THE TRANSPARENCY OF EVIL
We are in the first days of a year in which we step once again towards “Uncertainty”: 2021! The beginning of the great reset had been targeted specifically at the year 2020. And in its first stage it succeeded. A year ending in -0-. We were reset, by being pulled off the streets altogether… In the history of the blue planet, societies have never been on the same footing of equality, except in the year 2020. We shall remember you, 2020, as the one year in which societies met at a common point. And I suppose that will be the only thing we are able to remember. Almost no one has a clear, colourful, distinctive answer as to how the year 2020 went by. Because the design of the system was built on resetting, that is, on being made to forget… In our article “Nothing will be as it was before” we had tried to explain on this platform that we were in the stages of preparation for Enigma and the second 36 period, and that we would be made to forget, that is, how we would be reset.
What we hear of as certain powers, influential over the way of life on Earth, have finely calculated the historical eras as periods of 108 years. And we, never once noticing that we had been caught on the finest hook chosen from their calculations, were turned and overturned for generations; over the last 20 years we gave ourselves over, more and more, to the illusion that we had been resurrected in a virtual world, and we could not get enough of the versions of virtuality arriving wave after wave.
In his book “The Transparency of Evil – Essays on Extreme Phenomena”, the famous French sociologist Jean Baudrillard exposed with the utmost transparency the versions of virtuality of which we could not get enough; he warned, and tried to make it heard line by line, book by book. Those who heard, heard, and fought in their own worlds to sustain their awareness; as for those who did not hear, our author was indulgent towards them, on account of their way of life in the cave…
We thought that, before we are made to forget them, it might be useful to reread, in order to understand the present moment, the warnings in Baudrillard’s work The Transparency of Evil, which shows that the principle of development, progress and self-preservation, among the fundamental concepts that made the West what it is, has everywhere turned into the continuity of extinction and of the state of dying. How did Baudrillard express, as a whole and with the utmost transparency, the new formation taken on by the forms of evil?
We are within a culture in which bodies and minds are disseminated through signals and images; and why should we be surprised that this culture, just as it has produced the finest results, also produces the most lethal viruses? The nuclearisation of bodies began at Hiroshima, but with the spread of the mass media, images, signs, programmes and communication networks, bodies within a given environment are being nuclearised continuously and without end.
AIDS, the crash, electronic viruses and terrorism are not things that can take one another’s place; but they form a kind of family. AIDS is, in a sense, the crash of sexual values, just as computers played a “poisoning” role in the Wall Street crash. But since computers too have been infected by viruses, the crash of informational values is also imminent. The epidemic is not only active within each system but also has its effect from one system to another. All these tendencies revolve around a catastrophe scenario. The signs of this disordering had of course been in evidence for a long time: AIDS, which existed before it became an epidemic; the crash, with the example of 1929, which formed a precursor!, and with its ever-present danger; electronic piracy and accidents, which already have a twenty-year history.
In the societies we live in, which have been exposed to radiation (To what exactly? To the excessive radiation of happiness, security, information and communication? To the disintegration of symbolic nuclei, fundamental rules, social contracts? Who knows?*), there is no longer anything that resembles the chain reaction of terrorism more than the chain reaction of AIDS, of the financial raiders, of the computer hackers. The contagiousness and the fascination of terrorism are just as incomprehensible as those of all these events. When a computer programmer plants a “soft bomb” in a program and uses the destruction of the program as a means of pressure, what is he doing other than taking the program and all its operations hostage? When the raiders speculate on the fall or rise of companies on the stock exchange, what are they doing other than taking the companies hostage? All these practices operate on the model of terrorism (hostages, like shares and paintings, also have a value fixed at a going rate); yet we could just as well interpret terrorism on the model of AIDS, the electronic virus or public takeover bids on the stock exchange:
Is this science fiction? Almost. In information and communication, the value of the message, since the message passes from image to image and from screen to screen, is at the same time the value of pure circulation. We all take pleasure in this new centrifugal value (the stock exchange, the art market, the raiders) as though it were a spectacle. Electronic viruses are the expression of the deadly transparency of information on a world scale. That there should be unforeseeable events is no less attractive. In any case, any prediction makes one want to refute it. Events sometimes take this task of refutation upon themselves. For example, there are certain events that have been predicted to excess and that may not happen; these events are the opposite of those that arise unannounced. One must bet on unexpected developments, on conjunctural surprises, on this slip of the tongue (witz) of events … Can we foresee each time this slip of events (like a slip of the tongue)? That is to say, to maintain that statistical truth can always be refuted is not an academic hypothesis. It is a hope that springs from the rarest part of the cunning genius of society.
Whereas in the past the voluntary servitude of the masses was exploited to perfection, from now on it is their involuntary uncertainty that is exploited. This means that, unbeknown to the experts who concern themselves with the masses and to the tricksters who believe they influence them, the masses know that politics is virtually dead, but that the new game given them to play is as exciting as the fluctuations of the stock exchange. In this game the masses play with audiences, with ratings of charisma and prestige, with the going rate of images, as if with draughtsmen, with an unbearable lightness. The masses were deliberately demoralised and de-ideologised in order to be sacrificed alive to the calculus of probabilities; but today it is the masses who destabilise all images and who mock the truth of politics. They play at whatever they have been taught; speculating on the exchange of statistics and images, they play the game with all the immorality of a speculator. Faced with idiotic certainty and the merciless banality of figures, the masses embody, at the limits, the principle of uncertainty in the field of sociology. While the system of power organises the statistical order as best it can (and today the social order is a statistical order), the masses secretly look to statistical disorder.
From this viral, diabolical, ironic and reversible arrangement one may hope for an unexpected outcome, an event resembling a slip of the tongue. This society henceforth creates only events that are uncertain and impossible to elucidate. In the past an event existed in order to take place; today it is something whose taking place is planned. That is, the event now emerges as a virtual artefact, like a travesty of media forms.
A produced and simulated event. That is, either it is a real accident proving the undeniable virulence of viruses, or it is a complete simulation proving that today the best strategy is calculated destabilisation and deception. What is the heart of the matter? Even if the hypothesis of an experimental simulation is correct, this in no way guarantees that the process is under control. The test virus may turn into a destructive virus. No one can control the chain reactions. In that case we are faced not with a simulated accident but with an accident of simulation. Moreover, just as any accident or natural catastrophe may be claimed as a terrorist act, so such an act may be accepted as an accident or natural catastrophe. There is no end to the hypotheses.
For this reason the whole system is terrorist through and through. For the real terror is not the terror of violence or of accident, but the terror of uncertainty and deterrence. Some time ago a group that had carried out a simulated hold-up was given a heavier sentence than one that had carried out a real armed robbery: a violation of the reality principle is a more serious offence than a real attack.
What emerges from this is a gigantic uncertainty; a gigantic uncertainty at the heart of operational vitality. It was once again science that foresaw this kind of state of panic: the loss by subject and object of their respective positions within the experimental interface creates this state of definitive uncertainty as to the objective reality of the object and of knowledge. Science itself seems to have come under the influence of strange forces of attraction. But the same is true of the economy; the revival of the economy depends on the absolute unpredictability that prevails in this field. The same is true of the sudden development of information techniques; this development depends on the undecidability of the knowledge circulating there.
It is extremely doubtful whether all these techniques are an active part of the real world. What is rational in technology and science is, rather, to bring us face to face with an absolutely unreal world, beyond every principle of truth and reality. The contemporary revolution is the revolution of uncertainty.”
Translated from the Turkish original.