born 29 Reims.fr, father- civil servant, studied German at Sorbonne, phd: “Thèse de troisième cycle: Le Système des objets” (66, under Lefebvre), habilitation: “L’Autre par lui-même” (72)
prof of German in Lycee 58-66, prof of sociology at uni of Nanterre 72-87, prof of phil of culture and media criticism at European Graduate School 01-
scientific director at IRIS at uni de Paris Dauphine 86-90
the mirror of production (75)
simulacres et simulation (81)
the gulf war did not take place (95)
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america (86)
Instead of having experiences, people observe spectacles, via real or metaphorical control screens.
Instead of the real, we have simulation and simulacra.
4 logics of objects = 4 categories for value of commodities:
– functional value = Marx’ use value, “a pen writes”, “diamond ring adorning otherwise empty hand”
– exchange value, economic value, “a pen is worth three pencils”, “diamond ring as 3 months’ salary”
– symbolic exchange value, value in relation to another subject, “pen as a graduation present or speaker’s gift”, “diamond ring as love between 2 individuals”
– sign exchange value, value in system of objects, “pen as a part of desk set, or particular pen as a social status”, “biggest diamond ring as a highest social status”
keywords: realtime, end of history, disappearance.
..What’s beyond the end? Well, beyond the end, there is virtual reality, that is to say, the horizon of a programmed reality in which all our physiological and social functions (memory, affect, intelligence, sexuality, work) gradually become useless. Beyond the end, in the era of the transpolitical, the transaesthetic, or the transsexual, all our desiring machines first become tiny mechanisms of spectacle, and finally turn into celibate machines which exhaust all their capabilities in an empty vortex, as in Duchamp’s work. The countdown is the code for the automatic disappearance of the world. What’s left to be done when everything is already calculated, subtracted, realized in advance? Our problem is no longer what to do with real events, with real violence, but what to do with events that did not take place, that never had the time to take place? No longer the question: what are you doing after the orgy, the orgy of history, of freedom, of modernity? But rather: what are you doing when the orgy no longer takes place?..
..History, for example, ends with information and the creation of the instantaneous event..
..The retrospective curving of historical space, which in a sense resembles the recurrence of physical and cosmological space, is perhaps the big discovery of the end of the millennium..
..There is no better allegory for this fatal countdown than Arthur Clarke’s novel Nine Billion Names of God. A community of Tibetan monks is in charge of detailing and copying down all the names given to God. There are nine billion names. According to the prophecy, at the end of the countdown, once the last name is written down, the world comes to an end. But the monks are getting tired and, to go faster, they turn to IBM experts who come to the rescue with a bunch of computers. The work is done in three months. It is as if world history were to end in a few seconds thanks to a virtual intervention. Unfortunately, this also marks the disappearance of the world in real time. The prophecy of the end of the world which corresponds to the exhaustion of all of God’s names becomes true. On their way down from the mountain, the IBM technicians (who previously did not believe a word of the story) can see all the stars in the sky disappear one by one..
.. If history is a movie (which indeed it has become through its immediate retro-projection), the ‘truth’ in the news media is nothing more than the post-synchronizing, the dubbing, and the sub-titling of the film..
..In A Critique of Political Economy, Marx states that “mankind only poses problems that it can solve… We notice that a problem arises when the material conditions of its solution already exist or, at least, when they are about to exist.” But it is not like this anymore. Our jump into the virtual world unsettles all the material conditions that Marx was talking about, and deprives historical conditions of any dialectical solution. In a sense, the virtual is history’s final solution and the end result of real conflicts. Today, this means that humankind (or those who think on its behalf) only comes up with problems when they have already been solved. They have been virtually surpassed, or the system has displaced them by absorbing their occurrence. But wasn’t it already like this in Marx’s time? The emergence of the notions of class and struggle, the birth of a historical conscience: aren’t these indicative of the moment when humankind ceased to be violent and irreducible? This is reminiscent of Foucault and his analysis of power. When he starts to analyze power, isn’t it already the sign that power no longer has any political meaning, that it has lost its object? When ethnology looks at primitive societies, it means that they have already disappeared. Analysis itself is part of the process of disappearance..
(1998)