Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.
I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned” – mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.
As soon as you enter the system to denounce it, you are automatically made a part of it. There is no ideal omega point today from which hard and fast judgments can be made. You can see that those who make accusations against the political class are the same ones who replenish it. The class is fed by the accusations made against it. Even the bluntest critic is caught up in this circularity.
A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.
The whole world thus becomes integrated as a spectacle into the domestic universe.
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have.
Are the mass media on the side of the 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?
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.
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 strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.
The presence is not deleted before the vacuum is cleared before a redoubling of presence that erases the opposition of the presence and absence.
Intellectuals are doomed to disappear when artificial intelligence bursts on the scene, just as the heroes of silent cinema disappeared with the coming of the talkies. We are all Buster Keatons.
It is to the unknown one yields most impulsively; it is toward the unknown that one feels the most total, the most instinctive obligation.
All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation of crime.
The feminine seduces because it is never where it thinks it is, or where it thinks itself.
Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a ‘philosophy’ of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.
All these things – Factories, asylums, prisons, schools still exist and will no doubt continue to exist for an indefinite period as warning signs, to divert the reality of the domination of capital into an imaginary materiality. There have always been churches to hide the death of God, or to hide the fact that the God is everywhere, which amounts to the same thing.
In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty for everyone, then, since the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the more millions of individuals there are who are set apart by some tiny peculiarity. The slightest vibration in a statistical model, the tiniest whim of a computer are enough to bathe some piece of abnormal behaviour, however banal, in a fleeting glow of fame.
Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.
If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.