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Pataphysics of Year 2000
"A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction."
Elias Cannetti (1978:69)
There are diverse plausible hypotheses with respect to this vanishing or disappearance of history. Canetti's expression that "all mankind suddenly left reality" compellingly invokes the speed of liberation a body would require to escape the gravitational pull of a star or a planet. Following this imagery, we could suppose that the acceleration of technology-, event- and media- driven modernity, as well as the speed of other economic, political and sexual exchanges have set loose a tempo of liberation whereby we have become removed from the sphere of reference to the real, to history. We have been "liberated" in every sense of the term, so much so that we have moved beyond a certain space-time, we've left a certain horizon where the real was possible because gravitation was still strong enough for things to reflect on themselves and thereby possess or acquire some sort of duration (duree) and outcome.
A certain type of slowness or deliberation (i.e. a certain speed, but not too much), a certain distance, yet not too much, a certain liberation (the energy of rupture and change), but not too much - all these are necessary for this condensation, for the signifying crystallization of events to take place, one that we call history - this type of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call the real.
Outside of this gravitational pull which keeps bodies in orbit, all the atoms of meaning lose themselves or self-absolve in space. Every single atom follows its own trajectory towards infinity and dissolves in space. This is precisely what we are living in our present societies occupied with the acceleration of all bodies, all messages, all processes in all possible senses and wherein, via modern media, each event, each narrative, each image gets endowed with the simulation of an infinite trajectory. Every political, historical, cultural fact is invested with a kinetic energy which spreads over its own space and thrusts these facts into a hyperspace where they lose all meaning by way of an inability to attain their meaning. It is useless to turn to science-fiction: from this point on, from the here and now, through our computer science, our circuits and our channels, this particle accelerator has definitively disrupted and broken the referential orbit of things.
With respect to history, the narrative has become impossible since by definition it is the potential re-narrativization of a sequence of meaning. Through the impulse of total diffusion and circulation each event is liberated for itself only - each event becomes atomized and nuclear as it follows its trajectory into the void. In order to diffuse itself ad infinitum, it has to be fragmented like a particle. This is the way it attains a speed of no-return, distancing it from history once and for all. Every cultural, eventual group needs to be fragmented, disarticulated to allow for its entry into the circuits, each language must be absolved into a binary mechanism or device to allow for its circulation to take place - not in our memory, but in the electronic and luminous memory of the computers. There is no human language or speech (langage) that could compete with the speed of light. There is no event that could withstand its own diffusion across the planet. No meaning stands a chance once offered the means of its own acceleration. There is no history that will resist the centrifugal pull of facts or its short-circuiting in real time (in the same order of ideas: no sexuality will resist its own liberation, not a single culture will foreclose its own advancement, no truth will defy its own verification, etc.).
Even theory is no longer in the state of "reflecting" on anything anymore. All it can do is to snatch concepts from their critical zone of reference and transpose them to the point of no return, in the process of which theory itself too, passes into the hyperspace of simulation as it loses all "objective" validity, while it makes significant gains by acquiring real affinity with the current system.
The second hypothesis, with respect to the vanishing of history, is the opposite of the first, i.e., it pertains not to the acceleration but to the slowing down of processes. This too is derived directly from physics.
Matter slows the passage of time. More precisely, time seems to pass very slowly upon the surface of a very dense body of matter. The phenomenon increases in proportion to growth in density. The effect of this slowing down (ralentissement) will raise the wavelength of light emitted by this body in a way that will allow the observer to record this phenomenon. Beyond a certain limit, time stops, the length of the wave becomes infinite. The wave no longer exists. Light extinguishes itself.
The analogy is apparent in the way history slows down as it brushes up against the astral body of the "silent majorities". Our societies are governed by this process of the mass, and not only in the sociological or demographical sense of the word, but also in the sense of a "critical mass", of going beyond a certain point of no-return. That is where the crucially significant event of these societies is to be found: the advent of their revolutionary process along the lines of their mobility, (they are all revolutionary with respect to the centuries gone by), of their equivalent force of inertia, of an immense indifference, and of the silent power of this indifference. This inert matter of the social is not due to a lack of exchanges, of information or of communication; on the contrary, it is the result of the multiplication and saturation of exchanges. It is borne of the hyperdensity of cities, of merchandise, messages and circuits. It is the cold star of the social, a mass at the peripheries of which history cools out. Successive events attain their annihilation in indifference. Neutralized and bullet-sprayed by information, the masses neutralise history retrospect and act as a screen of absorption. They themselves have no history, no meaning, no conscience, no desire. They are potential residues of all history, of all meaning, of all desire. By inserting themselves into modernity, all these wonderful things managed to invoke a mysterious counterpart, the misappreciation of which has unleashed all current political and social strategies.
This time, it's the opposite: history, meaning, progress are no longer able to find their speed or tempo of liberation. They can no longer pull themselves out of this much too dense body which slows down their trajectory, slows down their time to the point from whereon perception and imagination of the future escapes us. All social, historical and temporal transcendence is absorbed via this mass's silent immanence. Already, political events no longer conduct sufficient autonomous energy to rouse us and can only run their course as a silent movie in front of which we all sit collectively irresponsible. That is where history reaches its end, not because of the lack of actors or participants, not due to a lack of violence (with respect to violence, there is always an increasing amount), not due to a lack of events (as for events, there will always be more of them thanks to the role of the media and information!) - but because of a slowing down or deceleration, because of indifference and stupefaction. History can no longer go beyond itself, it can no longer envisage its own finality or dream of its own end, it shrouds or buries itself in its immediate effect, it self-exhausts in special effects, it implodes in current events.
Essentially, one can no longer speak of the end of history since it has no time to rejoin its own end. As its effects accelerate, its meaning inexorably decelerates. It will end up stopping and extinguishing itself like light and time at the peripheries of an infinitely dense mass...
Humanity too, had its big-bang: a certain critical density, a certain concentration of people and exchanges that compel this explosion we call history and which is none other than the dispersal of dense and hieratic cores of earlier civilizations. Today, we are living an effect of reversal: we have overstepped the threshold of critical mass with respect to populations, events, information, control of the inverse process of inertia of history and politics. At the cosmic level of things, we don't know anymore whether we have reached this speed of liberation wherein we would be partaking of a permanent or final expansion (this, no doubt, will remain forever uncertain). At the human level, where prospects are more limited, it is possible that the energy itself employed for the liberation of the species (acceleration of birthrates, of techniques and exchanges in the course of the centuries) have contributed to an excess of mass and resistance that bear on the initial energy as it drags us along a ruthless movement of contraction and inertia.
Whether the universe infinitely expands or retracts to an infinitely dense and infinitely small core will hinge upon its critical mass (with respect to which speculation itself is infinite in view of the discovery of newer particles). Following the analogy, whether our human history will be evolutionary or involuted will presumably depend upon the critical mass of humanity. Are we to see ourselves, like the galaxies, on a definitive orbit that distances us from each other under the impact of a tremendous speed, or is this dispersal to infinity itself destined to reach an end, and the human molecules bound to draw closer to each other by way of an inverse effect of gravitation? The question is whether a human mass that grows day by day is able to control a pulsation of this genre?
Third hypothesis, third analogy. But we are still dealing with a point of disappearance, a point of evanescence, a vanishing-point, this time however along the lines of music. This is what I call the stereophonic effect. We are all obsessed with high fidelity, with the quality of musical "transmission" (rendu). On the console of our channels, equipped with our tuners, our amplifiers and our baffles, we mix, regulate and multiply soundtracks in search of an infallible or unerring music. Is this, though, still music? Where is the threshold of high fidelity beyond the point of which music as such would disappear? Disappearance would not be due to the lack of music, it would disappear for having stepped beyond this boundary, it would disappear into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect. Beyond this point, neither judgement nor aesthetic pleasure could be found anymore. Ecstasy of musicality procures its own end.
The disappearance of history is of the same order: there too, we have gone beyond this limit or boundary where, subjected to factual and information-al sophistication, history as such ceases to exist. Large doses of immediate diffusion, of special effects, of secondary effects, of fading - and this famous Larsen effect produced in acoustics by an excessive proximity between source and receiver, in history via an excessive proximity, and therefore the disastrous interference of an event with its diffusion - create a short-circuit between cause and effect, similarly to what takes place between the object and the experimenting subject in microphysics (and in the human sciences!). All things entailing a certain radical uncertainty of the event, like excessive high fidelity, lead to a radical uncertainty with respect to music. Elias Canetti says it well: "as of a certain point", nothing is true anymore. This is also why the soft music of history escapes us, it disappears under the microscope or into the stereophony of information.
At the heart of information one finds history haunted by its own disappearance. At the hub of hi-fi, music is haunted by its disappearance. At the core of experimentation, science is haunted by the disappearance of its object. Pivotal to pornography is a sexuality haunted by its own disappearance. Everywhere it is the same stereophonic effect, the absolute proximity of the real: the same effect of simulation.
This side of the vanishing-point - where there was still history, there was still music - remains irreparable. Where should one stop the perfecting of the stereo? Its bounds or limits are constantly pushed back or forced to retreat in the face of technical obsessions. Where should information stop? Confronted with such a fascination with "real time", with high fidelity, one can only resort to moral objections, and that does not carry much meaning/weight.
Once one has passed beyond this point, the process becomes irreversible, contrary to the hope Canetti seems to foster. We will no longer be able to find the music that had been before the stereo (if not by way of an effect that draws upon a supplementary technique of simulation), we will not be able to find the history that had been before information and the media. The original essence of music, the original concept of history have disappeared, since we can no longer isolate them from their models of perfection, which are also their models of simulation, of their forced absorption into a hyperreality that effaces them. We will no longer be able to know, ever, what the social and music had been before they exacerbated themselves in their useless perfection of today. We will never again know what history had been before its aggravation in the technical perfection of information - we will never again find out things as they were before their dissipation in the fulfilment of their model.
Suddenly, the situation becomes original again. The possibility to move out of history in order to enter into simulation is but the consequence of the fact that, basically, history itself was none other than an immense model of simulation. Not in the sense that its existence would have only amounted to the narrative or interpretation we supplied it with, but with respect to the time in which it took place, this linear time which is also the time of the end and of an unlimited suspense of the end. This is the only time wherein history could take place, in other words, within the succession of non-insane facts which engender cause and effect, without any appeal to absolute necessity and maintained in a disequilibrium regarding the future. So much different from the societies of ritual where all things attain their completion in an origin and where the ceremony retraces the perfection of this original event. In opposition to this order of accomplished (fulfilled) time, liberation of the "real" time of history, production of a linear and differential time may appear as a purely artificial process. Where does this suspense, where does this "what has to take place will take place at the end of time" come from (Judgement Day, salvation or catastrophe), and with respect to which sights are set on an expiry date or day of reckoning that does not lend itself to calculation, quasi remains incalculable? This model of linearity must have seemed perfectly fictional, completely absurd and immaterial in the eyes of cultures that had no idea of a differential "maturity date", of a successive sequence of things and of a finality. A scenario which would have otherwise been seen as invoking evil. The very first Christian movements were characterized by a vehement resistance against any attempt to put off the advent of the Kingdom of God. The endorsement of such an "historical" perspective on salvation, of its non-fulfilment in immediacy, did not go without violence, and all heresies have constantly reclaimed this leitmotif of the fulfilment of the promise in immediacy. Something in the order of a challenge of time. Whole communities have gone to the point of putting their lives on the line in order to hasten the advent of the Kingdom. And since this had been promised to them at the end of time, all one had to do is to put an end to time, immediately (and personally).
The whole of history was accompanied by a millennial challenge to the temporality of history. The historical perspective which recurringly displaces the game onto the plane of a hypothetical end, had always been opposed to a fatal demand or particularity, to a fatal strategy of time which seeks to burn stages and move beyond the end. We cannot say whether either of these tendencies had significantly impacted on each other, and even in the course of history the burning question still lingers: should we or should we not wait? Ever since the messianic convulsion of the first Christians and beyond the heresies and revolts, there had always been this anticipation of the end, ultimately through death, through a seductive suicide aimed at turning God away from history and making him face his responsibilities pertaining to beyond the end, to fulfilment. What in fact is terrorism if not its own means of conjuring up the end of history? It lures power into a trap by way of an immediate and total act. Instead of waiting for a final date of reckoning, it positions itself vis-a-vis an ecstatic end in the hope of inciting or spurring conditions for Judgement day. An illusory challenge, of course, always fascinating nevertheless because, in a rather profound sense, neither time nor history were ever accepted or embraced. Everyone remains conscious of the arbitrary or artificial character of time and history. And we are never the dupes of those who would have us hope.
Isn't there outside the confines of terrorism a glimmer of this demand for a parousia in the global fantasy of a catastrophe that hovers over today's world? The demand for a violent resolution to reality when this reality, in fact, eludes us endlessly in a hyperreality? Hyperreality's achievement is its obliteration of a reckoning, of a Judgement Day, of an Apocalypse or of a Revolution. All these discussions of the end escape us and history doesn't stand a chance to implement them because they will have already attained their end in the meantime (it is still the story of Kafka's Messiah: he arrives too late, one day too late, and this time-lag, this discrepancy becomes unbearable). To the extent that we short-circuit the Messiah, we will crank up the end. This has always been the nature of demonic temptation: to falsify ends and all calculation with respect to these ends, to falsify time and the occurrence of things and thereby precipitate our tendency towards impatience with respect to fulfilment. Or, to secretly intuit that the promise of fulfilment itself, too, is false and diabolic.
It is via our obsession with real time, with the instantaneity of information that a corresponding secret of a millennium arises: to do away with duration (duree), with differential time, to annul the somewhere else of the event, to anticipate its end by exempting it from linear time, to seize upon things even before they have taken place. In this respect, real time is an even greater artifice than differential time, whilst it also involves its denial - if we want immediate satisfaction (jouissance) from an event, if we want to live it in the moment as if we were already there, it is because we no longer have any trust in the meaning or purpose of the event. One can spot the same denial in apparently opposite attitudes - in the historicization, in the archiving, in the memorizing of everything related to our past as well as those appertaining to every other culture. Isn't this the symptom of a collective premonition (pressentiment) of the end, i.e., that with this we will have arrived at the end of the event and of live historical time, and that one needs to arm oneself with all forms of artificial memory, with all the signs of the past in order to confront the absence of the future and the ice age (temps glaciaires) that awaits us? Aren't the mental and intellectual structures in the process of burying and shrouding themselves in memories, in archives as they lay in quest of an unlikely resurrection? All thought, all ideas will bury themselves with the prudence of the Year 2000. They can already smell the whiff of terror of the Year 2000. They instinctively adopt the solution of these cryogenics that one drops in liquid nitrogen and whereby one expects to have found the means of their survival.
These societies that no longer expect anything from a future succession of things and have less and less faith in history, societies that bury themselves in the backdrop of their futurological (prospectives) technologies, behind their stockpiles of information and in the cellular networks of communication and where time is finally obliterated in pure circulation - these generations may indeed never wake up, yet not be aware of it. Year 2000 may well not take place - of which they know nothing.
Reversion of History
Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the twentieth century, history took a turn in another direction. Once it passed its apogee in time, once it reached the peak of the curve in its evolution, its solstice of history, a sliding back of events set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning. As in the case of cosmic space, historical space-time would also have a curvature. By way of the same chaotic effect in time as in space, things go faster and faster as they approach their culmination, just like the flow of water speeds up mysteriously as it approaches the waterfall. In the Euclidean space of history, the fastest route from one point to another is a straight line, the one of Progress and Democracy. This however only pertains to the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean space of the end of the century, a malevolent curvature invincibly reroutes all trajectories. The phenomenon is doubtlessly linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century just like the earth is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or to the subtle distortion of the field of gravity. Segalen says that on an Earth become a sphere, every movement distancing us from a point also brings us closer to that same point. This is true with respect to time as well. Every noticeable movement of history brings us imperceptibly closer to its antipode, indeed to its point of departure. This is the end of linearity. Viewed from this perspective, the future no longer exists. And if there is no future, neither is there an end anymore. And yet this is not what is meant by the end of history. What we have to deal with is a paradoxical process of reversion, a reversal of effect with respect to modernity which, having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments, disintegrates into its rudimentary components through a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence.
By means of this retroversion of history to infinity, through this hyperbolic curvature, the century eludes its own end. By way of this retrospective effect of events, we escape before our own death. Metaphorically speaking therefore, we will not even attain to the symbolic end of things, the symbolic culmination of Year 2000.
Can we avoid this retro-curvature of a history that backtracks on its footsteps and effaces its own traces; can we sidestep this fatal asymptote which in some way rolls back modernity in the way one rewinds a tapedeck? We are so accustomed to viewing all films over and over again, the fictitious ones as well as those pertaining to our lives; we have been so thoroughly contaminated by a retrospective technique that we are quite capable, under the blow of contemporary vertigo, to rethread history as one threads a film wrong side up.
Have we perhaps, propelled by the vain hope to evade our "abiding in our present destruction", as Canetti says, given ourselves up to a retrospective melancholy in order to relive and, make up for, everything; to relive for the sake of elucidating (as if the shadow of psychoanalysis is cast over all our history -as if the same events, the same circumstances were reproduced in nearly the same terms; as if the same wars broke out between the same people, and; all that had been stolen would resurge as if moved by an irrepressible fantasy so that the oeuvre itself would be perceived as the form of the unconscious, as primary process at work); are we to invoke all past events for the sake of comparison, to re-teach everything in terms of process? A delirium with process has quite recently gotten hold of us and, at the same time, a seizure or delirium with responsibility, precisely because it is becoming increasingly elusive. To remake history proper - to whitewash all the monstrosities: underlying the proliferation of scandals there is a vague (res)sentiment that history itself, too, is a scandal. A retro-process that will steer us to a delirium with/of origin, to this side of history, to a conviviality driven by instincts (animale), to the primitive niche, which is already the way things stand in the ecologic flirt with an impossible origin.
The only way to avoid this, to cut the chord tying us to this recession and obsession, is to place ourselves straightaway on an alternative temporal orbit, to leave our shadow, the shadow of the century, to take an elliptic short-cut and go beyond the end by not allowing it time to take place. This, at least, will help preserve what remains are left of history instead of subjecting it to a harrowing revision and then dispense it to those who will do an autopsy on the cadaver the way one does an autopsy on one's childhood in never-ending analysis. This would at least provide us with the possibility of retaining the memory and glory, and under the auspices of revision and rehabilitation we could begin cancelling each and all the events that have come before, forcing them to repent.
If we could circumvent this moratory of the end of the century, this retarded culmination of things which, strangely enough, resembles a labour of mourning, a misdirected or misfired (rate) labour of mourning that wants to review, re-write, restore and facelift everything in order to produce, seemingly in a paranoiac fervour (elan), a perfect book-keeping of the end of the century, a universally balanced budget, democracy everywhere, complete eradication of all conflicts and, if possible, the dismissal of all our memories of all "negative" events - if we could forego or desist this venture in bleaching, in international varnishing for which all nations of today are vying to conspire, if we could spare ourselves this democratic extreme-ity (extreme- onction) from where the New World Order speaks, we would at least be left with events that have preceded us with their glory, their character, their meaning, their uniqueness. Consequently, we are so much in a hurry to mask the worst of our deposit into our account (everyone is secretly afraid of the appalling balance we are about to carry over and offer to the Year 2000) that there remains nothing of our own history at the end of the millennium, nothing of its illumination, of its factual violence. If there is any distinct trait to the event, that which in fact comprises the event and hence has value in history, is its irreversibility, i.e., that there is something in it that always exceeds meaning and interpretation - which is exactly the opposite of what we see today: all that has happened in this century in terms of progress, of liberation, of revolution, of violence is currently under a well-meaning review process.
The question is this: is the movement of modernity reversible, and is this reversibility itself, in turn, irreversible? How far can this retrospective activity, this dream of the end of the millennium go? Isn't there a "wall of history", analogous to that of sound and speed, from which its abjuring (palinodique) movement cannot steer clear?
Rise Of The Void Towards The Periphery
As a watermark of unexpected, but also in view of other unforeseen events, the idea was conceived at the dawn of the nineties among a few friends to set up an Agency that would be invisible, anonymous and clandestine, Stealthy Agency, equally labelled as:
ANATHEMATIC ILLIMITED
TRANSFATAL EXPRESS
VIRAL INCORPORATED
INTERNATIONAL EPIDEMICS
Seeking to hunt down unreal events with which to disinform the public, it itself has remained unreal. In this sense, it perfectly fulfilled its role, as it managed to escape all radar detection to become a unique formula that is never virtual.
What this implied is that there were no longer ideas that had anything to do with facts - this was the "utopia" of the sixties and seventies - that there were no longer any actors involved in events, no intellectuals occupied with meaning. Instead, there was an insignificant upheaval of events, lacking real actors and authorized interpreters: action [l'actio] simultaneously disappeared with the auction [l'auctoritas]. All that remains are "current events", a kind of cinematographic "action", an "auction", i.e., the price-tagging of the event in an overbid of information. The event is taken up not only in action but in speculation and, eventually, in a chain reaction that links facticity to extremes in such a manner that no interpretation can be rejoined to it.
Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this linkage of things as if they had a meaning, so that they are no longer controlled or regulated except by artificial montage and non-sense. It is the putting up for auction of the event through radical disinformation, the price-tagging of the event instead of gambling with it, instead of investing in the stakes of history. If, on the other hand, should there be a stake in this, it remains occult, enigmatic, and resolved in events that have never really taken place. And I am not talking about ordinary events, but of the events of the East [Eastern Europe], of the Gulf War, etc. What the Agency otherwise specifically aimed at was to oppose this simulation with a radical dissimulation, to lift the veil from this non-happening of events. It has also occultized and enigmatized itself in their image in order to open up and clear to the way to a particular void, to a certain non-sense - unlike the media which remains relentlessly bent on filling up all interstices. Its aim was to manoeuvre itself in the void of events like Chuang-Tzu's butcher proceeds in the interstitial void of the body. This surreptitious, sly intervention in the meaning of the void against grotesque infatuation with information and the political scene, evidently could not amount to more than a dream and because of its assumed occult and enigmatic nature, it ended up not taking place like the events themselves. It fell into the same black hole, into the same virtual space as the non-events which it should have addressed (secretly however, and without anyone knowing, it remained operational in the image of these new events which were either mediatized or not). An apparently insolvable paradox. The idea, though, is not dead.
Stealthy Agency responded to the strike of events, to the strike of history. Like history, it, too, subscribed to absent events, looking for a way to furnish the most exact non-information on the absence of events; on this illimited strike with respect to the occupation of history; on void space over which the phantoms of Power still hover, similar to the empty space of Work strikers occupy in a factory, over which the phantom of Capital continues to hover.
It is as if the events had adopted the vocabulary of the order of strike. Step by step, everything forsook and defected from its time reconfiguring itself into a present/current void where only a visual psychodrama of information was left lingering behind. And this strike of events brings with it the lock-out of history. The fact that events no longer generate information [rather, it is the other way round], prompts incalculable consequences. All the negative work disappears on the horizon of the media precisely in the way that labour disappears on the horizon of capital. There too, relations become inverted: it is no longer labour that serves the reproduction of capital, it is capital that produces and reproduces labour. An enormous parody of the relations of production.
This deregulation of effects and causes no longer raises or incites critical consciousness, only singular objective irony. The Agency therefore had to withstand not only the temptation of information with respect to events on strike, it also had to abstain from offering a critical discourse so that it could capture the originality of this non-event which is that of objective irony. The radical irony of our history is that things no longer happen, everything has an air about it - contrary to the traditional cunning of history that made sure essential changes were produced without any air about them.
One only has to contemplate how the events of Eastern Europe had been taken at face or cash value, with their weight-in-gold freedom and "democratic values", or how the Gulf War spawned its weight-in-gold of human Rights and the New World Order. How, in fact, these events were priced beyond their value, at the scene of which history became similar to that of an art auction or bazaar today. In opposition to this speculative inflation which leaves everyone enervated, overexcited and indifferent, tetanic [convulsive] as well as apathetic, with respect to the gidouille of events, worthy of the name The Great Gidouille1 of History, one had to come up with a form of ironic deregulation of information, a form of idle writing in response to the idling facticity of our times while at the same time with a subtly catastrophic form that would correspond to the reckoning or redemptive nature of the end of the century. One had to recover amidst the strike of events the filigree or watermark of dissuasion, the deceptive form that guides the nullity of our times.
Dissuasion is a rather particular form of action: it is that which causes something not to happen. This governs the period we presently live in, which is not so much interested in producing events as it is to ensure they do not take place, and all this performed with an air or under the auspices of an historical event. Or, it could be that certain things took place instead of others which did not. Dissuasion also touches on war, history, the real, the passions. It allows for (!) strange events which do not in any way advance history, instead play it backwards by wedding an inverse, unintelligible curvature to our sense of history (i.e., that one cannot have any sense of history unless one falls in line with what is being forwarded as historical sense); one that no longer discloses any negative power (progressive, critical, revolutionary), consequently their only negativity would be the fact that they would not have happened. Disturbing.
The realm of dissuasion extends over the past as well. It can obliviate all certainty of facts and testimonies. It is able to destabilize memory just as well as it can destabilize all foresight. This is a diabolic power intent on burning passage to the real act of the event or, if it is allowed to take place, if, in fact, it did take place, would destroy its credibility.
Maybe this curvature implying that things have neither meaning nor a linear end is nothing but a depression in the meterological sense of the term - the void we feel may not be due to defection in meaning or memory but would perhaps be retraceable to a strange attraction that had come upon us from somewhere. Could it be that this lifelessness or catatonia that we are living is to be interpreted inversely, not in the sense of a void abandoned by the ebb of past events, but as a void owing its effect to aspiration, to the suctional pull of a future event, to the proximity of a factual mass which, through anticipation draws to itself all the oxygen that we breathe, brutally depressurizing thereby the social, political, cultural and mental sphere?
Pataphysic hypothesis, that of anti-gravity, of anti-density, of a science of imaginary solutions that arise beyond physics and metaphysics. In Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, Jarry had already described the profile of this strange attraction that stems from the reversal of the principles of physics: "Science today founds itself on the principle of induction: most people have most often seen this phenomenon preceded or followed by that one, and conclude that that's the way it will be forever ... But instead of declaring the law of falling bodies towards a centre why wouldn't one prefer that ofthe rise of the void towards the periphery, the void conceived of as unity of non-density, a hypothesis much less arbitrary than the one that opts for a concrete unity of positive density".
An inverse attraction of the void, instead of the full attracting the full. This is perhaps what would give our events this particular colour, this taste or, rather, this vapidity. At the moment of their arrival they have already become vanishing events with little meaning, if any, as they already come to align themselves with the void. In opposition to the old physics of meaning: a new gravitation, the true and only attraction of the void - undoubtedly the most fundamental natural law.
This would certainly explain the anomalies, including the mental universe and the field of "psychology". Our forms of action therefore, instead of being bearers of positive pulsion, are much more conveyors of expulsion and repulsion, i.e., the centrifugal mobility of particles that seek their liberation from density - to rejoin what? A mysterious periphery of space, an anti-gravity. Would this be the way to escape the heavy form, the gravity of "desire" conceived of as positive attraction, i.e., through a much more subtle eccentricity of seduction which would be, to take up the old cosmogonies that never lacked in charm, elusive beauty, out-of-body, much lighter molecules that only know of one way out, that of the void (like poetic language where every particle finds its resolution in anagrammatic resonance).
As for the new events, one could say that they plough a void in front of themselves as they go along, wherein they also get swallowed up. It seems that everything jostles ahead in a haste to be forgotten. These events leave no place for interpretation, if not for all interpretations simultaneously, and where they skirt all the intent of meaning and the heavy/weighty attraction of a continued history as they enter on the light orbit of a discontinued history. They arrive faster than their shadow - unforeseen for the most part - however, do not have any consequences. Meteoric events that bank on the same chaotic inconsequence as do the formation of clouds. With respect to the events of Eastern Europe therefore, one gets the impression of a long and sustained negative accumulation accompanied by a sudden resolution as the obvious and instantaneous conclusion of operations that are beyond our grasp. Under these conditions and with respect to events that are nevertheless significant, there is a strange taste left in the mouth of a deja- arrive, a retrospective development where one cannot see anything worthwhile with respect to its future. Our only astonishment is not to have foreseen it; our only regret - the inability to draw consequences from it. The screen of history changes with the same excessive and untimely rhythm as do natural phenomena.
One gets the impression that events are hurled headlong in isolation, all on their own as they abruptly and unforeseen get diverted to the point of their flight, i.e., to the peripheral void of the media. Just like physicists are no longer in the possession of the particle except for a vision of its trajectory on a screen, neither are we any longer in possession of pulsating events, except for a cardiogram, nor of representation or memory, except for an (unimaginative) encephalogram, nor of desire or jouissance, except for psychodrama and a cathodic vision.
This is somewhat like procreation in vitro: the embryo of a real event is transported into the artificial uterus of information where many orphan, fatherless and motherless, foetuses are delivered. The event is entitled to the same procreative practices as birth, to the same euthanasic practices as death.
We are unquestionably indebted to this physically pleasing sensation: the sentiment that collective or individual events are plunged into a hole of memory. This debility, no doubt, is due to a movement in reverse, to this parabolic curve interjected into the space of history. For the past cannot represent itself, it cannot be reflected upon unless it prods us in another sense, i.e., with respect to some sort of future or other. Retrospective is solidary with prospective that allows for something to be depicted as surpassed, as stolen and therefore as having taken place. If, by way of a strange revolution, we set out on the course of inverted meaning and get involuted in this dimension of the past, we will no longer be able to represent ourselves. The extension of memory would curve or bend and make a black hole out of every event. We live through this subjectively in the sudden loss of our memories, through the rupture in the continuity of names, faces and familiar forms. With respect to this kind of catastrophe of memory, we are not talking about natural forgetting nor of unconscious repression. Focus is on an inversion of this field of temporal gravitation which no longer allows signs of the past to be bearers of a specific mass, of a nuclear mass necessary for their retention, nor of a mirror of the present in which they could be reflected. The holes in memory are a bit like what has become of the ozone layer, where our protective screen breaks down or disintegrates. Or maybe they are simply not big enough to be engulfed in a way that it could start swirling to unfetter the light particles from the heavy ones, enlarging and deepening the black hole from where dead bodies would release or free up their aerial substance as in the case of Dante and Giordano Bruno. It is in an absolute void that the absolute event takes place. The void therefore can only be relative in view of the fact that death has remained virtual.
Strike Of Events
What has been lost is the glory of the event, its aura, as Benjamin would say. Over the centuries, history lived under the sign of glory, under the sign of a quite strong illusion that had played on the durability of time which one inherited from the ancestors and then passed onto descendants. This passion today would seem rather pathetic. What we are after is no longer glory but identity, no longer an illusion but, on the contrary, an accumulation of evidence - anything that can serve as a testimony to a historical existence, whereas the task once was to lose oneself in a prodigious dimension, in an "immortality" Hannah Arendt speaks about, and the transcendence of which would equal God (glory and salvation have long been the topic of discussion among people, like passion and compassion, rivals in the face of the Eternal).
The prodigious or phenomenal event which cannot be measured either in terms of its causes or its consequences and which creates its own scene, its own dramaturgy - no longer exists. Little by little, history has shrunk back into the probability of its causes, of its effects and, more recently, into the field of its present, into its effects measured in "real time". Events will not go any further than what their anticipated sense, their programming, and their diffusion will allow. This strike of events in itself constitutes a true historical manifestation, this refusal to signify whatever there may be, or even the capacity to signify whatever comes our way. This is the true end of history, the end of the Reason or Logic of history.
Then again, it would be too nice if we could be finished with history. For it is possible that not only has history disappeared (no more negative labour, no more political reasoning, no more prestige of the event) but that we have now succeeded in nourishing its end. Things go on as if we were still constructing history, and in the process of amassing signs of the social, signs of the political, signs of progress and change, we are doing none other than feeding the end of history. Cannibalism and necrophagous, whichever you prefer, always demand newer victims, newer events to finish them off just a little bit more. Socialism is a nice example where, after the failure of historical reason which it sought or pretended to embody, the buck was passed into its hands to make-do whatever it could with this gestation of the end of history, with this diet of the end.
We have been asking ourselves ever since, 'what could possibly come after the orgy - mourning or melancholy'? Plainly, neither this nor that, instead an incessant face-lifting of all the episodes of modern history, of its processes of liberation (of peoples, sexes, dreams, art and the unconscious - briefly, of all the constituents of the orgy of our times) under the sign of a premonition with respect to an apocalyptic end to it all.
As if in an advance escape we preferred a retrospective apocalypse and the revisioning of everything - all our societies have become revisionist, they sweetly rethink everything, they whitewash their political crimes, their scandals, they lick their wounds, they nourish their end. Celebration and commemoration themselves are nothing but the soft forms of necrophagous cannibalism, the homeopathic form of killing us softly. This is the work of the heirs whose resentment of death is unending. The museums, the jubilees, the festivals, the complete works, the lesser unedited fragments - all these testify to the fact that we are entering upon a vital era of resentment and repentance.
Exuberant and commemorative attitudes will no doubt become part of this collective flagellation. We are particularly spoiled in France, where actual rituals of mourning and condolences weigh down on our public life. All our monuments are mausoleums: the Pyramid, the Arc, the Orsay Museum, the chamber of the pharaoh, the Grand Bibliotheque - the cenotaph of culture. And this is not to mention the Revolution, a monument in and of itself, whose bicentennial created the greatest factual simulation of the end of the century.
There are two types of forgetting: either through slow or violent eradication of memory or via the advancement of spectacle, the passing of historical space into the space of advertising, the site where the media have acquired and, themselves have become, a temporal strategy of prestige. This is the way in which we have constructed ourselves in countlessly reinforced advertising images, in a memory of synthesis that serves as our primitive point of reference, as our founding myth and, above all, distances us from the real event of the Revolution.
"The Revolution is not on the agenda in France today because the great Revolution had already taken place and has served as an example for all others over the last two centuries. In all our dealings in France today, we proceed as if there were no revolution" (Louis Mermaz). It happened, it's over and will therefore never again take place. Our complete system rests on this negative anticipation. Not only are we unable to produce new history anymore, we can no longer even ensure its symbolic reproduction. We fashion our opera in the style of the Bastille - a pathetic attempt at reinstatement where royal music is played to the people. On the other hand, no other music would be played at a scene that the cultivated visit and where, through art and other forms of pleasure, the principle is reinforced that it is the lot of the privileged to voluntarily consecrate places that others had paid for with their lives.
Could one suggest that people storm the opera and dismantle it on the symbolic date of July 14? Could one insinuate that they march around with the bloody heads of our modern ministers of culture at the tip of their pikes?
But the fact is that we no longer make history, we have been reconciled with it and protect it as if it were a masterpiece in danger. Times have changed. Today we have a "vision" of a Revolution perfectly pious in the way it alludes to human Rights - not even a nostalgic vision, instead, one that is recycled in postmodern intellectual comfort(ing) terms. A vision that allows the elimination of Saint-Just from The Dictionary of the Revolution [Dictionnaire de la Revolution]. "Overrated rhetoric" says Francois Furet, the perfect historian of the repentance of Terror and glory.
There are those who let the dead bury the dead, and then there are those who will never grow weary digging them up in order to fix them. Unsuccessful both at the level of symbolic murder and mourning, death cannot be the end of the line as they have to unearth the dead in order to impale them - this is the Carpentras complex (after Timisoara [Roumania]: the rigged televising of dead bodies), the complex of profanation.
Nothing is more favourable for this operation than the one hundredth anniversary of their death - Rimbaud, van Gogh, Nietzsche, the year 91 would have been exceptionally qualified for cheap profanatory works.
There is a kind of suicidal attitude in this compulsive effort on the part of the cultural and intellectual elite to exalt thinkers who had only contempt for them and who were the living examples of their denunciation: Celine, Artaud, Bataille, Nietzsche. Taking the form of an instinctual fault or failure which Nietzsche had already diagnosed a hundred years ago, this suicidal attitude provides the characteristics of a species that is eventually doomed due to its inability to judge what is good for it. If the left were a species and if culture obeyed the laws of natural selection, it should have disappeared a long time ago. Instead, the left flirts with that which negates it, dying of the total contradiction between its critical faculty and its presence in power as it made culture into a mode of government. All this already comprises the forms of repentance.
Only terrorists have yet to repent. The intellectuals have paved the way for them - the Sartrians and others, since the fifties, have supplied us with the avant-garde of repentance. Today, the whole century repents, the repentance of class (or of race) everywhere rises above the pride and conscience of class. This is the sign under which the century has been intellectualized, an intellectualization today as if it had already embourgeois-d [s'est embourgeoise] a century. Furthermore, the term "intellectual" will disappear one day just like "bourgeois" did, and no longer is any ridicule in store for it, save for the person who actually uses the term.
This self-dissolving, typical of the West as it is of the East, can be seen in the degradation of the structures of power and representation (in other words, the more the political sphere is intellectualized, the more it secretly negates its will to govern or rule and this premonition about itself is the source of all corruption), and also in the numerous strategies aimed at the re-enchantment of values, cultures, difference[s]. We expend all its energy in the resistance to our own end, in which we have neither jouissance nor vertigo. It would probably be better to have a gigantic eve of August 4th, a big night of human rights where all humankind would surrender itself just like the aristocrats formerly renounced their rights - a relinquishing act in excess. What could possibly befall us in this pull towards a harkening back to our culture?
It seems that we are summoned to conduct an infinite retrospective of all that has gone before. What is true of politics and morals, also seems to apply to art as well. All movement in painting has withdrawn from the future and is now displaced towards the past. Art today is engaged in reappropriating works of either recent or of the more distant past, even contemporary works. This is what Russell Connor calls the kidnapping or rapture of modern art. Similar to loose threads that come undone from threadbare weft [woof], this is a kind of irony that could only result from the disillusionment of things, a fossilized irony. The twinkling of any eye that places the nude of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe [Dining on the grass] in front of Cezanne's Joueurs aux cartes [Cardplayers], much like the head-dressing of a monkey in an admiral's hat, is none other than the irony of advertising that swamps the world of art today. This is the irony of repentance and of resentment vis-a-vis one's own culture. Repentance and resentment, no doubt, comprise the final state of the history of art since they encompass, according to Nietzsche, the ultimate state in the genealogy of morals. This is a parody, or rather a palinode [recantation] of art and the history of art (an episode that reflects on a very brief history) - a parody of culture performed on itself in a vengeance typical of radical disillusionment. It's as if history constructed its own bins and began seeking its redemption foraging among the debris.
Alas! The end of history is also the end of the bins of history. Or perhaps the creation of even more bins to bury old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to toss Marxism which actually invented the bins of history? (By the way, there seems to be a justice here since those who had invented the bins were the ones who fell into them.) Conclusion: if there are no more bins of history, it is because History itself has become a bin. It has become its own bin, similar to the planet which is currently in the process of becoming one big bin.
Once ice freezes, all excrement moves to the surface. Once the dialectic freezes, all the sacred excrement of the dialectic is made visible. When the future thaws out, and even the present by now, one can observe the resurfacing of all the excrement of the past.
The problem is that of diminution. This does not only apply to physical substances, including atomic particles, but also to defunct ideologies, completed utopias, dead concepts, fossilized ideas that continue to pollute our mental space. These historical and intellectual waste products give rise to more serious concern than industrial waste. Who will do us the favour of cleaning out all the sedimentation of secular idiocy? According to history, this live waste, this languishing monster keeps dilating even after its death, like the bodies of Ionesco [Romanian president after Ceaucescu] - and how can one escape from that?
The environmental imperative states that all waste must be recycled otherwise it will just circulate indefinitely like satellites revolving around the Earth as they themselves turn into cosmic waste. History in a way prefigures this dilemma: either burst open the undegradable waste of great empires, of great narratives, of great systems given to decay under their gigantic proportions or simply recycle all waste in a synthetic form of sundry history, similarly to what we are producing today under the sign of Democracy and Human Rights which always amounted to a full-scale muddled reprocessing of all the residues of history - residues of brutal grinding over which ethnic, linguistic, federal and ideological phantoms of bygone societies still hover. Amnesia, anamnesis, anachronic revival of all kinds of characters of the past - royalty, feudality -have these ever really disappeared? Even democracy, this proliferating form, this smallest common denominator of all our liberal societies, this planetary democracy of Human Rights is to freedom what Disneyland is to the imaginary [fancy]. What it offers with regard to the modern need for freedom is very similar to the attributes required for the recycling of paper.
In reality, there is no insolvable problem for waste. The problem is resolved via the postmodern invention of recycling and the incinerator. From the ashes of the Great Incinerators of history, one resurrects the Phoenix of postmodernity! One has to take into account that all that was non- degradable, non-extinguishable is recycled today. And why? Because there is no final solution. We cannot escape the worst, to comprehend that History will not have an end because all of its components - the Church, communism, democracy, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies - continue on an indefinite course of recycling. What is truly incredible is that as much as we had thought to have gone beyond history, none of it has really been surpassed, none of it has disappeared - they are all there ready to resurface, all the archaic, anachronic forms quite intact and atemporal like the virus in the furthest recesses of the body. In an attempt to rescue itself from cyclic time, all that history has managed to accomplish was to relapse into the order of recyclables.
Thawing Of The East
Hurray! History has been resuscitated! The end or final outcome for the turn of the century is on the march. Everyone gets a breather from the idea that history, which was momentarily choked under the grip of totalitarian ideology, can assume its more charming side now that the barrier has been lifted on the countries of Eastern Europe. The realm of history is finally reopened to an unforeseen movement of people and to their thirst for freedom. Contrary to the depressive mythology that generally accompanies the turns of the century, this particular one seems to have inaugurated a bright, fresh new start of the final process, a novel hope and a fresh kickstart to go and place our bets. In the background though, all the portentous omens of the end of history still loom. How could one possibly question this bright reality and vitality when so many relevant events have been happening right under our nose?
On a closer look however, the event is a bit more mysterious because of its much closer affinity to a nonidentifiable "historical" object. What an extraordinary episode, this thawing of the countries of the East, this thawing of freedom! But what becomes of freedom once it is thawed out? A dangerous operation that may produce some rather ambiguous results (besides the fact that one cannot deepfreeze again what has been thawed out). The USSR and the nations of the East compartmentalized in deepfreeze were the testing ground, an experimental milieu for freedom since they were sequestered or confined and placed under extreme pressure. The West is but a guardian patrolling the depot for freedom and Human Rights. If ultra deepfreeze was the distinctive negative mark of the East, the ultrafluidity of our western world poses an even greater risk since under the pressure of freeing up and liberalizing all morals and opinions, the issue of freedom simply can no longer be raised. It is virtually resolved. In the West, freedom or the Idea of Freedom died a beautiful death: we all had a chance to take a good look at it in all the recent festivities performed in its name. In the East it was assassinated, but no crime is ever perfect. It will be very interesting to observe, experimentally, as the remains of freedom resurface, how they will be resuscitated now that all of freedom's signs have been effaced. We will see whether it can jumpstart the process of reanimation, of a rehabilitation post mortem. Thawed freedom may not be the most gainly sight. Might it turn out that all it has left is a haste to feverishly negotiate (the purchase and sales of) cars and electric appliances, indeed to turn psychotropic and pornographic, in other words, transform itself immediately into western fluidity or, in yet other terms, to reverberate from one end of a history of deepfreeze to a history of ultrafluidity and circulation at its polar extreme? What is fascinating in the events of the East is certainly not to see them rallying in a docile manner in support of a convalescing democracy and thereby providing it with renewed energy (and new markets), rather it is the telescopic portrayal of two particular modalities of the end of history: one with a frozen outcome in concentration camps, the other where, to the contrary, the end is accomplished in a total and centrifugal expansion of communication. A final solution in both cases. It is also possible that the thawing of Human Rights may be the socialist equivalent of the "depressurization of the West": a simple loss of energies in the western void, impounded to the East over a half century.
The intensity of the events may be misleading: if the zeal of the countries of the East merely aimed at deideologization and was driven by an eagerness to imitate liberal countries where all freedoms have long been traded for the technical comforts of life, then we would certainly know the value of this freedom and may well never be found a second time. History never gives a second serving. On the contrary, - and this is the unforeseen aspect for us in the West (the Good too has to go once the Evil empire collapses!) - this thawing of the East could prove to be harmful in the long run and, like carbon gases in the higher layers of the atmosphere, may create a political greenhouse effect, a rewarming of human relations on the planet through the melting down of Communist ice fields and thereby flood the shores of the West. It is rather bizarre that while we certainly doubt the possibility of a catastrophe in climate that would melt the ice fields, democratically we download all our power into aspirations at the political level.
If, at that time, the USSR had thrown its stock of gold on the world market, it would have completely destabilized the market. If the countries of the East begin to circulate the incredible stock of their refrigerated freedom, they too would destabilize the feeble metabolism of western values which no longer desire that freedom take on the form of action, instead they configure it as a virtual and consensual form of interaction, not as drama but as the universal psychodrama of liberalism. A sudden shot or injection of freedom as a live
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