. But mostly because our cul­ture dreams, behind this defunct power that it tries to annex, of an order that would have had noth­ing to do with it, and it dreams of it because it exter­mi­nated it by exhum­ing it as its own past.
We are fas­ci­nated by Ramses as Renais­sance Chris­tians were by the Amer­i­can Indi­ans, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ. Thus, at the begin­ning of col­o­niza­tion, there was a moment of stupor and bewil­der­ment before the very pos­si­bil­ity of escap­ing the uni­ver­sal law of the Gospel. There were two pos­si­ble responses: either admit that this Law was not uni­ver­sal, or exter­mi­nate the Indi­ans to efface the evi­dence. In gen­eral, one con­tented one­self with con­vert­ing them, or even simply dis­cov­er­ing them, which would suf­fice to slowly exter­mi­nate them.
Thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramses to ensure his exter­mi­na­tion by muse­u­mi­fi­ca­tion. Because mum­mies don’t rot from worms: they die from being trans­planted from a slow order of the sym­bolic, master over putre­fac­tion and death, to an order of his­tory, sci­ence, and muse­ums, our order, which no longer mas­ters any­thing, which only knows how to con­demn what pre­ceded it to decay and death and sub­se­quently to try to revive it with sci­ence. Irrepara­ble vio­lence toward all secrets, the vio­lence of a civ­i­liza­tion with­out secrets, hatred of a whole civ­i­liza­tion for its own foun­da­tion.
And just as with eth­nol­ogy, which plays at extri­cat­ing itself from its object to better secure itself in its pure form, demu­se­u­mi­fi­ca­tion is noth­ing but another spiral in arti­fi­cial­ity. Wit­ness the clois­ter of Saint-Michel de Cuxa, which one will repa­tri­ate at great cost from the Clois­ters in New York to rein­stall it in “its orig­i­nal site.” And every­one is sup­posed to applaud this resti­tu­tion (as they did “the exper­i­men­tal cam­paign to take back the side­walks” on the Champs Ely­sees!). Well, if the expor­ta­tion of the cor­nices was in effect an arbi­trary act, if the Clois­ters in New York are an arti­fi­cial mosaic of all cul­tures (fol­low­ing a logic of the cap­i­tal­ist cen­tral­iza­tion of value), their reim­por­ta­tion to the orig­i­nal site is even more arti­fi­cial: it is a total sim­u­lacrum that links up with “real­ity” through a com­plete cir­cum­vo­lu­tion.
The clois­ter should have stayed in New York in its sim­u­lated envi­ron­ment, which at least fooled no one. Repa­tri­at­ing it is noth­ing but a sup­ple­men­tary sub­terfuge, acting as if noth­ing had hap­pened and indulging in ret­ro­spec­tive hal­lu­ci­na­tion.
In the same way, Amer­i­cans flat­ter them­selves for having brought the pop­u­la­tion of Indi­ans back to pre-Con­quest levels. One effaces every­thing and starts over. They even flat­ter them­selves for doing better, for exceed­ing the orig­i­nal number. This is pre­sented as proof of the supe­ri­or­ity of civ­i­liza­tion: it will pro­duce more Indi­ans than they them­selves were able to do. (With sin­is­ter deri­sion, this over­pro­duc­tion is again a means of destroy­ing them: for Indian cul­ture, like all tribal cul­ture, rests on the lim­i­ta­tion of the group and the refusal of any “unlim­ited” increase, as can be seen in Ishi’s case. In this way, their demo­graphic “pro­mo­tion” is just another step toward sym­bolic exter­mi­na­tion.)
Every­where we live in a uni­verse strangely sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal—things are dou­bled by their own sce­nario. But this dou­bling does not sig­nify, as it did tra­di­tion­ally, the immi­nence of their death—they are already purged of their death, and better than when they were alive; more cheer­ful, more authen­tic, in the light of their model, like the faces in funeral homes.
The Hyperreal and the Imaginary
Dis­ney­land is a per­fect model of all the entan­gled orders of sim­u­lacra. It is first of all a play of illu­sions and phan­tasms: the Pirates, the Fron­tier, the Future World, etc. This imag­i­nary world is sup­posed to ensure the suc­cess of the oper­a­tion. But what attracts the crowds the most is with­out a doubt the social micro­cosm, the reli­gious, minia­tur­ized plea­sure of real Amer­ica, of its con­straints and joys. One parks out­side and stands in line inside, one is alto­gether aban­doned at the exit. The only phan­tas­mago­ria in this imag­i­nary world lies in the ten­der­ness and warmth of the crowd, and in the suf­fi­cient and exces­sive number of gad­gets nec­es­sary to create the mul­ti­tudi­nous effect. The con­trast with the abso­lute soli­tude of the park­ing lot—a ver­i­ta­ble con­cen­tra­tion camp—is total. Or, rather: inside, a whole panoply of gad­gets mag­ne­tizes the crowd in directed flows—out­side, soli­tude is directed at a single gadget: the auto­mo­bile. By an extra­or­di­nary coin­ci­dence (but this derives with­out a doubt from the enchant­ment inher­ent to this uni­verse), this frozen, child­like world is found to have been con­ceived and real­ized by a man who is him­self now cryo­g­e­nized: Walt Disney, who awaits his res­ur­rec­tion through an increase of 180 degrees centi­grade.
Thus, every­where in Dis­ney­land the objec­tive pro­file of Amer­ica, down to the mor­phol­ogy of indi­vid­u­als and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the minia­ture and the comic strip. Embalmed and paci­fied. Whence the pos­si­bil­ity of an ide­o­log­i­cal anal­y­sis of Dis­ney­land (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d’espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the Amer­i­can way of life, pan­e­gyric of Amer­i­can values, ide­al­ized trans­po­si­tion of a con­tra­dic­tory real­ity. Cer­tainly. But this masks some­thing else and this “ide­o­log­i­cal” blan­ket func­tions as a cover for a sim­u­la­tion of the third order: Dis­ney­land exists in order to hide that it is the “real” coun­try, all of “real” Amer­ica that is Dis­ney­land (a bit like pris­ons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipres­ence, that is carceral). Dis­ney­land is pre­sented as imag­i­nary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Ange­les and the Amer­ica that sur­rounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyper­real order and to the order of sim­u­la­tion. It is no longer a ques­tion of a false rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real­ity (ide­ol­ogy) but of con­ceal­ing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the real­ity prin­ci­ple.
The imag­i­nary of Dis­ney­land is nei­ther true nor false, it is a deter­rence machine set up in order to reju­ve­nate the fic­tion of the real in the oppo­site camp. Whence the debil­ity of this imag­i­nary, its infan­tile degen­er­a­tion. This world wants to be child­ish in order to make us believe that the adults are else­where, in the “real” world, and to con­ceal the fact that true child­ish­ness is every­where—that it is that of the adults them­selves who come here to act the child in order to foster illu­sions as to their real child­ish­ness.
Dis­ney­land is not the only one, how­ever. Enchanted Vil­lage, Magic Moun­tain, Marine World: Los Ange­les is sur­rounded by these imag­i­nary sta­tions that feed real­ity, the energy of the real to a city whose mys­tery is pre­cisely that of no longer being any­thing but a net­work of inces­sant, unreal cir­cu­la­tion—a city of incred­i­ble pro­por­tions but with­out space, with­out dimen­sion. As much as elec­tri­cal and atomic power sta­tions, as much as cinema stu­dios, this city, which is no longer any­thing but an immense sce­nario and a per­pet­ual pan shot, needs this old imag­i­nary like a sym­pa­thetic ner­vous system made up of child­hood sig­nals and faked phan­tasms.
Dis­ney­land: a space of the regen­er­a­tion of the imag­i­nary as waste-treat­ment plants are else­where, and even here. Every­where today one must recy­cle waste, and the dreams, the phan­tasms, the his­tor­i­cal, fairy­like, leg­endary imag­i­nary of chil­dren and adults is a waste prod­uct, the first great toxic excre­ment of a hyper­real civ­i­liza­tion. On a mental level, Dis­ney­land is the pro­to­type of this new func­tion. But all the sexual, psy­chic, somatic recy­cling insti­tutes, which pro­lif­er­ate in Cal­i­for­nia, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are insti­tutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is con­tac­tother­apy. They no longer walk, but they go jog­ging, etc. Every­where one recy­cles lost fac­ul­ties, or lost bodies, or lost social­ity, or the lost taste for food. One rein­vents penury, asceti­cism, van­ished savage nat­u­ral­ness: nat­u­ral food, health food, yoga. Mar­shall Sahlins’s idea that it is the econ­omy of the market, and not of nature at all, that secretes penury, is ver­i­fied, but at a sec­ondary level: here, in the sophis­ti­cated con­fines of a tri­umphal market econ­omy is rein­vented a penury/sign, a penury/sim­u­lacrum, a sim­u­lated behav­ior of the under­de­vel­oped (includ­ing the adop­tion of Marx­ist tenets) that, in the guise of ecol­ogy, of energy crises and the cri­tique of cap­i­tal, adds a final eso­teric aure­ole to the tri­umph of an eso­teric cul­ture. Nev­er­the­less, maybe a mental catas­tro­phe, a mental implo­sion and invo­lu­tion with­out prece­dent lies in wait for a system of this kind, whose vis­i­ble signs would be those of this strange obe­sity, or the incred­i­ble coex­is­tence of the most bizarre the­o­ries and prac­tices, which cor­re­spond to the improb­a­ble coali­tion of luxury, heaven, and money, to the improb­a­ble lux­u­ri­ous mate­ri­al­iza­tion of life and to undis­cov­er­able con­tra­dic­tions.
Political Incantation
Water­gate. The same sce­nario as in Dis­ney­land (effect of the imag­i­nary con­ceal­ing that real­ity no more exists out­side than inside the limits of the arti­fi­cial perime­ter): here the scan­dal effect hiding that there is no dif­fer­ence between the facts and their denun­ci­a­tion (iden­ti­cal meth­ods on the part of the CIA and of the Wash­ing­ton Post jour­nal­ists). Same oper­a­tion, tend­ing to regen­er­ate through scan­dal a moral and polit­i­cal prin­ci­ple, through the imag­i­nary, a sink­ing real­ity prin­ci­ple.
The denun­ci­a­tion of scan­dal is always an homage to the law. And Water­gate in par­tic­u­lar suc­ceeded in impos­ing the idea that Water­gate was a scan­dal—in this sense it was a prodi­gious oper­a­tion of intox­i­ca­tion. A large dose of polit­i­cal moral­ity rein­jected on a world scale. One could say along with Bour­dieu: “The essence of every rela­tion of force is to dis­sim­u­late itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dis­sim­u­lates itself as such,” under­stood as fol­lows: cap­i­tal, immoral and with­out scru­ples, can only func­tion behind a moral super­struc­ture, and who­ever revives this public moral­ity (through indig­na­tion, denun­ci­a­tion, etc.) works spon­ta­neously for the order of cap­i­tal. This is what the jour­nal­ists of the Wash­ing­ton Post did.
But this would be noth­ing but the for­mula of ide­ol­ogy, and when Bour­dieu states it, he takes the “rela­tion of force” for the truth of cap­i­tal­ist dom­i­na­tion, and he him­self denounces this rela­tion of force as scan­dal—he is thus in the same deter­min­is­tic and moral­is­tic posi­tion as the Wash­ing­ton Post jour­nal­ists are. He does the same work of purg­ing and reviv­ing moral order, an order of truth in which the ver­i­ta­ble sym­bolic vio­lence of the social order is engen­dered, well beyond all the rela­tions of force, which are only its shift­ing and indif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tion in the moral and polit­i­cal con­sciences of men.
All that cap­i­tal asks of us is to receive it as ratio­nal or to combat it in the name of ratio­nal­ity, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of moral­ity. Because these are the same, which can be thought of in another way: for­merly one worked to dis­sim­u­late scan­dal—today one works to con­ceal that there is none.
Water­gate is not a scan­dal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what every­one is busy con­ceal­ing, this dis­sim­u­la­tion mask­ing a strength­en­ing of moral­ity, of a moral panic as one approaches the prim­i­tive (mise en) scène of cap­i­tal: its instan­ta­neous cru­elty, its incom­pre­hen­si­ble feroc­ity, its fun­da­men­tal immoral­ity—that is what is scan­dalous, unac­cept­able to the system of moral and eco­nomic equiv­a­lence that is the axiom of left­ist thought, from the the­o­ries of the Enlight­en­ment up to Com­mu­nism. One imputes this think­ing to the con­tract of cap­i­tal, but it doesn’t give a damn—it is a mon­strous unprin­ci­pled enter­prise, noth­ing more. It is “enlight­ened” thought that seeks to con­trol it by impos­ing rules on it. And all the recrim­i­na­tion that replaces rev­o­lu­tion­ary thought today comes back to incrim­i­nate cap­i­tal for not fol­low­ing the rules of the game. “Power is unjust, its jus­tice is a class jus­tice, cap­i­tal exploits us, etc.”—as if cap­i­tal were linked by a con­tract to the soci­ety it rules. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equiv­a­lence to cap­i­tal hoping that it will comply, comply with this phan­tas­mago­ria of the social con­tract and ful­fill its obli­ga­tions to the whole of soci­ety (by the same token, no need for rev­o­lu­tion: it suf­fices that cap­i­tal accom­mo­date itself to the ratio­nal for­mula of exchange).
Cap­i­tal, in fact, was never linked by a con­tract to the soci­ety that it dom­i­nates. It is a sor­cery of social rela­tions, it is a chal­lenge to soci­ety, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scan­dal to be denounced accord­ing to moral or eco­nomic ratio­nal­ity, but a chal­lenge to take up accord­ing to sym­bolic law.
Möbius-Spiraling Negativity
Water­gate was thus noth­ing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adver­saries—a sim­u­la­tion of scan­dal for regen­er­a­tive ends. In the film, this is embod­ied by the char­ac­ter of “Deep Throat,” who was said to be the émi­nence grise of the Repub­li­cans, manip­u­lat­ing the left-wing jour­nal­ists in order to get rid of Nixon—and why not? All hypothe­ses are pos­si­ble, but this one is super­flu­ous: the Left itself does a per­fectly good job, and spon­ta­neously, of doing the work of the Right. Besides, it would be naive to see an embit­tered good con­science at work here. Because manip­u­la­tion is a waver­ing causal­ity in which pos­i­tiv­ity and neg­a­tiv­ity are engen­dered and over­lap, in which there is no longer either an active or a pas­sive. It is through the arbi­trary ces­sa­tion of this spi­ral­ing causal­ity that a prin­ci­ple of polit­i­cal real­ity can be saved. It is through the sim­u­la­tion of a narrow, con­ven­tional field of per­spec­tive in which the premises and the con­se­quences of an act or of an event can be cal­cu­lated, that a polit­i­cal cred­i­bil­ity can be main­tained (and of course “objec­tive” anal­y­sis, the strug­gle, etc.). If one envi­sions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear con­ti­nu­ity and dialec­ti­cal polar­ity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by sim­u­la­tion, all deter­mi­na­tion evap­o­rates, every act is ter­mi­nated at the end of the cycle having ben­e­fited every­one and having been scat­tered in all direc­tions.
Is any given bomb­ing in Italy the work of left­ist extrem­ists, or extreme-right provo­ca­tion, or a cen­trist mise-en-scène to dis­credit all extreme ter­ror­ists and to shore up its own fail­ing power, or again, is it a police-inspired sce­nario and a form of black­mail to public secu­rity? All of this is simul­ta­ne­ously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objec­tiv­ity of the facts does not put an end to this ver­tigo of inter­pre­ta­tion. That is, we are in a logic of sim­u­la­tion, which no longer has any­thing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Sim­u­la­tion is char­ac­ter­ized by a pre­ces­sion of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact—the models come first, their cir­cu­la­tion, orbital like that of the bomb, con­sti­tutes the gen­uine mag­netic field of the event. The facts no longer have a spe­cific tra­jec­tory, they are born at the inter­sec­tion of models, a single fact can be engen­dered by all the models at once. This antic­i­pa­tion, this pre­ces­sion, this short cir­cuit, this con­fu­sion of the fact with its model (no more diver­gence of mean­ing, no more dialec­ti­cal polar­ity, no more neg­a­tive elec­tric­ity, implo­sion of antag­o­nis­tic poles), is what allows each time for all pos­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tions, even the most con­tra­dic­tory—all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a gen­er­al­ized cycle.
The Com­mu­nists attack the Social­ist Party as if they wished to shat­ter the union of the Left. They give cre­dence to the idea that these resis­tances would come from a more rad­i­cal polit­i­cal need. In fact, it is because they no longer want power. But do they not want power at this junc­ture, one unfa­vor­able to the Left in gen­eral, or unfa­vor­able to them within the Union of the Left—or do they no longer want it, by def­i­ni­tion? When Berlinguer declares: “There is no need to be afraid to see the Com­mu­nists take power in Italy,” it simul­ta­ne­ously sig­ni­fies:
    • that there is no need to be afraid, since the Communists, if they come to power, will change nothing of its fundamental capitalist mechanism;
    • that there is no risk that they will ever come to power (because they don’t want to) and even if they occupy the seat of power, they will never exercise it except by proxy;
    • that in fact, power, genuine power no longer exists, and thus there is no risk whoever seizes power or seizes it again;
    • but further: I, Berlinguer, am not afraid to see the Communists take power in Italy which 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 Communists take power (and there are good reasons for that, even for a Communist).
All of this is simul­ta­ne­ously true. It is the secret of a dis­course that is no longer simply ambigu­ous, as polit­i­cal dis­courses can be, but that con­veys the impos­si­bil­ity of a deter­mined posi­tion of power, the impos­si­bil­ity of a deter­mined dis­cur­sive posi­tion. And this logic is nei­ther that of one party nor of another. It tra­verses all dis­courses with­out them want­ing it to.
Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gor­dian knot can at least be cut. The Möbius strip, if one divides it, results in a sup­ple­men­tary spiral with­out the reversibil­ity of sur­faces being resolved (here the reversible con­ti­nu­ity of hypothe­ses). Hell of sim­u­la­tion, which is no longer one of tor­ture, but of the subtle, malef­i­cent, elu­sive twist­ing of mean­ing4—where even the con­demned at Burgos are still a gift from Franco to West­ern democ­racy, which seizes the occa­sion to regen­er­ate its own flag­ging human­ism and whose indig­nant protest in turn con­sol­i­dates Franco’s regime by unit­ing the Span­ish masses against this for­eign inter­ven­tion? Where is the truth of all that, when such col­lu­sions admirably knot them­selves together with­out the knowl­edge of their authors?
Con­junc­tion of the system and of its extreme alter­na­tive like the two sides of a curved mirror, a “vicious” cur­va­ture of a polit­i­cal space that is hence­forth mag­ne­tized, cir­cu­lar­ized, reversibi­lized from the right to the left, a tor­sion that is like that of the evil spirit of com­mu­ta­tion, the whole system, the infin­ity of cap­i­tal folded back on its own sur­face: trans­fi­nite? And is it not the same for desire and the libid­i­nal space? Con­junc­tion of desire and value, of desire and cap­i­tal. Con­junc­tion of desire and the law, the final plea­sure as the meta­mor­pho­sis of the law (which is why it is so widely the order of the day): only cap­i­tal takes plea­sure, said Lyotard, before think­ing that we now take plea­sure in cap­i­tal. Over­whelm­ing ver­sa­til­ity of desire in Deleuze, an enig­matic rever­sal that brings desire “rev­o­lu­tion­ary in itself, and as if invol­un­tar­ily, want­ing what it wants,” to desire its own repres­sion and to invest in para­noid and fas­cist sys­tems? A malign tor­sion that returns this rev­o­lu­tion of desire to the same fun­da­men­tal ambi­gu­ity as the other, the his­tor­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion.
All the ref­er­en­tials com­bine their dis­courses in a cir­cu­lar, Möbian com­pul­sion. Not so long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dis­solved in the same type of demand. For­merly the dis­course on his­tory derived its power from vio­lently oppos­ing itself to that of nature, the dis­course of desire to that of power—today they exchange their sig­ni­fiers and their sce­nar­ios.
It would take too long to tra­verse the entire range of the oper­a­tional neg­a­tiv­ity of all those sce­nar­ios of deter­rence, which, like Water­gate, try to regen­er­ate a mori­bund prin­ci­ple through sim­u­lated scan­dal, phan­tasm, and murder—a sort of hor­monal treat­ment through neg­a­tiv­ity and crisis. It is always a ques­tion of prov­ing the real through the imag­i­nary, prov­ing truth through scan­dal, prov­ing the law through trans­gres­sion, prov­ing work through strik­ing, prov­ing the system through crisis, and cap­i­tal through rev­o­lu­tion, as it is else­where (the Tasa­day) of prov­ing eth­nol­ogy through the dis­pos­ses­sion of its object—with­out taking into account:
    • the proof of theater through antitheater;
    • the proof of art through antiart;
    • the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy;
    • the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc.
Every­thing is meta­mor­phosed into its oppo­site to per­pet­u­ate itself in its expur­gated form. All the powers, all the insti­tu­tions speak of them­selves through denial, in order to attempt, by sim­u­lat­ing death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to redis­cover a glim­mer of exis­tence and legit­i­macy. Such was the case with some Amer­i­can pres­i­dents: the Kennedys were mur­dered because they still had a polit­i­cal dimen­sion. The others, John­son, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phan­tom attempts, to sim­u­lated mur­ders. But this aura of an arti­fi­cial menace was still nec­es­sary to con­ceal that they were no longer any­thing but the man­nequins of power. For­merly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is mis­er­ably forced to feign death, in order to pre­serve the bless­ing of power. But it is lost.
To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, neg­a­tiv­ity, and antipower: this is the only solu­tion-alibi of every power, of every insti­tu­tion attempt­ing to break the vicious circle of its irre­spon­si­bil­ity and of its fun­da­men­tal nonex­is­tence, of its already seen and of its already dead.
The Strategy of the Real
The impos­si­bil­ity of redis­cov­er­ing an abso­lute level of the real is of the same order as the impos­si­bil­ity of stag­ing illu­sion. Illu­sion is no longer pos­si­ble, because the real is no longer pos­si­ble. It is the whole polit­i­cal prob­lem of parody, of hyper­sim­u­la­tion or offen­sive sim­u­la­tion, that is posed here.
For exam­ple: it would be inter­est­ing to see whether the repres­sive appa­ra­tus would not react more vio­lently to a sim­u­lated holdup than to a real holdup. Because the latter does noth­ing but dis­turb the order of things, the right to prop­erty, whereas the former attacks the real­ity prin­ci­ple itself. Trans­gres­sion and vio­lence are less seri­ous because they only con­test the dis­tri­bu­tion of the real. Sim­u­la­tion is infin­itely more dan­ger­ous because it always leaves open to sup­po­si­tion that, above and beyond its object, law and order them­selves might be noth­ing but sim­u­la­tion.
But the dif­fi­culty is pro­por­tional to the danger. How to feign a vio­la­tion and put it to the test? Sim­u­late a rob­bery in a large store: how to per­suade secu­rity that it is a sim­u­lated rob­bery? There is no “objec­tive” dif­fer­ence: the ges­tures, the signs are the same as for a real rob­bery, the signs do not lean to one side or another. To the estab­lished order they are always of the order of the real.
Orga­nize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harm­less, and take the most trust­wor­thy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the crim­i­nal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the oper­a­tion cre­ates as much com­mo­tion as pos­si­ble—in short, remain close to the “truth,” in order to test the reac­tion of the appa­ra­tus to a per­fect sim­u­lacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the net­work of arti­fi­cial signs will become inex­tri­ca­bly mixed up with real ele­ments (a police­man will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actu­ally pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will imme­di­ately find your­self once again, with­out wish­ing it, in the real, one of whose func­tions is pre­cisely to devour any attempt at sim­u­la­tion, to reduce every­thing to the real—that is, to the estab­lished order itself, well before insti­tu­tions and jus­tice come into play.
It is nec­es­sary to see in this impos­si­bil­ity of iso­lat­ing the process of sim­u­la­tion the weight of an order that cannot see and con­ceive of any­thing but the real, because it cannot func­tion any­where else. The sim­u­la­tion of an offense, if it is estab­lished as such, will either be pun­ished less severely (because it has no “con­se­quences”) or pun­ished as an offense against the judi­cial system (for exam­ple if one sets in motion a police oper­a­tion “for noth­ing”)—but never as sim­u­la­tion since it is pre­cisely as such that no equiv­a­lence with the real is pos­si­ble, and hence no repres­sion either. The chal­lenge of sim­u­la­tion is never admit­ted by power. How can the sim­u­la­tion of virtue be pun­ished? How­ever, as such it is as seri­ous as the sim­u­la­tion of crime. Parody ren­ders sub­mis­sion and trans­gres­sion equiv­a­lent, and that is the most seri­ous crime, because it can­cels out the dif­fer­ence upon which the law is based. The estab­lished order can do noth­ing against it, because the law is a sim­u­lacrum of the second order, whereas sim­u­la­tion is of the third order, beyond true and false, beyond equiv­a­lences, beyond ratio­nal dis­tinc­tions upon which the whole of the social and power depend. Thus, lack­ing the real, it is there that we must aim at order.
This is cer­tainly why order always opts for the real. When in doubt, it always prefers this hypoth­e­sis (as in the army one prefers to take the sim­u­la­tor for a real madman). But this becomes more and more dif­fi­cult, because if it is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble to iso­late the process of sim­u­la­tion, through the force of iner­tia of the real that sur­rounds us, the oppo­site is also true (and this reversibil­ity itself is part of the appa­ra­tus of sim­u­la­tion and the impo­tence of power): namely, it is now impos­si­ble to iso­late the process of the real, or to prove the real.
This is how all the holdups, air­plane hijack­ings, etc. are now in some sense sim­u­la­tion holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decod­ing and orches­tra­tion rit­u­als of the media, antic­i­pated in their pre­sen­ta­tion and their pos­si­ble con­se­quences. In short, where they func­tion as a group of signs ded­i­cated exclu­sively to their recur­rence as signs, and no longer at all to their “real” end. But this does not make them harm­less. On the con­trary, it is as hyper­real events, no longer with a spe­cific con­tent or end, but indef­i­nitely refracted by each other (just like so-called his­tor­i­cal events: strikes, demon­stra­tions, crises, etc.),5 it is in this sense that they cannot be con­trolled by an order that can only exert itself on the real and the ratio­nal, on causes and ends, a ref­er­en­tial order that can only reign over the ref­er­en­tial, a deter­mined power that can only reign over a deter­mined world, but that cannot do any­thing against this indef­i­nite recur­rence of sim­u­la­tion, against this nebula whose weight no longer obeys the laws of grav­i­ta­tion of the real, power itself ends by being dis­man­tled in this space and becom­ing a sim­u­la­tion of power (dis­con­nected from its ends and its objec­tives, and ded­i­cated to the effects of power and mass sim­u­la­tion).
The only weapon of power, its only strat­egy against this defec­tion, is to rein­ject the real and the ref­er­en­tial every­where, to per­suade us of the real­ity of the social, of the grav­ity of the econ­omy and the final­i­ties of pro­duc­tion. To this end it prefers the dis­course of crisis, but also, why not? that of desire. “Take your desires for real­ity!” can be under­stood as the ulti­mate slogan of power since in a non­ref­er­en­tial world, even the con­fu­sion of the real­ity prin­ci­ple and the prin­ci­ple of desire is less dan­ger­ous than con­ta­gious hyper­re­al­ity. One remains among prin­ci­ples, and among those power is always in the right.
Hyper­re­al­ity and sim­u­la­tion are deter­rents of every prin­ci­ple and every objec­tive, they turn against power the deter­rent that it used so well for such a long time. Because in the end, through­out its his­tory it was cap­i­tal that first fed on the destruc­tura­tion of every ref­er­en­tial, of every human objec­tive, that shat­tered every ideal dis­tinc­tion between true and false, good and evil, in order to estab­lish a rad­i­cal law of equiv­a­lence and exchange, the iron law of its power. Cap­i­tal was the first to play at deter­rence, abstrac­tion, dis­con­nec­tion, deter­ri­to­ri­al­iza­tion, etc., and if it is the one that fos­tered real­ity, the real­ity prin­ci­ple, it was also the first to liq­ui­date it by exter­mi­nat­ing all use value, all real equiv­a­lence of pro­duc­tion and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unre­al­ity of the stakes and the omnipo­tence of manip­u­la­tion. Well, today it is this same logic that is even more set against cap­i­tal. And as soon as it wishes to combat this dis­as­trous spiral by secret­ing a last glim­mer of real­ity, on which to estab­lish a last glim­mer of power, it does noth­ing but mul­ti­ply the signs and accel­er­ate the play of sim­u­la­tion.
As long as the his­tor­i­cal threat came at it from the real, power played at deter­rence and sim­u­la­tion, dis­in­te­grat­ing all the con­tra­dic­tions by dint of pro­duc­ing equiv­a­lent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from sim­u­la­tion (that of being dis­solved in the play of signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at reman­u­fac­tur­ing arti­fi­cial, social, eco­nomic, and polit­i­cal stakes. For power, it is a ques­tion of life and death. But it is too late.
Whence the char­ac­ter­is­tic hys­te­ria of our times: that of the pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion of the real. The other pro­duc­tion, that of values and com­modi­ties, that of the belle epoque of polit­i­cal econ­omy, has for a long time had no spe­cific mean­ing. What every soci­ety looks for in con­tin­u­ing to pro­duce, and to over­pro­duce, is to restore the real that escapes it. That is why today this “mate­rial” pro­duc­tion is that of the hyper­real itself. It retains all the fea­tures, the whole dis­course of tra­di­tional pro­duc­tion, but it is no longer any­thing but its scaled-down refrac­tion (thus hyper­re­al­ists fix a real from which all mean­ing and charm, all depth and energy of rep­re­sen­ta­tion have van­ished in a hal­lu­ci­na­tory resem­blance). Thus every­where the hyper­re­al­ism of sim­u­la­tion is trans­lated by the hal­lu­ci­na­tory resem­blance of the real to itself.
Power itself has for a long time pro­duced noth­ing but the signs of its resem­blance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a col­lec­tive demand for signs of power—a holy union that is recon­structed around its dis­ap­pear­ance. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the col­lapse of the polit­i­cal. And in the end the game of power becomes noth­ing but the crit­i­cal obses­sion with power—obses­sion with its death, obses­sion with its sur­vival, which increases as it dis­ap­pears. When it has totally dis­ap­peared, we will log­i­cally be under the total hal­lu­ci­na­tion of power—a haunt­ing memory that is already in evi­dence every­where, express­ing at once the com­pul­sion to get rid of it (no one wants it any­more, every­one unloads it on every­one else) 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 cannot ter­mi­nate its mourn­ing.
With the exten­u­a­tion of the polit­i­cal sphere, the pres­i­dent comes increas­ingly to resem­ble that Puppet of Power who is the head of prim­i­tive soci­eties (Clas­tres).
All pre­vi­ous pres­i­dents pay for and con­tinue to pay for Kennedy’s murder as if they were the ones who had sup­pressed it—which is true phan­tas­mat­i­cally, if not in fact. They must efface this defect and this com­plic­ity with their sim­u­lated murder. Because, now it can only be sim­u­lated. Pres­i­dents John­son and Ford were both the object of failed assas­si­na­tion attempts which, if they were not staged, were at least per­pe­trated by sim­u­la­tion. The Kennedys died because they incar­nated some­thing: the polit­i­cal, polit­i­cal sub­stance, whereas the new pres­i­dents are noth­ing but car­i­ca­tures and fake film—curi­ously, John­son, Nixon, Ford, all have this simian mug, the mon­keys of power.
Death is never an abso­lute cri­te­rion, but in this case it is sig­nif­i­cant: the era of James Dean, Mar­i­lyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply because they had a mythic dimen­sion that implies death (not for roman­tic rea­sons, but because of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of rever­sal and exchange)—this era is long gone. It is now the era of murder by sim­u­la­tion, of the gen­er­al­ized aes­thetic of sim­u­la­tion, of the murder-alibi the alle­gor­i­cal res­ur­rec­tion of death, which is only there to sanc­tion the insti­tu­tion of power, with­out which it no longer has any sub­stance or an auton­o­mous real­ity.
These staged pres­i­den­tial assas­si­na­tions are reveal­ing because they signal the status of all neg­a­tiv­ity in the West: polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion, the “Left,” crit­i­cal dis­course, etc.—a sim­u­lacral con­trast through which power attempts to break the vicious circle of its nonex­is­tence, of its fun­da­men­tal irre­spon­si­bil­ity, of its “sus­pen­sion.” Power floats like money, like lan­guage, like theory. Crit­i­cism and neg­a­tiv­ity alone still secrete a phan­tom of the real­ity of power. If they become weak for one reason or another, power has no other recourse but to arti­fi­cially revive and hal­lu­ci­nate them.
It is in this way that the Span­ish exe­cu­tions still serve as a stim­u­lant to West­ern lib­eral democ­racy, to a dying system of demo­cratic values. Fresh blood, but for how much longer? The dete­ri­o­ra­tion of all power is irre­sistibly pur­sued: it is not so much the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary forces” that accel­er­ate this process (often it is quite the oppo­site), it is the system itself that deploys against its own struc­tures this vio­lence that annuls all sub­stance and all final­ity. One must not resist this process by trying to con­front the system and destroy it, because this system that is dying from being dis­pos­sessed of its death expects noth­ing but that from us: that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the neg­a­tive. End of rev­o­lu­tion­ary praxis, end of the dia­lec­tic. Curi­ously, Nixon, who was not even found worthy of dying at the hands of the most insignif­i­cant, chance, unbal­anced person (and though it is per­haps true that pres­i­dents are assas­si­nated by unbal­anced types, this changes noth­ing: the left­ist pen­chant for detect­ing a right­ist con­spir­acy beneath this brings out a false prob­lem—the func­tion of bring­ing death to, or the prophecy, etc., against power has always been ful­filled, from prim­i­tive soci­eties to the present, by demented people, crazy people, or neu­rotics, who none­the­less carry out a social func­tion as fun­da­men­tal as that of pres­i­dents), was nev­er­the­less rit­u­ally put to death by Water­gate. Water­gate is still a mech­a­nism for the ritual murder of power (the Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion of the pres­i­dency is much more thrilling in this regard than the Euro­pean: it sur­rounds itself with all the vio­lence and vicis­si­tudes of prim­i­tive powers, of savage rit­u­als). But already impeach­ment is no longer assas­si­na­tion: it hap­pens via the Con­sti­tu­tion. Nixon has nev­er­the­less arrived at the goal of which all power dreams: to be taken seri­ously enough, to con­sti­tute a mortal enough danger to the group to be one day relieved of his duties, denounced, and liq­ui­dated. Ford doesn’t even have this oppor­tu­nity any­more: a sim­u­lacrum of an already dead power, he can only accu­mu­late against him­self the signs of rever­sion through murder—in fact, he is immu­nized by his impo­tence, which infu­ri­ates him.
In con­trast to the prim­i­tive rite, which fore­sees the offi­cial and sac­ri­fi­cial death of the king (the king or the chief is noth­ing with­out the prom­ise of his sac­ri­fice), the modern polit­i­cal imag­i­nary goes increas­ingly in the direc­tion of delay­ing, of con­ceal­ing for as long as pos­si­ble, the death of the head of state. This obses­sion has accu­mu­lated since the era of rev­o­lu­tions and of charis­matic lead­ers: Hitler, Franco, Mao, having no “legit­i­mate” heirs, no fil­i­a­tion of power, see them­selves forced to per­pet­u­ate them­selves indef­i­nitely—pop­u­lar myth never wishes to believe them dead. The pharaohs already did this: it was always one and the same person who incar­nated the suc­ces­sive pharaohs.
Every­thing hap­pens as if Mao or Franco had already died sev­eral times and had been replaced by his double. From a polit­i­cal point of view, that a head of state remains the same or is some­one else doesn’t strictly change any­thing, so long as they resem­ble each other. For a long time now a head of state—no matter which one—is noth­ing but the sim­u­lacrum of him­self, and only that gives him the power and the qual­ity to govern. No one would grant the least con­sent, the least devo­tion to a real person. It is to his double, he being always already dead, to which alle­giance is given. This myth does noth­ing but trans­late the per­sis­tence, and at the same time the decep­tion, of the neces­sity of the king’s sac­ri­fi­cial death.
We are still in the same boat: no soci­ety knows how to mourn the real, power, the social itself, which is impli­cated in the same loss. And it is through an arti­fi­cial revi­tal­iza­tion of all this that we try to escape this fact. This sit­u­a­tion will no doubt end up giving rise to social­ism. Through an unfore­seen turn of events and via an irony that is no longer that of his­tory, it is from the death of the social that social­ism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that reli­gions emerge. A twisted advent, a per­verse event, an unin­tel­li­gi­ble rever­sion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is in essence no longer present except to con­ceal that there is no more power. A sim­u­la­tion that can last indef­i­nitely, because, as dis­tinct from “true” power—which is, or was, a struc­ture, a strat­egy, a rela­tion of force, a stake—it is noth­ing but the object of a social demand, and thus as the object of the law of supply and demand, it is no longer sub­ject to vio­lence and death. Com­pletely purged of a polit­i­cal dimen­sion, it, like any other com­mod­ity, is depen­dent on mass pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion. Its spark has dis­ap­peared, only the fic­tion of a polit­i­cal uni­verse remains.
The same holds true for work. The spark of pro­duc­tion, the vio­lence of its stakes no longer exist. The whole world still pro­duces, and increas­ingly, but subtly work has become some­thing else: a need (as Marx ide­ally envi­sioned it but not in the same sense), the object of a social “demand,” like leisure, to which it is equiv­a­lent in the course of every­day life. A demand exactly pro­por­tional to the loss of a stake in the work process.6 Same change in for­tune as for power: the sce­nario of work is there to con­ceal that the real of work, the real of pro­duc­tion, has dis­ap­peared. And the real of the strike as well, which is no longer a work stop­page, but its alter­nate pole in the ritual scan­sion of the social cal­en­dar. Every­thing occurs as if each person had, after declar­ing a strike, “occu­pied” his place and work sta­tion and recom­menced pro­duc­tion, as is the norm in a “self-man­aged” occu­pa­tion, exactly in the same terms as before, all while declar­ing him­self (and in vir­tu­ally being) per­ma­nently on strike.
This is not a dream out of sci­ence fic­tion: every­where it is a ques­tion of dou­bling the process of work. And of a dou­bling of the process of going on strike—strik­ing incor­po­rated just as obso­les­cence is in objects, just as crisis is in pro­duc­tion. So, there is no longer strik­ing, nor work, but both simul­ta­ne­ously, that is to say some­thing else: a magic of work, a trompe l’oeil, a scen­odrama (so as not to say a melo­drama) of pro­duc­tion, a col­lec­tive dra­maturgy on the empty stage of the social.
It is no longer a ques­tion of the ide­ol­ogy of work—the tra­di­tional ethic that would obscure the “real” process of work and the “objec­tive” process of exploita­tion—but of the sce­nario of work. In the same way, it is no longer a ques­tion of the ide­ol­ogy of power, but of the sce­nario of power. Ide­ol­ogy only cor­re­sponds to a cor­rup­tion of real­ity through signs; sim­u­la­tion cor­re­sponds to a short cir­cuit of real­ity and to its dupli­ca­tion through signs. It is always the goal of the ide­o­log­i­cal anal­y­sis to restore the objec­tive process, it is always a false prob­lem to wish to restore the truth beneath the sim­u­lacrum.
This is why in the end power is so much in tune with ide­o­log­i­cal dis­courses and dis­courses on ide­ol­ogy, that is they are dis­courses of truth—always good for coun­ter­ing the mortal blows of sim­u­la­tion, even and espe­cially if they are rev­o­lu­tion­ary.
The End of the Panopticon
It is still to this ide­ol­ogy of lived expe­ri­ence—exhuma­tion of the real in its fun­da­men­tal banal­ity, in its rad­i­cal authen­tic­ity—that the Amer­i­can TV verité exper­i­ment attempted on the Loud family in 1971 refers: seven months of unin­ter­rupted shoot­ing, three hun­dred hours of non­stop broad­cast­ing, with­out a script or a screen­play, the odyssey of a family, its dramas, its joys, its unex­pected events, non­stop—in short, a “raw” his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, and the “great­est tele­vi­sion per­for­mance, com­pa­ra­ble, on the scale of our day-to-day life, to the footage of our land­ing on the moon.” It becomes more com­pli­cated because this family fell apart during the film­ing: a crisis erupted, the Louds sep­a­rated, etc. Whence that insol­u­ble con­tro­versy: was TV itself respon­si­ble? What would have hap­pened if TV hadn’t been there?
More inter­est­ing is the illu­sion of film­ing the Louds as if TV weren’t there. The pro­ducer’s tri­umph was to say: “They lived as if we were not there.” An absurd, para­dox­i­cal for­mula—nei­ther true nor false: utopian. The “as if we were not there” being equal to “as if you were there.” It is this utopia, this para­dox that fas­ci­nated the twenty mil­lion view­ers, much more than did the “per­verse” plea­sure of vio­lat­ing some­one’s pri­vacy. In the “verité” expe­ri­ence it is not a ques­tion of secrecy or per­ver­sion, but of a sort of fris­son of the real, or of an aes­thet­ics of the hyper­real, a fris­son of ver­tig­i­nous and phony exac­ti­tude, a fris­son of simul­ta­ne­ous dis­tanc­ing and mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, of dis­tor­tion of scale, of an exces­sive trans­parency. The plea­sure of an excess of mean­ing, when the bar of the sign falls below the usual water­line of mean­ing: the non­signi­fier is exalted by the camera angle. There one sees what the real never was (but “as if you were there”), with­out the dis­tance that gives us per­spec­ti­val space and depth vision (but “more real than nature”). Plea­sure in the micro­scopic sim­u­la­tion that allows the real to pass into the hyper­real. (This is also some­what the case in porno, which is fas­ci­nat­ing more on a meta­phys­i­cal than on a sexual level.)
Besides, this family was already hyper­real by the very nature of its selec­tion: a typ­i­cal ideal Amer­i­can family, Cal­i­for­nia home, three garages, five chil­dren, assured social and pro­fes­sional status, dec­o­ra­tive house­wife, upper-middle-class stand­ing. In a way it is this sta­tis­ti­cal per­fec­tion that dooms it to death. Ideal hero­ine of the Amer­i­can way of life, it is, as in ancient sac­ri­fices, chosen in order to be glo­ri­fied and to die beneath the flames of the medium, a modern fatum. Because heav­enly fire no longer falls on cor­rupted cities, it is the camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce lived real­ity in order to put it to death. “The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver them­selves into the hands of tele­vi­sion, and to die by it,” the direc­tor will say. Thus it is a ques­tion of a sac­ri­fi­cial process, of a sac­ri­fi­cial spec­ta­cle offered to twenty mil­lion Amer­i­cans. The litur­gi­cal drama of a mass soci­ety.
TV verité. A term admirable in its ambi­gu­ity, does it refer to the truth of this family or to the truth of TV? In fact, it is TV that is the truth of the Louds, it is TV that is true, it is TV that ren­ders true. Truth that is no longer the reflex­ive truth of the mirror, nor the per­spec­ti­val truth of the panop­tic system and of the gaze, but the manip­u­la­tive truth of the test that sounds out and inter­ro­gates, of the laser that touches and pierces, of com­puter cards that retain your pre­ferred sequences, of the genetic code that con­trols your com­bi­na­tions, of cells that inform your sen­sory uni­verse. It is to this truth that the Loud family was sub­jected by the medium of TV, and in this sense it amounts to a death sen­tence (but is it still a ques­tion of truth?).
End of the panop­tic system. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an abso­lute gaze, and the ideal of con­trol is no longer that of trans­parency. This still pre­sup­poses an objec­tive space (that of the Renais­sance) and the omnipo­tence of the despotic gaze. It is still, if not a system of con­fine­ment, at least a system of map­ping. More subtly, but always exter­nally, play­ing on the oppo­si­tion of seeing and being seen, even if the panop­tic focal point may be blind.
Some­thing else in regard to the Louds. “You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer lis­ten­ing to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is lis­ten­ing to you”—a switch from the panop­tic mech­a­nism of sur­veil­lance (Dis­ci­pline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deter­rence, in which the dis­tinc­tion between the pas­sive and the active is abol­ished. There is no longer any imper­a­tive of sub­mis­sion to the model, or to the gaze “you are the model!” “you are the major­ity!” Such is the water­shed of a hyper­real social­ity, in which the real is con­fused with the model, as in the sta­tis­ti­cal oper­a­tion, or with the medium, as in the Louds’ oper­a­tion. Such is the last stage of the social rela­tion, ours, which is no longer one of per­sua­sion (the clas­si­cal age of pro­pa­ganda, 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 about-face through which it becomes impos­si­ble to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. No more sub­ject, no more focal point, no more center or periph­ery: pure flex­ion or cir­cu­lar inflex­ion. No more vio­lence or sur­veil­lance: only “infor­ma­tion,” secret vir­u­lence, chain reac­tion, slow implo­sion, and sim­u­lacra of spaces in which the effect of the real again comes into play.
We are wit­ness­ing the end of per­spec­ti­val and panop­tic space (which remains a moral hypoth­e­sis bound up with all the clas­si­cal analy­ses on the “objec­tive” essence of power), and thus to the very abo­li­tion of the spec­tac­u­lar. Tele­vi­sion, for exam­ple in the case of the Louds, is no longer a spec­tac­u­lar medium. We are no longer in the soci­ety of the spec­ta­cle, of which the sit­u­a­tion­ists spoke, nor in the spe­cific kinds of alien­ation and repres­sion that it implied. The medium itself is no longer iden­ti­fi­able as such, and the con­fu­sion of the medium and the mes­sage (McLuhan)7 is the first great for­mula of this new era. There is no longer a medium in the lit­eral sense: it is now intan­gi­ble, dif­fused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it.
Such a blend­ing, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarm­ing pres­ence of the medium, with­out the pos­si­bil­ity of iso­lat­ing the effects—spec­tral­ized, like these adver­tis­ing laser sculp­tures in the empty space of the event fil­tered by the medium—dis­so­lu­tion of TV in life, dis­so­lu­tion of life in TV—indis­cernible chem­i­cal solu­tion: we are all Louds doomed not to inva­sion, to pres­sure, to vio­lence and black­mail by the media and the models, but to their induc­tion, to their infil­tra­tion, to their illeg­i­ble vio­lence.
But one must watch out for the neg­a­tive turn that dis­course imposes: it is a ques­tion nei­ther of dis­ease nor of a viral infec­tion. One must think instead of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the muta­tion of the real into the hyper­real, just as the other micro­molec­u­lar code con­trols the pas­sage from a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sphere of mean­ing to the genetic one of the pro­grammed signal.
It is the whole tra­di­tional world of causal­ity that is in ques­tion: the per­spec­ti­val, deter­min­ist mode, the “active,” crit­i­cal mode, the ana­lytic mode—the dis­tinc­tion between cause and effect, between active and pas­sive, between sub­ject and object, between the end and the means. It is in this sense that one can say: TV is watch­ing us, TV alien­ates us, TV manip­u­lates us, TV informs us … In all this, one remains depen­dent on the ana­lyt­i­cal con­cep­tion of the media, on an exter­nal active and effec­tive agent, on “per­spec­ti­val” infor­ma­tion with the hori­zon of the real and of mean­ing as the van­ish­ing point.
Now, one must con­ceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the oppos­ing poles of deter­mi­na­tion vanish, accord­ing to a nuclear con­trac­tion, retrac­tion, of the old polar schema that always main­tained a min­i­mal dis­tance between cause and effect, between sub­ject and object: pre­cisely the dis­tance of mean­ing, the gap, the dif­fer­ence, the small­est pos­si­ble gap (PPEP!),8 irre­duc­ible under pain of reab­sorp­tion into an aleatory and inde­ter­mi­nate process whose dis­course can no longer account for it, because it is itself a deter­mined order.
It is this gap that van­ishes in the process of genetic coding, in which inde­ter­mi­nacy is not so much a ques­tion of molec­u­lar ran­dom­ness as of the abo­li­tion, pure and simple, of the rela­tion. In the process of molec­u­lar con­trol, which “goes” from the DNA nucleus to the “sub­stance” that it “informs,” there is no longer the tra­ver­sal of an effect, of an energy, of a deter­mi­na­tion, of a mes­sage. “Order, signal, impulse, mes­sage”: all of these attempt to render the thing intel­li­gi­ble to us, but by anal­ogy, retran­scrib­ing in terms of inscrip­tion, of a vector, of decod­ing, a dimen­sion of which we know noth­ing—it is no longer even a “dimen­sion,” or per­haps it is the fourth (which is defined, how­ever, in Ein­steinian rel­a­tiv­ity by the absorp­tion of the dis­tinct poles of space and time). In fact, this whole process can only be under­stood in its neg­a­tive form: noth­ing sep­a­rates one pole from another any­more, the begin­ning from the end; there is a kind of con­trac­tion of one over the other, a fan­tas­tic tele­scop­ing, a col­lapse of the two tra­di­tional poles into each other: implo­sion—an absorp­tion of the radi­at­ing mode of causal­ity, of the dif­fer­en­tial mode of deter­mi­na­tion, with its pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive charge—an implo­sion of mean­ing. That is where sim­u­la­tion begins.
Every­where, in no matter what domain—polit­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, medi­a­tized in which the dis­tinc­tion between these two poles can no longer be main­tained, one enters into sim­u­la­tion, and thus into abso­lute manip­u­la­tion—not into pas­siv­ity, but into the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of the active and the pas­sive. DNA real­izes this aleatory reduc­tion at the level of living matter. Tele­vi­sion, in the case of the Louds, also reaches this indef­i­nite limit in which, vis-à-vis TV, they are nei­ther more nor less active or pas­sive than a living sub­stance is vis-à-vis its molec­u­lar code. Here and there, a single nebula whose simple ele­ments are inde­ci­pher­able, whose truth is inde­ci­pher­able.
The Orbital and the Nuclear
The apoth­e­o­sis of sim­u­la­tion: the nuclear. How­ever, the bal­ance of terror is never any­thing but the spec­tac­u­lar slope of a system of deter­rence that has insin­u­ated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear sus­pen­sion only serves to seal the triv­i­al­ized system of deter­rence that is at the heart of the media, of the vio­lence with­out con­se­quences that reigns through­out the world, of the aleatory appa­ra­tus of all the choices that are made for us. The most insignif­i­cant of our behav­iors is reg­u­lated by neu­tral­ized, indif­fer­ent, equiv­a­lent signs, by zero-sum signs like those that reg­u­late the “strat­egy of games” (but the true equa­tion is else­where, and the unknown is pre­cisely that vari­able of sim­u­la­tion which makes of the atomic arse­nal itself a hyper­real form, a sim­u­lacrum that dom­i­nates every­thing and reduces all “ground-level” events to being noth­ing but ephemeral sce­nar­ios, trans­form­ing the life left us into sur­vival, into a stake with­out stakes—not even into a life insur­ance policy: into a policy that already has no value).
It is not the direct threat of atomic destruc­tion that par­a­lyzes our lives, it is deter­rence that gives them leukemia. And this deter­rence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is pre­cluded—pre­cluded like the even­tu­al­ity of the real in a system of signs. The whole world pre­tends to believe in the real­ity of this threat (this is under­stand­able on the part of the mil­i­tary, the grav­ity of their exer­cise and the dis­course of their “strat­egy” are at stake), but it is pre­cisely at this level that there are no strate­gic stakes. The whole orig­i­nal­ity of the sit­u­a­tion lies in the improb­a­bil­ity of destruc­tion.
Deter­rence pre­cludes war—the archaic vio­lence of expand­ing sys­tems. Deter­rence itself is the neu­tral, implo­sive vio­lence of metastable sys­tems or sys­tems in invo­lu­tion. There is no longer a sub­ject of deter­rence, nor an adver­sary nor a strat­egy—it is a plan­e­tary struc­ture of the anni­hi­la­tion of stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of nuclear anni­hi­la­tion only serves as a pre­text, through the sophis­ti­ca­tion of weapons (a sophis­ti­ca­tion that sur­passes any pos­si­ble objec­tive to such an extent that it is itself a symp­tom of nul­lity), for installing a uni­ver­sal secu­rity system, a uni­ver­sal lockup and con­trol system whose deter­rent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in ques­tion, except with­out a doubt in the very ini­tial stages of the cold war, when one still con­fused the nuclear appa­ra­tus with con­ven­tional war) but, rather, at the much greater prob­a­bil­ity of any real event, of any­thing that would be an event in the gen­eral system and upset its bal­ance. The bal­ance of terror is the terror of bal­ance.
Deter­rence is not a strat­egy, it cir­cu­lates and is exchanged between nuclear pro­tag­o­nists exactly as is inter­na­tional cap­i­tal in the orbital zone of mon­e­tary spec­u­la­tion whose fluc­tu­a­tions suf­fice to con­trol all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruc­tion (with­out any ref­er­ence to real destruc­tion, any more than float­ing cap­i­tal has a real ref­er­ent of pro­duc­tion) that cir­cu­lates in nuclear orbit suf­fices to con­trol all the vio­lence and poten­tial con­flicts around the world.
What is hatched in the shadow of this mech­a­nism with the pre­text of a max­i­mal, “objec­tive,” threat, and thanks to Damo­cles’ nuclear sword, is the per­fec­tion of the best system of con­trol that has ever existed. And the pro­gres­sive satel­liza­tion of the whole planet through this hyper­model of secu­rity.
The same goes for peace­ful nuclear power sta­tions. Paci­fi­ca­tion does not dis­tin­guish between the civil and the mil­i­tary: every­where where irre­versible appa­ra­tuses of con­trol are elab­o­rated, every­where where the notion of secu­rity becomes omnipo­tent, every­where where the norm replaces the old arse­nal of laws and vio­lence (includ­ing war), it is the system of deter­rence that grows, and around it grows the his­tor­i­cal, social, and polit­i­cal desert. A gigan­tic invo­lu­tion that makes every con­flict, every final­ity, every con­fronta­tion con­tract in pro­por­tion to this black­mail that inter­rupts, neu­tral­izes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed accord­ing to its own logic because it risks anni­hi­la­tion. No strat­egy is pos­si­ble any longer, and esca­la­tion is only a puerile game given over to the mil­i­tary. The polit­i­cal stake is dead, only sim­u­lacra of con­flicts and care­fully cir­cum­scribed stakes remain.
The “space race” played exactly the same role as nuclear esca­la­tion. This is why the space pro­gram was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop con­cur­rently as a form of “peace­ful coex­is­tence.” Because what, ulti­mately, is the func­tion of the space pro­gram, of the con­quest of the moon, of the launch­ing of satel­lites if not the insti­tu­tion of a model of uni­ver­sal grav­i­ta­tion, of satel­liza­tion of which the lunar module is the per­fect embryo? Pro­grammed micro­cosm, where noth­ing can be left to chance. Tra­jec­tory, energy, cal­cu­la­tion, phys­i­ol­ogy, psy­chol­ogy, envi­ron­ment—noth­ing can be left to con­tin­gen­cies, this is the total uni­verse of the norm—the Law no longer exists, it is the oper­a­tional imma­nence of every detail that is law. A uni­verse purged of all threat of mean­ing, in a state of asep­sis and weight­less­ness—it is this very per­fec­tion that is fas­ci­nat­ing. The exal­ta­tion of the crowds was not a response to the event of land­ing on the moon or of send­ing a man into space (this would be, rather, the ful­fill­ment of an ear­lier dream), rather, we are dumb­founded by the per­fec­tion of the pro­gram­ming and the tech­ni­cal manip­u­la­tion, by the imma­nent wonder of the pro­grammed unfold­ing of events. Fas­ci­na­tion with the max­i­mal norm and the mas­tery of prob­a­bil­ity. Ver­tigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but with­out fear or drive. Because if the law, with its aura of trans­gres­sion, if order, with its aura of vio­lence, still taps a per­verse imag­i­nary, the norm fixes, fas­ci­nates, stu­pe­fies, and makes every imag­i­nary invo­lute. One no longer fan­ta­sizes about the minu­tiae of a pro­gram. Just watch­ing it pro­duces ver­tigo. The ver­tigo of a world with­out flaws.
Now, it is the same model of pro­gram­matic infal­li­bil­ity, of max­i­mum secu­rity and deter­rence that today con­trols the spread of the social. There lies the true nuclear fall­out: the metic­u­lous oper­a­tion of tech­nol­ogy serves as a model for the metic­u­lous oper­a­tion of the social. Here as well, noth­ing will be left to chance, more­over this is the essence of social­iza­tion, which began cen­turies ago, but which has now entered its accel­er­ated phase, toward a limit that one believed would be explo­sive (rev­o­lu­tion), but which for the moment is trans­lated by an inverse, implo­sive, irre­versible process: the gen­er­al­ized deter­rence of chance, of acci­dent, of transver­sal­ity, of final­ity, of con­tra­dic­tion, rup­ture, or com­plex­ity in a social­ity illu­mi­nated by the norm, doomed to the descrip­tive trans­parency of mech­a­nisms of infor­ma­tion. In fact, the spa­tial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: nei­ther the dis­cov­ery of the moon, nor mil­i­tary and strate­gic supe­ri­or­ity. Their truth is to be the models of sim­u­la­tion, the model vec­tors of a system of plan­e­tary con­trol (where even the super­pow­ers of this sce­nario are not free—the whole world is satel­lized).9
Resist the evi­dence: in satel­liza­tion, he who is satel­lized is not who one might think. Through the orbital inscrip­tion of a spa­tial object, it is the planet earth that becomes a satel­lite, it is the ter­res­trial prin­ci­ple of real­ity that becomes eccen­tric, hyper­real, and insignif­i­cant. Through the orbital instan­ti­a­tion of a system of con­trol like peace­ful coex­is­tence, all the ter­res­trial microsys­tems are satel­lized and lose their auton­omy. All energy, all events are absorbed by this eccen­tric grav­i­ta­tion, every­thing con­denses and implodes toward the only micro­model of con­trol (the orbital satel­lite), as con­versely, in the other, bio­log­i­cal, dimen­sion, every­thing con­verges and implodes on the molec­u­lar micro­model of the genetic code. Between the two, in this fork­ing of the nuclear and the genetic, in the simul­ta­ne­ous assump­tion of the two fun­da­men­tal codes of deter­rence, every prin­ci­ple of mean­ing is absorbed, every deploy­ment of the real is impos­si­ble.
The simul­tane­ity of two events in the month of July 1975 illus­trated this in a strik­ing manner: the linkup in space of the two Amer­i­can and Soviet super­satel­lites, apoth­e­o­sis of peace­ful coex­is­tence—the sup­pres­sion by the Chi­nese of ideogram­matic writ­ing and con­ver­sion to the Roman alpha­bet. The latter sig­ni­fies the “orbital” instan­ti­a­tion of an abstract and mod­elized system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of style and writ­ing will be reab­sorbed. The satel­liza­tion of lan­guage: the means for the Chi­nese to enter the system of peace­ful coex­is­tence, which is inscribed in their heav­ens at pre­cisely the same time by the linkup of the two satel­lites. Orbital flight of the Big Two, neu­tral­iza­tion and homog­e­niza­tion of every­one else on earth.
Yet, despite this deter­rence by the orbital power—the nuclear or molec­u­lar code—events con­tinue at ground level, mis­for­tunes are even more numer­ous, given the global process of the con­ti­gu­ity and simul­tane­ity of data. But, subtly, they no longer have any mean­ing, they are no longer any­thing but the duplex effect of sim­u­la­tion at the summit. The best exam­ple can only be that of the war in Viet­nam, because it took place at the inter­sec­tion of a max­i­mum his­tor­i­cal and “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” stake, and of the instal­la­tion of this deter­rent author­ity. What mean­ing did this war have, and wasn’t its unfold­ing a means of seal­ing the end of his­tory in the deci­sive and cul­mi­nat­ing his­toric event of our era?
Why did this war, so hard, so long, so fero­cious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?
Why did this Amer­i­can defeat (the largest rever­sal in the his­tory of the USA) have no inter­nal reper­cus­sions in Amer­ica? If it had really sig­ni­fied the fail­ure of the plan­e­tary strat­egy of the United States, it would nec­es­sar­ily have com­pletely dis­rupted its inter­nal bal­ance and the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal system. Noth­ing of the sort occurred.
Some­thing else, then, took place. This war, at bottom, was noth­ing but a cru­cial episode of peace­ful coex­is­tence. It marked the arrival of China to peace­ful coex­is­tence. The non­in­ter­ven­tion of China obtained and secured after many years, China’s appren­tice­ship to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strat­egy of rev­o­lu­tion to one of shared forces and empires, the tran­si­tion from a rad­i­cal alter­na­tive to polit­i­cal alter­na­tion in a system now essen­tially reg­u­lated (the nor­mal­iza­tion of Peking—Wash­ing­ton rela­tions): this was what was at stake in the war in Viet­nam, and in this sense, the USA pulled out of Viet­nam but won the war.
And the war ended “spon­ta­neously” when this objec­tive was achieved. That is why it was deesca­lated, demo­bi­lized so easily.
This same reduc­tion of forces can be seen on the field. The war lasted as long as ele­ments irre­duc­ible to a healthy pol­i­tics and dis­ci­pline of power, even a Com­mu­nist one, remained unliq­ui­dated. When at last the war had passed into the hands of reg­u­lar troops in the North and escaped that of the resis­tance, the war could stop: it had attained its objec­tive. The stake is thus that of a polit­i­cal relay. As soon as the Viet­namese had proved that they were no longer the car­ri­ers of an unpre­dictable sub­ver­sion, one could let them take over. That theirs is a Com­mu­nist order is not seri­ous in the end: it had proved itself, it could be trusted. It is even more effec­tive than cap­i­tal­ism in the liq­ui­da­tion of “savage” and archaic pre­cap­i­tal­ist struc­tures.
Same sce­nario in the Alge­rian war.
The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed vio­lence, the mur­der­ous antag­o­nism of the adver­saries—which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get them­selves killed in this kind of thing), behind this sim­u­lacrum of fight­ing to the death and of ruth­less global stakes, the two adver­saries are fun­da­men­tally in sol­i­dar­ity against some­thing else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objec­tive out­come in war, with the equal com­plic­ity of the two adver­saries, is total liq­ui­da­tion. Tribal, com­mu­ni­tar­ian, pre­cap­i­tal­ist struc­tures, every form of exchange, of lan­guage, of sym­bolic orga­ni­za­tion, that is what must be abol­ished, that is the object of murder in war—and war itself, in its immense, spec­tac­u­lar death appa­ra­tus, is noth­ing but the medium of this process of the ter­ror­ist ratio­nal­iza­tion of the social—the murder on which social­ity will be founded, what­ever its alle­giance, Com­mu­nist or cap­i­tal­ist. Total com­plic­ity, or divi­sion of labor between two adver­saries (who may even con­sent to enor­mous sac­ri­fices for it) for the very end of reshap­ing and domes­ti­cat­ing social rela­tions.
“The North Viet­namese were advised to coun­te­nance a sce­nario for liq­ui­dat­ing the Amer­i­can pres­ence in the course of which, of course, one must save face.”
This sce­nario: the extremely harsh bom­bard­ments of Hanoi. Their unten­able char­ac­ter must not con­ceal the fact that they were noth­ing but a sim­u­lacrum to enable the Viet­namese to seem to coun­te­nance a com­pro­mise and for Nixon to make the Amer­i­cans swal­low the with­drawal of their troops. The game was already won, noth­ing was objec­tively at stake but the verisimil­i­tude of the final mon­tage.
The moral­ists of war, the hold­ers of high wartime values should not be too dis­cour­aged: the war is no less atro­cious for being only a sim­u­lacrum—the flesh suf­fers just the same, and the dead and former com­bat­ants are worth the same as in other wars. This objec­tive is always ful­filled, just like that of the chart­ing of ter­ri­to­ries and of dis­ci­plinary social­ity. What no longer exists is the adver­sity of the adver­saries, the real­ity of antag­o­nis­tic causes, the ide­o­log­i­cal seri­ous­ness of war. And also the real­ity of vic­tory or defeat, war being a process that tri­umphs well beyond these appear­ances.
In any case, the paci­fi­ca­tion (or the deter­rence) that dom­i­nates us today is beyond war and peace, it is that at every moment war and peace are equiv­a­lent. “War is peace,” said Orwell. There also, the two dif­fer­en­tial poles implode into each other, or recy­cle one another—a simul­tane­ity of con­tra­dic­tions that is at once the parody and the end of every dia­lec­tic. Thus one can com­pletely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was fin­ished well before it started, that there was an end to war at the heart of the war itself, and that per­haps it never started. Many other events (the oil crisis, etc.) never started, never existed, except as arti­fi­cial occur­rences—abstract, ersatz, and as arti­facts of his­tory, catas­tro­phes and crises des­tined to main­tain a his­tor­i­cal invest­ment under hyp­no­sis. The media and the offi­cial news ser­vice are only there to main­tain the illu­sion of an actu­al­ity, of the real­ity of the stakes, of the objec­tiv­ity of facts. All the events are to be read back­ward, or one becomes aware (as with the Com­mu­nists “in power” in Italy the retro, post­hu­mous redis­cov­ery of the gulags and Soviet dis­si­dents like the almost con­tem­po­rary dis­cov­ery, by a mori­bund eth­nol­ogy, of the lost “dif­fer­ence” of Sav­ages) that all these things arrived too late, with a his­tory of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago exhausted their mean­ing and only live from an arti­fi­cial effer­ves­cence of signs, that all these events suc­ceed each other with­out logic, in the most con­tra­dic­tory, com­plete equiv­a­lence, in a pro­found indif­fer­ence to their con­se­quences (but this is because there are none: they exhaust them­selves in their spec­tac­u­lar pro­mo­tion)—all “news­reel” footage thus gives the sin­is­ter impres­sion of kitsch, of retro and porno at the same time doubt­less every­one knows this, and no one really accepts it. The real­ity of sim­u­la­tion is unbear­able—cru­eler than Artaud’s The­ater of Cru­elty, which was still an attempt to create a dra­maturgy of life, the last gasp of an ide­al­ity of the body, of blood, of vio­lence in a system that was already taking it away, toward a reab­sorp­tion of all the stakes with­out a trace of blood. For us the trick has been played. All dra­maturgy, and even all real writ­ing of cru­elty has dis­ap­peared. Sim­u­la­tion is the master, and we only have a right to the retro, to the phan­tom, par­o­dic reha­bil­i­ta­tion of all lost ref­er­en­tials. Every­thing still unfolds around us, in the cold light of deter­rence (includ­ing Artaud, who has the right like every­thing else to his revival, to a second exis­tence as the ref­er­en­tial of cru­elty).
This is why nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an acci­dent—save in the inter­val when the “young” powers could be tempted to make a non­de­ter­rent, “real” use of it (as the Amer­i­cans did in Hiroshima—but pre­cisely only they had a right to this “use value” of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be deterred from using it by the very fact of pos­sess­ing it). Entry into the atomic club, so pret­tily named, very quickly effaces (as union­iza­tion does in the work­ing world) any incli­na­tion toward vio­lent inter­ven­tion. Respon­si­bil­ity, con­trol, cen­sure, self-deter­rence always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our dis­posal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very pos­si­bil­ity of par­a­lyz­ing a whole coun­try by flick­ing a switch makes it so that the elec­tri­cal engi­neers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and rev­o­lu­tion­ary strike crum­bles at the very moment when the means are avail­able—but alas pre­cisely because those means are avail­able. Therein lies the whole process of deter­rence.
It is thus per­fectly prob­a­ble that one day we will see nuclear powers export atomic reac­tors, weapons, and bombs to every lat­i­tude. Con­trol by threat will be replaced by the more effec­tive strat­egy of paci­fi­ca­tion through the bomb and through the pos­ses­sion of the bomb. The “little” powers, believ­ing that they are buying their inde­pen­dent strik­ing force, will buy the virus of deter­rence, of their own deter­rence. The same goes for the atomic reac­tors that we have already sent them: so many neu­tron bombs knock­ing out all his­tor­i­cal vir­u­lence, all risk of explo­sion. In this sense, the nuclear every­where inau­gu­rates an accel­er­ated process of implo­sion, it freezes every­thing around it, it absorbs all living energy.
The nuclear is at once the cul­mi­nat­ing point of avail­able energy and the max­i­miza­tion of energy con­trol sys­tems. Lock­down and con­trol increase in direct pro­por­tion to (and undoubt­edly even faster than) lib­er­at­ing poten­tial­i­ties. This was already the aporia of the modern rev­o­lu­tion. It is still the abso­lute para­dox of the nuclear. Ener­gies freeze in their own fire, they deter them­selves. One can no longer imag­ine what project, what power, what strat­egy, what sub­ject could exist behind this enclo­sure, this vast sat­u­ra­tion of a system by its own forces, now neu­tral­ized, unus­able, unin­tel­li­gi­ble, non­ex­plo­sive except for the pos­si­bil­ity of an explo­sion toward the center, of an implo­sion where all these ener­gies would be abol­ished in a cat­a­strophic process (in the lit­eral sense, that is to say in the sense of a rever­sion of the whole cycle toward a min­i­mal point, of a rever­sion of ener­gies toward a min­i­mal thresh­old).
History: a Retro Scenario
In a vio­lent and con­tem­po­rary period of his­tory (let’s say between the two world wars and the cold war), it is myth that invades cinema as imag­i­nary con­tent. It is the golden age of despotic and leg­endary res­ur­rec­tions. Myth, chased from the real by the vio­lence of his­tory, finds refuge in cinema.
Today, it is his­tory itself that invades the cinema accord­ing to the same sce­nario—the his­tor­i­cal stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neu­tral­iza­tion, which is dubbed peace­ful coex­is­tence on a global level, and paci­fied monotony on the quo­tid­ian level—this his­tory exor­cised by a slowly or bru­tally con­geal­ing soci­ety cel­e­brates its res­ur­rec­tion in force on the screen, accord­ing to the same process that used to make lost myths live again.
His­tory is our lost ref­er­en­tial, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illu­sion would be to con­grat­u­late one­self on this “aware­ness of his­tory on the part of cinema,” as one con­grat­u­lated one­self on the “entrance of pol­i­tics into the uni­ver­sity.” Same mis­un­der­stand­ing, same mys­ti­fi­ca­tion. The pol­i­tics that enter the uni­ver­sity are those that come from his­tory, a retro pol­i­tics, emp­tied of sub­stance and legal­ized in their super­fi­cial exer­cise, with the air of a game and a field of adven­ture, this kind of pol­i­tics is like sex­u­al­ity or per­ma­nent edu­ca­tion (or like social secu­rity in its time), that is, post­hu­mous lib­er­al­iza­tion.
The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong ref­er­en­tials, these death pangs of the real and of the ratio­nal that open onto an age of sim­u­la­tion. Whereas so many gen­er­a­tions, and par­tic­u­larly the last, lived in the march of his­tory, in the euphoric or cat­a­strophic expec­ta­tion of a rev­o­lu­tion—today one has the impres­sion that his­tory has retreated, leav­ing behind it an indif­fer­ent nebula, tra­versed by cur­rents, but emp­tied of ref­er­ences. It is into this void that the phan­tasms of a past his­tory recede, the panoply of events, ide­olo­gies, retro fash­ions—no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to res­ur­rect the period when at least there was his­tory, at least there was vio­lence (albeit fas­cist), when at least life and death were at stake. Any­thing serves to escape this void, this leukemia of his­tory and of pol­i­tics, this hem­or­rhage of values—it is in pro­por­tion to this dis­tress that all con­tent can be evoked pell-mell, that all pre­vi­ous his­tory is res­ur­rected in bulk—a con­trol­ling idea no longer selects, only nos­tal­gia end­lessly accu­mu­lates: war, fas­cism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the rev­o­lu­tion­ary strug­gles, every­thing is equiv­a­lent and is mixed indis­crim­i­nately in the same morose and fune­real exal­ta­tion, in the same retro fas­ci­na­tion. There is how­ever a priv­i­leg­ing of the imme­di­ately pre­ced­ing era (fas­cism, war, the period imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the war—the innu­mer­able films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more per­verse, denser, more con­fused essence). One can explain it by evok­ing the Freudian theory of fetishism (per­haps also a retro hypoth­e­sis). This trauma (loss of ref­er­en­tials) is sim­i­lar to the dis­cov­ery of the dif­fer­ence between the sexes in chil­dren, as seri­ous, as pro­found, as irre­versible: the fetishiza­tion of an object inter­venes to obscure this unbear­able dis­cov­ery, but pre­cisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object per­ceived before the trau­matic dis­cov­ery. Thus the fetishized his­tory will prefer­ably be the one imme­di­ately pre­ced­ing our “irref­er­en­tial” era. Whence the omnipres­ence of fas­cism and of war in retro—a coin­ci­dence, an affin­ity that is not at all polit­i­cal; it is naive to con­clude that the evo­ca­tion of fas­cism sig­nals a cur­rent renewal of fas­cism (it is pre­cisely because one is no longer there, because one is in some­thing else, which is still less amus­ing, it is for this reason that fas­cism can again become fas­ci­nat­ing in its fil­tered cru­elty, aes­theti­cized by retro).10
His­tory thus made its tri­umphal entry into cinema, posthu­mously (the term his­tor­i­cal has under­gone the same fate: a “his­tor­i­cal” moment, mon­u­ment, con­gress, figure are in this way des­ig­nated as fos­sils). Its rein­jec­tion has no value as con­scious aware­ness but only as nos­tal­gia for a lost ref­er­en­tial.
This does not sig­nify that his­tory has never appeared in cinema as a pow­er­ful moment, as a con­tem­po­rary process, as insur­rec­tion and not as res­ur­rec­tion. In the “real” as in cinema, there was his­tory but there isn’t any any­more. Today, the his­tory that is “given back” to us (pre­cisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a rela­tion to a “his­tor­i­cal real” than neofig­u­ra­tion in paint­ing does to the clas­si­cal fig­u­ra­tion of the real. Neofig­u­ra­tion is an invo­ca­tion of resem­blance, but at the same time the fla­grant proof of the dis­ap­pear­ance of objects in their very rep­re­sen­ta­tion: hyper­real. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyper­re­sem­blance (like his­tory in con­tem­po­rary cinema) that makes it so that fun­da­men­tally they no longer resem­ble any­thing, except the empty figure of resem­blance, the empty form of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. It is a ques­tion of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly. That is why they are so exact, so minute, frozen in the state in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. All, but not only, those his­tor­i­cal films whose very per­fec­tion is dis­qui­et­ing: Chi­na­town, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the Pres­i­dent’s Men, etc. One has the impres­sion of it being a ques­tion of per­fect remakes, of extra­or­di­nary mon­tages that emerge more from a com­bi­na­tory cul­ture (or McLuhanesque mosaic), of large photo-, kino-, his­tori­cosyn­the­sis machines, etc., rather than one of ver­i­ta­ble films. Let’s under­stand each other: their qual­ity is not in ques­tion. The prob­lem is rather that in some sense we are left com­pletely indif­fer­ent. Take The Last Pic­ture Show: like me, you would have had to be suf­fi­ciently dis­tracted to have thought it to be an orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion from the 1950s: a very good film about the cus­toms in and the atmos­phere of the Amer­i­can small town. Just a slight sus­pi­cion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, with­out the psy­cho­log­i­cal, moral, and sen­ti­men­tal blotches of the films of that era. Stu­pe­fac­tion when one dis­cov­ers that it is a 1970s film, per­fect retro, purged, pure, the hyper­re­al­ist resti­tu­tion of 1950s cinema. One talks of remak­ing silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole gen­er­a­tion of films is emerg­ing that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: mar­velous arti­facts, with­out weak­ness, pleas­ing sim­u­lacra that lack only the imag­i­nary, and the hal­lu­ci­na­tion inher­ent to cinema. Most of what we see today (the best) is already of this order. Barry Lyndon is the best exam­ple: one never did better, one will never do better in … in what? Not in evok­ing, not even in evok­ing, in sim­u­lat­ing. All the toxic radi­a­tion has been fil­tered, all the ingre­di­ents are there, in pre­cise doses, not a single error.
Cool, cold plea­sure, not even aes­thetic in the strict sense: func­tional plea­sure, equa­tional plea­sure, plea­sure of machi­na­tion. One only has to dream of Vis­conti (Gué­pard, Senso, etc., 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 sen­sual rhetoric, dead time, a pas­sion­ate game, not only in the his­tor­i­cal con­tent, but in the mise-en-scène. None of that in Kubrick, who manip­u­lates his film like a chess player, who makes an oper­a­tional sce­nario of his­tory. And this does not return to the old oppo­si­tion between the spirit of finesse and the spirit of geom­e­try: that oppo­si­tion still comes from the game and the stakes of mean­ing, whereas we are enter­ing an era of films that in them­selves no longer have mean­ing strictly speak­ing, an era of great syn­the­siz­ing machines of vary­ing geom­e­try.
Is there some­thing of this already in Leone’s West­erns? Maybe. All the reg­is­ters slide in that direc­tion. Chi­na­town: it is the detec­tive movie renamed by laser. It is not really a ques­tion of per­fec­tion: tech­ni­cal per­fec­tion can be part of mean­ing, and in that case it is nei­ther retro nor hyper­re­al­ist, it is an effect of art. Here, tech­ni­cal per­fec­tion is an effect of the model: it is one of the ref­er­en­tial tac­ti­cal values. In the absence of real syntax of mean­ing, one has noth­ing but the tac­ti­cal values of a group in which are admirably com­bined, for exam­ple, the CIA as a mytho­log­i­cal machine that does every­thing, Robert Red­ford as poly­va­lent star, social rela­tions as a nec­es­sary ref­er­ence to his­tory, tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­ity as a nec­es­sary ref­er­ence to cinema.
The cinema and its tra­jec­tory: from the most fan­tas­tic or myth­i­cal to the real­is­tic and the hyper­re­al­is­tic.
The cinema in its cur­rent efforts is get­ting closer and closer, and with greater and greater per­fec­tion, to the abso­lute real, in its banal­ity, its verac­ity, in its naked obvi­ous­ness, in its bore­dom, and at the same time in its pre­sump­tion, in its pre­ten­sion to being the real, the imme­di­ate, the unsigni­fied, which is the cra­zi­est of under­tak­ings (sim­i­larly, func­tion­al­ism’s pre­ten­sion to des­ig­nat­ing—design—the great­est degree of cor­re­spon­dence between the object and its func­tion, and its use value, is a truly absurd enter­prise); no cul­ture has ever had toward its signs this naive and para­noid, puri­tan and ter­ror­ist vision.
Ter­ror­ism is always that of the real.
Con­cur­rently with this effort toward an abso­lute cor­re­spon­dence with the real, cinema also approaches an abso­lute cor­re­spon­dence with itself—and this is not con­tra­dic­tory: it is the very def­i­ni­tion of the hyper­real. Hypo­ty­po­sis and spec­u­lar­ity. Cinema pla­gia­rizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its clas­sics, retroac­ti­vates its orig­i­nal myths, remakes the silent film more per­fectly than the orig­i­nal, etc.: all of this is log­i­cal, the cinema is fas­ci­nated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fas­ci­nated by the real as a lost ref­er­ent. The cinema and the imag­i­nary (the nov­el­is­tic, the myth­i­cal, unre­al­ity, includ­ing the deliri­ous use of its own tech­nique) used to have a lively, dialec­ti­cal, full, dra­matic rela­tion. The rela­tion that is being formed today between the cinema and the real is an inverse, neg­a­tive rela­tion: it results from the loss of speci­ficity of one and of the other. The cold col­lage, the cool promis­cu­ity, the asex­ual nup­tials of two cold media that evolve in an asymp­totic line toward each other: the cinema attempt­ing to abol­ish itself in the cin­e­mato­graphic (or tele­vised) hyper­real.
His­tory is a strong myth, per­haps, along with the uncon­scious, the last great myth. It is a myth that at once sub­tended the pos­si­bil­ity of an “objec­tive” enchain­ment of events and causes and the pos­si­bil­ity of a nar­ra­tive enchain­ment of dis­course. The age of his­tory, if one can call it that, is also the age of the novel. It is this fab­u­lous char­ac­ter, the myth­i­cal energy of an event or of a nar­ra­tive, that today seems to be increas­ingly lost. Behind a per­for­ma­tive and demon­stra­tive logic: the obses­sion with his­tor­i­cal fidelity, with a per­fect ren­der­ing (as else­where the obses­sion with real time or with the minute quo­tid­i­ane­ity of Jeanne Hilmann doing the dishes), this neg­a­tive and impla­ca­ble fidelity to the mate­ri­al­ity of the past, to a par­tic­u­lar scene of the past or of the present, to the resti­tu­tion of an abso­lute sim­u­lacrum of the past or the present, which was sub­sti­tuted for all other value—we are all com­plic­i­tous in this, and this is irre­versible. Because cinema itself con­trib­uted to the dis­ap­pear­ance of his­tory, and to the advent of the archive. Pho­tog­ra­phy and cinema con­trib­uted in large part to the sec­u­lar­iza­tion of his­tory, to fixing it in its vis­i­ble, “objec­tive” form at the expense of the myths that once tra­versed it.
Today cinema can place all its talent, all its tech­nol­ogy in the ser­vice of rean­i­mat­ing what it itself con­trib­uted to liq­ui­dat­ing. It only res­ur­rects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Holocaust
For­get­ting exter­mi­na­tion is part of exter­mi­na­tion, because it is also the exter­mi­na­tion of memory, of his­tory, of the social, etc. This for­get­ting is as essen­tial as the event, in any case unlo­cat­able by us, inac­ces­si­ble to us in its truth. This for­get­ting is still too dan­ger­ous, it must be effaced by an arti­fi­cial memory (today, every­where, it is arti­fi­cial mem­o­ries that efface the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This arti­fi­cial memory will be the restag­ing of exter­mi­na­tion—but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and pro­foundly dis­turb some­thing, and espe­cially, espe­cially through a medium that is itself cold, radi­at­ing for­get­ful­ness, deter­rence, and exter­mi­na­tion in a still more sys­tem­atic way, if that is pos­si­ble, than the camps them­selves. One no longer makes the Jews pass through the cre­ma­to­rium or the gas cham­ber, but through the sound track and image track, through the uni­ver­sal screen and the micro­pro­ces­sor. For­get­ting, anni­hi­la­tion, finally achieves its aes­thetic dimen­sion in this way—it is achieved in retro, finally ele­vated here to a mass level.
Even the type of socio­his­tor­i­cal dimen­sion that still remained for­got­ten in the form of guilt, of shame­ful latency, of the not-said, no longer exists, because now “every­one knows,” every­body has trem­bled and bawled in the face of exter­mi­na­tion—a sure sign that “that” will never again occur. But what one exor­cises in this way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be repro­duced, because it has always been in the midst of cur­rently repro­duc­ing itself, and pre­cisely in the very form in which one pre­tends to denounce it, in the medium itself of this sup­posed exor­cism: tele­vi­sion. Same process of for­get­ting, of liq­ui­da­tion, of exter­mi­na­tion, same anni­hi­la­tion of mem­o­ries and of his­tory, same inverse, implo­sive radi­a­tion, same absorp­tion with­out an echo, same black hole as Auschwitz. And one would like to have us believe that TV will lift the weight of Auschwitz by making a col­lec­tive aware­ness radi­ate, whereas tele­vi­sion is its per­pet­u­a­tion in another guise, this time no longer under the aus­pices of a site of anni­hi­la­tion, but of a medium of deter­rence.
What no one wants to under­stand is that Holo­caust is pri­mar­ily (and exclu­sively) an event, or, rather, a tele­vised object (fun­da­men­tal rule of McLuhan’s, which must not be for­got­ten), that is to say, that one attempts to rekin­dle a cold his­tor­i­cal event, tragic but cold, the first major event of cold sys­tems, of cool­ing sys­tems, of sys­tems of deter­rence and exter­mi­na­tion that will then be deployed in other forms (includ­ing the cold war, etc.) and in regard to cold masses (the Jews no longer even con­cerned with their own death, and the even­tu­ally self-man­aged masses no longer even in revolt: deterred until death, deterred from their very own death) to rekin­dle this cold event through a cold medium, tele­vi­sion, and for the masses who are them­selves cold, who will only have the oppor­tu­nity for a tac­tile thrill and a post­hu­mous emo­tion, a deter­rent thrill as well, which will make them spill into for­get­ting with a kind of good aes­thetic con­science of the catas­tro­phe.
In order to rekin­dle all that, the whole polit­i­cal and ped­a­gog­i­cal orches­tra­tion that came from every direc­tion to attempt to give mean­ing to the event (the tele­vised event this time) was not at all exces­sive. Pan­icked black­mail­ing around the pos­si­ble con­se­quence of this broad­cast on the imag­i­na­tion of chil­dren and others. All the ped­a­gogues and social work­ers mobi­lized to filter the thing, as if there were some danger of infec­tion in this arti­fi­cial res­ur­rec­tion! The danger was really rather the oppo­site: from the cold to the cold, the social iner­tia of cold sys­tems, of TV in par­tic­u­lar. It was thus nec­es­sary that the whole world mobi­lize itself to remake the social, a hot social, heated dis­cus­sion, hence com­mu­ni­ca­tion, from the cold mon­ster of exter­mi­na­tion. One lacks stakes, invest­ment, his­tory, speech. That is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. The objec­tive is thus to pro­duce them at all cost, and this broad­cast served this pur­pose: to cap­ture the arti­fi­cial heat of a dead event to warm the dead body of the social. Whence the addi­tion of the sup­ple­men­tary medium to expand on the effect through feed­back: imme­di­ate polls sanc­tion­ing the mas­sive effect of the broad­cast, the col­lec­tive impact of the mes­sage—whereas it is well under­stood that the polls only verify the tele­vi­sual suc­cess of the medium itself. But this con­fu­sion will never be lifted.
From there, it is nec­es­sary to speak of the cold light of tele­vi­sion, why it is harm­less to the imag­i­na­tion (includ­ing that of chil­dren) because it no longer car­ries any imag­i­nary and this for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. By con­trast with the cinema, which is still blessed (but less and less so because more and more con­tam­i­nated by TV) with an intense imag­i­nary—because the cinema is an image. That is to say not only a screen and a visual form, but a myth, some­thing that still retains some­thing of the double, of the phan­tasm, of the mirror, of the dream, etc. Noth­ing of any of this in the “TV” image, which sug­gests noth­ing, which mes­mer­izes, which itself is noth­ing but a screen, not even that: a minia­tur­ized ter­mi­nal that, in fact, is imme­di­ately located in your head—you are the screen, and the TV watches you—it tran­sis­tor­izes all the neu­rons and passes through like a mag­netic tape—a tape, not an image.
The China Syndrome
The fun­da­men­tal stake is at the level of tele­vi­sion and infor­ma­tion. Just as the exter­mi­na­tion of the Jews dis­ap­peared behind the tele­vised event Holo­caust—the cold medium of tele­vi­sion having been simply sub­sti­tuted for the cold system of exter­mi­na­tion one believed to be exor­cis­ing through it—so The China Syn­drome is a great exam­ple of the supremacy of the tele­vised event over the nuclear event which, itself, remains improb­a­ble and in some sense imag­i­nary.
Besides, the film shows this to be the case (with­out want­ing to): that TV is present pre­cisely where it hap­pens is not coin­ci­den­tal, it is the intru­sion of TV into the reac­tor that seems to give rise to the nuclear inci­dent—because TV is like its antic­i­pa­tion and its model in the every­day uni­verse: tele­fis­sion of the real and of the real world; because TV and infor­ma­tion in gen­eral are a form of catas­tro­phe in the formal and topo­log­i­cal sense Rene Thorn gives the word: a rad­i­cal qual­i­ta­tive change of a whole system. Or, rather, TV and the nuclear are of the same nature: behind the “hot” and negen­tropic con­cepts of energy and infor­ma­tion, they have the same power of deter­rence as cold sys­tems do. TV itself is also a nuclear process of chain reac­tion, but implo­sive: it cools and neu­tral­izes the mean­ing and the energy of events. Thus the nuclear, behind the pre­sumed risk of explo­sion, that is to say of hot catas­tro­phe, con­ceals a long, cold catas­tro­phe, the uni­ver­sal­iza­tion of a system of deter­rence.
At the end of the film again comes the second mas­sive intru­sion of the press and of TV that insti­gates the drama—the murder of the tech­ni­cal direc­tor by the Spe­cial Forces, a drama that sub­sti­tutes for the nuclear catas­tro­phe that will not occur.
The homol­ogy of the nuclear and of tele­vi­sion can be read directly in the images: noth­ing resem­bles the con­trol and telecom­mand head­quar­ters of the nuclear power sta­tion more than TV stu­dios, and the nuclear con­soles are com­bined with those of the record­ing and broad­cast­ing stu­dios in the same imag­i­nary. Thus every­thing takes place between these two poles: of the other “center,” that of the reac­tor, in prin­ci­ple the ver­i­ta­ble heart of the matter, we will know noth­ing; it, like the real, has van­ished and become illeg­i­ble, and is at bottom unim­por­tant in the film (when one attempts to sug­gest it to us, in its immi­nent catas­tro­phe, it does not work on the imag­i­nary plane: the drama unfolds on the screens and nowhere else).
Har­ris­burg,11 Water­gate, and Net­work: such is the tril­ogy of The China Syn­drome—an indis­sol­u­ble tril­ogy in which one no longer knows which is the effect and which is the symp­tom: the ide­o­log­i­cal argu­ment (Water­gate effect), isn’t it noth­ing but the symp­tom of the nuclear (Har­ris­burg effect) or of the com­puter sci­ence model (Net­work effect)—the real (Har­ris­burg), isn’t it noth­ing but the symp­tom of the imag­i­nary (Net­work and China Syn­drome) or the oppo­site? Mar­velous indif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, ideal con­stel­la­tion of sim­u­la­tion. Mar­velous title, then, this China Syn­drome, because the reversibil­ity of symp­toms and their con­ver­gence in the same process con­sti­tute pre­cisely what we call a syn­drome—that it is Chi­nese adds the poetic and intel­lec­tual qual­ity of a conun­drum or sup­pli­ca­tion.
Obses­sive con­junc­tion of The China Syn­drome and Har­ris­burg. But is all that so invol­un­tary? With­out posit­ing mag­i­cal links between the sim­u­lacrum and the real, it is clear that the Syn­drome is not a stranger to the “real” acci­dent in Har­ris­burg, not accord­ing to a causal logic, but accord­ing to the rela­tions of con­ta­gion and silent anal­ogy that link the real to models and to sim­u­lacra: to tele­vi­sion’s induc­tion of the nuclear into the film cor­re­sponds, with a trou­bling obvi­ous­ness, the film’s induc­tion of the nuclear inci­dent in Har­ris­burg. Strange pre­ces­sion of a film over the real, the most sur­pris­ing that was given us to wit­ness: the real cor­re­sponded point by point to the sim­u­lacrum, includ­ing the sus­pended, incom­plete char­ac­ter of the catas­tro­phe, which is essen­tial from the point of view of deter­rence: the real arranged itself, in the image of the film, to pro­duce a sim­u­la­tion of catas­tro­phe.
From there to reverse our logic and to see in The China Syn­drome the ver­i­ta­ble event and in Har­ris­burg its sim­u­lacrum, there is only one step that must be cheer­fully taken. Because it is via the same logic that, in the film, nuclear real­ity arises from the tele­vi­sion effect, and that in “real­ity” Har­ris­burg arises from the China Syn­drome cinema effect.
But The China Syn­drome is also not the orig­i­nal pro­to­type of Har­ris­burg, one is not the sim­u­lacrum of which the other would be the real: there are only sim­u­lacra, and Har­ris­burg is a sort of second-order sim­u­la­tion. There is cer­tainly a chain reac­tion some­where, and we will per­haps die of it, but this chain reac­tion is never that of the nuclear, it is that of sim­u­lacra and of the sim­u­la­tion where all the energy of the real is effec­tively swal­lowed, no longer in a spec­tac­u­lar nuclear explo­sion, but in a secret and con­tin­u­ous implo­sion, and that today per­haps takes a more deathly turn than that of all the explo­sions that rock us.
Because an explo­sion is always a prom­ise, it is our hope: note how much, in the film as in Har­ris­burg, the whole world waits for some­thing to blow up, for destruc­tion to announce itself and remove us from this unname­able panic, from this panic of deter­rence that it exer­cises in the invis­i­ble form of the nuclear. That the “heart” of the reac­tor at last reveals its hot power of destruc­tion, that it reas­sures us about the pres­ence of energy, albeit cat­a­strophic, and bestows its spec­ta­cle on us. Because unhap­pi­ness is when there is no nuclear spec­ta­cle, no spec­ta­cle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is over), and it is for that reason that it is rejected—it would be per­fectly accepted if it lent itself to spec­ta­cle as pre­vi­ous forms of energy did. Parou­sia of catas­tro­phe: sub­stan­tial food for our mes­sianic libido.
But that is pre­cisely what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the explo­sion, but the implo­sion. No more energy in its spec­tac­u­lar and pathetic form—all the roman­ti­cism of the explo­sion, which had so much charm, being at the same time that of rev­o­lu­tion—but the cold energy of the sim­u­lacrum and of its dis­til­la­tion in home­o­pathic doses in the cold sys­tems of infor­ma­tion.
What else do the media dream of besides cre­at­ing the event simply by their pres­ence? Every­one decries it, but every­one is secretly fas­ci­nated by this even­tu­al­ity. Such is the logic of sim­u­lacra, it is no longer that of divine pre­des­ti­na­tion, it is that of the pre­ces­sion of models, but it is just as inex­orable. And it is because of this that events no longer have mean­ing: it is not that they are insignif­i­cant in them­selves, it is that they were pre­ceded by the model, with which their pro­cesses only coin­cided. Thus it would have been mar­velous to repeat the script for The China Syn­drome at Fes­sen­heim, during the visit offered to the jour­nal­ists by the EDF (French Elec­tric Com­pany), to repeat on this occa­sion the acci­dent linked to the magic eye, to the provoca­tive pres­ence of the media. Alas, noth­ing hap­pened. And on the other hand yes! so pow­er­ful is the logic of sim­u­lacra: a week after, the unions dis­cov­ered fis­sures in the reac­tors. Mir­a­cle of con­ta­gions, mir­a­cle of ana­logic chain reac­tions.
Thus, the essence of the film is not in any respect the Water­gate effect in the person of Jane Fonda, not in any respect TV as a means of expos­ing nuclear vices, but on the con­trary TV as the twin orbit and twin chain reac­tion of the nuclear one. Besides, just at the end—and there the film is unre­lent­ing in regard to its own argu­ment—when Jane Fonda makes the truth explode directly (max­i­mum Water­gate effect), her image is jux­ta­posed with what will inex­orably follow it and efface it on the screen: a com­mer­cial of some kind. The Net­work effect goes far beyond the Water­gate effect and spreads mys­te­ri­ously into the Har­ris­burg effect, that is to say not into the nuclear threat, but into the sim­u­la­tion of nuclear catas­tro­phe.
So, it is sim­u­la­tion that is effec­tive, never the real. The sim­u­la­tion of nuclear catas­tro­phe is the strate­gic result of this generic and uni­ver­sal under­tak­ing of deter­rence: accus­tom­ing the people to the ide­ol­ogy and the dis­ci­pline of abso­lute secu­rity—to the meta­physics of fis­sion and fis­sure. To this end the fis­sure must be a fic­tion. A real catas­tro­phe would delay things, it would con­sti­tute a ret­ro­grade inci­dent, of the explo­sive kind (with­out chang­ing the course of things: did Hiroshima per­cep­ti­bly delay, deter, the uni­ver­sal process of deter­rence?).
In the film, also, real fusion would be a bad argu­ment: the film would regress to the level of a dis­as­ter movie—weak by def­i­ni­tion, because it means return­ing things to their pure event. The China Syn­drome, itself, finds its strength in fil­ter­ing catas­tro­phe, in the dis­til­la­tion of the nuclear specter through the omnipresent hertzian relays of infor­ma­tion. It teaches us (once again with­out mean­ing to) that nuclear catas­tro­phe does not occur, is not meant to happen, in the real either, any more than the atomic clash was at the dawn­ing of the cold war. The equi­lib­rium of terror rests on the eter­nal defer­ral of the atomic clash. The atom and the nuclear are made to be dis­sem­i­nated for deter­rent ends, the power of catas­tro­phe must, instead of stupidly explod­ing, be dis­sem­i­nated in home­o­pathic, molec­u­lar doses, in the con­tin­u­ous reser­voirs of infor­ma­tion. Therein lies the true con­tam­i­na­tion: never bio­log­i­cal and radioac­tive, but, rather, a mental destruc­tura­tion through a mental strat­egy of catas­tro­phe.
If one looks care­fully, the film intro­duces us to this mental strat­egy, and in going fur­ther, it even deliv­ers a lesson dia­met­ri­cally opposed to that of Water­gate: if every strat­egy today is that of mental terror and of deter­rence tied to the sus­pen­sion and the eter­nal sim­u­la­tion of catas­tro­phe, then the only means of mit­i­gat­ing this sce­nario would be to make the catas­tro­phe arrive, to pro­duce or to repro­duce a real catas­tro­phe. To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cat­a­clysms unknots the equi­lib­rium of terror in which humans are impris­oned. Closer to us, this is what ter­ror­ism is occu­pied with as well: making real, pal­pa­ble vio­lence sur­face in oppo­si­tion to the invis­i­ble vio­lence of secu­rity. Besides, therein lies ter­ror­ism’s ambi­gu­ity.
Apocalypse Now
Cop­pola makes his film like the Amer­i­cans made war—in this sense, it is the best pos­si­ble tes­ti­mo­nial—with the same immod­er­a­tion, the same excess of means, the same mon­strous candor … and the same suc­cess. The war as entrench­ment, as tech­no­log­i­cal and psy­che­delic fan­tasy, the war as a suc­ces­sion of spe­cial effects, the war become film even before being filmed. The war abol­ishes itself in its tech­no­log­i­cal test, and for Amer­i­cans it was pri­mar­ily that: a test site, a gigan­tic ter­ri­tory in which to test their arms, their meth­ods, their power.
Cop­pola does noth­ing but that: test cinema’s power of inter­ven­tion, test the impact of a cinema that has become an immea­sur­able machin­ery of spe­cial effects. In this sense, his film is really the exten­sion of the war through other means, the pin­na­cle of this failed war, and its apoth­e­o­sis. The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hem­or­rhage into tech­nol­ogy.
The real war is waged by Cop­pola as it is by West­more­land: with­out count­ing the inspired irony of having forests and Phillip­ine vil­lages napalmed to retrace the hell of South Viet­nam. One revis­its every­thing through cinema and one begins again: the Molochian joy of film­ing, the sac­ri­fi­cial joy of so many mil­lions spent, of such a holo­caust of means, of so many mis­ad­ven­tures, and the remark­able para­noia that from the begin­ning con­ceived of this film as a his­tor­i­cal, global event, in which, in the mind of the cre­ator, the war in Viet­nam would have been noth­ing other than what it is, would not fun­da­men­tally have existed—and it is nec­es­sary for us to believe in this: the war in Viet­nam “in itself” per­haps in fact never hap­pened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the trop­ics, a psy­chotropic dream that had the goal nei­ther of a vic­tory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sac­ri­fi­cial, exces­sive deploy­ment of a power already film­ing itself as it unfolded, per­haps wait­ing for noth­ing but con­se­cra­tion by a super­film, which com­pletes the mass-spec­ta­cle effect of this war.
No real dis­tance, no crit­i­cal sense, no desire for “rais­ing con­scious­ness” in rela­tion to the war: and in a sense this is the brutal qual­ity of this film—not being rotten with the moral psy­chol­ogy of war. Cop­pola can cer­tainly deck out his heli­copter cap­tain in a ridicu­lous hat of the light cav­alry, and make him crush the Viet­namese vil­lage to the sound of Wagner’s music—those are not crit­i­cal, dis­tant signs, they are immersed in the machin­ery, they are part of the spe­cial effect, and he him­self makes movies in the same way, with the same retro mega­lo­ma­nia, and the same non-sig­ni­fy­ing furor, with the same clown­ish effect in over­drive. But there it is, he hits us with that, it is there, it is bewil­der­ing, and one can say to one­self: how is such a horror pos­si­ble (not that of the war, but that of the film strictly speak­ing)? But there is no answer, there is no pos­si­ble ver­dict, and one can even rejoice in this mon­strous trick (exactly as with Wagner)—but one can always retrieve a tiny little idea that is not nasty, that is not a value judg­ment, but that tells you the war in Viet­nam and this film are cut from the same cloth, that noth­ing sep­a­rates them, that this film is part of the war—if the Amer­i­cans (seem­ingly) lost the other one, they cer­tainly won this one. Apoc­a­lypse Now is a global vic­tory. Cin­e­mato­graphic power equal and supe­rior to that of the indus­trial and mil­i­tary com­plexes, equal or supe­rior to that of the Pen­ta­gon and of gov­ern­ments.
And all of a sudden, the film is not with­out inter­est: it ret­ro­spec­tively illu­mi­nates (not even ret­ro­spec­tively, because the film is a phase of this war with­out end) what was already crazy about this war, irra­tional in polit­i­cal terms: the Amer­i­cans and the Viet­namese are already rec­on­ciled, right after the end of the hos­til­i­ties the Amer­i­cans offered eco­nomic aid, exactly as if they had anni­hi­lated the jungle and the towns, exactly as they are making their film today. One has under­stood noth­ing, nei­ther about the war nor about cinema (at least the latter) if one has not grasped this lack of dis­tinc­tion that is no longer either an ide­o­log­i­cal or a moral one, one of good and evil, but one of the reversibil­ity of both destruc­tion and pro­duc­tion, of the imma­nence of a thing in its very rev­o­lu­tion, of the organic metab­o­lism of all the tech­nolo­gies, of the carpet of bombs in the strip of film…
The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
The Beaubourg effect, the Beaubourg machine, the Beaubourg thing—how to give it a name? Enigma of this car­cass of flux and signs, of net­works and cir­cuits—the final impulse to trans­late a struc­ture that no longer has a name, the struc­ture of social rela­tions given over to super­fi­cial ven­ti­la­tion (ani­ma­tion, self-man­age­ment, infor­ma­tion, media) and to an irre­versibly deep implo­sion. Mon­u­ment to the games of mass sim­u­la­tion, the Pom­pi­dou Center func­tions as an incin­er­a­tor absorb­ing all the cul­tural energy and devour­ing it—a bit like the black mono­lith in 2001: insane con­vec­tion of all the con­tents that came there to be mate­ri­al­ized, to be absorbed, and to be anni­hi­lated.
All around, the neigh­bor­hood is noth­ing but a pro­tec­tive zone—remod­el­ing, dis­in­fec­tion, a snob­bish and hygienic design—but above all in a fig­u­ra­tive sense: it is a machine for making empti­ness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power sta­tions pose: not lack of secu­rity, pol­lu­tion, explo­sion, but a system of max­i­mum secu­rity that radi­ates around them, the pro­tec­tive zone of con­trol and deter­rence that extends, slowly but surely, over the ter­ri­tory—a tech­ni­cal, eco­log­i­cal, eco­nomic, geopo­lit­i­cal glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The sta­tion is a matrix in which an abso­lute model of secu­rity is elab­o­rated, which will encom­pass the whole social field, and which is fun­da­men­tally a model of deter­rence (it is the same one that con­trols us glob­ally, under the sign of peace­ful coex­is­tence and of the sim­u­la­tion of atomic danger).
The same model, with the same pro­por­tions, is elab­o­rated at the Center: cul­tural fis­sion, polit­i­cal deter­rence.
This said, the cir­cu­la­tion of fluids is unequal. Ven­ti­la­tion, cool­ing, elec­tri­cal net­works the “tra­di­tional” fluids cir­cu­late there very well. Already the cir­cu­la­tion of the human flux is less assured (the archaic solu­tion of esca­la­tors in plas­tic sleeves, one ought to be aspi­rated, pro­pelled, or some­thing, but with a mobil­ity that would be up to this baroque the­atri­cal­ity of fluids that is the source of the orig­i­nal­ity of the car­cass). As for the mate­rial of the works, of objects, of books and the so-called poly­va­lent inte­rior space, these no longer cir­cu­late at all. It is the oppo­site of Roissy, where from a futur­ist center of “spa­tial” design radi­at­ing toward “satel­lites,” etc., one ends up com­pletely flat in front of …tra­di­tional air­planes. But the inco­her­ence is the same. (What hap­pened to money, this other fluid, what hap­pened to its mode of cir­cu­la­tion, of emul­sion, of fall­out at Beaubourg?)
Same con­tra­dic­tion even in the behav­ior of the per­son­nel, assigned to the “poly­va­lent” space and with­out a pri­vate work space. On their feet and mobile, the people affect a cool demeanor, more supple, very con­tem­po­rary, adapted to the “struc­ture” of a “modern” space. Seated in their corner, which is pre­cisely not one, they exhaust them­selves secret­ing an arti­fi­cial soli­tude, remak­ing their “bubble.” Therein is also a great tactic of deter­rence: one con­demns them to using all their energy in this indi­vid­ual defense. Curi­ously, one thus finds the same con­tra­dic­tion that char­ac­ter­izes the Beaubourg thing: a mobile exte­rior, com­mut­ing, cool and modern—an inte­rior shriv­eled by the same old values.
This space of deter­rence, artic­u­lated on the ide­ol­ogy of vis­i­bil­ity, of trans­parency, of poly­va­lency, of con­sen­sus and con­tact, and sanc­tioned by the black­mail to secu­rity, is today, vir­tu­ally, that of all social rela­tions. All of social dis­course is there, and on this level as well as on that of the treat­ment of cul­ture, Beaubourg fla­grantly con­tra­dicts its explicit objec­tives, a nice mon­u­ment to our moder­nity. It is nice to think that the idea did not come to some rev­o­lu­tion­ary spirit, but to the logi­cians of the estab­lished order, deprived of all crit­i­cal intel­li­gence, and thus closer to the truth, capa­ble, in their obsti­nacy, of putting in place a machine that is fun­da­men­tally uncon­trol­lable, that in its very suc­cess escapes them, and that is the most exact reflec­tion, even in its con­tra­dic­tions, of the cur­rent state of things.
Cer­tainly, all the cul­tural con­tents of Beaubourg are anachro­nis­tic, because only an empty inte­rior could cor­re­spond to this archi­tec­tural enve­lope. The gen­eral impres­sion being that every­thing here has come out of a coma, that every­thing wants to be ani­ma­tion and is only rean­i­ma­tion, and that this is good because cul­ture is dead, a con­di­tion that Beaubourg admirably retraces, but in a dis­hon­est fash­ion, whereas one should have tri­umphantly accepted this death and erected a mon­u­ment or an anti-mon­u­ment equiv­a­lent to the phal­lic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. Mon­u­ment to total dis­con­nec­tion, to hyper­re­al­ity and to the implo­sion of cul­ture-achieved today for us in the effect of tran­sis­tor­ized cir­cuits always threat­ened by a gigan­tic short cir­cuit.
Beaubourg is already an impe­rial com­pres­sion—figure of a cul­ture already crushed by its own weight—like moving auto­mo­biles sud­denly frozen in a geo­met­ric solid. Like the cars of Caesar, sur­vivors of an ideal acci­dent, no longer exter­nal, but inter­nal to the metal­lic and mechan­i­cal struc­ture, and which would have pro­duced tons of cubic scrap iron, where the chaos of tubes, levers, frames, of metal and human flesh inside is tai­lored to the geo­met­ric size of the small­est pos­si­ble space—thus the cul­ture of Beaubourg is ground, twisted, cut up, and pressed into its small­est simple ele­ments—a bundle of defunct trans­mis­sions and metab­o­lisms, frozen like a sci­ence-fic­tion mecanoid.
But instead of break­ing and com­press­ing all cul­ture here in this car­cass that in any case has the appear­ance of a com­pres­sion, instead of that, one exhibits Caesar there. One exhibits Dubuf­fet and the coun­ter­cul­ture, whose inverse sim­u­la­tion acts as a ref­er­en­tial for the defunct cul­ture. In this car­cass that could have served as a mau­soleum to the use­less oper­a­tional­ity of signs, one reex­hibits Tinguely’s ephemeral and autode­struc­tive machines under the sign of the eter­nity of cul­ture. Thus one neu­tral­izes every­thing together: Tinguely is embalmed in the museal insti­tu­tion, Beaubourg falls back on its sup­posed artis­tic con­tents.
For­tu­nately, this whole sim­u­lacrum of cul­tural values is anni­hi­lated in advance by the exter­nal archi­tec­ture.12 Because this archi­tec­ture, with its net­works of tubes and the look it has of being an expo or world’s fair build­ing, with its (cal­cu­lated?) fragility deter­ring any tra­di­tional men­tal­ity or mon­u­men­tal­ity, overtly pro­claims that our time will never again be that of dura­tion, that our only tem­po­ral­ity is that of the accel­er­ated cycle and of recy­cling, that of the cir­cuit and of the tran­sit of fluids. Our only cul­ture in the end is that of hydro­car­bons, that of refin­ing, crack­ing, break­ing cul­tural mol­e­cules and of their recom­bi­na­tion into syn­the­sized prod­ucts. This, the Beaubourg Museum wishes to con­ceal, but the Beaubourg cadaver pro­claims. And this is what under­lies the beauty of the 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 poly­va­lent space: cul­ture is a site of the secret, of seduc­tion, of ini­ti­a­tion, of a restrained and highly rit­u­al­ized sym­bolic exchange. Noth­ing can be done about it. Too bad for the masses, too bad for Beaubourg.
What should, then, have been placed in Beaubourg?
Noth­ing. The void that would have sig­ni­fied the dis­ap­pear­ance of any cul­ture of mean­ing and aes­thetic sen­ti­ment. But this is still too roman­tic and destruc­tive, this void would still have had value as a mas­ter­piece of anti­cul­ture.
Per­haps revolv­ing strobe lights and gyro­scopic lights, stri­at­ing the space, for which the crowd would have pro­vided the moving base ele­ment?
In fact, Beaubourg illus­trates very well that an order of sim­u­lacra only estab­lishes itself on the alibi of the pre­vi­ous order. Here, a cadaver all in flux and sur­face con­nec­tions gives itself as con­tent a tra­di­tional cul­ture of depth. An order of prior sim­u­lacra (that of mean­ing) fur­nishes the empty sub­stance of a sub­se­quent order, which, itself, no longer even knows the dis­tinc­tion between sig­ni­fier and sig­ni­fied, nor between form and con­tent.
The ques­tion: “What should have been placed in Beaubourg?” is thus absurd. It cannot be answered because the top­i­cal dis­tinc­tion between inte­rior and exte­rior should no longer be posed. There lies our truth, the truth of Möbius-doubt­less an unre­al­iz­able utopia, but which Beaubourg still points to as right, to the degree to which any of its con­tents is a coun­ter­mean­ing and anni­hi­lated in advance by the form.
Yet-yet … if you had to have some­thing in Beaubourg—it should have been a labyrinth, a com­bi­na­tory, infi­nite library, an aleatory redis­tri­bu­tion of des­tinies through games or lot­ter­ies—in short, the uni­verse of Borges—or even the cir­cu­lar Ruins: the slowed-down enchain­ment of indi­vid­u­als dreamed up by each other (not a dream­world Dis­ney­land, a lab­o­ra­tory of prac­ti­cal fic­tion). An exper­i­men­ta­tion with all the dif­fer­ent pro­cesses of rep­re­sen­ta­tion: defrac­tion, implo­sion, slow motion, aleatory link­age and decou­pling—a bit like at the Explorato­rium in San Fran­cisco or in the novels of Philip K. Dick—in short a cul­ture of sim­u­la­tion and of fas­ci­na­tion, and not always one of pro­duc­tion and mean­ing: this is what might be pro­posed that would not be a mis­er­able anti­cul­ture. Is it pos­si­ble? Not here, evi­dently. But this cul­ture takes place else­where, every­where, nowhere. From today, the only real cul­tural prac­tice, that of the masses, ours (there is no longer a dif­fer­ence), is a manip­u­la­tive, aleatory prac­tice, a labyrinthine prac­tice of signs, and one that no longer has any mean­ing.
In another way, how­ever, it is not true that there is no coher­ence between form and con­tent at Beaubourg. It is true if one gives any cre­dence to the offi­cial cul­tural project. But exactly the oppo­site occurs there. Beaubourg is noth­ing but a huge effort to trans­mute this famous tra­di­tional cul­ture of mean­ing into the aleatory order of signs, into an order of sim­u­lacra (the third) that is com­pletely homo­ge­neous with the flux and pipes of the facade. And it is in order to pre­pare the masses for this new semi­ur­gic order that one brings them together here—with the oppo­site pre­text of accul­tur­at­ing them to mean­ing and depth.
One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a mon­u­ment of cul­tural deter­rence. Within a museal sce­nario that only serves to keep up the human­ist fic­tion of cul­ture, it is a ver­i­ta­ble fash­ion­ing of the death of cul­ture that takes place, and it is a ver­i­ta­ble cul­tural mourn­ing for which the masses are joy­ously gath­ered.
And they throw them­selves at it. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses throw them­selves at it not because they sali­vate for that cul­ture which they have been denied for cen­turies, but because they have for the first time the oppor­tu­nity to mas­sively par­tic­i­pate in this great mourn­ing of a cul­ture that, in the end, they have always detested.
The mis­un­der­stand­ing is there­fore com­plete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cul­tural mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of the masses. The masses, them­selves, rush there to enjoy this exe­cu­tion, this dis­mem­ber­ment, this oper­a­tional pros­ti­tu­tion of a cul­ture finally truly liq­ui­dated, includ­ing all coun­ter­cul­ture that is noth­ing but its apoth­e­o­sis. The masses rush toward Beaubourg as they rush toward dis­as­ter sites, with the same irre­sistible elan. Better: they are the dis­as­ter of Beaubourg. Their number, their stam­pede, their fas­ci­na­tion, their itch to see every­thing is objec­tively a deadly and cat­a­strophic behav­ior for the whole under­tak­ing. Not only does their weight put the build­ing in danger, but their adhe­sion, their curios­ity anni­hi­lates the very con­tents of this cul­ture of ani­ma­tion. This rush can no longer be mea­sured against what was pro­posed as the cul­tural objec­tive, it is its rad­i­cal nega­tion, in both its excess and suc­cess. It is thus the masses who assume the role of cat­a­strophic agent in this struc­ture of catas­tro­phe, it is the masses them­selves who put an end to mass cul­ture.
Cir­cu­lat­ing in the space of trans­parency, the masses are cer­tainly con­verted into flux, but at the same time, through their opac­ity and iner­tia, they put an end to this “poly­va­lent” space. One invites the masses to par­tic­i­pate, to sim­u­late, to play with the models—they go one better: they par­tic­i­pate and manip­u­late so well that they efface all the mean­ing one wants to give to the oper­a­tion and put the very infra­struc­ture of the edi­fice in danger. Thus, always a sort of parody, a hyper­sim­u­la­tion in response to cul­tural sim­u­la­tion, trans­forms the masses, who should only be the live­stock of cul­ture, into the agents of the exe­cu­tion of this cul­ture, of which Beaubourg was only the shame­ful incar­na­tion.
One must applaud this suc­cess of cul­tural deter­rence. All the antiartists, left­ists, and those who hold cul­ture in con­tempt have never even gotten close to approach­ing the dis­suas­sive effi­cacy of this mon­u­men­tal black hole that is Beaubourg. It is a truly rev­o­lu­tion­ary oper­a­tion, pre­cisely because it is invol­un­tary, insane and uncon­trolled, whereas any oper­a­tion meant to put an end to cul­ture only serves, as one knows, to res­ur­rect it.
To tell the truth, the only con­tent of Beaubourg is the masses them­selves, whom the build­ing treats like a con­verter, like a black box, or, in terms of input-output, just like a refin­ery han­dles petro­leum prod­ucts or a flood of unpro­cessed mate­rial.
It has never been so clear that the con­tent—here, cul­ture, else­where, infor­ma­tion or com­modi­ties—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 flux. An immense to-and-fro move­ment sim­i­lar to that of sub­ur­ban com­muters, absorbed and ejected at fixed times by their work­place. And it is pre­cisely work that is at issue here—a work of test­ing, polling, and directed inter­ro­ga­tion: the people come here to select objects—responses to all the ques­tions they might ask them­selves, or rather they come them­selves in response to the func­tional and directed ques­tion that the objects con­sti­tute. More than a chain of work it is thus a ques­tion of a pro­gram­matic dis­ci­pline whose con­straints have been effaced behind a veneer of tol­er­ance. Well beyond tra­di­tional insti­tu­tions of cap­i­tal, the hyper­mar­ket, or the Beaubourg “hyper­mar­ket of cul­ture,” is already the model of all future forms of con­trolled social­iza­tion: reto­tal­iza­tion in a homo­ge­neous space-time of all the dis­persed func­tions of the body and of social life (work, leisure, media cul­ture), retran­scrip­tion of all the con­tra­dic­tory cur­rents in terms of inte­grated cir­cuits. Space-time of a whole oper­a­tional sim­u­la­tion of social life.
For that, the mass of con­sumers must be equiv­a­lent or homol­o­gous to the mass of prod­ucts. It is the con­fronta­tion and the fusion of these two masses that occurs in the hyper­mar­ket as it does at Beaubourg, and that makes of them some­thing very dif­fer­ent from the tra­di­tional sites of cul­ture (mon­u­ments, muse­ums, gal­leries, libraries, com­mu­nity arts cen­ters, etc.). Here a crit­i­cal mass beyond which the com­mod­ity becomes hyper­com­mod­ity and cul­ture hyper­cul­ture, is elab­o­rated—that is to say no longer linked to dis­tinct exchanges or deter­mined needs, but to a kind of total descrip­tive uni­verse, or inte­grated cir­cuit that implo­sion tra­verses through and through—inces­sant cir­cu­la­tion of choices, read­ings, ref­er­ences, marks, decod­ing. Here cul­tural objects, as else­where the objects of con­sump­tion, have no other end than to main­tain you in a state of mass inte­gra­tion, of tran­sis­tor­ized flux, of a mag­ne­tized mol­e­cule. It is what one comes to learn in a hyper­mar­ket: hyper­re­al­ity of the com­mod­ity—it is what one comes to learn at Beaubourg: the hyper­re­al­ity of cul­ture.
Already with the tra­di­tional museum this cut­ting up, this regroup­ing, this inter­fer­ence of all cul­tures, this uncon­di­tional aes­theti­ciza­tion that con­sti­tutes the hyper­re­al­ity of cul­ture begins, but the museum is still a memory. Never, as it did here, has cul­ture lost its memory in the ser­vice of stock­pil­ing and func­tional redis­tri­bu­tion. And this trans­lates a more gen­eral fact: that through­out the “civ­i­lized” world the con­struc­tion of stock­piles of objects has brought with it the com­ple­men­tary process of stock­piles of people—the line, wait­ing, traf­fic jams, con­cen­tra­tion, the camp. That is “mass pro­duc­tion,” not in the sense of a mas­sive pro­duc­tion or for use by the masses, but the pro­duc­tion of the masses. The masses as the final prod­uct of all social­ity, and, at the same time, as putting an end to social­ity, because these masses that one wants us to believe are the social, are on the con­trary the site of the implo­sion of the social. The masses are the increas­ingly dense sphere in which the whole social comes to be imploded, and to be devoured in an unin­ter­rupted process of sim­u­la­tion.
Whence this con­cave mirror: it is from seeing the masses in the inte­rior that the masses will be tempted to rush in. Typ­i­cal mar­ket­ing method: the whole ide­ol­ogy of trans­parency here takes on its mean­ing. Or again: it is in stag­ing a reduced ideal model that one hopes for an accel­er­ated grav­i­ta­tion, an auto­matic agglu­ti­na­tion of cul­ture as an auto­matic agglom­er­a­tion of the masses. Same process: nuclear oper­a­tion of a chain reac­tion, or spec­u­lar oper­a­tion of white magic.
Thus for the first time, Beaubourg is at the level of cul­ture what the hyper­mar­ket is at the level of the com­mod­ity: the per­fect cir­cu­la­tory oper­a­tor, the demon­stra­tion of any­thing (com­mod­ity, cul­ture, crowd, com­pressed air) through its own accel­er­ated cir­cu­la­tion.
But if the supply of objects brings along with it the stock­pil­ing of men, the latent vio­lence in the supply of objects brings with it the inverse vio­lence of men.
Every stock is vio­lent, and there is a spe­cific vio­lence in any mass of men also, because of the fact that it implodes—a vio­lence proper to its grav­i­ta­tion, to its den­si­fi­ca­tion around its own locus of iner­tia. The masses are a locus of iner­tia and through that a locus of a com­pletely new, inex­pli­ca­ble vio­lence dif­fer­ent from explo­sive vio­lence.
Crit­i­cal mass, implo­sive mass. Beyond thirty thou­sand it poses the risk of “bend­ing” the struc­ture of Beaubourg. If the masses mag­ne­tized by the struc­ture become a destruc­tive vari­able of the struc­ture itself—if those who con­ceived of the project wanted this (but how to hope for this?), if they thus pro­grammed the chance of putting an end with one blow to both archi­tec­ture and cul­ture—then Beaubourg con­sti­tutes the most auda­cious object and the most suc­cess­ful hap­pen­ing of the cen­tury!
Make Beaubourg bend! New motto of a rev­o­lu­tion­ary order. Use­less to set fire to it, use­less to con­test it. Do it! It is the best way of destroy­ing it. The suc­cess of Beaubourg is no longer a mys­tery: the people go there for that, they throw them­selves on this build­ing, whose fragility already breathes catas­tro­phe, with the single goal of making it bend.
Cer­tainly they obey the imper­a­tive of deter­rence: one gives them an object to con­sume, a cul­ture to devour, an edi­fice to manip­u­late. But at the same time they expressly aim, and with­out know­ing it, at this anni­hi­la­tion. The onslaught is the only act the masses can pro­duce as such—a pro­jec­tile mass that chal­lenges the edi­fice of mass cul­ture, that wittly replies with its weight (that is to say with the char­ac­ter­is­tic most deprived of mean­ing, the stu­pid­est, the least cul­tural one they pos­sess) to the chal­lenge of cul­tur­al­ity thrown at it by Beaubourg. To the chal­lenge of mass accul­tur­a­tion to a ster­il­ized cul­ture, the masses respond with a destruc­tive irrup­tion, which is pro­longed in a brutal manip­u­la­tion. To mental deter­rence the masses respond with a direct phys­i­cal deter­rence. It is their own chal­lenge. Their ruse, which is to respond in the very terms by which they are solicited, but beyond that, to respond to the sim­u­la­tion in which one impris­ons them with an enthu­si­as­tic social process that sur­passes the objec­tives of the former and acts as a destruc­tive hyper­sim­u­la­tion.13
People have the desire to take every­thing, to pil­lage every­thing, to swal­low every­thing, to manip­u­late every­thing. Seeing, deci­pher­ing, learn­ing does not touch them. The only mas­sive affect is that of manip­u­la­tion. The orga­niz­ers (and the artists and intel­lec­tu­als) are fright­ened by this uncon­trol­lable watch­ful­ness, because they never count on any­thing but the appren­tice­ship of the masses to the spec­ta­cle of cul­ture. They never count on this active, destruc­tive fas­ci­na­tion, a brutal and orig­i­nal response to the gift of an incom­pre­hen­si­ble cul­ture, an attrac­tion that has all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of break­ing and enter­ing and of the vio­la­tion of a sanc­tu­ary.
Beaubourg could have or should have dis­ap­peared the day after the inau­gu­ra­tion, dis­man­tled and kid­napped by the crowd, which would have been the only pos­si­ble response to the absurd chal­lenge of the trans­parency and democ­racy of cul­ture—each person taking away a fetishized bolt of this cul­ture itself fetishized.
The people come to touch, they look as if they were touch­ing, their gaze is only an aspect of tac­tile manip­u­la­tion. It is cer­tainly a ques­tion of a tac­tile uni­verse, no longer a visual or dis­cur­sive one, and the people are directly impli­cated in a process: to manip­u­late/to be manip­u­lated, to ven­ti­late/to be ven­ti­lated, to cir­cu­late/to make cir­cu­late, which is no longer of the order of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, nor of dis­tance, nor of reflec­tion. It is some­thing that is part of panic, and of a world in panic.
Panic in slow motion, no exter­nal vari­able. It is the vio­lence inter­nal to a sat­u­rated ensem­ble. Implo­sion.
Beaubourg cannot even burn, every­thing is fore­seen. Fire, explo­sion, destruc­tion are no longer the imag­i­nary alter­na­tive to this type of build­ing. It is implo­sion that is the form of abol­ish­ing the “qua­ter­nary” world, both cyber­netic and com­bi­na­tory.
Sub­ver­sion, vio­lent destruc­tion is what cor­re­sponds to a mode of pro­duc­tion. To a uni­verse of net­works, of com­bi­na­tory theory, and of flow cor­re­spond rever­sal and implo­sion.
The same for insti­tu­tions, the state, power, etc. The dream of seeing all that explode by dint of con­tra­dic­tions is pre­cisely noth­ing but a dream. What is pro­duced in real­ity is that the insti­tu­tions implode of them­selves, by dint of ram­i­fi­ca­tions, feed­back, overde­vel­oped con­trol cir­cuits. Power implodes, this is its cur­rent mode of dis­ap­pear­ance.
Such is the case for the city. Fires, war, plague, rev­o­lu­tions, crim­i­nal marginal­ity, catas­tro­phes: the whole prob­lem­atic of the antic­ity, of the neg­a­tiv­ity inter­nal or exter­nal to the city, has some archaic rela­tion to its true mode of anni­hi­la­tion.
Even the sce­nario of the under­ground city—the Chi­nese ver­sion of the burial of struc­tures—is naive. The city does not repeat itself any longer accord­ing to a schema of repro­duc­tion still depen­dent on the gen­eral schema of pro­duc­tion, or accord­ing to a schema of resem­blance still depen­dent on a schema of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. (That is how one still restored after the Second World War.) The city no longer revives, even deep down it is remade start­ing from a sort of genetic code that makes it pos­si­ble to repeat it indef­i­nitely start­ing with an accu­mu­lated cyber­netic memory. Gone even the Bor­ge­sian utopia, of the map coex­ten­sive with the ter­ri­tory and dou­bling it in its entirety: today the sim­u­lacrum no longer goes by way of the double and of dupli­ca­tion, but by way of genetic minia­tur­iza­tion. End of rep­re­sen­ta­tion and implo­sion, there also, of the whole space in an infin­i­tes­i­mal memory, which for­gets noth­ing, and which belongs to no one. Sim­u­la­tion of an imma­nent, increas­ingly dense, irre­versible order, one that is poten­tially sat­u­rated and that will never again wit­ness the lib­er­at­ing explo­sion.
We were a cul­ture of lib­er­at­ing vio­lence (ratio­nal­ity). Whether it be that of cap­i­tal, of the lib­er­a­tion of pro­duc­tive forces, of the irre­versible exten­sion of the field of reason and of the field of value, of the con­quered and col­o­nized space includ­ing the uni­ver­sal—whether it be that of the rev­o­lu­tion, which antic­i­pates the future forms of the social and of the energy of the social—the schema is the same: that of an expand­ing sphere, whether through slow or vio­lent phases, that of a lib­er­ated energy—the imag­i­nary of radi­a­tion.
The vio­lence that accom­pa­nies it is that of a wider world: it is that of pro­duc­tion. This vio­lence is dialec­ti­cal, ener­getic, cathar­tic. It is the one we have learned to ana­lyze and that is famil­iar to us: that which traces the paths of the social and which leads to the sat­u­ra­tion of the whole field of the social. It is a vio­lence that is deter­mined, ana­lyt­i­cal, lib­er­at­ing.
A whole other vio­lence appears today, which we no longer know how to ana­lyze, because it escapes the tra­di­tional schema of explo­sive vio­lence: implo­sive vio­lence that no longer results from the exten­sion of a system, but from its sat­u­ra­tion and its retrac­tion, as is the case for phys­i­cal stel­lar sys­tems. A vio­lence that fol­lows an inor­di­nate den­si­fi­ca­tion of the social, the state of an over­reg­u­lated system, a net­work (of knowl­edge, infor­ma­tion, power) that is over­en­cum­bered, and of a hyper­trophic con­trol invest­ing all the inter­sti­tial path­ways.
This vio­lence is unin­tel­li­gi­ble to us because our whole imag­i­nary has as its axis the logic of expand­ing sys­tems. It is inde­ci­pher­able because unde­ter­mined. Per­haps it no longer even comes from the schema of inde­ter­mi­nacy. Because the aleatory models that have taken over from clas­si­cal models of deter­mi­na­tion and causal­ity are not fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent. They trans­late the pas­sage of defined sys­tems of expan­sion to sys­tems of pro­duc­tion and expan­sion on all levels—in a star or in a rhi­zome, it doesn’t matter—all the philoso­phies of the release of energy, of the irra­di­a­tion of inten­si­ties and of the molec­u­lar­iza­tion of desire go in the same direc­tion, that of a sat­u­ra­tion as far as the inter­sti­tial and the infin­ity of net­works. The dif­fer­ence from the molar to the molec­u­lar is only a mod­u­la­tion, the last per­haps, in the fun­da­men­tal ener­getic process of expand­ing sys­tems.
Some­thing else if we move from a mil­len­nial phase of the lib­er­a­tion and dis­con­nec­tion of ener­gies to a phase of implo­sion, after a kind of max­i­mum radi­a­tion (see Bataille’s con­cepts of loss and expen­di­ture in this sense, and the solar myth of an inex­haustible radi­a­tion, on which he founds his sump­tu­ary anthro­pol­ogy: it is the last explo­sive and radi­at­ing myth of our phi­los­o­phy, the last fire of arti­fice of a fun­da­men­tally gen­eral econ­omy, but this no longer has any mean­ing for us), to a phase of the rever­sion of the social—gigan­tic rever­sion of a field once the point of sat­u­ra­tion is reached. The stel­lar sys­tems also do not cease to exist once their radi­at­ing energy is dis­si­pated: they implode accord­ing to a process that is at first slow, and then pro­gres­sively accel­er­ates—they con­tract at a fab­u­lous speed, and become invo­lu­tive sys­tems, which absorb all the sur­round­ing ener­gies, so that they become black holes where the world as we know it, as radi­a­tion and indef­i­nite energy poten­tial, is abol­ished.
Per­haps the great metrop­o­lises—cer­tainly these if this hypoth­e­sis has any mean­ing—have become sites of implo­sion in this sense, sites of the absorp­tion and reab­sorp­tion of the social itself whose golden age, con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with the double con­cept of cap­i­tal and rev­o­lu­tion, 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 taking implo­sion for a neg­a­tive process -inert, regres­sive—like the one lan­guage imposes on us by exalt­ing the oppo­site terms of evo­lu­tion, of rev­o­lu­tion. Implo­sion is a process spe­cific to incal­cu­la­ble con­se­quences. May 1968 was with­out a doubt the first implo­sive episode, that is to say con­trary to its rewrit­ing in terms of rev­o­lu­tion­ary prosopopeia, a first vio­lent reac­tion to the sat­u­ra­tion of the social, a retrac­tion, a chal­lenge to the hege­mony of the social, in con­tra­dic­tion, more­over, to the ide­ol­ogy of the par­tic­i­pants them­selves, who thought they were going fur­ther into the social—such is the imag­i­nary that still dom­i­nates us—and more­over a good part of the events of 1968 were still able to come from that rev­o­lu­tion­ary dynamic and explo­sive vio­lence, but some­thing else began at the same time there: the vio­lent invo­lu­tion of the social, deter­mined on that score, and the con­sec­u­tive and sudden implo­sion of power, in a brief moment of time, but that never stopped after­ward—fun­da­men­tally it is that which con­tin­ues, the implo­sion, of the social, of insti­tu­tions, of power—and not at all an unlo­cat­able rev­o­lu­tion­ary dynamic. On the con­trary, rev­o­lu­tion itself, the idea of rev­o­lu­tion also implodes, and this implo­sion car­ries weight­ier con­se­quences than the rev­o­lu­tion itself.
Cer­tainly, since 1968, and thanks to 1968, the social, like the desert, grows-par­tic­i­pa­tion, man­age­ment, gen­er­al­ized self-man­age­ment, etc.—but at the same time it comes close in mul­ti­ple places, more numer­ous than in 1968, to its dis­af­fec­tion and to its total rever­sion. Slow seism, intel­li­gi­ble to his­tor­i­cal reason.
Hypermarket and Hypercommodity
From thirty kilo­me­ters all around, the arrows point you toward these large triage cen­ters that are the hyper­mar­kets, toward this hyper­space of the com­mod­ity where in many regards a whole new social­ity is elab­o­rated. It remains to be seen how the hyper­mar­ket cen­tral­izes and redis­tributes a whole region and pop­u­la­tion, how it con­cen­trates and ratio­nal­izes time, tra­jec­to­ries, prac­tices—cre­at­ing an immense to-and-fro move­ment totally sim­i­lar to that of sub­ur­ban com­muters, absorbed and ejected at fixed times by their work place.
At the deep­est level, another kind of work is at issue here, the work of accul­tur­a­tion, of con­fronta­tion, of exam­i­na­tion, of the social code, and of the ver­dict: people go there to find and to select objects—responses to all the ques­tions they may ask them­selves; or, rather, they them­selves come in response to the func­tional and directed ques­tion that the objects con­sti­tute. The objects are no longer com­modi­ties: they are no longer even signs whose mean­ing and mes­sage one could deci­pher and appro­pri­ate for one­self, they are tests, they are the ones that inter­ro­gate us, and we are sum­moned to answer them, and the answer is included in the ques­tion. Thus all the mes­sages in the media func­tion in a sim­i­lar fash­ion: nei­ther infor­ma­tion nor com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but ref­er­en­dum, per­pet­ual test, cir­cu­lar response, ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the code.
No relief, no per­spec­tive, no van­ish­ing point where the gaze might risk losing itself, but a total screen where, in their unin­ter­rupted dis­play, the bill­boards and the prod­ucts them­selves act as equiv­a­lent and suc­ces­sive signs. There are employ­ees who are occu­pied solely in remak­ing the front of the stage, the sur­face dis­play, where a pre­vi­ous dele­tion by a con­sumer might have left some kind of a hole. The self-ser­vice also adds to this absence of depth: the same homo­ge­neous space, with­out medi­a­tion, brings together men and things—a space of direct manip­u­la­tion. But who manip­u­lates whom?
Even repres­sion is inte­grated as a sign in this uni­verse of sim­u­la­tion. Repres­sion become deter­rence is noth­ing but an extra sign in the uni­verse of per­sua­sion. The cir­cuits of sur­veil­lance cam­eras are them­selves part of the decor of sim­u­lacra. A per­fect sur­veil­lance on all fronts would require a heav­ier and more sophis­ti­cated mech­a­nism of con­trol than that of the store itself. It would not be prof­itable. It is thus an allu­sion to repres­sion, a “signal” of this order, that is put in place; this sign can thus coex­ist with all the others, and even with the oppo­site imper­a­tive, for exam­ple those that huge bill­boards express by invit­ing you to relax and to choose in com­plete seren­ity. These bill­boards, in fact, observe and surveil you as well, or as badly, as the “polic­ing” tele­vi­sion. The latter looks at you, you look at your­self in it, mixed with the others, it is the mirror with­out sil­ver­ing (tain) in the activ­ity of con­sump­tion, a game of split­ting in two and dou­bling that closes this world on itself.
The hyper­mar­ket cannot be sep­a­rated from the high­ways that sur­round and feed it, from the park­ing lots blan­keted in auto­mo­biles, from the com­puter ter­mi­nal—fur­ther still, in con­cen­tric cir­cles—from the whole town as a total func­tional screen of activ­i­ties. The hyper­mar­ket resem­bles a giant mon­tage fac­tory, because, instead of being linked to the chain of work by a con­tin­u­ous ratio­nal con­straint, the agents (or the patients), mobile and decen­tered, give the impres­sion of pass­ing through aleatory cir­cuits from one point of the chain to another. Sched­ules, selec­tion, buying are aleatory as well, in con­trast to work prac­tices. But it is still a ques­tion of a chain, of a pro­gram­matic dis­ci­pline, whose taboos are effaced beneath a veneer of tol­er­ance, facil­ity, and hyper­re­al­ity. The hyper­mar­ket is already, beyond the fac­tory and tra­di­tional insti­tu­tions of cap­i­tal, the model of all future forms of con­trolled social­iza­tion: reto­tal­iza­tion in a homo­ge­neous space—time of all the dis­persed func­tions of the body, and of social life (work, leisure, food, hygiene, trans­porta­tion, media, cul­ture); retran­scrip­tion of the con­tra­dic­tory fluxes in terms of inte­grated cir­cuits; space—time of a whole oper­a­tional sim­u­la­tion of social life, of a whole struc­ture of living and traf­fic.
A model of directed antic­i­pa­tion, the hyper­mar­ket (espe­cially in the United States) pre­ex­ists the met­ro­pol­i­tan area; it is what gives rise to metro areas, whereas the tra­di­tional market was in the heart of a city, a place where the city and the coun­try came to rub elbows. The hyper­mar­ket is the expres­sion of a whole life­style in which not only the coun­try but the town as well have dis­ap­peared to make room for “the metro area”—a com­pletely delim­ited func­tional urban zoning, of which the hyper­mar­ket is the equiv­a­lent, the micro­model, on the level of con­sump­tion. But the role of the hyper­mar­ket goes far beyond “con­sump­tion,” and the objects no longer have a spe­cific real­ity there: what is pri­mary is their serial, cir­cu­lar, spec­tac­u­lar arrange­ment—the future model of social rela­tions.
The “form” hyper­mar­ket can thus help us under­stand what is meant by the end of moder­nity. The large cities have wit­nessed the birth, in about a cen­tury (1850-1950), of a gen­er­a­tion of large, “modern” stores (many car­ried this name in one way or another), but this fun­da­men­tal mod­ern­iza­tion, linked to that of trans­porta­tion, did not over­throw the urban struc­ture. The cities remained cities, whereas the new cities are satel­lited by the hyper­mar­ket or the shop­ping center, ser­viced by a pro­grammed traf­fic net­work, and cease being cities to become met­ro­pol­i­tan areas. A new mor­pho­gen­e­sis has appeared, which comes from the cyber­netic kind (that is to say, repro­duc­ing at the level of the ter­ri­tory, of the home, of tran­sit, the sce­nar­ios of molec­u­lar con­trol that are those of the genetic code), and whose form is nuclear and satel­litic. The hyper­mar­ket as nucleus. The city, even a modern one, no longer absorbs it. It is the hyper­mar­ket that estab­lishes an orbit along which sub­ur­ban­izaiton moves. It func­tions as an implant for the new aggre­gates, as the uni­ver­sity or even the fac­tory some­times also does—no longer the nine­teenth-cen­tury fac­tory nor the decen­tral­ized fac­tory that, with­out break­ing the orbit of the city, is installed in the sub­urbs, but the mon­tage fac­tory, auto­mated by elec­tronic con­trols, that is to say cor­re­spond­ing to a totally deter­ri­to­ri­al­ized func­tion and mode of work. With this fac­tory, as with the hyper­mar­ket or the new uni­ver­sity, one is no longer deal­ing with func­tions (com­merce, work, knowl­edge, leisure) that are auton­o­mized and dis­placed (which still char­ac­ter­izes the “modern” unfold­ing of the city), but with a model of the dis­in­te­gra­tion of func­tions, of the inde­ter­mi­nacy of func­tions, and of the dis­in­te­gra­tion of the city itself, which is trans­planted out­side the city and treated as a hyper­real model, as the nucleus of a met­ro­pol­i­tan area based on syn­the­sis that no longer has any­thing to do with a city. Neg­a­tive satel­lites of the city that trans­late the end of the city, even of the modern city, as a deter­mined, qual­i­ta­tive space, as an orig­i­nal syn­the­sis of a soci­ety.
One could believe that this implan­ta­tion cor­re­sponds to the ratio­nal­iza­tion of diverse func­tions. But, in fact, from the moment a func­tion becomes hyper­spe­cial­ized to the point of being capa­ble of being pro­jected from every ele­ment on the ter­rain “keys in hand,” it loses the final­ity proper to it and becomes some­thing else alto­gether: a poly­func­tional nucleus, an ensem­ble of “black boxes” with mul­ti­ple input-out­puts, the locus of con­vec­tion and of destruc­tura­tion. These fac­to­ries and these uni­ver­si­ties are no longer fac­to­ries nor uni­ver­si­ties, and the hyper­mar­kets no longer have the qual­ity of a market. Strange new objects of which the nuclear power sta­tion is with­out a doubt the abso­lute model and from which radi­ates a kind of neu­tral­iza­tion of the ter­ri­tory, a power of deter­rence that, behind the appar­ent func­tion of these objects, with­out a doubt con­sti­tutes their fun­da­men­tal func­tion: the hyper­re­al­ity of func­tional nuclei that are no longer at all func­tional. These new objects are the poles of sim­u­la­tion around which is elab­o­rated, in con­trast to old train sta­tions, fac­to­ries, or tra­di­tional trans­porta­tion net­works, some­thing other than a “moder­nity”: a hyper­re­al­ity, a simul­tane­ity of all the func­tions, with­out a past, with­out a future, an oper­a­tional­ity on every level. And doubt­less also crises, or even new catas­tro­phes: May 1968 begins at Nan­terre, and not at the Sor­bonne, that is to say in a place where, for the first time in France, the hyper­func­tion­al­iza­tion “extra muros” of a place of learn­ing is equiv­a­lent to deter­ri­to­ri­al­iza­tion, to dis­af­fec­tion, to the loss of the func­tion and of the final­ity of knowl­edge in a pro­grammed neo­func­tional whole. There, a new, orig­i­nal vio­lence was born in response to the orbital satel­liza­tion of a model (knowl­edge, cul­ture) whose ref­er­en­tial is lost.
The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
We live in a world where there is more and more infor­ma­tion, and less and less mean­ing. Con­sider three hypothe­ses.
    • Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into “antimedia” (pirate radio, etc.).
    • Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon’s hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning.
    • Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media.
The third hypoth­e­sis is the most inter­est­ing but flies in the face of every com­monly held opin­ion. Every­where social­iza­tion is mea­sured by the expo­sure to media mes­sages. Who­ever is under­ex­posed to the media is des­o­cial­ized or vir­tu­ally aso­cial. Every­where infor­ma­tion is thought to pro­duce an accel­er­ated cir­cu­la­tion of mean­ing, a plus value of mean­ing homol­o­gous to the eco­nomic one that results from the accel­er­ated rota­tion of cap­i­tal. Infor­ma­tion is thought to create com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and even if the waste is enor­mous, a gen­eral con­sen­sus would have it that nev­er­the­less, as a whole, there be an excess of mean­ing, which is redis­tributed in all the inter­stices of the social—just as con­sen­sus would have it that mate­rial pro­duc­tion, despite its dys­func­tions and irra­tional­i­ties, opens onto an excess of wealth and social pur­pose. We are all com­plic­i­tous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our moder­nity, with­out which the cred­i­bil­ity of our social orga­ni­za­tion would col­lapse. Well, the fact is that it is col­laps­ing, and for this very reason: because where we think that infor­ma­tion pro­duces mean­ing, the oppo­site occurs.
Infor­ma­tion devours its own con­tent. It devours com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the social. And for two rea­sons.
1. Rather than cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion, it exhausts itself in the act of stag­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Rather than pro­duc­ing mean­ing, it exhausts itself in the stag­ing of mean­ing. A gigan­tic process of sim­u­la­tion that is very famil­iar. The nondi­rec­tive inter­view, speech, lis­ten­ers who call in, par­tic­i­pa­tion at every level, black­mail through speech: “You are con­cerned, you are the event, etc.” More and more infor­ma­tion is invaded by this kind of phan­tom con­tent, this home­o­pathic graft­ing, this awak­en­ing dream of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. A cir­cu­lar arrange­ment through which one stages the desire of the audi­ence, the antithe­ater of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which, as one knows, is never any­thing but the recy­cling in the neg­a­tive of the tra­di­tional insti­tu­tion, the inte­grated cir­cuit of the neg­a­tive. Immense ener­gies are deployed to hold this sim­u­lacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal des­im­u­la­tion that would con­front us in the face of the obvi­ous real­ity of a rad­i­cal loss of mean­ing.
It is use­less to ask if it is the loss of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that pro­duces this esca­la­tion in the sim­u­lacrum, or whether it is the sim­u­lacrum that is there first for dis­sua­sive ends, to short-cir­cuit in advance any pos­si­bil­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion (pre­ces­sion of the model that calls an end to the real). Use­less to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a cir­cu­lar process—that of sim­u­la­tion, that of the hyper­real. The hyper­re­al­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and of mean­ing. More real than the real, that is how the real is abol­ished. Thus not only com­mu­ni­ca­tion but the social func­tions in a closed cir­cuit, as a lure—to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in infor­ma­tion attach them­selves to this tau­to­log­i­cal proof that the system gives of itself by dou­bling the signs of an unlo­cat­able real­ity.
But one can believe that this belief is as ambigu­ous as that which was attached to myths in ancient soci­eties. One both believes and doesn’t. One does not ask one­self, “I know very well, but still.” A sort of inverse sim­u­la­tion in the masses, in each one of us, cor­re­sponds to this sim­u­la­tion of mean­ing and of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in which this system encloses us. To this tau­tol­ogy of the system the masses respond with ambiva­lence, to deter­rence they respond with dis­af­fec­tion, or with an always enig­matic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against think­ing that people believe in it: this is the trap of crit­i­cal think­ing that can only be exer­cised if it pre­sup­poses the naivete and stu­pid­ity of the masses.
2. Behind this exac­er­bated mise-en-scène of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the mass media, the pres­sure of infor­ma­tion pur­sues an irre­sistible destruc­tura­tion of the social.
Thus infor­ma­tion dis­solves mean­ing and dis­solves the social, in a sort of neb­u­lous state ded­i­cated not to a sur­plus of inno­va­tion, but, on the con­trary, to total entropy.14
Thus the media are pro­duc­ers not of social­iza­tion, but of exactly the oppo­site, of the implo­sion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macro­scopic exten­sion of the implo­sion of mean­ing at the micro­scopic level of the sign. This implo­sion should be ana­lyzed accord­ing to McLuhan’s for­mula, the medium is the mes­sage, the con­se­quences of which have yet to be exhausted.
That means that all con­tents of mean­ing are absorbed in the only dom­i­nant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event—what­ever the con­tents, whether they are con­form­ist or sub­ver­sive. A seri­ous prob­lem for all coun­ter­in­for­ma­tion, pirate radios, anti­me­dia, etc. But there is some­thing even more seri­ous, which McLuhan him­self did not see. Because beyond this neu­tral­iza­tion of all con­tent, one could still expect to manip­u­late the medium in its form and to trans­form the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the con­tent is wiped out, there is per­haps still a sub­ver­sive, rev­o­lu­tion­ary use value of the medium as such. That is—and this is where McLuhan’s for­mula leads, pushed to its limit—there is not only an implo­sion of the mes­sage in the medium, there is, in the same move­ment, the implo­sion of the medium itself in the real, the implo­sion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyper­real nebula, in which even the def­i­ni­tion and dis­tinct action of the medium can no longer be deter­mined.
Even the “tra­di­tional” status of the media them­selves, char­ac­ter­is­tic of moder­nity, is put in ques­tion. McLuhan’s for­mula, the medium is the mes­sage, which is the key for­mula of the era of sim­u­la­tion (the medium is the mes­sage—the sender is the receiver—the cir­cu­lar­ity of all poles—the end of panop­tic and per­spec­ti­val space—such is the alpha and omega of our moder­nity), this very for­mula must be imag­ined at its limit where, after all the con­tents and mes­sages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fun­da­men­tally, it is still the mes­sage that lends cred­i­bil­ity to the medium, that gives the medium its deter­mined, dis­tinct status as the inter­me­di­ary of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. With­out a mes­sage, the medium also falls into the indef­i­nite state char­ac­ter­is­tic of all our great sys­tems of judg­ment and value. A single model, whose effi­cacy is imme­di­ate, simul­ta­ne­ously gen­er­ates the mes­sage, the medium, and the “real.”
Finally, the medium is the mes­sage not only sig­ni­fies the end of the mes­sage, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the lit­eral sense of the word (I’m speak­ing par­tic­u­larly of elec­tronic mass media)—that is, of a medi­at­ing power between one real­ity and another, between one state of the real and another. Nei­ther in con­tent, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implo­sion sig­ni­fies. The absorp­tion of one pole into another, the short-cir­cuit­ing between poles of every dif­fer­en­tial system of mean­ing, the era­sure of dis­tinct terms and oppo­si­tions, includ­ing that of the medium and of the real—thus the impos­si­bil­ity of any medi­a­tion, of any dialec­ti­cal inter­ven­tion between the two or from one to the other. Cir­cu­lar­ity of all media effects. Hence the impos­si­bil­ity of mean­ing in the lit­eral sense of a uni­lat­eral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envis­age this crit­i­cal but orig­i­nal sit­u­a­tion at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is use­less to dream of rev­o­lu­tion through con­tent, use­less to dream of a rev­e­la­tion through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is inde­ci­pher­able.
The fact of this implo­sion of con­tents, of the absorp­tion of mean­ing, of the evanes­cence of the medium itself, of the reab­sorp­tion of every dia­lec­tic of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a total cir­cu­lar­ity of the model, of the implo­sion of the social in the masses, may seem cat­a­strophic and des­per­ate. But this is only the case in light of the ide­al­ism that dom­i­nates our whole view of infor­ma­tion. We all live by a pas­sion­ate ide­al­ism of mean­ing and of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, by an ide­al­ism of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through mean­ing, and, from this per­spec­tive, it is truly the catas­tro­phe of mean­ing that lies in wait for us.
But one must real­ize that “catas­tro­phe” has this “cat­a­strophic” mean­ing of end and anni­hi­la­tion only in rela­tion to a linear vision of accu­mu­la­tion, of pro­duc­tive final­ity, imposed 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 of the event,” to an impass­able hori­zon of mean­ing: beyond that noth­ing takes place that has mean­ing for us—but it suf­fices to get out of this ulti­ma­tum of mean­ing in order for the catas­tro­phe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilis­tic day of reck­on­ing, such as it func­tions in our con­tem­po­rary imag­i­nary.
Beyond mean­ing, there is the fas­ci­na­tion that results from the neu­tral­iza­tion and the implo­sion of mean­ing. Beyond the hori­zon of the social, there are the masses, which result from the neu­tral­iza­tion and the implo­sion of the social.
What is essen­tial today is to eval­u­ate this double chal­lenge—the chal­lenge of the masses to mean­ing and their silence (which is not at all a pas­sive resis­tance)—the chal­lenge to mean­ing that comes from the media and its fas­ci­na­tion. All the mar­ginal, alter­na­tive efforts to revive mean­ing are sec­ondary in rela­tion to that chal­lenge.
Evi­dently, there is a para­dox in this inex­tri­ca­ble con­junc­tion of the masses and the media: do the media neu­tral­ize mean­ing and pro­duce unformed [informe] or informed [infor­mée] masses, or is it the masses who vic­to­ri­ously resist the media by direct­ing or absorb­ing all the mes­sages that the media pro­duce with­out respond­ing to them? Some­time ago, in “Requiem for the Media,” I ana­lyzed and con­demned the media as the insti­tu­tion of an irre­versible model of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­out a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be under­stood at all as a strat­egy of power, but as a coun­ter­strat­egy of the masses them­selves when they encounter power. What then?
Are the mass media on the side of power in the manip­u­la­tion of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liq­ui­da­tion of mean­ing, in the vio­lence per­pe­trated on mean­ing, and in fas­ci­na­tion? Is it the media that induce fas­ci­na­tion in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spec­ta­cle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make them­selves into the vehi­cle of the moral con­dem­na­tion of ter­ror­ism and of the exploita­tion of fear for polit­i­cal ends, but simul­ta­ne­ously, in the most com­plete ambi­gu­ity, they prop­a­gate the brutal charm of the ter­ror­ist act, they are them­selves ter­ror­ists, inso­far as they them­selves march to the tune of seduc­tion (cf. Umberto Eco on this eter­nal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of ter­ror­ism, how can one find a good use of the media—there is none). The media carry mean­ing and coun­ter­mean­ing, they manip­u­late in all direc­tions at once, noth­ing can con­trol this process, they are the vehi­cle for the sim­u­la­tion inter­nal to the system and the sim­u­la­tion that destroys the system, accord­ing to an abso­lutely Möbian and cir­cu­lar logic—and it is exactly like this. There is no alter­na­tive to this, no log­i­cal res­o­lu­tion. Only a log­i­cal exac­er­ba­tion and a cat­a­strophic res­o­lu­tion.
With one cau­tion. We are face to face with this system in a double sit­u­a­tion and insol­u­ble double bind—exactly like chil­dren faced with the demands of the adult world. Chil­dren are simul­ta­ne­ously required to con­sti­tute them­selves as auton­o­mous sub­jects, respon­si­ble, free and con­scious, and to con­sti­tute them­selves as sub­mis­sive, inert, obe­di­ent, con­form­ing objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a con­tra­dic­tory demand he responds with a double strat­egy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the prac­tices of dis­obe­di­ence, of revolt, of eman­ci­pa­tion; in short, a total claim to sub­ject­hood. To the demand of being a sub­ject he opposes, just as obsti­nately and effi­ca­ciously, an object’s resis­tance, that is to say, exactly the oppo­site: child­ish­ness, hyper­con­formism, total depen­dence, pas­siv­ity, idiocy. Nei­ther strat­egy has more objec­tive value than the other. The sub­ject-resis­tance is today uni­lat­er­ally val­orized and viewed as pos­i­tive—just as in the polit­i­cal sphere only the prac­tices of free­dom, eman­ci­pa­tion, expres­sion, and the con­sti­tu­tion of a polit­i­cal sub­ject are seen as valu­able and sub­ver­sive. But this is to ignore the equal, and with­out a doubt supe­rior, impact of all the object prac­tices, of the renun­ci­a­tion of the sub­ject posi­tion and of mean­ing—pre­cisely the prac­tices of the masses—that we bury under the derisory terms of alien­ation and pas­siv­ity. The lib­er­at­ing prac­tices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the con­stant ulti­ma­tum we are given to con­sti­tute our­selves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of con­sti­tut­ing our­selves as sub­jects, of lib­er­at­ing our­selves, express­ing our­selves at what­ever cost, of voting, pro­duc­ing, decid­ing, speak­ing, par­tic­i­pat­ing, play­ing the game—a form of black­mail and ulti­ma­tum just as seri­ous as the other, even more seri­ous today. To a system whose argu­ment is oppres­sion and repres­sion, the strate­gic resis­tance is the lib­er­at­ing claim of sub­ject­hood. But this strat­egy is more reflec­tive of the ear­lier phase of the system, and even if we are still con­fronted with it, it is no longer the strate­gic ter­rain: the cur­rent argu­ment of the system is to max­i­mize speech, the max­i­mum pro­duc­tion of mean­ing. Thus the strate­gic resis­tance is that of the refusal of mean­ing and of the spoken word—or of the hyper­con­formist sim­u­la­tion of the very mech­a­nisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-recep­tion. It is the strat­egy of the masses: it is equiv­a­lent to return­ing to the system its own logic by dou­bling it, to reflect­ing mean­ing, like a mirror, with­out absorb­ing it. This strat­egy (if one can still speak of strat­egy) pre­vails today, because it was ush­ered in by that phase of the system which pre­vails.
To choose the wrong strat­egy is a seri­ous matter. All the move­ments that only play on lib­er­a­tion, eman­ci­pa­tion, on the res­ur­rec­tion of a sub­ject of his­tory, of the group, of the word based on “con­scious­ness rais­ing,” indeed a “rais­ing of the uncon­scious” of sub­jects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direc­tion of the system, whose imper­a­tive today is pre­cisely the over­pro­duc­tion and regen­er­a­tion of mean­ing and of speech.
Absolute Advertising, Ground-Zero Advertising
Today what we are expe­ri­enc­ing is the absorp­tion of all vir­tual modes of expres­sion into that of adver­tis­ing. All orig­i­nal cul­tural forms, all deter­mined lan­guages are absorbed in adver­tis­ing because it has no depth, it is instan­ta­neous and instan­ta­neously for­got­ten. Tri­umph of super­fi­cial form, of the small­est common denom­i­na­tor of all sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, degree zero of mean­ing, tri­umph of entropy over all pos­si­ble tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unar­tic­u­lated, instan­ta­neous form, with­out a past, with­out a future, with­out the pos­si­b­lity of meta­mor­pho­sis, has power over all the others. All cur­rent forms of activ­ity tend toward adver­tis­ing and most exhaust them­selves therein. Not nec­es­sar­ily adver­tis­ing itself, the kind that is pro­duced as such—but the form of adver­tis­ing, that of a sim­pli­fied oper­a­tional mode, vaguely seduc­tive, vaguely con­sen­sual (all the modal­i­ties are con­fused therein, but in an atten­u­ated, agi­tated mode). More gen­er­ally, the form of adver­tis­ing is one in which all par­tic­u­lar con­tents are annulled at the very moment when they can be tran­scribed into each other, whereas what is inher­ent to “weighty” enun­ci­a­tions, to artic­u­lated forms of mean­ing (or of style) is that they cannot be trans­lated into each other, any more than the rules of a game can be.
This long move­ment toward trans­lata­bil­ity and thus toward a com­plete com­bi­na­to­rial, which is that of the super­fi­cial trans­parency of every­thing, of their abso­lute adver­tis­ing (of which pro­fes­sional adver­tis­ing is, once again, only an episodic form), can be read in the vicis­si­tudes of pro­pa­ganda.
The whole scope of adver­tis­ing and pro­pa­ganda comes from the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion and the market crash of 1929. Both lan­guages of the masses, issu­ing from the mass pro­duc­tion of ideas, or com­modi­ties, their reg­is­ters, sep­a­rate at first, pro­gres­sively con­verge. Pro­pa­ganda becomes the mar­ket­ing and mer­chan­dis­ing of idea-forces, of polit­i­cal men and par­ties with their “trade­mark image.” Pro­pa­ganda approaches adver­tis­ing as it would the vehic­u­lar model of the only great and ver­i­ta­ble idea-force of this com­pet­ing soci­ety, the com­mod­ity and the mark. This con­ver­gence defines a soci­ety—ours—in which there is no longer any dif­fer­ence between the eco­nomic and the polit­i­cal, because the same lan­guage reigns in both, from one end to the other; a soci­ety there­fore where the polit­i­cal econ­omy, lit­er­ally speak­ing, is finally fully real­ized. That is to say dis­solved as a spe­cific power (as an his­tor­i­cal mode of social con­tra­dic­tion), res­o­lute, absorbed in a lan­guage with­out con­tra­dic­tions, like a dream, because tra­versed by purely super­fi­cial inten­si­ties.
A sub­se­quent stage is crossed once the very lan­guage of the social, after that of the polit­i­cal, becomes con­fused with this fas­ci­nat­ing solic­i­ta­tion of an agi­tated lan­guage, once the social turns itself into adver­tis­ing, turns itself over to the pop­u­lar vote by trying to impose its trade­mark image. From the his­tor­i­cal des­tiny that it was, the social itself fell to the level of a “col­lec­tive enter­prise” secur­ing its pub­lic­ity on every level. See what sur­plus value of the social each adver­tise­ment tries to pro­duce: werben werben (adver­tise adver­tise)—the solic­i­ta­tion of the social every­where, present on walls, in the hot and blood­less voices of female radio announc­ers, in the accents of the sound track and in the mul­ti­ple tonal­i­ties of the image track that is played every­where before our eyes. A social­ity every­where present, an abso­lute social­ity finally real­ized in abso­lute adver­tis­ing —that is to say, also totally dis­solved, a ves­tige of social­ity hal­lu­ci­nated on all the walls in the sim­pli­fied form of a demand of the social that is imme­di­ately met by the echo of adver­tis­ing. The social as a script, whose bewil­dered audi­ence we are.
Thus the form of adver­tis­ing has imposed itself and devel­oped at the expense of all the other lan­guages as an increas­ingly neu­tral, equiv­a­lent rhetoric, with­out affects, as an “asyn­tac­tic nebula,” Yves Stour­dzé would say, which envelops us from every side (and which at the same time elim­i­nates the hotly con­tro­ver­sial prob­lem of “belief” and effi­cacy: it does not offer sig­ni­fieds in which to invest, it offers a sim­pli­fied equiv­a­lence of all the for­merly dis­tinc­tive signs, and deters them with this very equiv­a­lence). This defines the limits of adver­tis­ing’s cur­rent power and the con­di­tions of its dis­ap­pear­ance, since today adver­tis­ing is no longer a stake, it has both “entered into our cus­toms” and at the same time escaped the social and moral dra­maturgy that it still rep­re­sented twenty years ago.
It is not that people no longer believe in it or that they have accepted it as rou­tine. It is that if its fas­ci­na­tion once lay in its power to sim­plify all lan­guages, today this power is stolen from it by another type of lan­guage that is even more sim­pli­fied and thus more func­tional: the lan­guages of com­puter sci­ence. The sequence model, the sound track, and the image track that adver­tis­ing, along with the other big media, offers us—the model of the com­bi­na­tory, equal dis­tri­bu­tion of all dis­courses that it pro­poses—this still rhetor­i­cal con­tin­uum of sounds, signs, sig­nals, slo­gans that it erects as a total envi­ron­ment is largely over­taken, pre­cisely in its func­tion of sim­u­la­tion, by the mag­netic tape, by the elec­tronic con­tin­uum that is in the process of being sil­hou­et­ted against the hori­zon of the end of this cen­tury. Micro­pro­cess­ing, dig­i­tal­ity, cyber­netic lan­guages go much fur­ther in the direc­tion of the abso­lute sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of pro­cesses than adver­tis­ing did on its humble still imag­i­nary and spec­tac­u­lar-level. And it is because these sys­tems go fur­ther that today they polar­ize the fas­ci­na­tion that for­merly devolved on adver­tis­ing. It is infor­ma­tion, in the sense of data pro­cess­ing, that will put an end to, that is already putting an end to the reign of adver­tis­ing. That is what inspires fear, and what is thrilling. The “thrill” of adver­tis­ing has been dis­placed onto com­put­ers and onto the minia­tur­iza­tion of every­day life by com­puter sci­ence.
The antic­i­pa­tory illus­tra­tion of this trans­for­ma­tion was Philip K. Dick’s papula—that tran­sis­tor­ized adver­tis­ing implant, a sort of broad­cast­ing leech, an elec­tronic par­a­site that attaches itself to the body and that is very hard to get rid of. But the papula is still an inter­me­di­ary form: it is already a kind of incor­po­rated pros­the­sis, but it still inces­santly repeats adver­tis­ing mes­sages. A hybrid, then, but a pre­fig­u­ra­tion of the psy­chotropic and dat­apro­cess­ing net­works of the auto­matic pilot­ing of indi­vid­u­als, next to which the “con­di­tion­ing” by adver­tis­ing looks like a delight­ful change in for­tune.
Cur­rently, the most inter­est­ing aspect of adver­tis­ing is its dis­ap­pear­ance, its dilu­tion as a spe­cific form, or even as a medium. Adver­tis­ing is no longer (was it ever?) a means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion or of infor­ma­tion. Or else it is over­taken by the mad­ness spe­cific to overde­vel­oped sys­tems, that of voting for itself at each moment, and thus of par­o­dy­ing itself. If at a given moment, the com­mod­ity was its own pub­lic­ity (there was no other) today pub­lic­ity has become its own com­mod­ity. It is con­fused with itself (and the eroti­cism with which it ridicu­lously cloaks itself is noth­ing but the auto­erotic index of a system that does noth­ing but des­ig­nate itself—whence the absur­dity of seeing in it an “alien­ation” of the female body).
As a medium become its own mes­sage (which makes it so that now there is a demand for adver­tis­ing in and of itself, and that thus the ques­tion of “believ­ing” in it or not is no longer even posed), adver­tis­ing is com­pletely in unison with the social, whose his­tor­i­cal neces­sity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social: a demand that the social func­tion like a busi­ness, a group of ser­vices, a mode of living or of sur­vival (the social must be saved just as nature must be pre­served: the social is our niche)—whereas for­merly it was a sort of rev­o­lu­tion in its very project. This is cer­tainly lost: the social has lost pre­cisely this power of illu­sion, it has fallen into the reg­is­ter of supply and demand, just as work has passed from being a force antag­o­nis­tic to cap­i­tal to the simple status of employ­ment, that is to say of goods (even­tu­ally rare) and ser­vices just like the others. One can thus create adver­tis­ing for work, the joy of find­ing work, just as one will be able to create adver­tis­ing for the social. And, today, true adver­tis­ing lies therein: in the design of the social, in the exal­ta­tion of the social in all its forms, in the fierce, obsti­nate reminder of a social, the need for which makes itself rudely felt.
Folk­loric dances in the metro, innu­mer­able cam­paigns for secu­rity, the slog