Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.
The Stockholm Syndrome, the Theatre of Cruelty, voluntary servitude, living coin, the ready made, the accursed share, the total social fact, dust-breeding, the perfect crime – we find all these figures in the reality-TV cocktail, in that potlatch of vacuousness. It even drags the judgement that condemns it into its vacuousness.
What is one to do against an enemy whose weapons are conformism and stupidity? Should one make oneself more conformist and more stupid? If his strategy lies in cunning and achievement, should one make oneself more cunning, more of an achiever? Should one make oneself more mediatic than the media?
But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.
Fortunately, there are other, more poetic ways of ridding oneself of freedom – that of gaming, for example, where what is at stake is not a freedom subject to the law, but a sovereignty subject to rules. A more subtle and paradoxical freedom which consists in a rigorous observance, an enchanted form of voluntary servitude that is, as it were, the miraculous combination of master and slave: in gaming no one is free, everyone is both the master and the slave of the game.
The old form of voluntary servitude was that of free men using that freedom paradoxically to turn themselves into serfs. The new voluntary servitude is that of men obeying the demand that they be free.
The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.
Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation.
Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfilment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping-ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events – thus becoming like the ‘dream’ of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, ‘real’ paternity being merely the fulfilment of the dream.
Let us turn our gaze towards the Southern lands, where only the melancholy light of origins shines.
In the past, catharsis was the purification of the passions by fire. Today it is their liquidation by flow.
Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion – in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real. Viral, pernicious thought, corrosive of meaning, generative of an erotic perception of reality’s turmoil.
Secondary-school pupils are demanding more school, more funding, more staff, more security. Nineteenth-century demands. School is finished. All we can do is transform it into a gigantic Web cafe. In their own heads, the school students have already moved over into multimedia and the twenty-first century, as is attested by the incongruity of the demonstrations, including the incongruity of the anachronistic violence of the hooligan element.
From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.
Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with them, since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any place or space-time, they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia.
But the object cannot be allowed to escape from ephemerality or from fashion.
We mustn’t believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia – we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real.
Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.
The balance of terror is the terror of balance.
But against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will also look for slowness – not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence, inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a secret here too.
In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.