Owlseyes ’s Reviews > Simulacra and Simulation > Status Update

...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.