Talking recently. News report making horror in the quiet of the fireside and invoking wordstreams. A man you never woulda thought actually did. A concealed erection for the horrific and making abjection out of neighbours and friends. Glinting hammer to the head eyes.
She- why do they act surprised, shocked, horrified?
Me- because the symmetry unsettles and makes for grim admission of the lurking things inside.
She- no. because appearance was played like an expert. no fool wants to his error rubbed in his face; each thinks they pierce the veil when in fact they are snared in its ripples and folds.
Thinking on. Bus sitting movement out of the city and out of a life. It came up creepy, all epiphenomenal epiphany, a shadow’s reflection in an insects wing: we know, constantly, that we are being deluded, tricked, lied to, played like a string section all wires frayed, given grubs and told they are steaks and swallowing them down with a wink and a nod to the schism we desire most. And when the murderer is caught, when the politician’s lie is caught out, when the bureaucrat admits a mistake, when the person we thought we were slips away, or a friend disappoints- yes the anger is at them, yes of course. And yes it is right to be angered at all this as that is the game, that is what the Code demands, it is the pulse of history and all movement that we dub, in another favourite delusion, progress.
But more. This anger. This shock. This physiologic seizure and Dostoyevskian thirst for hangmen and revolution. Another point. We are angered that they have dropped the pretension. That they have let all the Code hang in the air like so many midgets to swatted away with a careless hand. We are angry because in ceasing to pretend they reveal that all our reality is thus. All the world is a stage, is it? The murderer on the radio, that we listened about and discussed, he reveals it starkly; what happens when you ignore the Code…. when you go off Script.
The Big Other is just that. A nexus of swarming Scripts. A Scriptwork. An encoding and a directing. A handing over of postures and lines. Correct reasons, correct responses, correct glances. Its all there. Except the question, become so inane a joke for the past decades, of ‘what’s my motivation?’ And there are motivations, there is a galore, a spree, a Carnival Bass-bin, Valve System roar, denial system of motivations. And yet, there is no motivation. They are all of the Scriptwork. And we want this Scriptwork to tell us what to do. It speaks nothing that we have not written for ourselves and we know it and yet still desire it. There used to be a name. Voluntary Servitude.
But there is no way out of the Scriptwork. This is not to say there is nothing outside of Scripts and Scripting. No. None of that. Things are. The Real is. The world, life, things, they can do without us. Only we cling stubbornly and heroically and beautifully to ourselves. Only we want to become more than we are. This is another Script that operates on us all. Be More. Be Better. Be Good. Loose that weight. Write that book. Get that job. Have a good time! Don’t go too far!
A multiplicity of ever dividing and mutating scripts, neither a chaos nor a complexity. They, it seems, always come reducible in pairs. The schizoid demands of own actions and our own longing to believe in the source of those actions, the shoring up and holding static of something that is entirely accidental, without any final necessity. PARTY/DRINK RESPONSIBLY. EXPRESS YOURSELF/BE POLITE. FUCK/SETTLE DOWN. LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR/HATE THEY NEIGHBOUR’S DARKNESS. Even down to the person you think you are, that your friends think you are, that a stranger doesn’t think about at all.
And our daily activity is just this same Scriptwork. Let’s not pretend that we aren’t weaving constantly a pretending. Its quite real, its got its reality, this phantasmic sluicing non-sense. Labour is man’s activity. Labour is his life. Yes. Of course. But Labour is also the production and the reproduction of the Script. Hence; Scriptwork.
‘”But how will they know its a re-enactment and not an actual hold-up?”
“They won’t!” I said. “But it doesn’t matter…”‘
-Tom McCarthy, Remainder
This is what ideology is. What the big Other is. It is a realm of direction. To an extent it is a complex of direction and self-direction. It is an emergent system that we call living, in the existential-situationist sort of sense. Man is a social animal means, first and foremost, that man is an animal that play-act. Man simulates himself. Does this contradict earlier things I have written about culture and/or technology and nature collapsing into an ontological monism? I don’t know and I don’t care.
The central mistake of Baudrillard, under the most conventional of readings, is to believe that the ‘Real’ ever existed (and for Baudrillard we are only ever talking about the Real as an anthropocentric real…so let us forget about the rest of it, what is really real). This error is an inheritance. It goes back to the last great revolutionary Guy Debord. Under the pavement the beach; behind the Spectacle, undistorted and virginal reality.
Now I’m not denying that we can know things about reality or that we can touch or feel the Real via knowledge and gnosis (I prefer the idea of a phenomenological shock) but it is wholly wrong for us to believe that we can ever get outside of the Scriptwork. The Promethean responses such as communism, anarchism, various forms of existential-mysticism are all movements I am drawn to. As long as they can recognise their own simulated nature and the simulated nature of the world about them. I have a feeling, that I can’t really back up, that even the Real, the really real, is itself and always has been a kind of simulation.
This is a gnosticism without any Other Realm. This is an empty eschatology. This is a messianism without hope. Does the world-as-simulation or the more extreme real-as-simulation mean that we give up ethical concerns, or that we give up revolutionary desires? No. I don’t think so. I think it merely means that we have to recognise that the is no ground to be sought except in the empty. Finally it means transforming Beckett slightly, although of course retaining the individuated form as well:
We can’t go on. We must go on.
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