Simulacrum Quotes

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.

We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us—because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand—the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests—the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature—only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value—leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand.

The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever "truer." The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to "landscape" the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now"likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

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.

Addiction is passion’s dark simulacrum and, to the naïve observer, its perfect mimic. It resembles passion in its urgency and in the promise of fulfillment, but its gifts are illusory. It’s a black hole.

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real — that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo- realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — you can have all of them, but none is true.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising.

They possessed a peaceful relic to set their child free, and the simulacrum they had fed would fade away.

Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact!

As far as segregationists were concerned, racial integration and communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values. Yet those charged with mounting the American offence in space saw strength in countering the Russian values of secrecy with its opposites - transparency, democracy, equality- and not a simulacrum.

It is the simulacrum which ensures the continuity of the real today, the simulacrum which now conceals not the truth, but the fact that there isn’t any—that is to say, the continuity of the nothing... Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgment, in immortality. The only problem is to survive there. For there the irony, the challenging, the anticipation, the maleficence come to an end, as inexorably as hope dies at the gates of hell. And it is indeed there that hell begins, the hell of the unconditional realization of all ideas, the hell of the real.

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.

What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction?

It is never too late to revive your origins. It is their destiny: since they were not the first to be in on history, they will be the first to immortalize everything by reconstitution (by putting things in museums, they can match in an instant the fossilization process nature took millions of years to complete). But the conceptions Americans have of the museum is much wider than our own. To them, everything is worthy of protection, embalming, restoration. Everything can have a second birth, the eternal birth of the simulacrum.

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

How old did you have to be before you learned the difference between the simulacrum of love and the reality?

Loosh is a hyperdimensional energy given off by the human soul when traumatized. The Archons parasitically feed on it. Think of it as their simulacrum of kundalini.

There is a theory that when a planet, like our earth for example, has manifested every form of life, when it has fulfilled itself to the point of exhaustion, it crumbles to bits and is dispersed like star dust throughout the universe. It does not roll on like a dead moon, but explodes, and in the space of a few minutes, there is not a trace of it visible in the heavens. In marine life we have a similar effect. it is called implosion. When an amphibian accustomed to the black depths rises above a certain level, when the pressure to which it adapts itself is lifted, the body bursts inwardly. Are we not familiar with this spectacle in the human being also? The norsemen who went berserk, the malay who runs amuck—are these not examples of implosion and explosion? When the cup is full it runs over. but when the cup and that which it contains are one substance, what then? There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such overbrimming splendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the madonnas the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the face becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out—and received. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the life of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon. Rarer still are the anomalous ones who, having come to the full, are so terrified by the wonder of it that they spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to stifle that which gave them birth and being. The war of the mind is the story of the soul-split. When the moon was at full there were those who could not accept the dim death of diminution; they tried to hang full-blown in the zenith of their own heaven. They tried to arrest the action of the law which was manifesting itself through them, through their own birth and death, in fulfillment and transfiguration. Caught between the tides they were sundered; the soul departed the body, leaving the simulacrum of a divided self to fight it out in the mind. Blasted by their own radiance they live forever the futile quest of beauty, truth and harmony. Depossessed of their own effulgence they seek to possess the soul and spirit of those to whom they are attracted. They catch every beam of light; they reflect with every facet of their hungry being. instantly illumined, When the light is directed towards them, they are also speedily extinguished. The more intense the light which is cast upon them the more dazzling—and blinding—they appear. Especially dangerous are they to the radiant ones; it is always towards these bright and inexhaustible luminaries that they are most passionately drawn…

He looks at me, the circle, then me again. “It’s really you, right? I didn’t create some simulacrum that was inhabited by a demon? Prove it’s you. Say something only Spencer would say.” “Like what?” “Say something annoying.” I think about it. “Well, you claim to be British, there’s really only one thing I can think of.” “That being?” I lean in close, my lips gently brushing his ear. “Soccer.” He shoves me away. “Fuck. You. It’s foot… Yeah, it’s you.

Divinity retains the appearance of insight, when in reality it celebrates ignorance. Its tenets are so much clay, and when the clay sets, it becomes dogma.

The only way to be pardoned by the races violently abused and reduced to slavery - whites, blacks, yellows and browns included -- is to repent the Modernity, capitalism and all three main eurocentric and colonialist political theories - starting from liberalism (main evil) and communism and fascism as well. Real life matters, not this abhorrent and mean liberal simulacrum. The life should not be black. Without identity every life will be senseless and "black". Meaningful lives matter. It is the Modernity and capitalism that should be killed. Otherwise it will continue and in much worse way as before. Death to the System!

In situations where there are no real feasible solutions to a problem, the gathering and publication of performance data serves as a form of virtue signaling. There is no real progress to show, but the effort demonstrated in gathering and publicizing the data satisfies a sense of moral earnestness. In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success.

There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simpleminded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward.

People are obsessed with spectacle. We live in the society of the spectacle. People are addicted to the spectacular. They want bigger and better spectacles. They need more and more to keep them stimulated. They crave entertainment. They crave more powerful simulations, more breathtaking special effects, more everything. No one wants POR – plain old reality. Simulation – hyperreality – the simulacrum – these are what the people desire. We all live in Disneyland now – an utter fantasy world. Our true God is Mickey Mouse. At least he’s a lot nicer than Yahweh.

It begins at the end, for it is the end that begins it all.

I have never been anything more than a mere vestige, a simulacrum of myself.

Feminists have long dreamed of sexual freedom. What they refuse to accept is its simulacrum: sex that is said to be free, not because it is equal, but because it is ubiquitous.

Our deepest memories are like infinite roots reflected in the brook, a simulacrum without end. And yet every story, like every life, lasts only so long.

A simulacrum chases us dog-faced in the mirror like chickadees thrumming to the throat of god

simulacrum

Until genuine political, economic, and cultural liberty are established, democracy is unlikely to offer anything more than a simulacrum of legitimacy for an oppressive regime.

At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people.

Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was almost as good as the real thing.

someone, walking in the white street, looked in at our window, he would have seen in the family tableau a simulacrum of domestic joy.

simulacrum

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent. Tuesday,

Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.

The simulacrum tilts its head, just like Darin used to. “They’re hurting me, Laia.” It’s not Darin. My mind is slipping. This is guilt, fear. The voice changes, twisting and layering as if there are three Darins all talking at once. The light in the fake-Darin’s eyes goes out as quickly as a sun in a storm, and his irises darken into black pits, as if his entire body is filled with shadow. “I won’t survive it, Laia. It hurts.” The

It appears now to be universally admitted that, before the exile, the Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but our story proves that it would be an error to suppose that they did not believe in the continuance of individual existence after death by a ghostly simulacrum of life. Nay, I think it would be very hard to produce conclusive evidence that they disbelieved in immortality; for I am not aware that there is anything to show that they thought the existence of the souls of the dead in Sheol ever came to an end. But they do not seem to have conceived that the condition of the souls in Sheol was in any way affected by their conduct in life. If there was immortality, there was no state of retribution in their theology. Samuel expects Saul and his sons to come to him in Sheol.

Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles. We know that the Supreme Ruler cannot have a seat so narrow, so miserable a throne, so straight a tribunal, so scanty a court, so small and feeble a simulacrum that a phantasm can bring to birth, a dream shatter, a delusion restore, a chimera disperse, a calamity diminish, a misdeed abolish and a thought renew it again, so that indeed with a puff of air it were brimful and with a single gulp it were emptied. On the contrary we recognize a noble image, a marvellous conception, a supreme figure, an exalted shadow, an infinite representation of the represented infinity, a spectacle worthy of the excellence and supremacy of Him who transcendeth understanding, comprehension or grasp. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.

The human body might well be regarded as a mere simulacrum; but it envelopes our reality, it darkens our light, and broadens the shadow in which we live. The soul is the reality of our existence. Strictly speaking, the human visage is a mask. The true man is that which exists under what is called man. If that being, which thus exists sheltered and secreted behind that illusion which we call the flesh, could be approached, more than one strange revelation would be made. The vulgar error is to mistake the outward husk for the living spirit.

In the future, we could be exposed to realistic videos of politicians saying things they never said: Baudrillard’s simulacrum come to life. These are Black Mirror–like developments that will complicate our ability to distinguish between the imitation and the real, the fake and the true.

And thus far it was a life: in the void. Wragby was there, the servants . . . but spectral, not really existing. Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was the simulacrum of reality. The oak-leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything . . . no touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last. Why should there be anything in them, why should they last? Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality.

The FRG … was the closest thing any of them had to family, this simulacrum of friendship, women suddenly thrown together in a time of duress, with no one to depend on but each other, all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas, walled in by strip malls, chain restaurants, and highways that led to better places. Most of them had gotten used to making life for themselves without a husband, finding doctors and dentists and playgrounds, filling their cell phones with numbers and their calendars with playdates, and then the husbands would return and the Army would toss them all at some other base in the middle of nowhere to begin again.

Christians recognize that all social organizations exist as parodies of eschatological hope. And so it is that the city is a poor imitation of heavenly community;13 the modern state, a deformed version of the ecclesia;14 the market, a distortion of consummation; modern entertainment, a caricature of joy; schooling, a misrepresentation of true formation; liberalism, a crass simulacrum of freedom; and the sovereignty we accord to the self, a parody of God himself. As these institutions and ideals become ends in themselves, they become the objects of idolatry. The shalom of God—which is to say, the presence of God himself—is the antithesis to all such imitations.

Vera spent about two hours one afternoon trying to make me appreciate the elegance of Lovelace’s procedure for calculating Bernoulli numbers. I pleaded with her, telling her, only half jokingly, that her explanation was wasted on an arts graduate. She looked thunderous. I had hit some intellectual sore point. “Don’t be proud of this false specialization that is killing wisdom,” she said. “There is no natural distinction between the arts and sciences.” “Well, one deals in facts,” I said. “The other doesn’t.” “So history is an art or a science?” she countered. Before I could reply, she added, “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky have also discovered the laws of nature.” “They were novelists, Vera. By definition, they made things up.” “You are so limited! Bill Gates also makes things up. Is he a novelist? Science, it’s a process of creation too. Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

-Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever 'truer.' The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. -The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to 'landscape' the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) -Symmetry demands an actual + virtualfuture, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. -Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? -One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. -Proposition: I am in love with Luisa Ray.

I should have left that evening without ever seeing her again. I had a presentiment from then on that in a love that is not shared—or, in other words, in love, for there are people for whom there is no shared love—all we can taste of happiness is that simulacrum which had been granted me at one of those unique moments when a woman’s kindness, or her caprice, or chance applies to our desires, in a perfect coincidence, the same words and the same actions as if we had truly been loved.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. It took less than a year for the new Nazi order to consolidate. By the end of 1933, Germany had become a one-party state in which all major institutions had been humbled. That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to confirm the new order. Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.

She deigned to asked me how ice queens reproduce. I grinned, and her mother looked horrified. “We procreate by way of ice cubes, of course. We put them in our nests and let them incubate for the period of about four months, and when the temperature is right, we put them out to roost and let them flake off into billions of snowflakes, rather like tadpoles breaking in droves from their eggs. And that, child,” I said, with a simulacrum of glee, “is how winter is born.” “Does it hurt?” “No more than the approach of Monday does to most of the world. It is a natural process, you understand, but it is dreadful hard work.

Words, so much more readily remembered, gradually replace our past with their own. Our birth pangs become pages. Our battles, our triumphs, our trophies, our stubbed toes, will survive only in their descriptions; because it is the gravestone we visit, when we visit, not the grave. It is against the stone we stand our plastic flowers. Who wishes to bid good morrow to a box of rot and bones? We say a name, and only a faint simulacrum of its object forms itself (if any at all does)- forms itself in that grayless gray area of consciousness where we put imaginary maps and once heard music; where we hunt for lost articles and diagram desire.

In a timorous voice, he said he could see clearly now, could see the future. The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers. The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity. The future is more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar simulacrums. Something something Rousseau something. Manhattan is sinking.

This was becoming an increasingly common fixture here on campus, students protesting some sort of perceived injustice. It wasn't too surprising; righteous indignation was practically the calling card of a college student. They were experts at single-mindedly championing any cause they saw as deserving, but having few practical ideas on how to really change things.

Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn't politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.' He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd... 'Did you just say that women aren't creative geniuses because they have babies?' 'No," he said, 'No. Not because. I wouldn't say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we're all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that's a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she's creating so much more than just a world on the page, she's creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it's so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it's because they're making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It's a kind of bodily genius. You can't tell me that isn't at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward.

They say there is always a photographic moment to be seized where the most banal of beings yield up their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity, and rather than looking for the identity beneath the appearances, we should look for the mask beneath the identity, the figure which haunts us and diverts us from our identities -- the masked divinity which, in effect, haunts each of us for a moment, one day or another.

I was having so much fear," the simulacrum said, kissing my eyelids and I couldn't help but think about the eyelid kissing, and how this is a thing Rema always liked to do, and though I understand that eye lid kissing is a fairly standard part of any amatory repertoire, I remember how it really needled me at the beginning, needled me for being a sort of learned behavior, which therefore pointed to that whole world that was Rema before I knew her, and pointed to all those people who were not me who had gone into the creation of her as she was, and-well, in that way she was like some alien sedentary rock forma tion, some meteor fallen to my planet, and it seemed a violation of me to have no choice but to love some charred castaway, with all its strata-I guess I am very jealous and possessive_I just found it very diffi cult those moments, like eyelid kissing, when I couldn't help but perceive her duplicity, her triplicity.

Warhol himself was never anything but a kind of hologram. Famous people came to the Factory to hover around him without being able to get anything from him, but they tried to pass through him as you might with a filter or a camera lens, which is what he had in effect become. Valerie Solanas was even to try to shatter that lens by shooting at it, to pass through the hologram to establish that blood could still flow from it. So we can agree with Warhol: `You can't get more superficial than me and live'. And he nearly didn't come out of it alive.

The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological institution.16 It is in this sense, then, that the modern state is a parody of the church: “The body of the state is a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” (RONT, 182). As a result, while political rhetoric may suggest that the state is confined to a “public” sphere or that the reign of the secular is circumscribed, in fact the modern state demands complete allegiance, and the reign of the secular does not tolerate territories of resistance.17 The state is happy to absorb all kinds of private pursuits under the umbrella of civil society, but it cannot tolerate a religious community that claims to be the only authentic polis and proclaims a king who is a rival to both Caesar and Leviathan. In such a case, this community’s allegiance to its king ultimately trumps its allegiance to the state or empire, and its understanding of the nature of human persons does not fit the normative picture of liberalism. This the state cannot tolerate. It is in this sense that “every worship service is a challenge to Caesar.

There, in that presumed paradise, the engineers were stranded in the company of an infantile mentality. They created artificial smartness, made a simulacrum of intelligence. But what they talked to all day was little more than a mechanism that read bits off a disk drive. If a comma in the code was out of place, it complained like a kid who won’t tolerate a pea touching the mashed potatoes. And, exhausted though the programmer may be, the machine was like an uncanny child that never got tired. There was Karl and the rest of the team, fitting the general definition of the modern software engineer: a man left alone all day with a cranky, illiterate thing, which he must somehow make grow up. It was an odd and satisfying gender revenge. Is it any surprise that these isolated men need relief, seek company, hook up This is not to say that women are not capable of engineering’s male-like isolation. Until I became a programmer, I didn’t thoroughly understand the usefulness of such isolation: the silence, the reduction of life to thought and form; for example, going off to a dark room to work on a program when relations with people get difficult. I’m perfectly capable of this isolation. I first noticed it during the visit of a particularly tiresome guest. All I could think was: There’s that bug waiting for me, I really should go find that bug.

And it is, indeed, to the more general problem of fetishism that this new twist brings us: after the becoming-sign of the object, the becoming-object of the sign. In the sexual register, the fetish is no longer a sign but a pure object, meaningless in itself - a banal accessory, but one of absolute value, for which there can be no possible exchange. It is that object and no other. But this banal singularity means that any object whatever can become a fetish. Its potentiality is total, precisely because it lies beyond any sexual reference or metaphor. It is the perfect object of sex, its perfect realization, insofar as it substitutes for any real sex - just as Virtual Reality substitutes itself for the real world and in that way becomes the universal form of our modern fetishism. Modern man's immense panoply of information technology has become his true object of (perverse?) desire. Fetishism being, as the name indicates (Feiticho), linked to abstraction and artifice, it is all the more radical for the abstraction being total. If it was possible, in the past, to speak of the fetishism of the commodity, of money, of the simulacrum and the spectacle, that was still a limited fetishism (related to sign-value). There stretches beyond this for us today the world of radical fetishism, linked to the de-signification and limitless operation of the real - to the sign's becoming pure object once again, before or beyond any metaphor.

Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too—that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated—and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad. 38 In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises 39 is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we properly reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

In Kafka’s works the family table locks the child into a site where Father presides; it offers one of the prime occasions for paternity to enthrone itself, conducting prescriptive raids on the child’s bearing—invading his plate, entering and altering his body, adjusting his manner of being. The table becomes the metonymy for all law, the place where sovereign exceptionalism asserts itself: Father does not have to obey his own law, he can pick his teeth or clean his ears while the eaters submit to the severity of his rule. The children, in Kafka at least, and in the simulacrum of home in which many others were grown, are consistently downgraded to the status of unshakable refugees, parasites, those who quiver under the thickness of anxiety while laws, like platters, are passed and forced down one’s delicate throat. Give us this day our daily dread: it is difficult to imagine the Kafka family going out to eat, though that is what it would have taken for the death grip of mealtime to loosen, let go. At home, at the table, little Franz Kafka was eaten alive. By the time of the famous “Letter to Father,” he was vaporized. He says so himself: A good deal of the damage done to the young psyche occurred at table. The neighborhood restaurant might have rerouted the oppressive domesticity of home rule—it might have introduced a hiatus or suspensive regime change that would allow for hunger’s pacing. Part of a spectacle of public generality, the theater of ingestion—possibly also of incorporation—the restaurant causes the hold on the child to slacken, if only because there are witnesses and waiters whose work consists in diminishing the intensities of paternal law and the sacrificial rites that underlie their daily distribution—the daily apportionment of dread.

To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible pursuit of good, the movement of Integral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the movement towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a better world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order of morality or of any kind of finality. Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihilism, the nihilism of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality contract or the reality 'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic. It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is true, everything is simulacrum' - an absurd proposition since it is also a realist one! It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the Virtual, another to deny it so as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual. It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self-evidence have always been the lowest forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism of form. It is to speak the world in its radicality, in its dual, reversible form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe, any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative, is ever the last word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction - in short, belief - grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up - a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows - the actual past - from another such simulacrum - the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey.

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates. Passion is divine fire: it enlivens and makes holy; it gives light and yields inspiration. Passion is generous because it’s not ego-driven; addiction is self-centred. Passion gives and enriches; addiction is a thief. Passion is a source of truth and enlightenment; addictive behaviours lead you into darkness. You’re more alive when you are passionate, and you triumph whether or not you attain your goal. But an addiction requires a specific outcome that feeds the ego; without that outcome, the ego feels empty and deprived. A consuming passion that you are helpless to resist, no matter what the consequences, is an addiction. You may even devote your entire life to a passion, but if it’s truly a passion and not an addiction, you’ll do so with freedom, joy and a full assertion of your truest self and values. In addiction, there’s no joy, freedom or assertion. The addict lurks shame-faced in the shadowy corners of her own existence. I glimpse shame in the eyes of my addicted patients in the Downtown Eastside and, in their shame, I see mirrored my own. Addiction is passion’s dark simulacrum and, to the naïve observer, its perfect mimic. It resembles passion in its urgency and in the promise of fulfillment, but its gifts are illusory. It’s a black hole. The more you offer it, the more it demands. Unlike passion, its alchemy does not create new elements from old. It only degrades what it touches and turns it into something less, something cheaper. Am I happier after one of my self-indulgent sprees? Like a miser, in my mind I recount and catalogue my recent purchases — a furtive Scrooge, hunched over and rubbing his hands together with acquisitive glee, his heart growing ever colder. In the wake of a buying binge, I am not a satisfied man. Addiction is centrifugal. It sucks energy from you, creating a vacuum of inertia. A passion energizes you and enriches your relationships. It empowers you and gives strength to others. Passion creates; addiction consumes — first the self and then the others within its orbit.

The Golem If (as affirms the Greek in the Cratylus) the name is archetype of the thing, in the letters of “rose” is the rose, and all the Nile flows through the word. Made of consonants and vowels, there is a terrible Name, that in its essence encodes God’s all, power, guarded in letters, in hidden syllables. Adam and the stars knew it in the Garden. It was corroded by sin (the Cabalists say), time erased it, and generations have forgotten. The artifice and candor of man go on without end. We know that there was a time in which the people of God searched for the Name through the ghetto’s midnight hours. But not in that manner of those others whose vague shades insinuate into vague history, his memory is still green and lives, Judá the Lion the rabbi of Prague. In his thirst to know the knowledge of God Judá permutated the alphabet through complex variations and in the end pronounced the name that is the Key the Door, the Echo, the Guest, and the Palace, over a mannequin shaped with awkward hands, teaching it the arcane knowledge of symbols, of Time and Space. The simulacrum raised its sleepy eyelids, saw forms and colors that it did not understand, and confused by our babble made fearful movements. Gradually it was seen to be (as we are) imprisoned in a reverberating net of Before, Later, Yesterday, While, Now, Right, Left, I, You, Those, Others. The Cabalists who celebrated this mysterium, this vast creature, named it Golem. (Written about by Scholem, in a learned passage of his volume.) The rabbi explained the universe to him, “This is my foot, this yours, and this the rope,” but all that happened, after years, was that the creature swept the synagogue badly. Perhaps there was an error in the word or in the articulation of the Sacred Name; in spite of the highest esoteric arts this apprentice of man did not learn to speak. Its eyes uncanny, less like man than dog and much less than dog but thing following the rabbi through the doubtful shadows of the stones of its confinement. There was something abnormal and coarse in the Golem, at its step the rabbi’s cat fled in fear. (That cat not from Scholem but of the blind seer) It would ape the rabbi’s devotions, raising its hands to the sky, or bend over, stupidly smiling, into hollow Eastern salaams. The rabbi watched it tenderly but with some horror. How (he said) could I engender this laborious son? Better to have done nothing, this is insanity. Why did I give to the infinite series a symbol more? To the coiled skein on which the eternal thing is wound, I gave another cause, another effect, another grief. In this hour of anguish and vague light, on the Golem our eyes have stopped. Who will say the things to us that God felt, at the sight of his rabbi in Prague?

Simulacrum worlds such as these require that their constituent parts, their contents, seems endless. The authors leads us down a narrative path, but we always have the impression that we could leave that trail and bushwhack, and at the end of our wanderings, we'd find the unlit parts of these worlds intact and replete with nuance.

There was a silence, and I looked at Laura—really looked at her—and had the sudden impression that I was having dinner with a simulacrum, a knockoff. I felt like the man who buys the box of genuine wartime memorabilia at auction and brings it home to discover, under the first layer, piles and piles of shredded newspaper.

By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode - what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is a culmination of our experiences in a way that we - biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions - can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.

While contemporary restaurants pay lip service to the notion of companionability, they provide us with only its most inadequate simulacrum. The number of people who nightly patronize restaurants implies that these places must be refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanisms by which to introduce patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which people chronically segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. The focus is on the food and the decor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections. In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry. Patrons will tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city, restaurants are adept at gathering people into the same space and yet lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

I swallowed and bit my lower lip, "Maybe freedom is never truly free, as they say," I said into his green eyes, "it comes with a price, and sooner or later, time will come to collect its toll.

Mr. Italia sat belching under a pair of oval-framed photographs of parents hairier, if possible, than himself. His wife was dead, but there was a picture of her, too, in her casket, gazing out at us with an eerie simulacrum of motherly love. Dark-complected Mr. Italia was indeed, with handle-bar mustaches of a size that might have made him topple forward out of his chair were it not for the posture seemingly aimed at correcting the leverage in his favor. He drank beer after thrusting into my hand a bottle of soda pop of marked but unidentifiable flavor, pale yellow in color, and lukewarm.

The actor’s life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.

Such is the allegory of otherness vanquished and condemned to the servile fate of resemblance. Our image in the mirror is not innocent, then. Behind every reflection, every resemblance, every representation, a defeated enemy lies concealed. The Other vanquished, and condemned merely to be the Same. This casts a singular light on the problem of representation and of all those mirrors which reflect us `spontaneously' with an objective indulgence. None of that is true, and every representation is a servile image, the ghost of a once sovereign being whose singularity has been obliterated. But a being which will one day rebel, and then our whole system of representation and values is destined to perish in that revolt. This slavery of the same, the slavery of resemblance, will one day be smashed by the violent resurgence of otherness. We dreamed of passing through the looking-glass, but it is the mirror peoples themselves who will burst in upon our world. And `this time will not be defeated'. What will come of this victory? No one knows. A new existence of two equally sovereign peoples, perfectly alien to one another, but in perfect collusion? Something other, at least, than this subjection and this negative fatality. So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to go on to the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less ... I'll not be your mirror!

simulacrum

Steven Pressfield wrote, “What have you and I been put on this Earth to do? Is it not the creation of the ‘inauthentic,’ that is the purposefully crafted, in order to deliver to others the gift and simulacrum of authenticity? That’s why they call it Art, and why, in some crazy way, it’s realer than real and truer than true.

Vast and grey, the sky is a simulacrum to all but him whose days are vast and grey, and― In the tall, dried grasses a goat stirs with nozzle searching the ground. ―my head is in the air but who am I . . ? And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me.

If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner (how long will it be before someone starts a society for the protection of battered and maltreated objects?). Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another - from cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects. This is actually the only strong symbolic chain, the one through which a victim of the whim of a superior power passes it on to an inferior species, the whole process ending with someone taking it out on a powerless simulacrum, like a toy - and beginning no doubt with an all-powerful simulacrum, like the masked divinities which men themselves invent to justify this wretched chain.

They say other species have stopped short, and that only the human species, the humanoid branch, has made its definitive breakthrough. In fact while all the others persevered in their specific forms and ended up disappearing genetically, thus leaving evolution to run its course, only the human species succeeded in surpassing itself in the simulacrum of itself - in disappearing genetically to resuscitate artificially. By perpetuating itself in a world of clones and electronic prostheses (perfect in so far as they will have eliminated every potential species, including humanity), man will thus, in a definitive act, have wiped out the natural genesis of things. Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intang ible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sacred character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision-making function be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? Political charisma is precisely not that gracious charisma which emanates from the irresistible power of a pure object, such as the power of a woman, but an ungracious will which derives its power and its glory from voluntary servitude. This is true of all institutions, the military, the clerical, the medical, and more recently the psychoanalytic, but it is particularly so in politics which remains the most striking hallucination of all the weaknesses of the will.

It is not certain that we possess the necessary concepts to think this fait accompli, this virtual performance of the world which is tantamount to the elimination of all negation, that is, a pure and simple de-negation. What can critical thought, thought based on the negative, do against the state of denegation? Nothing. To think extreme phenomena, thought must itself become an extreme phenomenon; it must abandon any critical pretensions, any dialectical illusions, any rational hope, and move, like the world, into a paradoxical phase, an ironic and paroxystic phase. It has to be more hyperreal than the real, more virtual than virtual reality. The simulacrum of thought has to move more quickly than the others. Since we can no longer multiply the negative by the negative, we have to multiply the positive by the positive. One has to be even more positive than the positive to take in both the total positivity of the world and the illusion of that pure positivity.

THE GREAT DISAPPEARANCE IS NOT, then, simply that of the virtual transmutation of things, of the mise en abyme of reality, but that of the diversion of the subject to infinity, of a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality. We might say, at a pinch, that consciousness (the will, freedom) is everywhere; it merges with the course of things and, as a result, becomes superfluous. This is the analysis Cardinal Ratzinger (the Pope) himself made of religion: a religion which accommodates to the world, which attunes itself to the (politcal, social) world, becomes superfluous. It is for the same reason — because it became increasingly merged with objective banality — that art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous.

Stalin's double. Since he wasn't a perfect likeness, they touched him up using plastic surgery, after which they eliminated all his relatives and all the witnesses to the operation. He played his role so well that in the end he came to think he was Stalin (as did Stalin himself!). At that point they sent him to the Gulag. But so well did he identify with his role that, on learning of Stalin's death, he died three days later.

The time when perfection was of the order of crime is over, when beneath perfect beauty something criminal lay hidden. With the cloning and recycling of the species in conformity with an ideal norm, it will no longer even be a crime to be perfect. The exactitude of the creature will shine in the genetic firmament. There will be a universal presumption of innocence and a total excommunication of evil. This technical redemption of all the taints of the species will render any new divine intervention useless. There will no longer be any Last Judgement. Reality for us is a little like the ground for trapeze artists, who work with a net without knowing that beneath it the ground has disappeared. In this way, screens allowed the real to slip away. In this way, icons allowed God to slip quietly away.

Keep objects as a system Keep production as a mirror Keep death as an exchange Keep the world as a simulacrum Keep the evil transparent Keep the majorities silent Keep your seduction alive Keep your memory cool Keep yourself as an other Keep perfection as a crime Keep illusion for the end Keep on line for the while

There stands upon the horizon a new figure of self yet to be unfolded that one must...honor. All of this will be the same, but it will look and feel different upon one’s return—it is important to know this now. One can stand upon a ridge high above the valley, upon a formation of jutting rocks and look over the precipice of what one has known. Even in its multitude of permutations, all looks familiar: the mountains, the fields, the skies—all of it connected to one’s eyes as though by invisible threads. The idea of breaking free from them is now rather troubling. Do those threads have the tensility to endure the stretch of a journey? Will these specters of recognition remain immutable and intact and hitched to the undulating satchel through one’s peregrinations to yet unseen territories, or do these delicate snares snap, relegating these identities only to the wake, sequestered in their purity even from one’s keenest reminiscence? Irrespective of the case, one should assume there to be a reconstitution of both identifier and identified over this inexorable trek—the unyielding essence of each layered, nevertheless, by the sediment of accumulating circumstance until there exists an uncertainty when they meet again. The landscape of then is a petrified visage—the organic layers of tree barks are supplanted by crystalized molds of mineral simulacrum, grass stalks of ages ago have dried and yellowed, autumn blossoms breathe new scents unaware of previous aromas whose places they now occupy, ambling figures have crumbled to bone whistles stacked in cylinders in muted sarcophagi with their predecessors. Faces meet landscapes—there is a vague recognition between the overlapping partners, an attempt at translation to identify elements once apprehended, but inevitably no solution is available in the moment that can bridge pristine artifacts with reconfigured forms.

Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching "modernization" to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: "managed democracy," "conservative modernization." Then he steps back, smiling, and says: "We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself." And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle. Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only "simulacrum" and "simulacra" . . . and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra," in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov's genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representations to validate tranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

The knife presented itself to the boy as if in shimmery italics. The boy could not remember ever having bought the thing. It was a heftless, nervous-atomed, self-disowning simulacrum of what a knife was supposed to look like in such a low-built town.

We live in the Age of Spectacle. Spectacle promises to engage us, to mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways. Very like the promise of nuclear energy: to be safe, clean, and cheap, but turned out to be dangerous, dirty (contaminated), and expensive. The promise made by the spectacle has been forfeited. Not only are we not engaged, we are profoundly distanced—unable to discriminate, edit, or measure shock or empathy. The “regime of visual authority [is a] coercive organization of images according to a stopwatch” and passes its organization off to us as a simulacrum of the real.

The totality constituted by Good and Evil together transcends us, but we should accept it totally. There can be no intelligence of things so long as this fundamental rule is ignored. The illusion that the two can be distinguished in order to promote one or the other is absurd. (This applies to the proponents of evil for evil's sake as much as to anyone else, for they will end up doing good.) All kinds of events are out there, impossible to predict. They have already occurred, or are just about to heave into view. All we can do is train our searchlight, as it were, and keep our telescopic lens on this virtual world in the hope that some of those events will be obliging enough to allow themselves to be captured. Theory can be no more than this: a trap set in the hope that reality will be naive enough to fall into it. The essential thing is to point the searchlight the right way. Unfortunately, we don't know which way that is. We can only comb the sky. In most instances the events are so far away, metaphysically speaking, that they merely cause a slight phosphorescence on the screen. They have to be developed and enlarged, like photographs. Not in order to discover their meaning, however: they are not logograms, but holograms. They can no more be explained than the fixed spectrum of a star or the variations of red. To capture such strange events, theory itself must be remade as something strange: as a perfect crime, or as a strange attractor.

But the end of history is not the last word on history. For, against this background of perpetual non-events, there looms another species of event. Ruptural events, unforeseeable events, unclassifiable in terms of history, outside of historical reason, events which occur against their own image, against their own simulacrum. Events that break the tedious sequence of current events as relayed by the media, but which are not, for all that, a reappearance of history or a Real irrupting in the heart of the Virtual (as has been said of 11 September). They do not constitute events in history, but beyond history, beyond its end; they constitute events in a system that has put an end to history. They are the internal convulsion of history. And, as a result, they appear inspired by some power of evil, appear no longer the bearers of a constructive disorder, but of an absolute disorder. Indecipherable in their singularity, they are the equivalent in excess of a system that is itself indecipherable in its extension and its headlong charge.

The common source in the ethos of Western civilization from which flow both the traditionalist and the libertarian currents, has made possible a continuing discussion which is creating the fusion that is contemporary American conservatism. That fused position recognizes at one and the same time the transcendent goal of human existence and the primacy of the freedom of the person in the political order. Indeed, it maintains that the only possible ultimate vindication of the freedom of the individual person rests upon a belief in his overriding value as a person, a value based upon transcendent considerations. And it maintains that the duty of men is to seek virtue; but it insists that men cannot in actuality do so unless they are free from the constraint of the physical coercion of an unlimited state. For the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil.

What I am getting at here is that this religious institution we call church has become a simulacrum that rarely mirrors the ecclesia.