The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

"Any created object, visual or analytic, conceptual or photographic, has to condense all the dimensions of the game into a single one: the allegorical, the presentative (mimicry), the agonal (agon), the random (alea) and the vertigious (ilinx). Recomposing the spectrum. A work, an object, a piece of architecture, a photograph, but equally a crime or an event, must: be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into pay and produce vertigo." [215]

"The more daily life is eroded, routinized and interactivized, the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatory sets of rules." [215]

"According to Ilya Prigogine, we intuitively sense the irreversibility of physical phenomena and time's arrow is irreversible. But we may hypothesize a reversible process at the very heart of time, and at the very heart of thought. A dual arrow of time, a dual arrow of thought (according to some scientists, the elementary physical laws are reversible, that is to say, their mathematical expression is unchanged if the temporal variable is reversed). How can we reconcile this reversibility with the irreversibility we observe on the basis of the commonplace intuition we have of time?" [201]

"Every process growing exponentially generates a barrier: the speed barrier, the heat barrier, the information barrier, the transparency barrier, the Virtual barrier. And that barrier is insuperable." [192]

"The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous. Life and the world are not interactive -- life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game. There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language. Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface -- a kind of generalized echography." [188]

"On the symbolic plane there is only one way to pay back, and that is the counter-gift. If that is impossible, then there is vengeance, which is itself a form of counter-gift. Compassion here is useless and perverse: it merely adds to the inferiority of the victim. Moreover, this ruse of repentance is a particularly underhand manoeuvre on the part of those in power, since it means stealing from the people the last of their rights, their only opportunity for political participation: the chance to unmask and condemn the powerful. It is the same with the media and the news sources when they put themselves in the dock and engage in self-criticism. They rob the public of the last of their rights as citizens -- the right not to believe a single word they are told. Just as advertising, by affecting a self-deprecating ironic tone, short-circuits our opportunities for deriding it. This kind of deterrence is at work everywhere: 'citizens' are deprived of their right of revenge and their capacity to take reprisals." [171]

"The corruption of ideas is no exception. They too follow a much more cynical, subtle trajectory than the pathways of reason, and the networks of thought that are created bear only a distant relation to truth. It is this cunning which means that, as soon as they are invested with power, politicians immediately turn against that which, or those who, carried them to power, just as intellectuals very quickly turn against the verg ideas that inspired them." [169]

"Such is 'real time', the time of communication, information and perpetual interaction: the finest deterrence-space of time and events. On the real-time screen, by way of simple digital manipulation, all possibilities are potentially realized -- which puts an end to their possibility. Through electronics and cybernetics, all desires, all play of identity and all interactive potentialities are programmed in and auto-programmed. The fact that everything here is realized from the outset prevents the emergence of any singular event. Such is the violence of real time, which is also the violence of information." [132]

"Art has always denied itself. But once it did so through excess, thrilling to the play of its disappearance. Today it denies itself by default -- worse, it denies its own death. It immerses itself in reality, instead of being the agent of the symbolic murder of that same reality, instead of being the magical operator of its disappearance." [112]

"Art, in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing towards absence. But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality? Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this fluid universe of communication, the networks and interaction." [109]

"The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the nonexhibition of non-works in non-galleries -- the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works." [107]

"What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation -- the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints in the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea art remains intact." [107]


"Do we not prefer any old parallel universe to the real one? Any old double life to the one given to us? There is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment. Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious. Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness. Like the fragment, it has only to be elliptical. It has only to be an exception." [103]

"The silence of the image is equalled only by the silence of the masses and the silence of the desert." [102]


"Objects are merely a pretext for light. If there were no objects, light would circulate endlessly and we would not even be aware of it. If there were no subjects, thought would circulate infinitely and there would not even be any echo of it in consciousn ess. The subject is that upon which thought comes to rest in its infinite circulation, that against which it reflects. The object is that upon which light comes to rest, that which reflects it. The photograph is the automatic writing of light." [102]

"Lichtenberg speaks, in one of his aphorisms, of a tremor: any act, even an exact one, is preceded by a trembling, a haziness of gesture, and it always retains something of it. When this haziness, this tremor, does not exist, when an act is purely operational and is perfectly focused, we are on the verge of madness." [99]

"The photographic image is the purest because it simulates neither time nor movement and confines itself to the most rigorous unreality. All the other forms (cinema, video, computer-generated images) are merely attenuated forms of the pure image and its rupture with the real." [97]

"The ultimate violence done to the image is the violence of the computer-generated image, which emerged ex nihilo from numerical calculation and the computer. There is an end here to the very imagining of the image, to its fundamental 'illusion', since in the process of computer-generation the referent no longer exists and the real itself no longer has cause to come to pass, being produced immediately as Virtual Reality. There is an end here to that direct image-taking, that presence to a real object in an irrevocable instant, which created the magical illusion of the photograph and made the image a singular event." [95]

"Images that ultimately bear witness, behind their alleged 'objectivity', to a deep disavowal of the real, at the same time as a disavowal of the image, which is assigned the task of representing that which does not want to be represented, of violating the real by 'breaking and entering'. In this sense, most photographs (but media images too, in general, and all that makes up the 'visual') are not true images. They are merely reportage, realist cliché or aesthetic performance, enslaved to all the ideological systems." [93]

"The Iconoclasts of Byzantium smashed images to erase their signification (the visible face of God). While apparently doing the opposite, and in spite of our cult of idols, we are still iconoclasts: we destroy images by overloading them with signification; we kill images with meaning." [92]

"Of news coverage we are the hostages, but we also treat it as a spectacle, consume it as spectacle, without regard for its credibility. A latent incredulity and derision prevent us from being totally in the grip of the information media. It isn't critical consciousness that causes us to distance ourselves from it in this way, but the reflex of no longer wanting to play the game. Somewhere in us lies a profound desire not to have information and transparency (nor perhaps freedom and democracy -- all this needs looking at again). Towards all these ideals of modernity there is something like a collective form of mental reserve, of innate immunity." [84-5]

"People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank o written page with my eyes -- something I cannot do with the scree. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensorty relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen." [81-2]

"And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoders -- you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ectasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination -- and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertig of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuity interactivity." [81]

"Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine, the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning. Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence. And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming. This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities." [80-1]

"In the mirror we differentiate ourselves from our image, we enter upon an open form of alienation and of play with it. The mirror, the image, the gaze, the scene -- all these things open on to a culture of metaphor. Whereas in the operation of the Virtual, at a certain level of immersion in the visual machinery, the man / machine distinction no longer holds: the machine is on both sides of the interface. Perhaps you are indeed merely the machine's space now -- the human being having become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. There is no 'through' the screen the way there is a 'through' the looking-glass or mirror. The dimensions of time itself merge there in 'real time'. And, the characteristic of any virtual surface being first of all to be there, to be empty and thus capable of being filled with anything whatever, it is left to you to enter, in real time, into interactivity with the void." [80]

"What are we to do with an interactive world in which the demarcation line between subject and object is virtually abolished? That world can no longer either be reflected or represented; it can only be refracted or diffracted now by operations that are, without distinction, operations of brain and screen -- the mental operations of a brain that has itself become a screen." [78]

"The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind the a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response'). It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail. All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium." [78]

"It is the same with text, with any 'virtual' text (the Internet, word-processing): you work on it like a computer-generated image, which no longer bears any relation to the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. At any rate, as soon as you are in front of the screen, you no longer see the text as a text, but as an image. Now, it is in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right, never an interaction." [76]

"When an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, the event is rendered undecidable and virtual; it is stripped of its historical dimension and removed from memory. We are in a generalized feedback effect. Wherever a mingling of this kind -- a collision of poles -- occurs, then the vital tension is discharged. Even in 'reality TV', where, in the live telling of the story, the immediate televisual acting, we see the confusion of existence and its double." [75]

"This is the fall of dreams into the psychical domain, 'the fall of the imagination into the psychological swamp' (Hélé Béji). This fall into the psychical domain means, in fact, that dreams no longer have any prophetic value: to do so they would have to originate in a transcendence, the transcendence of night, and come from elsewhere, whereas they are now merely a mode of interaction with oneself." [70]

"Now, what makes exchange possible if not the abstract transcendence of value? What makes the exchange of language possible if not the abstract transcendence of the sign? It is all these things that are eliminated today, ground to dust. The same vertiginous deregulation is visited on both value and the sign. Not the real, but the sign and, through it, the whole universe of meaning and communication is undergoing the same deregulation as markets (doubtless it even preceded the deregulation of the world market)." [67-8]

"We have abolished the real world. What world remains, then? The world of signs? Not at all. We have put paid to the real world and, in the process, done away with that of the sign. It is the murder of the sign that paves the way for Integral Reality." [67]

"If the people puts itself in the hands of the political class, it does so more to be rid of power than out of any desire for representation. We may interpret this as a sign of passivity and irresponsibility, but why not venture a subtler hypothesis: namely, that this passing of the buck proceeds from an unwittingly lucid intuition of an absence of desire and will of their own -- in short, a secret awareness of the illusoriness of freedom?" [54]

"Reality will have been only a fleeting solution then. Indeed, it merely succeeded others, such as the religious illusion in all its forms. This truth, this rationality, this objective reality -- which we took in exchange for religious values, imagining that we had moved definitively beyond them -- is only the disenchanted heir to those same religious values. It does not seem ever genuinely to have gained the upper hand, as it happens, nor does it appear that the transcendent solution is entirely past and gone or that God is dead, even though we now deal only with his metastases." [43]

"If thought cannot be exchanged for reality, then the immediate denial of reality becomes the only reality-based thinking. But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true." [36-37]

"In the end, it is the strangeness of the world that is fundamental and it is that strangeness which resists the status of objective reality. Similarly, it is our strangeness to ourselves that is fundamental and resists the status of subject. It is not a matter of resisting alienation, but of resisting the very status of subject." [36]

"Such as it is, the world is without causal explanation or possible representation (any mirror whatever would still be part of the world). Now, that for which there is neither a meaning nor a definitive reason is an illusion. The world therefore has all the characteristics of a thorough-going illusion. For us, however, whatever its metaphysical beauty, this illusion is unbearable. Hence the need to produce all the possible forms of a simulacrum of meaning, of transcendence --- things which all mask this original illusoriness and protect us from it. Thus the simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth." [32]

"Immersion, immanence and immediacy -- these are the characteristics of the Virtual." [31]

"Time itself, lived time, no longer has time to take place. The historical time of events, the psychological time of affects and passion, the subjective time of judgement and will, are all simultaneously called into question by virtual time, which is called, no doubt derisively, 'real time'." [30]

"The computer-generated image is like this too, a digital image which is entirely fabricate, has no real referent and from which, by contrast with analogue images, the negative itself has disappeared -- not just the film negative, but the negative moment that lies at the heart of the image, that absence that causes the image to resonate. The technical fine-tuning here is perfect. There is no room for fuzziness, tremor or chance. Is this still an image?" [28]

"Integral Reality is also to be found in integral music: the sort you find in quadraphonic spaces or can 'compose' on a computer. The music in which sounds have been clarified and expurgated and which, shorn of all noise and static, is, so to speak, restored to its technical perfection. The sounds of such music are no longer the play of a form, but the actualization of a programme. It is a music reduced to a pure wavelength, the final reception of which, the tangible effect on the listener, is exactly programmed too, as in a closed circuit. It s, in a sense, a virtual music, flawless and without imagination, merging into its own model, and even the enjoyment of it is virtual enjoyment. Is this still music? The question must be open to doubt, since they have actually come up with the idea of reintroducing noise into it to make it more 'musical'." [27-28]

"'Does reality exist? Are we in a real world?' -- this is the leitmotiv or our entire present culture. But it merely expresses the fact that we can no longer bear this world, which is so prey to reality, except by way of a radical denial. And this is logical: since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it has to be justified here and now in this one by lending itself force of reality, by purging itself of any illusion. But at the same time, by the very effect of this counter-transference, the denial of the real as such grows. Reality, having lost its natural predators, is growing like some proliferating species. A little bit like algae or even like the human race in general. The Real is growing like the desert. 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real'. Illusion, dreams, passion, madness and drugs, but also artifice and simulacrum -- these were reality's natural predators. They have all lost energy, as though struck down by some dark, incurable malady. We have, then, to find an artificial equivalent for them, since, if we do not, reality, once it has attained its critical mass, will end up destroying itself spontaneously, will implode of its own accord -- which it is, in fact, currently doing, giving way to the Virtual in all its forms. It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality -- a process that ends in Integral Reality. What we have in virtuality is no longer a hinterworld: the substitution of the world is total; this is the identical doubling of the world, its perfect mirroring, and the matter is settled by the pure and simple annihilation of symbolic substance. Even objective reality becomes a useless function, a kind of waste that is ever more difficult to exchange and circulate. We have moved, then, from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultra-reality that puts an end to both reality and illusion." [26-27]

"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead." [23]

"Any questioning of reality, of its obviousness and its principle, is deemed unacceptable and condemned as negationist. The charge against you: what do you make of the reality of misery, suffering and death? Now, it isn't about taking sides on material violence or on the violence of misfortune -- it is about a line you are forbidden to cross, the line marking a taboo on reality, a taboo also on even the slightest attempt at interfering with a clear division between good and evil, on pain of being regarded as a scoundrel or an imposter. The affirmation or contestation of reality, of the reality principle, is, then, a political choice, and almost a religious one, in that any infringement of this principle is sacrilegious -- the very hypothesis of simulation being perceived, deep down, as diabolical (it takes up where heresy left off in the archaeology of the thinking of evil)." [22-23]

"The eclipse of God left us up against reality. Where will the eclipse of reality leave us?" The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact [21]

"Things have no origin any longer and no end, they cannot develop logically or dialectically any more, but only chaotically or randomly. They are becoming 'extreme' in the literal sense -- ex terminis: they are beyond the limits." At the reception of the Simens Media Prize

"What we also see here, too, is a characteristic recourse to a third term that stands outside the apparently given dichotomy of production / destruction: 'seduction' is, as it were, the option fro left field (Baudrillard also says it is the 'feminine' one, but that is another matter), the term that comes from outside the structure -- from 'elsewhere'. Chris Turner: The Intelligence of Evil: An Introduction, page 8.

"Deep down, things have never functioned socially, but symbolically, magically, irrationally, etc." In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, page 68.

"With the decline of psychoanalysis and sexuality as strong structures, one may catch a glimpse of another, parallel universe ... a universe that can no longer be intepreted in terms of psychic or psychological relations, nor those of repression and the unconscious, but must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances -- that is, in the terms of seduction." Seduction, page 7.

"It is impossible to destroy the system by a contradiction-based logic or by reversing the balance of forces -- in short, by a direct, dialectical revoluion affecting the economic or political infrastructure. Everything that produces contradiction or a balance of forces or energy in general merely feeds back into the system and drives it on." Le ludique et le policier et autres textes parus dans Utopie [1967/78] page 335