The God of this last Age. The industrial revolution gave rise to a whole new generation of signs and objects. These were signs with no caste tradition, which had never known the restrictions of status, and which would not have to be counterfeited because they were being produced on such a gigantic scale. The problem of the singularity and the origin of these signs no longer arises; technique is their origin. They have no meaning beyond the dimensions of the industrial simulacrum. The great simulacra constructed by man evolve from a universe of natural laws to one of forces and tensions, and finally, today, to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, we have the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation by models, differential modulation, feedback, questionnaires (question/réponse?): such is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra were only operative). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (Leibnizs God) and DNA its prophet. In fact, it is in the genetic code that the genesis of simulacra finds its most developed form. At the limit of an always increasing elimination of references and finalities, an ever-increasing loss of resemblances and designations, we find the digital and programmatic sign, whose value is purely tactical, at the intersection of other signals (bits of information/tests) whose structure is that of a micromolecular code of command and control. In its reproduction, the system puts an end to its own myth of origin and the referential values it has secreted during its process of development. By extinguishing its own foundational myth, the system also eliminates its internal contradictions (no more reality and no referent with which to challenge it). But it does away, in the same stroke, with its teleological myths, with the revolution itself. What the revolution always held out for was the triumph of the generic human reference, the original potential of man. If capital scratches generic man himself from the map (in favor of genetic man?), what then? The golden age of revolution was also the era of capital, when myths of origin and end were still in circulation. The irony is that the major historical threat to capital lay in the mythic imperative of rationality that characterized it from the beginning. But once it has short-circuited these myths in a factual operationalism, undermined rational discourse, and become its own myth, or more precisely, the indeterminate, random machine that it is today – something comparable to a genetic social code - then capital eliminates the opportunity for a determinate reversal. This is the essential violence of capital today. It remains to be seen whether this operationality is not also a myth - if, indeed, DNA itself is not a myth ... Art and industry can thus exchange signs: art, in order to become a reproductive machine (Andy Warhol), without ceasing to be art, since this machine is only a sign; and production, in order to lose all social purpose and thus to verify and exalt itself at last in the hyperbolic and aesthetic signs of prestige that are the great industrial combines, the 400-meter-high business blocks and the statistical mysteries of the GNP ... In this vertigo of serial signs - shadowless, impossible to sublimate, immanent in their repetition - who can say where the reality of what they simulate resides? Apparently, these signs repress nothing ... even the primary process is abolished. The cool universe of digitality absorbs the worlds of metaphor and of metonymy, and the principle of simulation thus triumphs over both the reality principle and the pleasure principle. -- Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:01:57 +0000