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The great Nietzschean idea of transvaluation of all values has seen itself realized in precisely the opposite way: in the involution of all values. We have not passed beyond, but fallen short of Good and Evil, short of the True and the False, short of the Beautiful and the Ugly — we have passed not into a dimension that is the product of excess but into one generated by lack. There has been neither transmutation nor surpassing, but dissolution and loss of distinction…
When the false takes over all the energy of the true — or vice versa — then art is produced, or illusion. When the real absorbs all the energy of the unreal, fiction results. On the other hand, when the true loses even its opposite energy, that of the imaginary, the outcome is simulation, the lowest degree of morality ensues…
This is not the end of history in Fukuyama's sense, by the resolution of all contradictions to which it had given rise, but the dilution of history as event: its media mise en scene, its excess of visibility. The continuity of time, which is a way of defining history (for there to be a possible recurrence of a sequence of meaning there has necessarily to be a past, a present and a future, with a continuity between them), is less and less certain. With instant information, there's no longer any time for history itself. In a sense, it doesn't have time to take place. It's short-circuited. To Point this out isn't to believe in nothing any more, as you put it, but to register this curving back of history and try to thwart its lethal effects…
What is capitalism for you today?
I really don't know. It's sort of a dilution of the universal in a global state of affairs. It's a sort of purely operational general equivalent. It no longer even involves any opposing or negative values, such as revolution or the indignity of labour. For a long time the communists proposed an antagonistic system. There's no antagonistic system today simply because the system itself no longer has any values or gravity. All that remains is an automatic transcription of the world into the global…
What becomes globalized is, first of all, the market, the promiscuity of all exchanges and all products, the perpetual flow of money. In cultural terms, it's the promiscuity of all signs and all values — or, in other words, pornography. For the worldwide broadcasting and parading of everything and anything over the networks is pornography. There's no need for sexual obscenity: this interactive copulation suffices. At the end of this process, there's no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal itself is globalized: democracy, human rights, circulate precisely like any global product, like oil or capital…
This resurgence — or even insurrection — of singularity may assume violent, anomalous, irrational aspects from the viewpoints of 'enlightened' thought — it may take ethnic, religious or linguistic forms but also, at the individual level, temperamental and neurotic ones…
The Americans parachuted peace into Bosnia in exactly the same way as they parachuted war into Iraq. What we have here is a model in which peace and war are concertinaed, the two being indistinct today, as Orwell accurately foresaw. From the standpoint of this parachuting operation, whether or not there are thousands of deaths is immaterial. The Gulf operation could have been carried out without a single fatality: this was the in fact the case on the American side. That was a war that was clean from technological and conceptual points of view. But this is no longer a war. It is the same police-style violence in peace and war…
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