The Delirium will be Televised:
Excerpts on TV Screens
20 excerpts-turned-aphorisms from Achim Szepanski’s In the Delirium of the Simulation (2025) Third Edition which is coming around March ‘25. Some of the longer essays have been edited, and the book is being reformatted again to the 11x18 series. Last copies of the 2nd Edition are almost gone, but you can still find them out in some stores globally.
We’re tying Achim Szepanski’s work into the work of Lucas Ferraço Nassif, here, by screening for screens, in his book In the Delirium of the Simulation.
1
The n-generations of post-humanism’s drones are thus still haunted by the ghosts of humanism, often enough still oriented towards human intelligence. On the other hand, in the future, A.I. will also be able to alienate itself from humans, while current digital technologies with their new machines, new images and interactive screens will not leave behind an alienated human. Rather, they form an integrated circuit with him. In an essay on the superman, Deleuze demanded that the relationship between machine and human must remain in and under the aspects of economics, politics and biology. However, the dream of human democracy has long since been transposed into the algorithms of social media, which produce a new egomania as a waste product, while history collapses into the logic of capital, insofar as the future of non-accruals remains an ideal of capitalisation or is restored as such. At the same time, the horizon of capital continues to shimmer in the vertigo of unknowable infinities, non-Euclidean curves and the entropological moments of the impossible (ibid.: Position 643). Any intervention necessary in response to this is not about the vision of a new speculative cosmology, but about the destruction of capitalisation, which is inscribed in everything and anything.
2
On the images perceived through the screen, the simulated effects of reality, a subjectless calculation plays out in series of zeros and ones, that of the code, which Žižek calls the real with reference to Lacan (ibid.). For Baudrillard, however, this operative calculation of the code is only one aspect of the simulated real (in addition to the signs and images generated by the code), while it does not concern the real as the limit of the system; we will come back to this. The simulation attempts to “realise” the real, to extract what is only implicitly present in it and make it explicit.
3
However, there are even more terrible stagings that are not even recognised as such: the prison is a model of a model of the real: a model of the construction of a country in which commercial interests are exhaustively integrated into the land mass, a model in which even objects break the law. Disneyland itself is not only imaginary, but a model that is more real than real. The real and the imaginary flatten out and merge into hyperreality. However, the older Baudrillard also points out that in the stage of digitality and the screen, the triad of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic no longer applies (Baudrillard, 2000: 103).
4
Baudrillard ultimately believes that the mass is only a “spongy, sticky ... idea” (Baudrillard, 2010), namely that which remains when the core of the social has disappeared. The only functioning referent of the masses is now the silent majority, to which Baudrillard, on the one hand, concedes a function of revenge on the system precisely through its silence, but on the other hand also reduces it to its purely statistical functionality. This would make it merely the expression of the simulation, the swarm that completely evaporates (ibid.). The mass is now the negative of the social, which merely emerges as a simulant from the sea of social networks, which in turn absorb everything like a sponge and push it down to the blind sediment of relationships and profiles. This is where all our "social" relationships begin to proliferate. At the same time, today, you are most likely to become part of the masses when you are alone, namely in front of a screen.
5
Ultimately, a mass of taste has emerged, which, with its contrasting and differential connections—think broken and chic—levels out the last class cultures both on screen and at mass events. In the best case, each participant in the mass becomes the taste policeman of the other, whereby the specificity of each taste (ordering of fantasies in between the private and the public, whereby the latter is structure-forming) remains recognised, and this is precisely what constitutes mass taste (Metz & Seeßlen, 2011: 221).
6
It is the serial chains of images consumed on screen that generate the prescription of fantasy values and thus mass taste, and which, as visiotypes, produce a hyperreality of image deliriums and narratives that often enough still deal with rituals of authenticity. The images of the internet and entertainment as fiction form a mix that seems to indicate reliability: the image of looted stores refers to the uprising, just as the image of people wailing indicates war.
7
The screen, which for Baudrillard generally stands for networks, circuits, punched tapes, magnetic tapes, simulation models, indeed for all systems of recording, reproduction and surfaces of inscription, is a place where the outside disappears (Baudrillard, 1991: 102). The light of a television comes from within and reflects nothing. It seems to be the cause and origin of the phenomena that appear there. Nevertheless, it is precisely in cyberspace that concrete elements, sound, text and video are broadcast and sequenced, which, when the user clicks on them, can produce something like a vague meaning for him or even have a montage character, although the algorithms are increasingly regulating these sequences. The phenomena are ultimately judged according to their interface value, which indicates an unconditional trust in the digitised phenomenon, which goes hand in hand with increasing transparency, while the reference to an unfathomable outside of illusions can also be cut here. What remains invisible is the technology of the computer, bytes, chips and electricity, the code behind the screen and the play of appearances that are an effect of the code.
Baudrillard's distinction between representation and simulation remains to be considered, insofar as every recording system, be it a scientific apparatus, a survey or a sound recorder, is now a screen that projects a simulated reality rather than reflecting a reality. However, the screen that the media weaves around the masses also remains a screen of uncertainty, resulting not from a lack of information but from an excess of information, which for Baudrillard is in turn irreparable and can therefore never be eliminated. Information no longer has to be rational, because it is measured neither against an ideal nor a negative instance. It is nothing other than operative. In fact, the real that emerges from the ecstasy of information is not that of a Laruelle or Lacan, because it is either not closed (Laruelle) or no longer envelops an imaginary (Lacan), it is rather a hyperreal that has emerged from a radiant synthesis of combinatorial models in a hyperspace without atmosphere
8
The internet is also a very special communication system. Today, the internet is both a prerequisite and a paradigm for the screen-mediated social factory. In this, every form of attention-work in metabolic time can be understood as informatic work, which is integrated into flat and mechanised reference systems (links), which with every click provides an output page, but not an identical one. Instead of transmitting messages between people, the internet simulates the experience of being among people in a way that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. Conservative critics now argue that there are things that a simulation on the internet cannot capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, for example, ethical responsibility towards other people arises from their face, indeed from the experience of looking directly into the face of another living person. But Facebook is a world of images of digitised faces, of selfies and avatars. For Kurt Röttgers, however, the rhetoric of loss that prevails here also has its limits, insofar as communication already takes place in the in-between of the text and is already mediated by the media, rather than taking place in the a-medially direct encounter of bodies. The text is sui generis a simulation space (Röttgers, 2021: 373).
In his new book Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary also talks about the simulation of the social on the internet (Crary, 2022: 16). The endless agglomeration and recombination of data, be it videos, images or texts, produces a truly numbing and mind-numbing cacophony as well as a disorientation of thought. For Fuchs, the internet as a social system offers mental systems flows of disinhibited communication, insofar as there are no stop rules or breakpoints on the internet, but only this and so on and so forth (Fuchs, 2023: 265). Every position on the internet is in communication with every other position and propagates primarily functional differences in the transport from one webpage to another webpage. The extremely high investments in big data systems and digital technologies are also based on the belief that there is no longer anything of ontological relevance that could not at least potentially be reduced to serial units of digital data. In this context, Crary quotes Lyotard, who sees the rampant progression of capitalist technoscience as the final negation of the libertarian project of modernity and also as the erasure of the human (Crary, 2022: 69). Users increasingly interact in online worlds that offer less pre-determined and routinised answers to all questions, as Crary believes, but rather enable the endless concatenation of disjunctures, with visual and textual engagement indicating the surfing of patterns of performativity. The 24/7 engagement with screens has long anesthetised us, according to Crary, so that we have lost the sensory capacity to experience ourselves as part of life on earth.
9
The crucial point here, for Crary, is not that we become like the machine, but that we lose the ability to experience the voices of another as an object of concern or intimate reflection or depth. The millions of ever-smiling selfies circulating on social media or online advertising create an endless surface of images organised by likeability. The accumulation of likes allows the accumulation of capital to seep into the screen and produces certain standards of beauty on it. Users offer themselves to the gaze of the digital regime and shamelessly exhibit a fluid jouissance, unaware that the regime is constantly restaging the continuity between jouissance, capitalisation and marketing. The user voluntarily makes himself visible by means of Photoshop, whereby the selfie represents his desire to pose for the gaze, insofar as he, as the one who photographs himself, places himself under the gaze regime of both others and the digital system itself. With the networked images of the digital system, the gaze now comes from everywhere and therefore leaves hardly any possibility of anonymity. It boils down to total visibility and the totalitarian surveillance and quantifying gaze of the state and capital.
Baudrillard accentuated this somewhat differently: with information technology and electronic machines, the subject is literally sucked into the screen and the boundary between the human and the inhuman becomes blurred. However, this does not mean that the human being becomes a machine one-to-one, just as the machine does not necessarily have to take on more and more human traits. Nevertheless, for Baudrillard, as for Virilio, an anthropological uncertainty arises here. In his book The Impossible Exchange, Baudrillard uses the chess game between Kasparov and the computer Deep Blue to show that Kasparov still wins the first game because he contributes intuition, affect and cunning, while the computer only calculates and plays out all possibilities in this context (Baudrillard, 2000: 157). In the second game, which Kasparov loses, the computer succeeds in incorporating moments of Kasparov's game into its calculations, but this does not mean that the computer thinks (although it can operate unconscious cognition in A.I. today). Thinking implies always being able to say no, and this is precisely where the computer fails.
10
Shipley sees the definitive blockbuster in his book Stratagem of the Corpse in eight billion people jogging on treadmills into the void (into the void shown on screens, but too close to our eyes for us ever to see them as screens): The sheep have replaced the beasts of the apocalypse. The climax of the collapse will film itself, documenting its own duration even before it occurs, filming the victory of the end, the extinction of the world's population as a testing ground for the possibilities of pure cinematic excess (Shipley, 2021: 34).
It is not the (active) observation of a viewer, but the passivity of a receiver who absorbs even the virtuality of the corpses on the screen without censorship, question or hope. For Baudrillard, even the apocalypse no longer exists; it has given way to the precession of the neutral, the forms of the neutral and indifference. The apocalypse is the revelation of reality in a world in which only its simulated form still exists. And so, now that the actual apocalypse is behind us, we are instead confronted with the virtual reality of the apocalypse, with the posthumous comedy of the apocalypse. With a silent yawn of our contented uselessness, we enjoy the war that never happened for us in the West. There are no longer any ideologies of war, it is all about the ideology of war. The notion of war as an event with something at stake is behind us, so there is only the media event, making war an empty screen unto itself. We have seen war (and the end) so often that we have grown weary of it. It comes, it goes: nothing changes. But of course it never goes away, which not coincidentally also contributes to our fatigue.
11
In the 1990s, Arthur Kroker noted the end of the fascination with the shopping mall, which had, by that point, transformed into a liquid TV screen that has the advantage over television in that it appealed to all the senses and transformed the body into a multiplicity of organs, yet only virtually fulfilling its promises to the thoroughly possessive individual. Advertising and goods undergo a peculiar transformation in the postmodern shopping centres that Baudrillard and Kroker call “supergadgets”, and this is why advertising no longer has or needs a territory. Its usable forms no longer have any meaning. The Forum des Halles, for example, is a gigantic advertising installation; an operation of the public.
12
The screen image has become the paradigmatic means by which capital processes its programs, although the corporate-sponsored state—with its law, its police, its military, its borders—continues to play a role as medium and screen infrastructure.
13
The screen image can therefore not be separated from the computer code that programs and stages it. The Mona Lisa, either in the Louvre or on the screen, is no longer just a painting, but rather a node and an interface in a huge information network. The environment of everyday language that "surrounds" the software is part of the software. This colonisation of text and image indicates the transformation of "human" interests into M′. For Beller, this is the real subsumption.
14
If humans are integrated into the networks of intelligent machines, then as a fractal subject that (re)finds itself in each of its mechanical prostheses in order to mutate into a model itself. Today, simulation models in the sense of Baudrillard produce inhuman phenomena that can even force humans to adapt to them. The models of A.I. are not bound to specific physical bodies; their materiality lies in their storage medium and is binary coded as an alternation of charge and non-charge. The world of texts, films, images and signs only becomes hyper-visible on the screen and can be continuously reworked and recreated by the A.I. machines. If everything is already fully coded, then the subject, who is still actively constituting his own world, disappears.
15
For Baudrillard, the scientific object, like the stars, is light years away, but reappears as a trace on the screens. Quantum theory must at least establish that the object no longer exists as a unity and solidity—it is always two in its cosmological dimension. It disappears under certain circumstances, it escapes, it has no definitive status, it only appears in the form of ephemeral and aleatory traces on the screens of virtualisation.
16
In this way, the apocalypse is immanently delayed because it has already completed its end on TV, or, to put it another way, because it is premature, it does not arrive in time.
17
Everything falls prey to the drug of communication, business calculation and the littered operation of more. This ranges from the metastatic form of butter, the flavoured margarine, which stands for the hopeless fight against obesity, insofar as it constantly outbids its own pathology and thus still escapes any dietetics, to the endless loops of share prices that run endlessly in the picture on the television channels, as if the share prices represented the content for the ECG of global financial capital.
18
However, it is precisely in consumption today that classes as units of political, economic and cultural power are being dissolved in favour of much more flexible "lifestyle" conglomerates, which nevertheless reveal a kind of class logic of the elites, for whom culture is merely the sign system for status in the competitive struggle. So the classes do not disappear completely after all, because lower-class television is juxtaposed with elite universities, fast food and discount grocery stores with Michelin-starred kitchens, one-euro discount stores with designer brand scenarios, the gentrification of the popular in expensive traditional costume contrasts with the zero fashion of KiK. The alleged singularity excesses of the middle class, which find their appropriate expression in the Tui catalog, have to position themselves in the in-between of extremes.
19
59 With the end of classical computer simulations and models, the programmer himself is gradually becoming superfluous, and self-replicating algorithms and deep learning algorithms are being introduced that no longer require the human engineer. According to Bernard Stiegler, hyper-industrial societies based on the self-production of digital traces and dominated by automatisms lead to the proletarianisation of theoretical knowledge, just as the broadcasting of analogue traces via television led to the proletarianisation of life knowledge, and just as the subjugation of the worker's body to mechanical traces inscribed in machines led to the proletarianisation of labour knowledge (Stiegler, 2016).
20
57 A phantom subject emerges, the "you" of the code. This delirious subject is a kind of self-indulgent egomaniac who, unlike the narcissist, does not concentrate on the (unsuccessful) doubling of his own ego, but instead exhibits his ego in order to constantly capture contact and feedback as a kind of transmitting and absorbing screen, i.e. as a screen for networks of influence and as a terminal for the code. Alterity disappears here in the cursed flow of self-construction, which makes the other disappear in the hypostasis of the ego itself. Lacan's statement that what I want is the good of others, provided it remains in my image, now comes to nothing, because it still remains in the narcissistic figure, whereas Baudrillard's look no longer inhales narcissism, but poses an offensive self-exhibition as a video image, a kind of egoism that, with its illustrated selfies, brings all kinds of individuality programs into play, which not only identify the ego as a post-creative producer, but above all as an end consumer of social media (Baudrillard, 1992: 31).