The Precession of Simulacra 74
What stirs in the shadow of this posture, under the pretext of a maximal ‘objective’ menace, and thanks to that nuclear sword of Damocles, is the perfection of the best system of control which has never existed. And the progressive satellisation of the whole planet by that hypermodel of security. The same goes for peaceful nuclear installations. Pacification doesn’t distinguish between the civil and the military: wherever irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, wherever the notion of security becomes absolute, wherever the norm of security replaces the former arsenal of laws and violence (including war), the system of deterrence grows, and around it grows an historical, social and political desert. A huge involution makes every conflict, every opposition, every act of defiance contract in proportion to this blackmail which interrupts, neutralises and freezes them. No mutiny, no history can unfurl any more according to its own logic since it risks annihilation. No strategy is even possible any more, and escalation is only a puerile game left to the military. The political stake is dead. Only simulacra of conflict and carefully circumscribed stakes remain. The ‘space race’ played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. This is why it was so easily able to take over from it in the ‘60’s (Kennedy Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently in a mode of ‘peaceful coexistence.’ For what is the ultimate function of the space race, of lunar conquest, of satellite launchings, if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of satellisation, whose perfect embryo is the lunar module: a programmed microcosm, where nothing can be left to chance? Trajectory, energy, computation, physiology, psychology, the environment – nothing can be left to contingency, this is the total universe of the norm – the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail which is law. A universe purged of every threat to the senses, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness – it is this very perfection which is fascinating. For the exaltation of the masses was not in response to the lunar landing or the voyage of man in space (this is rather the fulfillment of an earlier dream) – no, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of their planning and technical manipulation, by the immanent wonder of programmed development. Fascinated by the maximisation of norms and by the mastery of probability. Unbalanced by the model, as we are by