The objective illusion is the physical fact that in this universe no things coexist in real time – not sexes, stars, this glass, this table, or myself and all that surrounds me. By the fact of dispersal and the relative speed of light, all things exist only in a recorded version, in an unutterable disorder of time-scales, at an inescapable distance from each other. And so they are never truly present to each other, nor are they, therefore, ‘real’ for each other. The fact of this irremediable distance and this impossible simultaneity, the fact that when I perceive this star it has perhaps already disappeared — a relationship which can be extended, relatively speaking, to any physical object or living being — this is the ultimate foundation, the material definition, so to speak, of illusion.
The illusion of time is of the same order. It is the objective fact that you are never entirely there at the particular moment, and that integral presence is only ever virtual. If it is true that at any point in time you are in that moment and not elsewhere, you are never at the single point where the whole event might be said to be summed up. ‘Real’ time does not, therefore, exist; no one exists in real time; nothing takes place in real time — and the misunderstanding is total.
This distance is vital, for without it we would perceive nothing; everything would be totally crowded together, as it doubtless was in the primal state of the world — the only state we can say existed in real time, since all matter was coexistent with itself, present itself at a single point and a single moment. Once that initial (and perfectly hypothetical) state came to an end, the illusion of the world began. Everything began to exist but, by that very token, did so on the basis of a relative but definitive absence of every thing from every other. Hence on the basis of an irrevocable illusion.
That distance, that absence, are today under threat. What is impossible at the cosmic level (that the night should disappear by the simultaneous perception of the light of all the stars) or in the sphere of memory and time (that all the past should be perpetually present, and the events should no longer fade into the mists of time) is possible today in the technical universe of information. The info-technological threat is the threat of an eradication of the night, of that precious difference between night and day, by a total illumination of all moments. In the past, messages faded on a planetary scale, faded with distance. Today we are threatened with lethal sunstroke, with a blinding profusion, by the ceaseless feedback of all information to all points of globe.
It’s a good thing we ourselves do not live in real time! What would we be in ‘real’ time? We would be identified at each moment exactly with ourselves. A torment equivalent to that of eternal daylight — a kind of epilepsy of presence, epilepsy of identity. Autism, madness. No more absence from oneself, no more distance from others. Now, otherness is that happy distortion without which everyone would simultaneously be me. It is the vital illusion of otherness which prevents the ego from succumbing to absolute reality. Language, too, is what prevents everything from signifying at every moment, and allows us to escape the perpetual irradiation of meaning. This specific illusion of language, this poetic function, no longer exists in virtual or digital languages, where the equivalence is total, the interaction as well regulated as in closed question-and-answer circuits and the energy as immediately decodable as a heat source’s energy is decodable by the water in a pan. These languages are no more languages than the computer-generated image is an image.
Fortunately, something in language is irreducible to this computation, something in the subject is irreducible to identification, something in exchange is irreducible to interaction and communication.
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime (Le crime parfait). Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p.53-55
i remember in Mike Hodges’ Croupier there were lines like these on the voice over, “gambling is not about money,” the croupier who dyed his hair black for his work coldly, and almost wearily explains, (to his unconvinced fiancée, who was killed later in the film, and to his audience, very probably including he himself) “…it’s about the outright denial of the odds of life…” The croupier in the film, is also a writer striving for his first publication, he contemplates and takes on the tone of the subjects he is writing about, the gamblers themselves, “He wants to fuck over the whole world – to ruin himself and everyone else…” Strictly observing his professionalism throughout the whole film we, of course, never did once see him gamble… with money; instead he, should i say, rather accidentally, puts every thing other than money at stake.
The croupier, played (methodologically) by Clive Owen, is named Jack. At one point he muses, “In life there is a choice: be a gambler or a croupier.” The haunting voice goes on, “…I was hooked on watching punters lose.” Oh Jack, how does it feel when you call “Black Jack,” or a “Zero,” winningly devoid of affection in your voice? But Jack! Whose life? And, which life?
The croupier Jack wrote about in his book, is simply named Jake.
It is not altogether difficult to expect reluctance on the part of Jack’s fiancée, to condone that Jake in the book, she was almost nauseating on the spot, horrified and heatedly she told Jack that she doesn’t like the book. On demand of an explanation, she says, “…there is no hope in it.”
And yes, there should be a young woman like Kate Hardie, who appears as Bela in the film… or a Sonya Marmeladov, or Anna Snitkina; they share that some thing i simply envy, and adore.
–Porcelain. Ed. D Alexandrovna. Exist Random, 1999. p4-6
They spent their days singing psalms and making knives. They made blades better than anyone in the whole of Silesia and fitted them with carefully polished handles made of ash wood, which every human hand fell in love with instantly. They sold them once a year in early autumn when the apples were ripening on the trees. They held a sort of fair, which attracted people from all over the district; they each bought several knives, sometimes as many as a dozen, in order to sell them on at a profit. During these fairs people forget that the Cutlers were of a different faith and believed in a different God, and that it would have been easy to produce evidence and drive them away. For who would make such good knives then?
Whenever they bore a child they mourned instead of rejoicing. Whenever someone died, they undressed him, laid his naked corpse in a hole in the ground and danced around the open grave.
Their settlement was at one end of a line of hills that divided two mountain chains. There was a stone building in the middle of a few small, windowless mud huts that looked like dog kennels. These huts were full of knives. They stored them the ways cheeses are hung up for smoking, with the blades hanging downwards from the wooden ceilings. They swung in the draught, clanging against each other like bells. People walked fearlessly beneath this sky full of blades, the steel tips touching their heads.
They had a very curious belief about how the world began – they believed that all matter is the ‘affect’ of the spirit: the spirit grew forgetful, stopped concentrating and experienced something that it is not supposed to – an affect, that is, an overpowering emotion. (The theologians later puzzled on what sort of an emotion it might have been – terror perhaps, or maybe despair at the idea of existing and having no escape from existence? But there is no clear explanation.)
The Cutlers believed that the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life. It animates the body, while at the same time killing it, for every day of life takes us further away from God. If man did not have a soul he would not suffer. He would live like a plant in the sunlight, like an animal that grazes in sunny pastures, but because he has a soul, which at the very start of its existence once looked upon God’s inexpressible radiance, everything seems dark to him. To be a small piece chipped off the whole, but to remember that whole, to be made for death, but have to live, to have been killed but to remain alive – that’s what it means to have a soul.
Morning and evening they chanted their mournful psalms -as they cut ash wood for handles, as they melted steel and shape the blades, as they shook wild apples from the trees in autumn, and as they cared for their few children – those unfortunate creatures who had unwittingly come into the world.
They had eccentric customs, and their whole way of life was eccentric. Whenever they had intercourse, they took care to prevent the semen from reaching the womb. They spilled it on the ground as an offering to their God, imagining that divine radiance lay hidden in human semen, and that by making an offering this way, they were releasing it from matter and returning it to God. This is why they rarely bore children.
Their only form of prayer was the lamentatons they called psalms, while their only ritual was this spilling of their semen as an offering. Otherwise they did not pray; they thought of God as a superhuman being who had nothing in common with man and did not even understand human prayers.
– Olga Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night. Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003. p.207-209
[...] The solitude of the photographic subject in space and time is correlative with the solitude of the object and its temperamental silence. What photographs well is what has found its temperamental identity, that is, no longer has need of the desire of the other.
The only deep desire is not for what I lack, nor even for the person who lacks me (though that is, itself, more subtle), but for the person who does not lack me, for what is perfectly capable of existing without me. Someone who does not lack me — that is radical otherness. Desire is awlays the desire for that alien perfection, at the same time as it is the desire perhaps to shatter it, to break it down. You get aroused only for things whose pefection and impunity you want both to share and to shatter.
Where does the objective magic of photography come from? The answer is that it is the object which does all the work. Photographers will never admit it, and always argue that all the originality lies in their vision of the world. This is how they take photos which are too good, confusing their subjective vision with the reflex miracle of the photographic act.
That has nothing to do with writing, the seductive power of which is far superior. But photography’s power to stupefy is far greater than that of writing. It is rare for a text to be able to offer itself up with the same instantaneity, the same manifestness as a shadow, a light, a texture, a photographic detail. Just sometimes in Gombrowicz or in Nabokov, when their writing recaptures the trace of the original disorder, the material, objectal vehemence of things without qualities, the erotic potency of a senseless world.
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime (Le crime parfait). Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p. 88-89.
“…I’ve always been fascinated by the imbalance between the physical author of a book, the individual who puts his name onto the cover, and the authentic author who I am not certain is the same person. Take War and Peace, for example. On the cover it says, ‘Leo Tolstoy.’ You open the book on the first page, and somebody starts speaking to you. Is this Tolstoy real? No, it is the one that can be perceived as the narrative voice of Tolstoy. One that is very different from the man called Tolstoy. The stories, it seems to me, are written by a certain place in our interior which is unknown and inaccessible to us. This is the reason why the biography of the writer and his work are never in accordance. A biographical study will never tell you where exactly the work came from.”
Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came to my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial, and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or a demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of a mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war – it’s the other side’s weapon, and they’ve attacked me with it so that I’m wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don’t know how powerful or how weak I am – I don’t know anything about myself because I can’t remember anything, and that’s why I don’t try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It’s an extraordinary feeling – to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn’t make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.
Olga Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night. Trans. Anotonia Lloyd-Jones. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003. p 72-73
Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.
—Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. p 65.
To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires?
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p 6-7.
