/lit/ - Literature

>The Three Orders of Simulacra

>There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance:

>The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the 'classical' period, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era. Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase.

>The first-order simulacrum operates on the natural law of value, the second-order simulacrum on the market law of value, and the third-order simulacrum on the structural law of value.

>There is a direct relation between the Jesuits' mental obedience and the demiurgic ambition to exorcise the natural substance of things in order to replace it with a synthetic substance. Just as man submits to organisation, so things take on the ideal functionality of the corpse. Technology and technocracy are already fully operative in the notion of an ideal counterfeit of the world, expressed in the invention of a universal substance and a universal combinatory of substances.

-- JB/SE&D

this is probably the stuff JB is best known for, which is why it’s always a bad idea to start with S&S, because this is more or less what he would be talking about in everything that followed. the key thing here is that he really was the original visionary of the Matrix, which is essentially an HR Giger vision that *you can’t see,* because it was hidden from within. but the other thing is that it wasn’t until Uncle Nick that the idea of teleoplexy would be introduced to the Wild Ride. the internet was a long ways off yet, along with the fall of the Soviet Union and much else. JB never really cared all that much about communism, his thing was more situationism. but culturally was predicting basically exact same things Uncle Nick was saying in Fanged Noumena. the hinge between the Old and New worlds of theory in this sense is entirely in the technological transformation of economics and vice versa.