/lit/ - Literature

>Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living imagination in certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary substance, it passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is when everything functions and serves something else, it is the absolute, signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jacques Tati's film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in Kafka. The age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy, finality not only in material things, but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death is confused with the law of value - and strangely with the structural law of value by which everything is arrested as a coded difference in a universal nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder. Our societies' true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the world's sterilised memories are frozen.

>The cryogenic freezing of all knowledge so that it can be resurrected, knowledge passes into immortality as sign-value. Against our dream of losing and forgetting everything, we set up an opposing great wall of relations, connections and information, a dense and inextricable artificial memory, and we bury ourselves alive in the fossilised hope of one day being rediscovered.

>Computers are the transistorised death to which we submit in the hope of survival.

>Museums are already there to survive all civilisations, in order to bear testimony. But to what? It is of little importance. The mere fact that they exist testifies that we are in a culture which no longer possesses any meaning for itself and which can now only dream of having meaning for someone else from a later time. Thus everything becomes an environment of death as soon as it is no longer a sign that can be transistorised in a gigantic whole, just as money reaches the point of no return when it is nothing more than a system of writing.

-- JB/SE&D