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Clarisse discovered that the Christian mythology made the redeemer a carpenter

what Clarisse says comes from, probably, another sphere: that of the will

Meingast: we live in the time of the vote ballot and this is a coward anti philosophical time

...what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

I am a nihilist.
I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances,

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality anymore - hyper-reality
abolishes both.

SIMULACRA AND SCIENCE FICTION

Three orders of simulacra:

-simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, (...)

-simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, (...)

-simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game - total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.

After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the one with which we will all now be concerned - a symbolic universe, but one which, through a sort of reversal of the mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, car, erotic machinery), appears as if traversed by an intense force of initiation.

Viewed at this angle, even the exact sciences come dangerously close to pataphysics. Because they depend in some way on the hologram and on the objectivist whim of the deconstruction and exact reconstruction of the world (in its smallest terms) founded on a tenacious and naive faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves.

HOLOGRAMS

It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues - ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double.

The Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code. No more mother, no more father: a matrix.

In the United States, a child was born a few months ago like a geranium: from cuttings. The first clone child (the lineage of an individual via vegetal multiplication). The first born from a single cell of a single individual, his "father," the sole progenitor, of which he would be the exact replica, the
perfect twin, the double

CLONE STORY

Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest.

Because fascination remains. One need only look at Las Vegas, the absolute advertising city (of the 1950s, of the crazy years of advertising, which has retained the charm of that era, today retro in some sense, because advertising is secretly condemned by the programmatic logic that will give rise to very different cities)

Advertising is no longer (was it ever?) a means of communication or of information.

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.

The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and the market crash of 1929.

Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. (...) 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.

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.

-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.

Consider three hypotheses.

-Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. (...)

-Or information has nothing to do with signification. (...)

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Hypermarket and Hypercommodity

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.

Apocalypse Now

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.

So, it is simulation that is effective, never the real. The simulation of nuclear catastrophe...

...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.

History is a strong myth, perhaps, along with the unconscious, the last great myth.

The cinema and its trajectory: from the most fantastic or mythical to the realistic and the hyperrealistic.