|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Cian O'Connor
||
|| Why, it's not like Camilia leaves her own character
|| out of her ravings. The woman's an egomaniac, judging
|| by her typical articles.
||
I'll take Paglia's egomania or her astrology any day if it means not reading this hogwash. How anyone can take this nutter seriously is beyond me. Salvador Dali used to make more sense:
Hakki ------------------------------------- Rise Of The Void Towards The Periphery
Jean Baudrillard
As a watermark of unexpected, but also in view of other unforeseen events, the idea was conceived at the dawn of the nineties among a few friends to set up an Agency that would be invisible, anonymous and clandestine, Stealthy Agency, equally labelled as:
ANATHEMATIC ILLIMITED TRANSFATAL EXPRESS VIRAL INCORPORATED INTERNATIONAL EPIDEMICS
Seeking to hunt down unreal events with which to disinform the public, it itself has remained unreal. In this sense, it perfectly fulfilled its role, as it managed to escape all radar detection to become a unique formula that is never virtual.
What this implied is that there were no longer ideas that had anything to do with facts - this was the "utopia" of the sixties and seventies - that there were no longer any actors involved in events, no intellectuals occupied with meaning. Instead, there was an insignificant upheaval of events, lacking real actors and authorized interpreters: action [l'actio] simultaneously disappeared with the auction [l'auctoritas]. All that remains are "current events", a kind of cinematographic "action", an "auction", i.e., the price-tagging of the event in an overbid of information. The event is taken up not only in action but in speculation and, eventually, in a chain reaction that links facticity to extremes in such a manner that no interpretation can be rejoined to it.
Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this linkage of things as if they had a meaning, so that they are no longer controlled or regulated except by artificial montage and non-sense. It is the putting up for auction of the event through radical disinformation, the price-tagging of the event instead of gambling with it, instead of investing in the stakes of history. If, on the other hand, should there be a stake in this, it remains occult, enigmatic, and resolved in events that have never really taken place. And I am not talking about ordinary events, but of the events of the East [Eastern Europe], of the Gulf War, etc. What the Agency otherwise specifically aimed at was to oppose this simulation with a radical dissimulation, to lift the veil from this non-happening of events. It has also occultized and enigmatized itself in their image in order to open up and clear to the way to a particular void, to a certain non-sense - unlike the media which remains relentlessly bent on filling up all interstices. Its aim was to manoeuvre itself in the void of events like Chuang-Tzu's butcher proceeds in the interstitial void of the body. This surreptitious, sly intervention in the meaning of the void against grotesque infatuation with information and the political scene, evidently could not amount to more than a dream and because of its assumed occult and enigmatic nature, it ended up not taking place like the events themselves. It fell into the same black hole, into the same virtual space as the non-events which it should have addressed (secretly however, and without anyone knowing, it remained operational in the image of these new events which were either mediatized or not). An apparently insolvable paradox. The idea, though, is not dead.
Stealthy Agency responded to the strike of events, to the strike of history. Like history, it, too, subscribed to absent events, looking for a way to furnish the most exact non-information on the absence of events; on this illimited strike with respect to the occupation of history; on void space over which the phantoms of Power still hover, similar to the empty space of Work strikers occupy in a factory, over which the phantom of Capital continues to hover.
It is as if the events had adopted the vocabulary of the order of strike. Step by step, everything forsook and defected from its time reconfiguring itself into a present/current void where only a visual psychodrama of information was left lingering behind. And this strike of events brings with it the lock-out of history. The fact that events no longer generate information [rather, it is the other way round], prompts incalculable consequences. All the negative work disappears on the horizon of the media precisely in the way that labour disappears on the horizon of capital. There too, relations become inverted: it is no longer labour that serves the reproduction of capital, it is capital that produces and reproduces labour. An enormous parody of the relations of production.
<snipped - add words at random for the rest>