A SMALL ORGANIC BANANA: PHONOPHILIA IN 12 SCENES

1.

‘The Big Dipper!’ With one hand he let go of the wheel of his bike and he pushed his index finger into the sky above. ‘Your phone number resembles the Big Dipper!’

I hadn’t the faintest idea what the Big Dipper looked like, but hey, I was sixteen, it was 4am on a Saturday night and the boy I was riding home with compared my phone number to a constellation of stars. It was almost the same as reciting a love poem.

I can’t remember whether he ever called me but since that moment I do recognize the Big Dipper without hesitation. 1-9-6-4-8.

2.

This was a time when phone numbers consisted of just five digits (in the villages surrounding my home town they even had just four), which you learned by heart like a mantra.

Whispering the numbers to yourself seemed to bring the boy closer, as if he came to life by your breath.

Now I don’t even know my lover’s phone number by heart. Sometimes I start to practice, just in case of emergencies, trying to make it into a little song like I used to.

But emergencies are too rare an occurrence to actually remember the sequence.

I’m not nostalgic when it comes to phone numbers, not even when I think about the romantic practices that will never take place again.

Like the other guy who went through dozens of pages of the Culemborg phone book, trying to find my number.

We were registered under my mother’s name, which he didn’t know. He did know my address, so he traced line after line, page after tissue paper page, until he found it.

And could call me.

That was twenty years ago and everything about the situation has changed.

Not too long ago, you could say: just go online and type the person’s address in a digital phone book and there it is, that is the number you are looking for. But who uses a digital phone book? Who even has a landline phone that is registered in such a database? Who even has a landline, period? And why would you want to look up a phone number anyway?

It’s awfully obtrusive to just go and call a girl, why don’t you just add her on Facebook and start a chat?

3.

The other person is so close, a few clicks and there he is, that the game of longing and seduction is lost.

That is, at least, what the philosophers say. Byung-Chul Han describes our time as being characterized by a constant availability of everything and everyone: ‘Unmediated enjoyment, which admits no imaginative or narrative detour, is pornographic.’

A boy who traces the Big Dipper in the starry night so as to remember your phone number – that’s the real thing.

Chatting away on Facebook while scrolling through hundreds of pictures – degeneration.

Surely, desire in the age of Facebook can just as soon take on the guise of obsession, which might then from one day to another, through overstimulation and unending nourishment, turn into immediate boredom.

There is no quest anymore, no fear of the other not knowing who you are, no absence.

The other is always within arm’s reach, ready to be scrutinized from every possible angle – you can read the articles he reads, listen to the music he listens to, get to know the people he knows.

The distance to the object of desire has never been so short and that’s precisely why true love and lust diminish.

In her sociology of love, Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz describes the feelings one might get from a Facebook-chat as fictional, since there has never been a ‘real’ interaction.

Moreover, the person on the other side is ‘virtual’ and in the end remains ‘absent’ and ‘non- existent’, and therefore somewhat phantasmagorical.

For there to be something like ‘true love’ distance is required, says Han, something you cannot grasp, cannot see, something that makes you sense what the other is, namely: an other.

‘Not enjoyment in real time, but imaginative preludes and postludes, temporal deferrals, deepen pleasure and desire.’

Such imagination however, is fading, and so-called image culture is to blame.

All of the pictures, emojis, videos; they’re in your face, digitally produced, and therefore literally without a negative.

This genre, Han writes, ‘belongs to the order of liking, not loving’.

4.

Drawing the Big Dipper in the night sky, isn’t that the ultimate image –wordless, loaded, a composition of light and darkness – the last thing to compare to a love poem?

Can we even keep up the difference between the ‘real’ and online?

Medium and reality have become so intertwined on all levels – whether it’s language, perception, our senses – that divorcing the two is a fiction in itself, more fictional, I’d say, than feelings aroused by a virtual person.

The world is constantly shifting on all these levels, is what the protagonist from Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 would say.

For him, the city has already been drenched in an extra layer of meaning for years, a layer that originates in his smartphone.

He states rather matter-of-factly:

‘As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation as the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.’

Messages about love, suffering, life and death reach you through this blue- lighted screen, but that doesn’t make them less ‘real’ than a rendezvous arranged without using a device.

Those messages are read, first and foremost, because whoever would call anybody anymore?

In that sense the world is built up more and more from language, rather than from images.

5.

A couple of years ago, I spent a summer on my iPhone, which through various social media brought to me the object of my desire. My coincidental geographical location didn’t matter. The iPhone was glued to my hand, even if I crossed the border. At an ever-increasing pace I exchanged messages with J., on Twitter, on Last.fm – a website for keeping track of the music that you listen to – and Facebook, text message, WhatsApp, and, for months on end, via the digital Scrabble app Wordfeud. How does something like that start? Well, you follow each other on Twitter and read along as the other’s life unfolds on your timeline. A funny comment is followed by a direct message, you give a clever riposte, you Google one another, you read up on him so to speak, start to write just in keywords so as to get one more reaction, the messages shorten instead of lengthen, and within a few weeks a construction of idiomatic words, sentences, allusions, written sighs and dots is erected. Would philosophers such as Han and Illouz ever have experienced such a truly mediatized love affair?

6.

I’ve never been good on the phone. Calling a boy?! Forget about it. Fortunately the smartphone is a computer that happens to have a call function. Chatting is more important, whether it’s through WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter. In that way the phone is still a junction that makes love possible, as it’s always been. It can even become the 19 personification of the loved one, with all the pain that entails. The landline at times could seem like a hostile entity, not ringing as it was, while the boy had done so much as compare your phone number to the Big Dipper. The plump appliance that was shared with family or housemates was located in a cold hallway and its line was always too short. You’d press the earpiece, which to be honest was of grotesque proportion, to your ear but the harder you pressed, the longer the distance between you and him seemed to become. In his 1930 play La voix humaine, Jean Cocteau tells the story of a woman receiving a break-up call: on the other side of the line a man puts an end to their relationship. I always associated those kinds of impersonal ways to break up with the cell phone, but apparently that is not correct. The cell phone does seem to make the humiliation worse, because there is the option to use nothing more than a text message. To the woman on stage the distance produced by the phone call is enough of a humiliation. She longs for physical interaction: ‘You used to see each other … One look could make everything alright, but with this device what’s gone is gone.’ Slowly, she wraps the phone line around her neck.

7.

The telephone has always brought pleasure, too. The Hungarian writer from the interbellum period, Dezső Kosztolányi, describes the morning ritual of his marvelous hero Kornél Esti:

‘In the morning when he woke up Esti had the telephone brought to him in bed.

He put it by his pillow, under his warm quilt, like other people put the cat.

He liked that electric animal.’

The electric animal in Esti’s bed is a landline, of course.

The smartphone has even more going for it to become a lover itself; it’s always there with you, it lies in bed on the pillow besides you, it nestles in your pocket, ready to vibrate, right next to the loins.

It’s like a child for whom you develop a sixth sense, you keep track of it from the corner of your eye and when it drifts off out of sight you follow up on all the regular spots to find it again, quickly.

Yes, it is like an animal that is caressed, that is nourished, an electric animal that you turn about in your hand, just to feel its contours and the possibilities that are contained within it.

8.

Telephonic love rises to a peak in Spike Jonze’s film Her. Theodore develops a truthful romantic engagement with his operating system Samantha. This is not a dystopian movie (at least not to me) – rather it shows that love for a system that has all the characteristics of a human being, except for physicality, is human love. Who would ever dare to call Theodore’s feelings fictitious? And the relationship with Samantha as ‘virtual’, ‘absent’ or ‘non-existent’? Her tells us about programmatic love. The first time that I felt my phone turn into a substitute for the one I loved, or rather turn into the centrifugal point of my desire, was with K. I met him at a party, stayed the night in his apartment in the middle of town, and spent the following days terrified that I would stumble into him unprepared, or, even worse, that I would never see him again. I didn’t have his phone number; something like social media was still budding somewhere on the web that required calling in through a landline. After a couple of days living in the negative, to paraphrase Han, I wrote him a letter. ‘I’m terrified of stumbling into you unprepared, or, even worse, of never seeing you again.’ I signed it with my mobile number, left it in his postbox and began waiting. The mobile phone I owned back then, eight years before my iPhone-driven summer of lust, had a two-color screen and enough memory to store five text messages. I copied some of the messages that K. sent me in a text file that over the course of the years has disappeared in the quicksand of my hard disk. I can’t remember the words, although language was all we had. The most important were the punctuation marks, the difference between one, two and three dots. K. was the one who taught me how to desire in 160 signs. We only met two or three times after that night, but it didn’t matter. My phone was K. I liked the electric animal.

9.

Complaining about new technologies has always happened.

Already in 1900 the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, in his novel The Hidden Force, had Eva complain about how the telephone killed all the fun:

‘people no longer saw each other, they no longer needed to dress up or get out the carriage, since they chatted on the telephone, in sarong and linen jacket, and almost without moving’.

A new technology takes away another scrap of our humanity, until there is nothing left.

We don’t even need to dress up – see how civilization erodes!

Another more tragic example comes from the story The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which is from 1816.

Nathaniel falls in love with Olimpia, whom he sees only from far away.

When he finds out that his obsessive love is directed at a robot, he throws himself of a tower. Dead.

What these stories tell us is that technology which becomes too human makes us less human ourselves.

But what if Nathaniel would have tried to talk to Olimpia sooner? Wouldn’t he be able to continue feeling a deep, truthful love for her? Isn’t it the closing of the border between the technological and the human, between distance and nearness, between death and love, which finally results in the downfall of Nathaniel? Whoever saw Her has to admit that such borders are more porous than we might have previously thought. By the way, their programmatic love doesn’t end well either. Seduction and desire, only rarely do they get a happy ending. Technology has nothing to do with that.

10.

Am I another pathetic nutcase if I describe my phone as the substitute of my lover? I don’t think so.

Technology has always been inextricably connected to humans and human relationships.

That is not to say that it always leads to some kind of progression.

As Ben Lerner puts it, something happens in the balance of things which makes the world rearrange itself.

The device in your hand, against your thigh, on your breast and in your purse is an integrated part of your being.

Sure, it’s a machine, a robot, but to quote Nathan Jurgenson, ‘it is still deeply part of a network of blood; an embodied, intimate, fleshy portal that penetrates into one’s mind, into endless information, into other people’. Embodied, intimate, fleshy: might the smartphone channel desire and pleasure after all, let phonophilia bloom? Isn’t it possible that the wordiness of mobile communication, the ongoing practice in the use of the written word, turns out to be precisely the savior of the game of seduction? My summer of iPhone lust made me realize that real time pleasure can actually transcend the genre of ‘to like’. Whereas K. and I had played checkers, the game that started with J. took on the complexity of chess. The transition from text message to Twitter meant a transition from 160 to 140 signs, from paid to free, from five messages each time to fifty. We played Wordfeud as if our lives depended on it – word after word after word. LLAMA. LEGS. STIPULATE. By playing the game – the one of Scrabble and the one of the direct message – we taught each other the art of seduction, I can’t call it anything else. Or, maybe. The art of titillation.

11.

Smartphone sex doesn’t have a lot to do with porn or webcam sex. The latter is a matter of imagery, the former of language. In the imagery of webcam sex there is no negative, as Han would have it, everything is exposure, pornography. In direct message sex everything is language, everything is dots, everything is wordy sighs and groans, everything, everything. ‘For a year already I hadn’t had any telephone sex,’ writes Arnon Grunberg in a column. ‘I texted my girlfriend: “Shall we have some telephone sex? Tomorrow or tonight?”’ She’s fine with it, but it won’t take off. ‘After a while she said: “Hold on, I will get a banana.” I heard her go down the stairs, opening and shutting cupboards. “What kind of banana is it?” I asked. “A small, organic banana.”’ This makes me laugh. Whoever would think of calling in the first place? Try to imagine however that your lover sent you a message, a written one, through the private channel of a public microblogging service: ‘A small, organic banana.’ Doesn’t it sound like poetry, the poetry of lust?

12.

Love is, as Han says, seeing the other as other. But also: seeing the otherness in what the rest of the world deems merely normal. The Big Dipper in the five accidental digits of a phone number, two (not three!) dots to end a text message, a Wordfeud word being connected to yours and simply, your own phone, the personification of him. My phonophilia romances all ended badly. I was left with dozens of messages and broken off Scrabble games. I misunderstood the words, I didn’t know how to play the game at the top level. Language can be dangerous. Like love, like a love poem. 2014

SOURCES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS

45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies.

There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.

It is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of women was common among the Australian aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But it does appear that generally speaking the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society.

46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions.

It is clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the other sources.

47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

48. It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression.

The degree of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are consequences of technological progress.

All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before.

(Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people’s hands.

For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc.

If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise.

If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations.

But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.)

49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security.

In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change.

Thus there is no stable framework.

50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups.

The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities.

Beyond that, a technological society has to weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently.

In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.

52. Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin, his friend or his co-religionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is “nepotism” or “discrimination,” both of which are terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system.

53. Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems. But we do not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today.

54. A few pre-industrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to the same extent as modern man. In America today there still are uncrowded rural areas, and we find there the same problems as in urban areas, though the problems tend to be less acute in the rural areas. Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor.

55. On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th century, the mobility of the population probably broke down extended families and small-scale social groups to at least the same extent as these are broken down today.

In fact, many nuclear families lived by choice in such isolation, having no neighbors within several miles, that they belonged to no community at all, yet they do not seem to have developed problems as a result.

56. Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and deep.

A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he arrived at old age he might be working at a regular job and living in an ordered community with effective law enforcement.

This was a deeper change than that which typically occurs in the life of a modern individual, yet it does not seem to have led to psychological problems.

In fact, 19th century American society had an optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today’s society.

57. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is imposed on him, whereas the 19th century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice.

Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his own effort. In those days an entire county might have only a couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One may well question whether the creation of this community was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneer’s need for the power process.

58. It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which there has been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without the kind of massive behavioral aberration that is seen in today’s industrial society. We contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way. We don’t mean to say that modern society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has become particularly acute.

THE DIVINE IRREFERENCE OF IMAGES

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has.

To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have.

One implies a presence, the other an absence.

But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending:

"Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill.

Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré).

Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."

Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces "true" symptoms?

Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill.

Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness's henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "real" illnesses according to their objective causes.

Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious manner at the borders of the principle of illness. As to psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for "real" more real than the other - but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any old symptom of classical medicine? Dreams already are.

Certainly, the psychiatrist purports that "for every form of mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms of which the simulator is ignorant and in the absence of which the psychiatrist would not be deceived."

This (which dates from 1865) in order to safeguard the principle of a truth at all costs and to escape the interrogation posed by simulation - the knowledge that truth, reference, objective cause have ceased to exist. Now, what can medicine do with what floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, with the duplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer either true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the duplication of the discourse of the unconscious in the discourse of simulation that can never again be unmasked, since it is not false either?

What can the army do about simulators?

Traditionally it unmasks them and punishes them, according to a clear principle of identification.

Today it can discharge a very good simulator as exactly equivalent to a "real" homosexual, a heart patient, or a madman.

Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" and the authentic symptom. "If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.

Beyond medicine and the army favored terrains of simulation, the question returns to religion and the simulacrum of divinity:

"I forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented."

Indeed it can be.

But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra?

Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology?

Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?

This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.

This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear

- that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum

- from this came their urge to destroy the images.

If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs.

One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images, were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God. On the other hand, one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous, because, in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images, they were already enacting his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which, perhaps, they already knew no longer represented anything, that they were purely a game, but that it was therein the great game lay - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

This was the approach of the Jesuits, who founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.

This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

- it is the reflection of a profound reality;

- it masks and denatures a profound reality;

- it masks the absence of a profound reality;

- it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;

- it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance - representation is of the sacramental order.

In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence.

In the third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery.

In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs).

The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality - a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us - a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.