/lit/ - Literature

>Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates : reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language economic exchange, accumulation and power. Hence the reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of exchange in the sacrifice, the reversibility of time in the cycle, the reversibility of production in destruction, the reversibility of life in death, and the reversibility of every term and value of the langue in the anagram. In every domain it assumes the form of extermination and death, for it is the form of the symbolic itself. Neither mystical nor structural, the symbolic is inevitable.

>Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy· it operates with political economy as its simulated model.

>Contemporary revolutions are indexed on the immediately prior state of the system. They are all buttressed by a nostalgia for the resurrection of the real in all its forms, that is as second-order simulacra: dialectics, use value, the transparency and finality of production the 'liberation' of the unconscious, of repressed meaning (the signifier, or the signified named 'desire'), and so on. All these liberations provide the ideal content for the system to devour in its successive revolutions, and which it brings subtly back to life as mere phantasmas of revolution. These revolutions are only transitions towards generalised manipulation. At the stage of the aleatory processes of control, even revolution becomes meaningless.

>Cybernetic operativity, the genetic code, the aleatory order of mutation, the uncertainty principle, etc., succeed determinate, objectivist science, and the dialectical view of history and consciousness.

>Identity is untenable: it is death, since it fails to inscribe its own death. Every closed or metastable, functional or cybernetic system is shadowed by mockery and instantaneos subversion (which no longer takes the detour through long dialectical labour), because all the system's inertia acts against it.

-- Jean Baudrillard/Symbolic Exchange and Death
>aw yeah