/lit/ - Literature

>Practically and historically, this means that social control by means of the end (and the more or less dialectical providence that ministers to the fulfilment of this end) is replaced with social control by means of prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation, all governed, however, by the code. Instead of a process finalised in accordance with its ideal development, we are dealing with generative models. Instead of prophecy, we fall subject to 'inscription' There is no radical difference between the two. Only the schemata of control change and, it has to be said, reach a fantastic degree of perfection. From a capitalist productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order, aiming this time at absolute control. The biological theory of the code has taken up arms in the service of this mutation. Far from 'indeterminate,' this mutation is the outcome of an entire history where God, Man, Progress and even History have successively passed away to the advantage of the code, where the death of transcendence benefits immanence, which corresponds to a far more advanced phase of the vertiginous manipulation of social relations.

>Every image, every media message and also every surrounding functional object is a test. That is to say, in all the rigour of the term, it triggers response mechanisms in accordance with stereotypes or analytic models. The object today is no longer 'functional' in the traditional sense of the term; it doesn't serve you, it tests you. It no longer has anything to do with yesterday's object, any more than 'mediatised' information has with the 'reality' of facts. Both object and information already result from a selection, an edited sequence of camera angles, they have already tested 'reality' and have only asked those questions to which it has responded. Reality has been analysed into simple elements which have been recomposed into scenarios of stable oppositions, just as the photographer imposes his own contrasts, lighting and angles onto his subject (any photographer will tell you that no matter what you do it is enough to catch the original from a good angle at the moment or inflection that turns it into the exact response to the instantaneous test of the apparatus and its code); exactly like the test or referendum when they translate a given conflict or problem into a question/answer game. Thus tested, reality tests you in return according to the same score-card, and you decode it following the same code, inscribed in its every message and object like a miniature genetic code.

>Here comes the great Culture of tactile communication, under the sign of techno-Iumino-kinetic space and total spatio-dynamic theatre!

-- JB/SE&D