09/13/02

The Balcony:

Three Types of Processes:

Simulacrum: St. Augustine: The battle between the real icon (that touches the ideal of Christ) and the actor pretending to be Christ (because they are flesh, the city of man). In balcony: the general, bishop, judge, pretending to be the judge, bishop, and general.

Spectacle: While in the simulacrum there was a sense of an original, in the spectacle there is still an origin image, but it is a serial image. It’s a series of images flashing by. The faster the seriality of the images. But there is an outside of the spectacle. At least that is the utopian idea of spectacle. The spectacle. In Madame Irma’s machine, there are lots of things in the machine. The seriality of images is embedded in the machine. It’s the site of control and surveillance.

Simulation: There is not outside, there is no original. There is no higher idea, no beach underneath the ground. In the balcony, there is a kind of Xerox infinity going on. People are trying to gain access to something that does not really exist. When the judge, bishop, and general actually have to be the roles, they begin to ask questions about whether it is better to be a role in a real or pretended space.
They’re all at play here. He places these elements under erasure. Eventually its all about power playing itself out. Dead power. Silence power. There’s an inertia to power.

Buy the Data Trash

If he erases the simulacrum, spectacle, and simulation—what does he create with these elements? Virtual. The virtual in the philosophical sense that D. and G. In an acorn, there is the virtual tree. There is a virtual possibility of becoming something else. What is virtual, what does the acorn offer us in terms of actualization. Genet wanted a form of life that could not yet be.

Genet’s movie… Lovesong rent it.

One of the elements, especially in the middle of the play. The chief of police becomes dead power, more powerful, doesn’t need to be a real power, just as powerful as fleshed-put power.

Mid-Eighties: Dead power played itself out. There was a sense of collapse of the revolution, postmodern nihilism. Made clear the simulation has collapsed into a space of dead power. We are no existing in dead capital. The revolution has played itself out in castration. The streets are dead. In Data Trash, there is now dead information, dead capital… This dead capital works in terms of fantasy empowerment. In

Neuromancer—mass consent hallucination.

There might be a way to disturb dead power, to disturb non-information. Multinational capitalism was based upon the computer. Virtual capitalism is based upon wet-ware.

The wanted to disturb not subvert. The process of imagining. Gendered confusion in Madama Irma’s machines. Everything is unanchored and unbound: gender, class, hierarchies.

In order to fight against an image, Roger has turned into an image. The fight no longer takes place in reality, but in the list. There’s a transformation between the images and the lists. It is now a combat of allegories. The maps of the internet are allegories. There are ways to move outside the frozen images of Chantal.

Irma say of Chantal and the corpse: Look at this corpse, the minister wanted a fake one, but the corpse is real. The corpse is speeding towards… immobility

Roger: in order to fight against an image. This fight is taking place in the list. It is now a combat of allegories.

One of the things that is important is disturbing speed and intertia… If you begin to look at the topologies of the internet. Some has centers, some are galactic, some are fractal, In the bulletin board system of the play is the battle of allegories.

The was we were going to battle the frozen images that were castrated and appropriated, where was the inertia that was playing itself out. In Data Trash, following the notion of the police man, the code man is not a dictator. There’s a greater power that is ushering the world into technological dependency. The making of technology accessible.

Chatal and the revolutionaries become a network. Disanchored themselves with the war. Hamlet machine: revolutionary who exists in vituality. In one of the elements, the chief of police asked what’s happening in the revolution. What we need is people that will die for an obscure notion (like the state, the ideal, the deep immobility). What is happening right now,

Bush is fighting his father’s war but he’s also fight the wrong war. 911 was an information bomb, mediatized, memorialized. Virilio. It was a temporal bomb. It went back into the future. We’re now in 1953 because we have an evil empire, everything’s become binary again.

A war about allegories instead of a war about blood and law. The maps, frontier control. Frontier rules the virtual. We have re-entered the notion of social Darwinism… The hypertext body. Dude this is fucking dumb. This is just meandering. Blah blah. I I I… Can’t he stop talking about stupid shit… castration scene… penis flying into the air.

Simple gestures that are not bound to the networks. It was something that they had to improvise. They were very much like Roger, ready to die. Then they broke into the electronic network. They were the dominant information piece. Then this elements of inertia and speed actually worked. Every time the gesture is repeated it is different.