Join the new world

We only think we know what words mean. There was popular game show on US television for many years called "Password". Nobody ever thought it had anything to do with electronic systems security.

It meant much more than that.

It was a game about words. Figuring out the word got you through to the next round. The word was your pass to entering, to becoming, to winning.

Betty White was a star player at that game.



The primacy of consumption, which overtook the primacy of production nearly 60 years ago, brought objects to the fore.

Now, the objects talk to one another through signs which refer to an unreal world, one considerably less real than the minions of the old world of consumption and profit led us to believe.

This is the nausea of the obsessive object: its capacity to avenge itself on an over-sure subject, while remaining inert and dumb, yet effacing the thing itself. To help us cope, Marxist linguistic analysis developed into a useful tool of psychoanalysis which reveals the object as reducible to no discipline at all, rendering it entirely enignmatic, thus throwing into question all postulates, confabulating the interplay of values, and revealing an even greater ambiguity underlying the sign than the sign itself.

The nausea is still there, but at least now we can understand it.

It is the kind of loss of rationality that startles one out of a smaller sickness.




Unlike, say, empty and idiotic "communist" slogans regurgitated for humorous effect, this is interesting communist analysis: How the object slips away and absents itself; and how all that remains is Unheimlich - uncanny.

The exchange is the medium, yes, but it remains unconsummated. The object is mediatory, yet because it is immanent, it is immediate, it shatters the mediation with its in-your-face presence. It both gratifies and disappoints.

There is no Redemption for the object, only a "remainder" which the subject cannot lay hold of. In this manner, we are led to believe that accumulation, that profusion will contain the remains.

In the end it only puts more obstacles on the path to relating. One communicates through the objects. Then proliferation blocks communications.


This interests me.




We thought we were bored because the general equivalence of use-value and exchange-value appeared to have exhausted meaning. Luckily, anthropology undermined such notions and shattered the ideology of the market. Vulgar liberatarians beware. 🙂

Knowing about cultures and societies where such value-systems are virtually non-existent, in which the mediating agency of a transcendent abstraction comes into play, in which things are never exchanged directly, where right alongside commodity-value there exists aesthetic-value, this kind of observation of lived experience opened the possibility for a different kind of circulation in which the transcendence of power is never firmly established.

We (re-)discovered that poetic language exchanges words for the intesity of pleasure they afford - outside the sphere of their mere decipherment, beyond their operation in "meaning value".

One could say, then, that all powers are in fact built on the distinction between the values of good and evil.

This kind of operative utopia is an attempt to conceive a more radical foundation of things.




The immoral sphere consists of play or gaming, where all that counts is the event of the game itself and an unfolding advent of its shared rules. To be able to play, one has to be totally involved.


Games create a more dramatic relation between partners than commodity exchange. Each has a singular position with regard to the stakes for victory or defeat.


Even in its most banal forms, the stakes of gaming force upon us a different entry from that imposed by exchange, which is something so ambiguous that it could be more accurately denoted "impossible exchange". In relation to it, the immorality of games is enticing due to its illusion of certainty.





In symbolic exchanges direction is reversible: reversibility of all that we can organize as alternative values.

Here life and death are exchanged and the idea of value, of what is good (life) and bad (death) is cast into question. It is a reversibility without a dialectic.

Gaming also devalues money as having no fixed value. It is always put back into circulation according to the symbolic rule.

Likewise we can undersand the symbolic exhange of forms: animal, human, divine, exchanged according to metamorphoses in which each ceases to be contained by its definition. It is a universal collusiveness of inseperable forms.

Indeed, stepping back... isn't everything really decided at the level of symbolic exchange, at a level far beyond rationality and "real" value?

Let's go one step further: I'll go ahead and assert that there has never been an "economy" at all in the rational scientific sense in which various professors of the left and right have described it over the years, especially in recent years.

Symbolic exchange has always been at the radical base of things.

That is where things are decided.




The universe of seduction stands out radically against the universe of production.

Seduction involves everything, not only sexual exchange. The positivizing of sexuality as function and jouissance - ecstatic delight - is how sexual identities confront and engage one another. Sexual liberation is a naive and somewhat banal project based on identity.

Seduction is a more fatal game, and a more dangerous one, offering the possibility of a radical otherness.

Like the liberation of the workers, the liberation of sexual identities was conceived within a productivist schema that aims at release of accumulated energy. Seduction on the other hand aims at the accumulation of nothing; it is a playing with desire rather than a playing on desire.

Seduction is the original crime.

Our attempts to positivize the world are aimed at abolishing this dangerous terrain of seduction. Really, all types of production are subordinate to it.



Though they do not actually share an etymology, it is tempting to connect "scene" and "obscene".

The spectacle is bound up with the scene. There is gaze and distance, play and otherness.

In obscenity, the distance of the gaze dissolves. Precisely, it is obscene because there is no stage. Obscenity is pornography realized. It is sex devoured, a total "acting out" of things that should be subject to dramaturgy, to an interesting play between partners.




The media coverage of events, of what is loosely called "information", especially when things become "too real", blurs this line again.

We are alienated from our natural separation from things.

The curse is that we are brought up ultra-close to them. Rather than communication we have viral contamination, with everything spreading rapidly from one person to another with immediacy, a promiscuity without distance or charm.

And without genuine pleasure.



There is art which invents scenes which are other than the real, with another set of rules. And there is art which is a pure reflection of decomposition.

Objective truth is obscene. We cannot quite manage to believe it. In order to bear it we apply ironic strategies to survive. We find ourselves between good and evil without any possible hope of reconciliation.



Though they are no consolation, we have to accept these rules of the game, thinking all the same that one day we may unify the world and restore the hypothetical realm of the good. And it is precisely when we try to actualize such "total good" that evil emerges.

Fate is often unfortunate.




The perfect crime would be the elimination of the real world, yet such a crime would have no motive and no alleged perpetrator.

What concerns me more is the elimination of the original illusion, the fateful illusion of the world.



It is said that once all nine billion name of God are known, then the universe will end. If a brilliantly fast computer is built to accomplish this task, and then sure enough the stars begin to flicker out one by one, will we have perfected our being with the truth?



All great cultures strive to manage the illusion by illusion, to treat evil with evil, so to speak. Perhaps seeking to reduce illusion with truth is the most fantastical illusion of all?

Isn't a quest to end radical uncertainty, to eliminate every negative, destructive principle, to create a completely homogenized and verified world, as it were, in some sense to seek the eradication of the world?


The totalization of perfection is the story of the perfect crime.

(Of course I am considering all of this only with respect to the "world" of eRepublik...)










































Thanks for playing,
RFW