The obsolescence of man, vol I , part 2: The

world as phantom and as matrix:

philosophical considerations on radio and
television - Gnther Anders
Anders.jpg
The first complete English translation of a remarkable 1956 essay about television
from Vol. I of The Obsolescence of Man by Gnther Anders, whousing
phenomenological analyses, excerpts from his diaries and reflections on daily life
depicts a capitalist world that manufactures a warped mass-man by imposing
nonparticipation, consumption of images, artificial needs (drug addiction is the
model for todays needs), separation, conditioning, an eternal present,
commodified leisure and the dissolution of the individual in vapid mass produced
roles, in a text that in many ways anticipates the theory of the spectacle of Guy
Debord and the situationists.
Translated in April-May 2014 from: Gnther Anders, La Obsolescencia del
Hombre (Vol. I), tr. Josep Monter Prez, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2011, pp. 105-208.
La Obsolescencia del Hombre (Vol. I) was originally published in Germany in 1956
under the title: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen I.

Chapter 1 - The world delivered to your

home
The Obsolescence of Man, Volume I, Part Two, The World as Phantom and as
Matrix: Philosophical Considerations on Radio and Television Gnther
Anders1
But since the king did not like the idea that his son, straying from the main roads,
should be wandering all over the land to obtain his own opinions of the world, he
presented him with a carriage and horses. Now you do not need to walk, were his
words. What they meant was: You are no longer allowed to walk. The effective
reality: You can no longer walk.

Chapter I
THE WORLD DELIVERED TO YOUR HOME
Section 1
No Means Is Only a Means.
The first reaction to the critique to which we shall subject radio and television will
sound something like this: such a generalization is not permitted; what is of interest is
exclusively what we do with these instruments, how we use them, for what purposes
we use them as means: good or bad, human or inhuman, social or antisocial.
We have all heard this optimistic argumentif we can be permitted to use such an
expressionwhich is a legacy of the era of the first industrial revolution; and in all of
its lairs it still lives on with the same unreflective superficiality.
The validity of this argument is more than doubtful. The freedom to use the
technology that it presupposes; its faith in the idea that there are parts of our world
that are nothing but means which can be assessed ad libitum as noble goals is
pure illusion. The instruments themselves comprise facta that also affect us. And this
reality, which affects us regardless of the goal to which we wish to harness these
instruments, will not just disappear by verbally demoting them to the status of
means. In fact, the crude division of our life into means and ends which is
entailed by this argument, has nothing to do with reality. Our existence, replete with
technologies, cannot be broken down into discrete signs, strictly delineated, which
identify some things as means and others as ends. Such a distinction is only
legitimate in individual actions and isolated mechanical operations. It is not legitimate
when we are dealing with the totality, in politics or philosophy. Anyone who
structures his or her life as a whole with the help of these two categories considers it
according to the model of action determined by the end, that is, as a technical process,
which is an expression of the barbarism that normally provokes such rage, especially
when it is presented in the form of the slogan, The end justifies the means. The
rejection of this formula displays the same laziness as its acceptance (which is
furthermore so rare), since he who rejects it also affirms, although not explicitly, the
legitimacy of the two categories. Real humanity, however, only begins when this
distinction is rendered absurd: when both the means and the ends are so infused with a
cultured way of life and ethical education that, faced with concrete fragments of life
or the world, one can no longer understand or even question whether they are means
or ends; only when

The
journey
Is just as good as drinking from it.

towards

the

spring

We can, of course, use television for the purpose of participating in a religious service.
But what affects or transforms us in this experiencewhether we like it or not
just like the religious service itself, is the fact that we do not participate, but rather
consume only its image. This picture-book effect, however, is not only different from
the proclaimed effect, but very much the opposite of it. What marks us and
demarcates us, what conforms us and deforms us, is not just the objects transmitted by
the media, but the media themselves, the devices themselves, which are not just
objects with one possible use, but which determine their use by virtue of their fixed
structure and function and, accordingly, also determine the style of our actions and our
lives: in short, us.
The readers to whom the following pages are addressed are, in the first place,
consumers, that is, those who listen to radio and watch TV. Secondly, professional
philosophers and the employees of the radio and television industries. The theme of
my reflections will seem strange to the philosophers; and to the specialists, the way I
address it will seem strange. Of course, I am not addressing all consumers, but only
those to whom it has occasionally occurred, during or after a broadcast, that they were
perplexed and asked themselves: And just what was I doing then? What am I really
doing? It is to these perplexed persons that I must offer a few observations.
Section 2
Todays mass consumption takes place as a sum of solo performances. Each consumer
is an unpaid domestic worker employed in the production of the mass man.
In the days before the cultural faucets of radio were installed in their homes, the
Smiths and the Millers had thronged the movie theaters in order to collectively
consume, and therefore as a mass, the commodities that had been produced for them
in a stereotyped and massive way. One might be tempted to perceive in this situation a
certain coherent style: the confluence of mass production2 and mass consumption; but
one would be mistaken. Nothing more completely contradicts the intentions of mass
production than a situation of consumption in which some or even large numbers of
consumers simultaneously enjoy the same individual specimen (or a single
reproduction of such a product) of a commodity. For the interest of those who direct
the mass production is indifferent to the fact that this consumption should represent as
a whole a real community experience or only the sum of many individual
experiences. What is of interest to them is not the standardized masses as such, but the
masses fragmented into a certain number, as large as possible, of buyers; not the
opportunity for everyone to consume the same thing, but the fact that each person
3

should buy the same thing to meet the same need (whose implantation was obtained in
the same manner). In countless industries this ideal has been completely or almost
completely achieved. To me it seems debatable whether the motion picture industry
can attain this goal in an optimal manner because, as a continuation of the theatrical
tradition, it still serves its commodity as a spectacle for many people at the same time.
This undoubtedly represents an archaic residue. It is not surprising that the radio and
television industries, despite the motion picture industrys enormous scale of
development, can compete with the movies: both industries have the added good luck
that they sell as a commodity, in addition to the commodities that are meant for
consumption, also the apparatus necessary for that consumption; and, unlike the
cinema, they can be sold to almost every consumer. Nor is it surprising that almost
everyone takes advantage of this opportunity, since this commodity, unlike the motion
picture, can be delivered to the homes of the consumers by means of the radios and
televisions. So it did not take long for the Smiths and Millers, who used to spend their
evenings in the movie theaters, to instead stay at home to receive radio comedies or
news of the world. The natural situation of the moviesthe consumption of the mass
commodity by a mass of peopleno longer prevails here, something that naturally
does not entail any reduction in the scale of mass production; instead, mass production
for mass-menand the production of mass-men themselvesis increasing every day
without interruption. Millions of listeners are served the same food for their ears;
every one of them was treated, by way of this en masse product, as a mass-man, as an
indefinite article; each one was thus fixed in this quality, that is, his lack of quality.
It just turned out that, for the mass production of radios and televisions, the collective
consumer was rendered superfluous. The Smiths and the Millers therefore consume
the mass products en famille or even alone; the more isolated the consumer, the more
productive: thus we witness the rise of the type of mass-hermit; and, now, there are
millions of examples of this typeeach one separated from the others, but
nonetheless the same as themwho are seated in their homes like hermits, but not to
renounce the world, but in order not to miss even a crumb of the world in effigie for
the love of God.
Everyone knows that the industry has abandoned its postulate of centralization, which
was the indisputable model some thirty years ago, most often for strategic reasons, in
favor of the principle of dispersion. It is not contradictory that this principle of
dispersion should be valid today for the production of the mass-man. And I say, for his
production, despite the fact that we have so far spoken only of dispersed consumption.
But this leap from consumption to production is justified here because both coincide
in a certain way, since (in a non-materialistic sense) man is what he eats: mass-men
are produced because they consume mass products; this implies at the same time that
the consumer of mass-produced commodities, through his consumption, becomes a
collaborator in the production of the mass-man (that is, he becomes a collaborator in
4

the process of transforming himself into a mass-man). Thus, consumption and

production coincide here. If consumption is dispersed, so too is the production of
the mass-man. And this takes place wherever consumption takes place: in the presence
of every radio and every television. In a certain way, each individual is employed and
occupied as adomestic worker. It is true, of course, that he is a domestic worker of a
very unusual type, because of the nature of his work: his self-transformation into a
mass-man through his consumption of mass-produced commodities, that is, through
his leisure. Whereas the classical domestic worker made products in order to assure
himself of a minimum of consumer goods and leisure, todays domestic worker
consumes a maximum number of leisure products in order to collaborate in the
production of the mass-man. The process is completely paradoxical insofar as the
domestic worker, instead of being paid for this collaboration, must even pay for it
himself; especially for the means of production (the radio or television and, in many
countries, even for the broadcasts), by the use of which he allows himself to be
transformed into the mass-man. He therefore pays to sell himself; even his lack of
freedomwhich lack he has helped to bring abouthe must obtain by buying it,
since it, too, has been transformed into a commodity.
But even if you reject this shocking way of looking at the consumer of mass-produced
commodities as the collaborator of the production of the mass-man, it cannot be
denied that in order to create this kind of mass-man, which is today desired, no longer
requires effective mass participation in the form of consolidated masses. Le Bons
reflections on crowds and how they transform man are obsolete, since the
depersonalization of individuality and the standardization of rationality are carried out
at home. The stage-managing of masses that Hitler specialized in has become
superfluous: if one wants to transform a man into a nobody (and even make him proud
to be a nobody), it is no longer necessary to drown him in a mass, or to bury him in a
cement construction mass-produced by masses. No depersonalization, no loss of the
ability to be a man is more effective than the one that apparently preserves the
freedom of the personality and the rights of the individual. If the procedure
of conditioning takes place in a special way in the home of every personin the
individual home, in isolation, in millions of isolated unitsthe result will be perfect.
The treatment is absolutely discreet, since it is presented as fun, the victim is not told
that he must make any sacrifices and he is left with the illusion of his privacy or, at
least, of his private space. In actuality, the old expression, A mans home is worth its
weight in gold is once again true, if in a completely new sense, since it is worth its
weight in gold not just to the owner of the home, who gulps down the soup
of conditioning by the ladle-full, but also for those who are the masters of the
homeowners: the caterers and suppliers who serve the diners this soup that is their
daily fare.
Section 3
5

The radio and the television screen become transformed into a negative family table;
and the family is transformed into a miniature audience.
It will be understood that this mass consumption is not usually called by its true name.
To the contrary: it is presented as something that favors the rebirth of the family and
privacy, which is understandable, but an understandable hypocrisy: the new inventions
invoke nothing but the old ideals, which can fortuitously be presented as factors that
influence purchasing. The French family has discovered, we read in Wiener
Presse (December 24, 1954), that television is an excellent means to divert young
people from costly pastimes, and to keep children at home and to give a new
stimulus to family gatherings. This evaluation ignores the possibility that this kind of
consumption actually entails, to the contrary, the complete dissolution of the family;
and it does so in such a manner that this dissolution preserves or even acquires the
appearance of an intimate family life. And it does in fact dissolve it, since what
dominates the home, thanks to television, is the broadcast of the outside worldreal
or fictional; and it dominates the home in such an unlimited manner that it invalidates
and renders phantasmagorical the reality of the home, not only that of the four walls
and the furniture, but also of the shared family life itself. When that which is remote
becomes familiar, the familiar becomes remote or disappears. When the phantom
becomes real, reality becomes a phantom. Nowadays, the real home has been demoted
to the status of a container and its function is reduced to containing the video screen
for the outside world. As a Wiener Presse article datelined from London (October 2,
1954) says: Social workers removed two children from a house in the East End of
London, a one-year old and a three-year old, who had been abandoned. The only
furniture in the house, in which they were playing, consisted of a few broken chairs.
But in a corner there was an expensive new television. The only food in the cupboard
consisted of a slice of bread, a pound of margarine and a bottle of condensed milk.
The last remnants of what had once constituted the home environment, life in
common and the atmosphere of normal life, have disappeared. Without even an open
confrontation having taken placeor even being necessarythe realm of the
phantom was victorious over the realm of the home from the very moment the
television made its entry into the home: it came, it was seen, and it conquered.
Immediately the walls echo, they become transparent, the glue that holds the family
together melts away, shared privacy disintegrates.
Decades ago, one could have observed that the social hallmark of the family, the
massive table in the center of the living room, around which the family gathered, had
begun to lose its force of attraction, it became obsolete and is now absent from the
modern home. Now it has found its true successor in the new gadget, the television;
only now has it been replaced with a new piece of furniture, whose social symbolism
and persuasive power can measure up against the comparable features of the family
table. This does not mean, however, that the television has become the center of the
6

family; to the contrary, what the television set reproduces and embodies is precisely
the decentralization of the family, its ex-centricity, because it is the negative family
table. It does not provide a common center point, but rather a common avenue of
escape for the members of the family. Whereas the table was a centripetal force for the
family and it had encouraged those who sat around it to set the shuttles of mutual
family interests in motion, to share glances and conversations in order to continue
weaving the fabric of family life, the television screen is centrifugal. In fact, the
family members are not seated in such a way as to face one another; the arrangement
of chairs in front of the television screen is a chance affair and should the family
members look at each other it is only by accident, just as any speech between them (if
they should ever want or be able to talk) is a result of chance. They are no longer
together, but merely placed one next to the other; they are mere spectators. In these
circumstances one can no longer speak of weaving the fabric of family life, or of a
world in which they participate or which they create together. What takes place
instead is only that the members of the family fly towards a realm of unreality at the
same time, all of them together in the best cases, but never really share the experience
at the point of liftoff; or else they journey towards a world that they actually share
with no one (since they do not really participate in it themselves); or if they do share it
in some manner, they only do so with all the millions of soloists of mass
consumption, who just like them and at the same time as them stare at their television
screens. The family has been restructured into a miniature audience, and the living
room has been transformed into a miniature movie theater and the movie theater has
become the model for the home. If there is still anything that the members of the
family experience or participate in, not alone, or even as isolated individuals alongside
the other members of the family, but truly as a shared family experience, it is only the
experience of awaiting the moment and working for the moment, when they will have
finally paid off all the installments on their televisions and will once and for all put an
end to their lives in common. The unconscious goal of their last life in common is
therefore its extinction.
Section 4
Television and radio speak on our behalf; they thus transform us into minors and
subordinates. 3
Television viewers, we have said, converse with each other only by accidentinsofar
as they still retain the will or the ability to speak.
This is true even of people who listen to the radio. They too speak only by mistake.
Their will and their ability to speak diminish with each passing daythis does not
mean that they literally fall silent, but only that their garrulousness has assumed a
purely passive form. If in our fable we said, in the words of the king, that Now you
7

do not need to walk means Now you cannot walk, in this case the Now you no
longer need to talk is transformed into Now you can no longer talk. Since the
television and the radio speak on our behalf, they also deprive us of our ability to
speak; they rob us of our capacity to express ourselves, of our opportunities for
speech, and of our pleasure in speaking, just as the music of the phonograph has
robbed us of the live music that we used to perform in our homes.
The pairs of lovers sauntering along the shores of the Hudson, the Thames or the
Danube with a portable radio do not talk to each other, but listen to a third person
the public, almost always anonymous, voice of the program that they walk like a dog;
or more accurately, that walks them like a pair of dogs. Since they are only a public in
miniature that follows the voice of the broadcast, they do not walk alone, but in the
company of a third person. We may not speak, therefore, of any kind of situation of
intimate conversation, which is ruled out in advance; and any intimate contacts that
might take place between the lovers are introduced and even stimulated not by them,
but by that third party, the deep or crooning voice of the program that (for is not this
the very meaning of the word, program) tells both lovers what to feel and what to
do depending on whether it is day or night. And since they do what they are told to do
in the presence of this third party, they do it in an acoustically indiscreet situation.
However entertaining their obedience may seem to the two lovers, it is a certainty that
they do not entertain each other; rather, both are entertained by that third party which
alone has a voice; and this voice does not entertain them only in the sense
of conversing with them, or even of just amusing them, but also in the sense
of soutenir [supporting them], since as the third party in the alliance, this voice gives
them that support and aid that they cannot mutually provide each other, since they do
not know what to do with themselves. The fact that even the actual faire amour itself
is almost always conducted to the accompaniment of the radio (and not only playing a
creative swooning musical), does not need to be shamefully dissimulated for a world
that not only knows this is true, but also practices it as something entirely normal. In
fact, the radio, which is admitted or desired today in every situation, plays the role of
that torch-bearing female guide whom the ancients called upon to witness their
amorous pleasures; the difference between the two is that todays guide is a
mechanical public utility, that its torch must provide not just illumination, but also
warmth, and must not remain silent under any circumstances, but to the contrary must
talk its head off and provide a background of noise in the form of songs or words in
order to suppress that horror vacui which does not loosen its grip on the pair of lovers
even in actu. This background noise is so fundamentally important that it has even
been adopted by the voicepondences, introduced in 1954, those recorded magnetic
tapes, which people send to each other. When a lover utters this kind of illiterate love
letter, what he is doing is speaking on a pre-recorded musical background, because for
his adored addressee it is likely that nothing more than his voice would be too bare
8

a gift. What really has to be heard, somewhat like a suitor who has been transformed
into a thing, is likewise the third voice.
But the situation of lovemaking is just one example, the most blatant. In much the
same way, people keep themselves entertained in any situation, in every activity; and
when, by some oversight or carelessness, they speak to each other, behind them
speaks, as the principal actor, as the tenor, the voice of the radio and transmits to them
the reassuring and comforting feeling that it will continue to speak even after they
themselves have had their sayeven after they are dead.
And no matter how much they now have a guaranteed right to speak, they have been
completely inoculated in their hearing, and have essentially ceased to be
, just as, as eaters of bread, they have ceased to be homines fabri, since they do
not give form to their verbal nourishment, nor do they bake their own bread. For them
words are no longer something one speaks, but something one merely hears; speaking
is no longer something that one does, but something that one receives. It is clear that
they therefore have the logos in a completely different sense than is conveyed by
Aristotles definition; and it is just as clear that they are thus transformedin the
etymological sense of the terminto infantile beings, that is, into minors, those who
do not speak. No matter in what cultural or political milieu this process towards the
condition of [an existence without speech] takes place, its end result
is always the same: a type of man who, because he no longer speaks himself, no
longer has anything to say; and who, because he only listensand this is more and
more the caseis a subordinate. The initial effects of this development are manifest
even today: the languages of all advanced countries have become cruder and poorer;
and there is a growing aversion to the use of language.4 But not only thisthere has
also been a corresponding impoverishment and barbarization of experience, that is, of
man himself, because mans inner life, its richness and its subtlety, cannot endure
without the richness and subtlety of his way of speaking and not only because
language is mans means of expression, but also because man is the product of his
way of speaking; in short: because man is articulated as he himself articulates and is
disarticulated to the degree that he does not articulate.5
Section 5
Events come to us, not we to them.
The consumer goods by means of which such a transformation of human nature is
achieved are brought into our homes, just like gas or electricity. The deliveries are not
confined to artistic products, such as music or radio dramas; they also include actual
events, at least those events that are selected and processed to represent reality or to
serve as substitutes for it. A man who wants to be in the swim, to know what is
9

going on outside, must go to his home, where the events are waiting for him, like
water ready to flow from the faucet. For if he stayed outside, in the chaos of reality,
how could he pick out anything real of more than local significance? Because, in
fact, the outside world covers up the outside world. Only after we have closed the
door behind us, does the outside world become visible to us; only after we have been
transformed into windowless monads, does the universe reflect itself in us; only when
we have dedicated ourselves to the tower to such a point that, instead of being
prisoners, we become its residents, does the world appear and offer itself to us, and we
are transformed into Lynceus.6 The ridiculous promise: Look how close the good is,
which our fathers had to propose in response to the question, Why go out into the
world?, will have to be revised and stated in this way: Look how close the distant
is, or even, Look, the remote is only near. And this brings us to the heart of our
subject, since the fact that eventsthe events themselves, not reports about them
that football games, church services, atomic explosions, visit us at home; the fact that
the mountain comes to Mohammed,the world comes to man, and not the reverse, is,
along with the mass production of hermits and the transformation of the family into a
miniature audience, the essentially revolutionary achievement that radio and
television has brought.7
This third revolution is the real subject of our investigation, since it is almost
exclusively devoted to unique changes that are inflicted on man as a being who is
supplied with a world, and to the no less unique consequences entailed by this supply
of the world for the concept of the world and for the world itself. In order to prove
that what we are dealing with here are truly philosophical questions, we shall provide
a list, although not in any systematic order, of some of the consequences that must be
discussed in the course of our investigation.
1. When the world comes to us, instead of our going to it, we are no longer in the
world, but only its consumers, as in the Land of Cockaigne.
2. When the world comes to us only as an image, it is half-present and half-absent, in
other
words,
it
is
like
a
phantom.
3. When we have access to it at any time we want (we do not of course call the shots,
but we can connect to it or disconnect from it), we are possessors of a God-like power.
4. When the world speaks to us without our being able to speak to it, we are deprived
of
speech,
and
hence
condemned
to
be
unfree.
5. When the world is clearly perceptible to us, but no more than that, i.e., not subject
to our action, then we are transformed into eavesdroppers and voyeurs.
6. When an event that occurs at a particular place is broadcast, and when it can be
made to appear at any other place as a broadcast, it becomes a movable, indeed,
almost ubiquitous object, and has forfeited its spatial location, its principium
individuationis.
7. When the event is no longer attached to a specific location and can be reproduced
10

virtually any number of times, it acquires the characteristics of an assembly-line

product; and when we pay for having it delivered to our homes, it is a commodity.
8. When the actual event is socially important only in its reproduced form, i.e., as a
spectacle, the difference between being and appearance, between reality and image of
reality,
is
abolished.
9. When the event in its reproduced form is socially more important than the original
event, this original must be shaped with a view to being reproduced; in other words,
the event becomes merely a master matrix, or a mold for casting its own
reproductions.
10. When the dominant experience of the world thrives on such assembly-line
products, the concept the world is abolished insofar as it denotes that in which we
live. The real world is forfeited; the broadcasts, in other words, further an idealistic
orientation.
It is quite obvious that what we have here are philosophical problems. All the points
set forth above will be discussed during the course of our investigation. Up to the last
point: the surprising utilization of the expression idealistic, which must therefore be
explained immediately.
Already, in Point 1, we proposed that, for us, as consumers of radio and television, the
world is no longer present as outside world, in which we are, but as our world. In fact,
the world has changed placesin a peculiar way: it is certainly not to be found, as the
vulgar formulas of idealism state, in our consciousness or in our brain; however,
because of the fact that it has in effect been moved from the outside to the inside and,
instead of being found outside, it has made its abode in my house as an image that
must be consumed, as a mere eidos, this translocation is similar in the most surprising
manner to classical idealism. Now, the world has become mine, it is my
representation, it has been transformed into a representation for me (if we
understand the term, representation in a dual sense: not only in the sense of
Schopenhauer, but in that of the theater). The idealist element consists in this for
me, since idealist, in the broadest sense of the word, is any attitude that transforms
the world into something that is mine, ours, into something at our disposal, in
short: into a possessive: therefore, into my representation or into my (Fichtean)
product of positing. If the term idealist is surprising, this is because the being
mine is in general only asserted speculatively, while here it describes a situation in
which the metamorphosis of the world into something that is at my disposal has
technically taken place in a real way. It is evident that already the mere assertion
proceeds from a disproportionate pretension to freedom, since in it the world is
claimed as property. Hegel used the expression idealism in this broader sense
without any qualms, in his Philosophy of Right, to denominate as idealist the
predatory animal insofar as it appropriates, annexes and imagines the world in the
form of prey or plunder, that is, it makes use of it as its own. Fichte was an idealist,
11

because he considered the world to be something posited by him, as the product of

the activity of his ego, and therefore as his own product. What all idealists have in
common in the broadest sense is the assumption that the world is here, it
exists, for man, whether as a gift, or as freely created, so that man himself does not
belong to the world, he does not represent a part of the world; he is instead the polar
opposite of the world. The interpretation of this gift, of this datum as sensory data is
only one variety of idealism among many others, and certainly not one of the most
important.8
If it is true of all the variations of idealism that they transform the world into a
possessive: into a domain that is ruled (Genesis), into an image of perception
(sensualism), into a consumer good (Hegels predatory animal), into a product of
positing or production (Fichte), into property (Stirner), in our case the expression
can in fact be utilized with a good conscience, since here all the possible nuances of
the possessive are united.
If television and radio open windows to the world, at the same time they transform the
consumers of the world into idealists.
This claim will naturally sound strange and contradictory after having spoken of the
triumph of the outside world over the inner world. It sounds strange to me, too. The
fact that both assertions can be held at once seems to indicate an antinomy in the manworld relation. At first sight, this antinomy is insoluble. If it is at all possible, our
investigation must go further, since it began by way of contradiction and does not
presuppose, in toto, anything but the attempt to explain this contradictory situation.
Section 6
Because the world is brought into our homes, we do not have to explore it: as a result,
we do not acquire experience.9
In a world that comes to man, man has no need to go to the world in order to explore
or experience it; that which was once called experience has become superfluous.
Up until recently, expressions such as to go into the world or to experience have
denoted important anthropological concepts. Since man is a being relatively little
endowed with instincts, he has been compelled to experience and know the world a
posteriori in order to find his place in it; only in this way could he reach his goal and
become experienced. Life used to consist of a voyage of exploration; that is why the
great Erziehungsromane (educational novels) dealt with the ways manalthough
always in the worldhad to travel in order to get to know the world. Today, because
the world comes to himas an imagehe need not bother to explore it; such
12

explorations and experiences are superfluous, and since all superfluous functions
become atrophied, he can no longer engage in explorations and become
experienced.10 It is indeed evident that the type of experienced man is becoming
increasingly rare, and that age and experience tend to be regarded as less and less
valuable. Like pedestrians who have taken to flying we no longer need roads; in
consequence, our knowledge of the ways of the world, which we formerly used to
explore, and which made us experienced, is declining. Simultaneously with this, the
world itself becomes a pathless wilderness. Whereas formerly we stored up for us
like a commodity put aside for future use; we do not have to go to the events, the
events are paraded before us.
Such a portrait of our contemporaries may at first sight appear distorted. For it has
become customary to look upon the automobile and the airplane as symbols of
modern man, homo viator, a being whose essence is travel (Gabriel Marcel). What is
in question is precisely the correctness of this definition. For modern man does not
attach value to his travelling because of any interest in the regions he visits, actually
or vicariously; he does not travel to become experienced but to still his hunger for
omnipresence and for rapid change as such. Moreover, the speed of his movement
deprives him of the opportunity for experience (to the extent that speed itself has now
become the sole and ultimate experience)not to mention the fact that the number of
objects worthy of being experienced and capable of adding to his experience is
continually decreased by his successful efforts to make the world uniform, and that
even today he feels at home, in need of no experience, wherever he may land. An
advertising poster of a well-known airline, utterly confusing provincialism and
globalism, appeals to its customers with these words: When you use our services,
you are everywhere at home. Everywhere at home: there is indeed good reason to
assume that today any trip (even though the man who takes it may sleep comfortably
in his electrically heated cabin while flying over the North Pole) is felt to be an
antiquated, uncomfortable and inadequate method of achieving omnipresence.
Modern man still resorts to this method precisely because, despite all his efforts, he
has not yet succeeded in having everything delivered to his homesomething that he
has come to regard as his inherent right.
The consumer of millions of separate radio and television broadcasts, lying down on
his sofa, rules the world in effigie from his home: he connects with it, he allows it to
pass before his eyes, he disconnects from it; this master of the multitude of images is
by no means any less typical for us than the aviator and the motorist; nor is the latter,
when he is driving through the countryside with his radio playing, since he, too,
procures the satisfaction and the consolation of knowing that not only does he have to
leave in search of the world, but the world also has to come to him and the world
(which is now subjected to the penalty of running after him and with him), really only
turns for the exclusive purpose of entertaining him.11
13

The world turns for him. Entertains him. Just like at home.
These expressions point to a mode of existence, a relation to the world that is so
extraordinarily perverse that even Descartes mauvais genie trompeur (malicious
demon) would be incapable of devising a comparable deception. Such a mode of
existence may be described as idealistic in two ways:
1. Despite the fact that we really live in an alienated world,12 the world is presented
to us in such a manner that it seems to exist for us, as though it were our own and like
ourselves.
2. We take (i.e., regard and accept) it as such, although we stay at home in our
living rooms; that is, despite the fact that we do not actually take it (like the
predatory animal or the conqueror), nor do we actually make it our own; in any case,
not we, the ordinary consumers of radio and television. Instead, we take it because
it is served to us in the form of images. In this way we transform ourselves into master
of the phantoms of the world, but our mastery takes the form of voyeurism.
We have already addressed the first point. The next chapter will be devoted to the
second point.
Section 7
The world brought into our homes is banalized.13
This is not the place to discuss the origin, the etiology or the symptomology of
alienation. The literature on this subject is enormous, and we must take this
phenomenon for granted.14 The deception in question here consists, as we have said,
in the fact that we, despite living as we do in an estranged world [verfremdete Welt],
as consumers of films, radio and televisionbut not only as suchseem to be on
friendly terms with everything and everybody: people, places, situations, events, even
the most surprising, or precisely the most surprising, ones. On March 7, 1955, a
hydrogen bomb with the friendly name of Grandpa was detonated. This phenomenon
of pseudo-familiarization, which for reasons that we shall explain in the next section
does not have a name, we call banalization of the world: banalization, not
insinuation, because what is taking place here does not consist in our abandonment
to the strange or the bizarre, but in the fact that we are supplied with strange people,
things, events and situations as if they were totally familiar; that is, it consists in the
creation of a banalized situation.15
Some illustrations (we shall take two examples of estrangement at random): while our
use of something and our production of things are two different things (since what we
use is always ready at hand, while the nature of what we produce in collaboration with
14

others, to the contrary, is unintelligible to us or alien to our lives); while our next-door
neighbors, whom we pass by every day for years, usually do not know us and the
distance between us and them remains unbridged for years on end, film stars, girls
whom we never meet personally but whom we have seen countless times and whose
spiritual and physical characteristics are known to us more completely than those of
our co-workers, appear to us in the guise of old friends, as chums. We are
automatically on a footing of intimacy with them; we refer to them by their first
names, as Rita or Myrna. What is delivered to us has become immediate and affects us
directly along with it: the abyss has been eliminated. The importance that is attributed
to this elimination of the abyss is shown by 3D motion pictures, whose invention and
introduction arose not only from an interest in technical improvements or merely from
the competitive struggle (against television), but from the desire to confer upon the
absence of distance between the transmission and the receiver a maximum degree of
sensory and spatial credibility. If it were technically possibleand who can predict
what is still in store for us, considering the current dizzying rate of artistic progress?
they will also make us happy with tele-tactile effects, by means of which we will
be able to palpably feel the blow of the boxers left-hook in our jaws. Only in that way
will a real closeness be achieved. Although even today the 3D motion picture
promises: You are with them, they are with you.
To bring about such a state of affairs, to enable the program consumer to treat the
world as something familiar, the televised image must address him as an old chum. In
fact, every broadcast has this chummy quality. When I tune into the President, he
suddenly sits next to me at the fireplace, chatting with me, although he may be
thousands of miles away. (I am only marginally aware of the fact that this intimacy
exists in millions of copies.) When the female announcer appears on the screen, she
speaks to me in a tone of complete frankness, as though I were her bosom friend.
(That she is also the bosom friend of all men is again only a marginal realization.)
When the radio family begins to share their concerns with me, I become their
confidant, as if I were their neighbor, family doctor or parish priest. (It does not matter
that everyone becomes their confidants or the fact that they are there in order to make
us their confidants or that we should become the family of neighbors.) All of them
come to me as intimate or indiscreet visitors; all of them find me in a prebanalized situation. Not one of these people who are transported into my house retains
even an atom of unfamiliarity. And this is true not only of persons, but of everything
else, of the world as a whole. The magical power of banalization is so irresistible, the
range of its capacity for metamorphosis is so extensive that nothing can resist it:
things, places, events or situations, everything is transformed so that it comes to us
with a friendly smile on its face, with a vulgar tatwamasi on its lips. This has reached
the point where, finally, we are not just on intimate terms with movie stars but also
with the stars of the firmament, and we speak of good old Cassiopeia just as we
15

would speak of Rita or Myrna. And this is not meant as a joke. The fact that laymen
and scientists regard it as possible and even probable that the inhabitants of other
planets who allegedly operate the flying saucers have, like us and precisely in our
time, nothing better to do than to undertake interplanetary voyages, proves that we
look upon everything in the universe as one of our sort. This is a sign of
anthropomorphism compared to which the anthropomorphism of the so-called
primitive cultures seems timid. For the purveyors of the banalized universe, the
formula of identity of Plotinus and Goethe, If the eye were not sun-like, is replaced
by the commercial slogan, If the sun were not eye-like, since if it were not so then
nature could not be sold and, with it, a virtual commodity would be lost. We are thus
systematically transformed into pals of the globe and the universe, certainly only into
pals, since it is clear that one cannot say that modern man, conditioned in this manner,
has a feeling of authentic fraternity, of pantheism, of love of the most distant peoples
or, much less, the sense of the one.
What we have said of things and persons distant in space, also applies to things and
persons distant in time, of the past: it, too, becomes one of our pals. And I am not
talking about historical films, in which such treatment is the rule. But even in a
serious, vividly written American academic book, Socrates is described as quite a guy
in other words he is put in a category that brings the distant great man seemingly
close to the reader; for, needless to say, the reader too is quite a guy. This label gives
the reader the unconsciously gratifying feeling that Socrates, if he had not happened to
live in that remote past, would be essentially like us, would not have anything to say
that is essentially different from what we have to say, and in no case could claim
greater authority than we do. More than one person thinks, without any basis
whatsoever, that, should he be transported back to the time of Socrateswhich must
not be taken all that seriouslyhe would not be one of the lesser lights of ancient
Greece. For someone who thinks in this way, Socrates is inferior to us or, in any
event, is no better: the idea that Socrates could have been any better than him is ruled
out as much by his faith in progress as by his mistrust of privileges of any kind.
Others perceive (as their reaction to historical films and similar productions proves)
historical figures almost as comical, that is, as hillbillies in the realm of time, as
creatures who did not grow up in the capital city, in the Now, and that, for that reason,
they act like village idiots of history or superstitious backwoodsmen. Every electrical
invention made since their time is looked upon as an eloquent proof of their
inferiority. Finally, to many of our contemporaries historical figures appear as nonconformists, as suspiciously queer fellows, for it is obvious that they regard
themselves as something quite specialnamely, unlike every decent man who
chooses to live in the present, they prefer to take up residence in a cavern of the past.
But whether a great man of the past is regarded as quite a guy or a provincial hick,
these categories denote proximity and are therefore variations of banalization.
16

But let us return to the case of Socrates, the guy: the epithet here is obviously based
on the great political principle formulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
All men are born equal, which has now been romantically extended into the
assertion of the Equality of all citizens of the Commonwealth of times past and
present. Needless to say, such a romantic extension of the principle of equality
suggests not only a false historical proximity, but also a misconception of the common
denominator of all mankindfor, after all, the essence of Socrates consists in the very
thing that our sort is lacking. The method allegedly intended to bring the object
close to us, actually serves to veil the object, to alienate it, or simply to do away with
it altogether. Indeed, it does away with it, since the past, by being projected onto the
single plane of the world of pals and chums, has actually ceased to exist qua history
and this is perhaps even more plausible than our general thesis, that when all the
various and variously distant regions of the world are brought equally close to us, the
world as such vanishes.
Section 8
The Sources of Banalization: The Democratic Universe. Banalization and the
Commodity Character. Banalization and Science.
So just what lies behind this banalization?
Like every historical phenomenon on such a scale banalization is also overdetermined, that is, it owes its very existence to sources of diverse provenance, which
had to converge and unite in order to convert it into a historical reality.
Before we go in search of the principal root of this phenomenon, we would like to
briefly mention its three collateral roots. We have already addressed one of them in
our discussion of Socrates. We call it the democratization of the universe and by this
term we mean to refer to:
1. When each and every thing, regardless of how far away or how close it is, is
familiar to me; when each and every thing can demand the same right to make its
voice heard, which I accept as something equally familiar; when the odium of
privilege is attributed to every relative advantage, one has as a matter of coursein an
unconscious way, it is truea structurally democratic totum, a universe, to which
certain principles are applied (which are morally and politically accepted), the
principles of equal rights and tolerance for all. Viewed historically, such an extension
of moral principles to the cosmic level is not at all extraordinary. Man has always
recreated the image of the universe in accordance with that of his own society. What
was extraordinary was the division, which has been dominant during the last few
centuries in Europe, of the image of the world into a practical image and a theoretical
17

image that is completely alien to it. It is therefore not at all surprising to find in the
United States, with its powerful democratic tradition, a tendency to realize these
principles it proclaims. There is even an academic philosophy that, embracing the
most extreme implications of this conceptimplies a real negation of the monist or
dualist principles of classical philosophy: the philosophy of William James.
2. It is evident that banalization is a phenomenon of neutralization, since it puts
everything on the same level or the semblance thereof; therefore, it is also evident that
whoever seeks the roots of this trend has to address the basic neutralizing forces of the
world. Democracy itself (that is, its absurd extension to non-political domains) is a
neutralizing force.
The basic neutralizing force today is certainly not of a political, but of an economic
nature: it is the commodity character of all phenomena. Is this also a source
of banalization?
The first reaction we will hear will be: impossible. Impossible, because, as everyone
knows, the commodity character alienates, and banalization, which makes things
familiar, is apparently at the very opposite end of the spectrum from alienation.
The question is not so easily resolved, however. As true as it is that everything that is
transformed into a commodity is alienated, at the same time it is just as true that every
commodity, insofar as it is meant to be purchased and transformed into part of our
life, also must be banalized. More precisely:
Every commodity must exist in such a way that, in its manual useadapted to a need,
a style and a standard of livingit is accommodated to the taste and is pleasing to the
eye. Its degree of quality is defined by virtue of the degree of this adaptation;
expressed negatively: it depends on the low resistance it provokes when it is used and
the low level of raw alien residues that its enjoyment leaves behind. Thus, since the
broadcast is a commodity, it, too, must be presented in a way that is pleasant to the
eyes and the ears, it must be easily assimilable, ready to enjoy, not alien, with no
bones or pits; that is, in such a way that it is directed at us as if it were our simile, cut
to our measure, as if it were part of our condition.
Viewed in this way, banalization appears to shed its negative qualities and seems to
refer to nothing but the fundamental fact that, as homines fabri, we make something
from something else, adapting the world to our measure, or in other words, it is
reduced to culture in the broadest sense of the word. The fact that everything we do
is a form of banalization is, in a certain way, undeniable; but this indiscriminate use
of the expression, to which a derogatory connotation is added, is completely
unacceptable, since in the last analysis we cannot define the act of making something
by referring to its most signal defect: for example, we cannot denounce all carpenters
18

because one of them supplies us with wood that is not wood, while others provide us
with tables made of wood, which are incomparably more suitable for us. In fact, there
is no deception here. What is deceptive is the adaptation only because it offers a
product as if it were really made of wood. And this is the case in the banalized world,
since the latter is a product that, due to its venal commodity character, is offered
tailored to the buyer and in a way that it is convenient for him; that is, since the world
is inconvenient, the commodity simulates precisely those properties that the world
completely lacks; and, in spite of everything, this product has the audacity or the
innocence to claim that it is the world.
3. As the last root of banalization, for which everything is equally close to us, we shall
finally refer to the attitude of the scientist, whose legitimate pride consists in
converting what is most remote into something of the greatest familiarity by way of
his research and, in the process, he alienates what is most intimately part of his life:
he devotes himself cum studio to that which is to him, as an individual, of no
importance at all and neutralizes sine ira what is closest to him; in short: he
neutralizes the distance between what is nearby and what is remote. The scientist can
undoubtedly pursue and persevere in this attitude that neutralizes everything, his
objectivity, only by way of a dazzling moral cunning, by way of an act of violence
against himself, by way of an ascetic renunciation of the natural perspective of the
world. To believe that he can separate this neutrality from that moral root of his own
and deliver it to anyone, and therefore also to anyone who leads a non-ascetic
existence, not dedicated to knowledge and overwhelmingly opposed to this neutrality,
is an error not only of science, but also of the moral tasks of its popularization. But
this error is the beginning of praxis; in a sense, today, every reader, radio listener,
consumer of television, spectator of highbrow cinema, is transformed into a
vulgar double of the scientist: he, too, expects everything to be equally remote and
nearby, which usually does not by any means imply that he has to concede to all
phenomena the same right to be known, but rather the same right to be enjoyed.
However, since today knowing is presented as pleasure andlearning as fun, the border
between the two has been erased.
Section 9
Banalization is a camouflaged form of alienation itself.16
With these observations we have not yet presented the principal root of banalization;
nor have we plausibly shown the reason for the particular fact that this process, the
existence of which can be confirmed in various ways, does not even have a name. It is
really very strange that this phenomenon, despite the fact that it is no less powerful,
nor less symptomatic of our times, nor less disastrous, than alienation, which is
evidently its antagonist, should have remained so concealed, while alienation itself
19

(and of course this is accomplished by means of the banalization of the term, that is,
by rendering it innocuous) is not ignored.
But is banalization really the antagonist of alienation?
Not at all. And thus we arrive at its principal root, the root that, at the same time, also
allows us to understand why it has never had a name until now. As paradoxical as it
may sound, the principal root of banalization is alienation itself.
Anyone who confers credibility upon banalization; and who views it as the
antagonistic force opposed to alienation, falls victim to a widely disseminated fraud.
Mere
reflection
on
the
question
of
whetherbanalization helps
or
hinders alienation renders the notion that banalization is the antagonist
of alienation superfluous, because the response to the question is erroneous: it is
useful to alienation. In fact, its main function consists in masking the causes and
symptoms of alienation, and their utter misery; it deprives man, who has
been estranged from his world and for whom his world has become alien, of the
ability to recognize this fact; briefly: it consists in throwing a cloak [of invisibility]
over alienation, in denying the reality of alienation for the purpose of allowing it free
rein for its unconstrained action; what it achieves, by relentlessly filling the world
with images of apparent familiarity, offering the world itself, including its most distant
regions, geographically and temporally, as one big home, as auniverse of comfort. It is
this function that explains the existence of banalization. Behind the latter, as the boss
who gives the orders, is alienation itself. To view these two forces as if they were two
estranged brothers or hostile enemies would be absurd, and as nave as it is nondialectical. Instead, both collaborate like a pair of hands that cooperate
harmoniously: in the wound inflicted by alienation with one hand, the other hand rubs
the balm of familiarity. And even if it is not always the same hand, since, finally, one
can view the two processes as a single process and banalization as an action of
camouflage on the part of alienation, which proffers itself ingenuously disguised as its
antagonist, in order to seemingly testify against itself, in order to assure a balance of
forces and to cast aspersions on its own rule just as Metternich did, when he
founded a liberal opposition newspaper apparently against his own policies.
There is a Molussian tale about an evil gnome who cures a blind man; not by
removing the scales from his eyes, however, but by blinding him with another kind of
blindness: the gnome made him blind also to the fact that he was blind, it made him
forget how to really perceive what was real; it did this by plunging him into an
uninterrupted series of dreams. The disguised alienation of banalization is like this
gnome: it, too, seeks to give comfort to man, who is dispossessed of his world, by way
of images conveying the illusion that he even has a whole universe, one that is
familiar, his own universe, equal to his former world in each and every one of its
20

parts; and this is brought about by making him forget what a non-alienated existence
and non-alienated world is like. The situation in which we find ourselves is actually
even more ensorcelled than that of the blind man of the tale, since in our case the
gnome that plunged our blindness into the darkness of forgetting is the same one that
cast the spell that blinded us in the first place.
So it is not at all surprising that alienation implements this operation of self-deception
surreptitiously, and that this operation is not even once called by its own name. What
interest could the powerful have, who are alienating our world, in directing our
attention towards their activities? Even if it were only by way of the introduction of a
word, in calling our attention to the fact that they need to cloak itsalienation by
supplying us with substitute images and to the fact that they are successful in doing
so? What is really surprising is the fact that they actually succeed in keeping under
wraps an everyday phenomenon that is as widespread and public
as banalization merely by not giving it a name. In any case, it cannot be denied that
this is the way it is. For this purpose they supply their images, but they do not say
anything about the nature of their supply. And they can do this without worrying as
long as we, who are at the receiving end of the delivery, allow ourselves to be really
deceived and, although deceived, we feel just fine. It is as if, wounded by alienation,
we had rendered ourselves incapable of noticing that we find ourselves under the
effects of the drug of banalization; and we are too drowsy from the drug to even feel
that we are wounded; it is thus as if the two circumstances mutually reinforce one
another.
But even assuming that banalization does not arise by way of the operation of
camouflage and deception on the part of alienation, it is still incontestable that it is
itself alien. Yes; it, too. Because, usually, since what alienation does is cause what is
near to become remote, and what banalization does is transform what is remote into
something familiar, the effect of neutralization is in both cases the same: by way of
this neutralization the world and the position of men within the world is distorted,
since it is a part of the structure of the existence-in-the-world distributed in
concentric circles of nearness and remoteness around man, and man, for whom the
totality is equally near and far and everything interests him in the same way, is either
an indifferent god or a completely unnatural man. And we are not talking about Stoic
gods here.
In fact, there is nothing that more disastrously alienates us more from ourselves and
the world than the fact that we pass our existence almost uninterruptedly accompanied
by these false family members, these spectral slaves, that in our bedroomnow that
the alternation of sleeping and waking had given way to that of sleeping and listening
to the radiowe perform a ceremony so somnolent that the first fragment of the
world serves us as a morning audience, so that they question us, look at us, sing to us,
21

encourage us, console us, they instill us with vigor or they make us more relaxed and
thus we begin the day, which is not our day; nor is there anything that makes selfalienation more unquestionable than starting the day under the aegis of these pseudofriends, since even if we could frequent the company of real friends, we prefer to
continue to live in the company of our portable chums, since we do not consider them
to be replacements for real men, but as our real friends.
One day I was riding the bus and I greeted a woman in front of me who was listening
to a masculine voice, evidently one she very much liked, which resonated vigorously
from her diminutive portable radio; she flinched with surprise, as if I was the ghost
rather than the man in the little box, as if I were guilty of having violated the peace of
her home by intruding myself in her reality, into the reality of her love life. I am
convinced that today there is a an endless number of persons who, if you were to
confiscate their radios, would feel more cruelly punished than prison inmates, whose
freedom has been confiscated, but who are allowed to keep their gadgets: the latter
can continue to enjoy their lives in a fortunate extroversion, since their world and their
friends are at their disposal as listenersso what has changed?; the unfortunate
wretch, however, who has been deprived of his gadget, immediately feels as if he
were the prey of a panic fear of being deaf in the void and feels like he is suffocating
amidst his loneliness and worldlessness. I remember that when I was living in New
York, an eighteen-year old Puerto Rican came to the house of the woman from whom
we rented an apartment, whose radio had suddenly fallen silent as if it were the end of
the world: this young man had come to listen to this radio to hear the beloved voice of
one of his phantom friends from Los Angeles, which he did not want at all to miss;
when with a press of a button he heard that voicehe not only knew the frequency
but also where it was on the dialhe began to moan softly, relieved, and broke out in
tears, happy for having once again found the ground under his feet. Naturally, without
even a glance at the landlady or at me. Compared to this rediscovered, never-seen
accomplice, we were unreal.
Section 10
On the question of whether alienation is still an ongoing process.
It is possible that there is something amiss with the thesis that our need for
insinuating supplied friends and for the banalized world also alienates us, the
men of our time. And not because the proposition goes too far, but because it does not
go far enough, since a currently unjustified optimism speaks from the basis of the
assumption that, although we are beings nourished exclusively on substitutes, models
and illusions, we are still egos with a separate selfhood, and that therefore we are
still capable of having a real identity without being capable of being our true selves
or of recovering our true selves. Hasnt the time come and gone since alienation
22

was still possible as action and process, at least in some countries? Do we not find
ourselves now in a situation in which we are not our true selves, but only the sum
total of substitutes with which we are stuffed to the gills on a daily basis? Can one
dispossess the dispossessed, pillage the pillaged, cause the mass-man to be alienated
from himself? Is alienation still an ongoing process? Or is it rather a fait accompli?
Not so long ago we ridiculed the soulless psychologies, which scoffed at categories
such as the ego or selfhood as ridiculous metaphysical leftovers, as falsifications
of man. But were we right to do so? Wasnt our disdain pure sentimentalism? Was it
those psychologists who falsified man? Werent those psychologists of falsified man,
man as robot, justified in their pursuit of robotology instead of psychology? And
justified as well in their falsehoods, because the man whom they studied was precisely
man in his falseness?
1. This English translation is based on: Gnther Anders, La Obsolescencia del
Hombre (Vol. I), tr. Josep Monter Prez, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2011. Originally
published in Germany in 1956 under the title: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen
I. The 2011 Spanish edition of Volume I consists of: a Preface to the Fifth
German Edition (dated October 1979); an Introduction; and the four main parts
of the book, entitled, On Promethean Shame, The World as Phantom and as
Matrix: Philosophical Considerations on Radio and Television, Being without
Time: On Becketts Waiting for Godot, and On the Bomb and the Roots of
Our Blindness to the Apocalypse. The English translation of Sections 2
through 7 that follows below is based for the most part on an abridged and
revised English translation of Sections 2 through 7 of Part Two (The World as
Phantom and as Matrix: Philosophical Considerations on Radio and
Television) that was published under the title, The World As Phantom and As
Matrix in the journal Dissent in 1956 (tr. Norbert Guterman, Dissent, Vol. 3,
No. 1, Winter 1956, pp. 14-24). This article may be viewed online (in April
2014) at:http://thiva.egloos.com/2023093 and a PDF file of the same article can
also be accessed at: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/22307294/theworld-as-phantom-and-as-matrix-ucsb-department-of-history.)
[American
translators note.]
2. This is how we translate the term, Massenproducktion, which refers not only
to the mass production of products, but also to the fact that it is production
whose products are intended for the masses. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
3. We
have
translated Unmndige as
minors
and Hrige as
subordinates. Unmndige literally means a person who has no voice and
therefore cannot speak for himself. Similarly, hrig is a person who listens and
23

acts in obedience to what he hears: he is thus subordinated or, more broadly

speaking, he belongs to, is a dependant of (which is the other meaning of
the German root word, hr); hence the sense of obedience. As we shall see
below, un-mndig is the literal translation of the Latin in-fans (composed of in
and the verb, for/fari, which means to speak). [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
4. We have already experienced a prelude to this increasingly more generalized
atrophy of language in the decline of the epistolary art, caused by fifty years of
the telephone, and which has gone so far that today the letters that were
ordinarily exchanged among the educated people of a hundred years ago,
generally seem to us to be masterpieces of friendship and precise
communication. The subsequent atrophy that has taken place, however, affects
not only the refinement of their mode of expression, but also men themselves,
since they articulate themselves by way of their mode of expression. [Authors
note.]
5. Today, nothing is more misplaced than the doleful or arrogant complaint of
the irrationalist who claims that our language does not correspond with the
richness and profundity of our experience. The great men of the past, with
whose richness and profundity we can hardly compare, completely measured
up, in regard to their use of language, to their experiences; the power of their
way of speaking embraced even the most extreme topics and the inadequacy of
language, the rejection of speech, they only declared quite recently, always
compared to its supreme essence. The less one has to say, the more rapidly does
one transform mysticism into a necessity, poverty becomes wealth and the more
arrogant one becomes in displaying the immensity of ones own experience
with the failure of language. Young people rapidly end up with the ineffable.
The real need and our contemporary confusion do not consist in the fact that
we can, by talking too much, destroy our alleged richness and profundity, but
quite the contrary, that we can throw our richness overboard (to the extent that
we possess such a quality) and blind our profundity, because, as far as our
supply of language goes, we have begun to unlearn how to speak. [Authors
note.]
6. The image of ivory towers, which man builds and in which he secludes
himself in order not to see reality, is completely obsolete. It was not so long ago
that it was by building towers that reality itself was created, which is their
construction manager and housekeeper. Thus, we do not live in them as
fugitives from reality, but as its obligatory lessees. If we live in them, however,
it is not in order to devote our attention to an illusory, completely different
world, but so that we can live in its image. Not in its true image, of course, but
24

in that false one that it, for real interest, desires that we should consider it as
the real thing. We close ourselves off, then, to separate ourselves from it
while apparently it is displaying itself to us. This distraction, however, is
naturally set in motion with a realistic intention of the highest degree: so that,
by way of its false image, we should really mark ourselves, that is, persuade
ourselves that now our human reality is optimally useful. Those who put up
resistance are called introverts and its docile victims, extroverts. [Authors
note.]
7. The idea of the world that comes to us is so familiar to us that we consider
anything that goes beyond our terrestrial experience as visitors: yesterday
Martian flying saucers and today supermen from Sirius. [Authors note.]
8. The classical formulation of the world as gift is encountered in the story of
Creation, which introduces the world as created for man. It is not by chance
that modern idealisms should be post-Copernican; in a certain sense, all of
them represent attempts to salvage this Biblical for us, which was so
compatible with the pre-Copernican image of the world; that is, an attempt to
preserve a disguised geo-centrism and its concomitant anthropocentrism in a
de-centered universe. [Authors note.]
9. The author is indulging in a play on words involving the expressions that
mean to go on a journey (auf Fahrt gehen) and without experience (un-erfahren): in a way, it is assumed that experience is obtained from the journey (as
he already pointed out with regard to the journey of Ulysses). [Note of the
Spanish Translator.]
10. It is certainly not by accident that this getting to know the world is
disappearing at the same time and in the very same cultural space where the
trauma of the physical getting to know the world was being abolished in the
same way with technical means. [Authors note.]
11. Now they are even installing televisions in cars; as of December 1954 you
can by a General Motors Cadillac equipped with a television. [Authors note.]
12. In conformance with the usual linguistic practice we translate entfremdete
Welt as alienated world. In order to indicate this alienation, however, the
author uses the term Verfremdung, which is taken from Brecht and which refers
to the re-location and re-utilization of something (or someone) that, due to
this relocation, loses its own place and, in this sense, is alienated (dislocated
or distorted); in the latter context we translate the term as estrangement,
25

whenever to estrange (also) means to exile to a foreign country. In any

case, Anders himself explains subsequently how he uses this term, which is
necessarily a novel use of the word insofar as it refers to a situation that is itself
new. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
13. We have translated the term Verbiederung as banalization. The author
uses this term to refer to the process of transforming all that is remote and
strange in order to transform it into something apparently domestic and homelike (as he says at the end of the next footnote). The root bieder refers to what
is common, familiar, homely, or welcoming; Anders emphasizes the apparent
or superficial aspect of this process; thus, in order to emphasize its negative
connotation, which goes beyond making something popular or familiar, we
have chosen the term banalization, which upon closer examination is nothing
but another way to say alienation, or it is even a form of alienation. [Note
of the Spanish Translator.]
14. Books and magazine articles, which have appropriated the use of these
words that were originally so revolutionary, use them today with such ease and
such skill that they confer the appearance of familiarity upon a phenomenon
that has been thus deprived of its force and its strangeness. We no longer view
it as it was viewed a hundred years ago, when it was introduced in the context
of work, the commodity, freedom and property, that is, in a revolutionary
context. The expression has become not just presentable in high society but it
has even become the badge of membership in the avant-garde, and there is no
self-respecting interpreter of modern art who does not brandish this badge. It
does not matter whether or not this is intentional; the effect of this common use
of the term consists in depriving alienation of its morally scandalous sting, i.e.,
in its alienation (according to the proper linguistic sense of the word). What
you get from your enemies serves to disinherit them. This process of dilution
has the following sources: 1. German sociology of the late 1920s (Karl
Mannheim), whose contribution consisted in extracting from Marxism certain
terms in order to embed them in a different context or in the language of
everyday life and thus to deprive them of their bite. In the early 1930s this
sociology spread to France and, at the end of the 1930s, to the United States. 2.
Surrealism, which, during its fleeting alliance with communism, flirted with
Hegelian terminology. Those who currently use the expression do so in a nave
way, since they follow in the footsteps of the epigones of the thirties and some
of them are quite surprised when they find out who originally coined these
everyday words that are so dear to them. Even this brief reflection on the
current use of the term alienation shows the process of transformation that
proceeds in a totally contrary direction: pseudo-familiarization and
26

domestication. But this process is not identical, for example, with the wellknown process of the configuration of words according to stereotypes; what
this process involves in making something into a familiar appearance is not
limited to terminology; its plunder is, rather, the world, the entire world; its
pretension is no less universal than that of estrangement: just as the latter
affects all that is familiar and intimate in order to transform it into the
unfamiliar, cold, reified and public, the apparent familiarization appropriates all
that is remote and strange in order to transform it into something apparently
domestic and home-like. [Authors note.]
15. Before we provide examples, we shall prophylactically point out that,
although the border between these two terms can sometimes be blurred, what
we call banalization does not coincide, for example, with popularization,
since banalization treats its object in a consummately disrespectful way and
profits from the deterioration and damage inflicted on the consumer, while
what is accurately referred to as merely popularization, like all mere
information, is a transmission not only of the object of information, but also
with respect to itself. [Authors note.]
16. We will also point out with respect to what has already been said
about Verfremdung that, in another book by Gnther Anders, Hombre sin
mundo (Pre-Textos, 2007), we translated this term with the word re-utilization,
since in that book it refers more to alienation as a method (as Brecht did, for
example, in The Case of Galileo) insofar as it involves the re-use of
something or someone in a different domain, one that is not originally its native
element, and is therefore alien to it: it is exiled. [Note of the Spanish
Translator.] [Hombre sin mundo: Man without World, originally published in
Germany in 1984 under the title, Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und
LiteraturNote of the American Translator.]

Chapter 2 - The phantom

Chapter II
THE PHANTOM
The world is brought to us in our homes. Events are served to us in abundance.
But how are they served to us? In the form of events? Or only as their copies? Or only
as reports about the events?
27

In order to be able to answer these questions, which are addressed in the following
paragraphs, we shall translate them into another language; and let us ask ourselves:
how are the events broadcast in the home of the receiver? How is the
receiver in them? Are they really present? Or only present in appearance? Are they
absent, then? And in what way are they present or absent?
Section 11
The man-world relation is unilateral; the world, neither present nor absent, is
transformed into a phantom.
On the one hand, they really seem to be present: when we listen to a radio broadcast
of a battle in a war or a parliamentary debate, we are hearing not only
reports about explosions or about the speakers, but those phenomena themselves.
Does this not mean that the events, which we previously were unable nor were we
permitted (nor should we) to influence, are now really in our homes and we in them?
Of course not, for does the fact that we have free access to the voices of the world and
that the latter has the right to be in our home, while we on the other hand are without
any rights at all and have no voice in the delivered eventsdoes this constitute a
living present? And the fact that we cannot respond to anyone, although they speak to
us, or seem to interrogate us, nor can we intervene in any events, whose noise roars all
around us? Is it not a property of the real present that the man-world relation is
reciprocal? Is this relation not severed here? Has it not become unilateral, up to the
point where the world is perceptible to the listener, but not vice-versa? Is the listener
not subject to the radical stricture: dont talk back? Doesnt this silence signify
powerlessness? Is not the ubiquity that is bestowed upon us the present of the slave?
And isnt the slave absent, insofar as he is treated as a non-being, like air, and cannot
have anything to say?
Evidently, he is absent, too. However, it would for the same reasons be possible to
interpret this unilateral relationship in the opposite way, that is, as the guarantee of
freedom and presence, for is it not freedom when, due to this unilateral process, we
can participate at a distance in any event, that is, without incurring any danger and
remaining invulnerable; with the privilege to use it as enjoyment and entertainment?
And is that person not truly present who cannot be vanquished, in other words,
relegated to absence, by any occurrences, of which he is a witness?
This sounds plausible too. And it would be altogether understandable if someone were
to interrupt these questions, all this back and forth about whether the broadcast is
present or absent, and point out that this does not have any meaning. What the radio
or the television delivers to us, I can hear someone say, are images. Representations,
28

not presence! The fact that the images do not allow any interference and treat us like
air is something that is obvious and has been a commonplace for a long time under the
rubric of esthetic appearance.
However, as convincing as this may sound, the argument is false. Firstand this is a
fundamentally phenomenological factbecause there are no acoustic images: the
gramophone does not present us with any kind of image of the symphony, but with the
symphony itself. If a mass meeting is brought to us over the radio, what we think we
hear is not any kind of image of the shouting crowd, but its noise, despite the fact
that the crowd itself is not physically within our reach. Furthermore, as listenersat
least when we are dealing with the broadcast of an art form (a drama), including its
apparent characterwe find ourselves in an attitude that could not be less esthetic:
whoever listens to a football game does so as an impassioned fan, he believes that it is
really taking place and has nothing to do with the as if of art.
No, these objections are incorrect. What we perceive are not mere images. But in the
same way, we are not really present in the real. In fact, the question: Are we present
or absent? is without meaning. But not because the answer image (and along with
it, absent) is understood by itself, but because the nature of the situation brought
about by the broadcast consists in its ontological ambiguity; because the events that
are broadcast are, at the same time, present and absent, real and apparent,
there and not there; in short: because they are phantoms.
Section 12
On television, image and reproduction are synchronized. This simultaneity is the form
of the atrophy of the present.
But, it will be objected, what is true for radio broadcasts is not true for television.
You cannot deny that the latter supplies us with images.
This is a more difficult issue. They are not, however, images in the usual sense of the
word. The essential aspect of images in the history of human representation was the
fact that between the latter and the object reproduced by the latter there was, despite
the fact that it was not explicitly expressed, a temporal difference, a temporal
disjunction. This disjunction is expressed in German by the words in conformance
with:1 either it presents an image in conformance with a model; or it produces
something real that conforms to a model. Therefore, either the image follows its theme
as a copy or commemorative monument, in order to recall its past, that is, to retrieve it
and preserve its present; or it precedes its object as a magical object of evocation or as
an idea, blueprint, prototype, in order to subsequently disappear, once it has been left
behind by the event or object which takes place or is created; or finallyand even this
29

mode of neutralization still represents a relation with timeit was a means to transfer
us or to make us imagine that we are transferred to a dimension outside of the present,
beyond time. It would be hard to find any images that do not effectively present any of
these temporal relations of man with the world; and it is doubtful that one can call the
forms that lack this disjunction, images. So it is this type of form that defines the
images that television transmits:
For in these images one can no longer speak of a temporal relation with the
reproduced, despite the fact that they take place as if in a movie in time. In them, what
we have called the temporal disjunction has been reduced to nothing; they are
presented simultaneously and synchronized with the events reproduced by them: just
like the telescope, they show something that is present. And does this not mean
presence? Are not the forms that show something that is present, images?2
This problem has not gone unremarked, but the denomination it was given was
insufficient. Resort was had to what was close at hand, to the already existing
expression instantaneous and with this word it was thought that one could dispatch
the phenomenon. This term, however, only obscures the problem. For images in the
most legitimate sense are instantaneous, since they attempt to capture the ephemeral
moment; in accordance with their function, as images they are closer to
commemorative monuments, even to mummies, than they are to televised phantoms.
In these phantoms, however, it is no longer just a matter of that preservation of
memory, since not only are they presented, but they also disappear at the same time as
the events that they reproduce; therefore, even though they may at times be congealed,
their lives are as brief as the lives of the events themselves. If they are instantaneous,
they are at most images of the moment for the moment, and therefore similar to the
images in a mirror, since they are simultaneous and synchronous and perishable like
the image reflected in the mirror and, therefore, pure present from any point of view.
Having said that, however, are we not just playing around with the word, present?
Are we not taking advantage of the fact that the term oscillates between two meanings
in order to suggest imaginary problems? For there can be no doubt that we are using it
in two senses: on the one hand, to describe a concrete present; that is, the situation in
which man actually finds himself with other men or with the world and
simultaneously grows (=concrescunt) by interacting with, encountering and
confronting them. On the other hand, we use it to show mere formal simultaneity; that
is, the fact that man and any event whatsoever, being at the sharp point of the
same nunc, share the same worldwide moment. It is not by chance, however, that this
double meaning should be possessed by this wordand not only in German; this
double meaning is instead based on the fact that one cannot really demarcate the
border, in the fact that an event or a part of world is of such small interest to us when
the present is defined only in the sense of simultaneity. The present goes beyond
30

what is only simultaneous; the latter is the limiting case; it is what is of least interest
to me, and therefore most alien; but, on the other hand, since it has not even been
withdrawn into a non-datum, it shows that it still interests me.3
But even if it were to be possible to draw a solid line to separate the two meanings, it
would not be we who would be playing such a duplicitous game, but television. For
this game is precisely the principle of the broadcast, since its power consists
in presenting only or almost only the simultaneous in such a way that it functions as
the real present, in conferring upon what is present only formally the appearance of a
concrete present, in completely dissolving the borderline, which was already blurred,
between the two presents and thus between the relevant and the irrelevant. Every
broadcast of images proclaimsand rightly so: Now I am me; and not only me, the
broadcast, but me, the transmitted event. And by means of this now I am me, by
means of this act of making present, it becomes a phenomenon that goes beyond
everything that is purely image; and since it is likewise not something that is really
present, it becomes an intermediate thing between being and appearance, which, when
we spoke of the radio broadcast, we referred to as a phantom.
In this respect, not only is there nothing to object to with regard to the dissolution of
the borders between the two presents, but it must be welcomed, if it is undertaken
correctly, since today there are too many things that we dismiss unjustly because they
are only simultaneous, that is, as adiaphoron, despite the fact that they affect us and
can interest us, they are nostra res and comprise the most concrete and threatening
present. The danger of parochialism is no less pressing than that of false universalism.
Techniques for the expansion of our moral horizon of the present are absolutely
necessary, techniques that would allow us to see beyond the horizon of our senses.
This expansion, however, is not provided by television; television instead dissolves
our horizon to the point where we no longer recognize the real present; and we even
fail to devote ourselves to the event that should really interest us, not even that
apparent interest, that we have learned to devote to the apparent presents transmitted
right to our homes.
It is not necessary for us to add that the number of phantoms of the present is
unlimited. And since the principle that reduces the consumer and the event to a
common denominator is abstract and precise, that is, it consists in the mere common
now, it is also universal. There are no events that fall outside of the universal now;
therefore, there is nothing that cannot be transformed into something that is allegedly
present. However, the more present it becomes, the less present it was. Among the
fans of radio and television that I have met, not one of them, by means of his daily
portion of simultaneities, was educated to be a friend of the world or even just to
be contemporaneous with his era. To the contrary; I have encountered many for whom
31

this daily bread has deprived them of the world, and left them without any reference
points, dispersed, that is, it transformed them into mere contemporaries of the now.4
Section 13
Digression: interpolation concerning an extinguished passion. The disoriented person
lives only in the now. Television and radio produce an artificial schizophrenia.
The individuum is transformed intodivisum.
Several decades ago, there was a series of poets (Apollinaire or the young Werfel, for
example),5 who, in a variation on the old formula, were always in various marriages
at the same time, or, formulated more seriously, they were disoriented and
fugitives everywhere, in the metaphysical sense of ubique simul. Often beginning
with the word, now, in their poems they detailed what happened at the same
moment in Paris, Prague, Cape Town, Shanghai, or anywhere else. It is indisputable
that what drove these poets to compose their particular hymnal catalogues of
fragments of the world was a real metaphysical excitation: perhaps they confused non
percipi and non esse; that is, they considered as non-existent, as lost, everything that,
existing, went unnoticed; in any case, they were profoundly afflicted because,
condemned to always remain in a single contingent here, they had to abandon their
quest to escape everything that exists. They cherished the hope of rendering present
the disorientedyonder and, therefore, absent by way of a kind of spell: they
desperately tried to reunite them and to fit them into the focal point of an ubiquitous
momentary now, in which all these places and events would be found and could
participate. One could speak of an attempt to perform metaphysical magic, since what
they sought to accomplish was to annul the discretionary nature, which was
unbearable for them, of events that were separated from each other (and therefore
absent), of which the world consists, by way of the magic spell of the quality of the
ubiquity of the now; that is, they sought to establish the moment as a magic charm
against space as principium individuationis. However mistaken their passion may
have been, it certainly was a final variation of the Eleatic passion: the desire
tometaphysically discredit multiplicity. The fact that they viewed what was most
unreal, in the instant of the now, the properly existent, in that it had to be manifested
by revoking the multiple as illusion, was almost tragic; a mere testimony of the fact
that we no longer possess really metaphysical principles, not even the most
fashionable pantheists, any more than the system does in its last resort, which
converts the totality into the real. Certainly, they, too, were therefore the last.
However, how vital they were, compared to our contemporary fans of the now! It
would be hard to discover in the latter the least glimmer of that passion for the now.
Naturally, it was no accident that these poets arose at the historical moment when the
technique of disorientation (by way of illustrated magazines and things of that kind)
32

began to acquire massive proportions. It was just that the poets desperately tried to
accommodate disorientation, while the purpose of the techniques of disorientation and
the machinery of entertainment consisted, to the contrary, in producing disorientation
or in favoring its development. What disorientation (usually understood in too
disoriented fashion, that is, only as a metaphor) attempted to do was to deprive men
of their individuation, or, more precisely, to dispossess them of the consciousness of
this loss by depriving them of their principium individuationis, their spatial
orientation; in other words, by moving them to a place in which, ubique simul, they
always find themselves in another place, and no longer occupy any particular point
and are never with themselves, never in any particular affair; in short: nowhere. It will
be objected that the victims of this technique of disorientation are not really victims,
since industry, with its supply of disorientation, has simply adjusted to a demand,
something that is not entirely false, but certainly does not explain everything, since
the demand has also been produced.
Concerning men who, by way of their daily labor, are boxed in the limited space of a
very specialized job that is of little interest to them and, furthermore, exposed to
boredom, one cannot expect that at the moment that they abandon that scene of
pressure and boredom, that is, after work, they should be capable of or should want to
recover their proportio humana, that they should reencounter themselves (if their selfidentity still exists) or even that they should still want to do so. Instead, since the
conclusion of compression seems to be an explosion and those who are so suddenly
liberated from their work no longer know anything but alienation, insofar as they are
not just exhausted, they succumb to a thousand alien things, it does not matter what
they are; consequently, after the calm of boredom it is appropriate to return to the flow
of time and imprint another rhythm on the scenes that change so rapidly.
There is nothing that so completely satisfies this understandable hunger for the
ubiquity and rapidity of change than radio and television broadcasts, since they
counterbalance anxiety and exhaustion at the same time with tension and release,
rhythm and inactivity, tutelage and leisure, they serve all these purposes at once; they
even spare us the trouble of succumbing to that disorientation, since it is thrown into
our arms; in short: it is not possible to resist such a diversified temptation. It is
therefore not surprising that the abomination of being in two or one hundred
marriages simultaneously, which caused those poets so much suffering, has now
become the normal situation of a more ingenuous leisure (in appearance); that is, in
the situation of all of those who, just sitting there, go on voyages and have now
become accustomed to being everywhere at the same time, that is, nowhere, up to the
point that they actually no longer inhabit any place at all, at least no place, much less a
home, but at the most their temporary inhabitable place, which changes with each
passing moment: the now.
33

However, we still have not completely described the disoriented character of our
contemporaries, since its climax is found in a situation, which can only be
called artificially produced schizophrenia; and this schizophrenia is not only a
collateral effect of the machinery of disorientation, but is expressly intended and, in
addition, demanded by its customers, although not by this name, of course.
What do we mean here by schizophrenia?
That situation in which the ego is divided into two or more partial beings, at least in
two or more partial functions; in beings or functions, which are not only not
coordinated, but which are not at all capable of being coordinated; and not just this,
but the fact that the ego is not capable, either, of attributing any importance to this
coordination; even more, the ego emphatically rejects such coordination.
Descartes, in his second meditation, described as impossible concevoir la moiti
daucune me. Today, the divided soul is an everyday phenomenon. In fact, there is no
feature that is more characteristic of our time, at least of its leisure time dimension,
than its inclination to devote itself at the same time to two or more disparate activities.
For example, the man in the tanning salon, working on his tan, while his eyes swim
through an illustrated magazine, his ears are attending to a sporting event and his teeth
are chewing gum: this figure of the simultaneously passive player and of
the hyperactive character who is doing nothing is an everyday phenomenon all over
the world.
The fact that this figure is an ordinary sight and is accepted as normal does not make
it any less interesting; to the contrary, it is its very existence that demands a full
explanation.
If one were to ask the man in the tanning salon what it is that he is actually doing,
that is, just what it is that is entertaining his soul, of course he could not provide an
answer; he cannot answer because the question relating to him is based on a false
premise, i.e., on the assumption that he is the subject of the act and the entertainment.
If in this case one can still speak of subject or subjects, they consist only of his
organs: his eyes, which are being entertained by their images; his ears, which are
being entertained by their sporting event; his teeth, which are being entertained with
their gum; in short: his identity is so radically disorganized, that the search for the
man himself would be a search for something that does not exist. He is disoriented,
then, not only (as before) by a multitude of places in the world, but in a plurality of
particular functions.6

34

The question about what it is that drives man to this disorganized frenzy of activity
and that makes its particular functions so autonomous (or autonomous in appearance)
has actually already been answered. But we shall repeat: it is the horror vacui; fear of
autonomy and freedom; or, more exactly: the fear of articulating for oneself the space
of freedom that leisure places at ones disposal, the fear of the void to which one is
exposed by leisure; the fear of having to fill up ones free time by ones own efforts.
His job has so definitively accustomed him to being kept busy,7 that is, to not being
autonomous, that at the moment when he leaves work he cannot face the task of really
self-directed activity, since there is no longer any self that can assume responsibility
for this activity. All leisure today has secret family resemblances with unemployment.
When at that moment he is abandoned to himself, he buries himself in his particular
functions, since he does not exist as an organizing principle. Naturally, however, these
functions of his are repeatedly exercised merely for the purpose of keeping
himself busy; hence the fact that, at the very moment he is rendered unemployed he
sets to work with both hands at the first good opportunity that arises; and the first one
is good enough, because it is nothing but a container and represents a support,
something to which he can fix a function.8 One container, or one support, is not
enough in any event; each organ needs its own, because even if there is
only one organ that is unoccupied, this would represent a breach through which the
flood of nothingness could be introduced. To only listen or to only see is completely
insufficient, without taking into account the fact that the exclusivity of such only
doing this or that would demand a capacity for abstraction and concentration,
something that is not at all the case when one lacks an organizing center. This is,
furthermore, the reason why we will always need continuous music in silent films and
why we will begin to breath with difficulty when music disappears and only the visual
dimension remains. In short: in order to be rendered impermeable to
nothingness, every organ has to be occupied. And being occupied as a description of
the situation is incomparably more accurate than being kept busy.9
However, since occupation does not have to consist in workbecause we are dealing
here with leisurewhat occupies the organs can only be means of
enjoyment [stimulants]. Each organ, each function goes in search of its consumption
and its satisfaction by consuming.
This need not inevitably consist in a positive enjoyment, butunfortunately language
does not have a term for itonly in the fact that it cannot set in motion fear or hunger,
which appear when there is a lack of objects of enjoyment; just as breathing as such
does not need to produce a positive enjoyment (in fact, it only rarely does so), but the
lack of air on the contrary results in suffocation [hunger for air] or panic.
35

This term, hunger, is the motto, since each organ believes that it suffers hunger at
the moment when, instead of being occupied, it is exposed to the void and, therefore,
it is free. Each moment of non-consumption is poverty for the organ; the best example
of this is the inveterate smoker. Thus, horribili dictu, freedom (=free time=not doing
anything=non-consumption) is identical with poverty. This is also the cause of the
demand for means of consumption that can be consumed uninterruptedly and
therefore do not entail the danger of satiation. And I said danger, because the
condition of being satiated would limit the time of enjoyment; therefore, dialectically,
it would be transformed into non-consumption; therefore, into poverty: this is the
explanation for the role of the constant chewing of gum and of the radio that plays
non-stop.10
Of course, the perverse identification of freedom and povertyand consequently, of
the privation of freedom and happinessis nothing new:
The total work of art of the 19th century had already speculated on the horror
vacui and provided works that totally claimed man, surprising all his senses at the
same time; history shows us the degree of rapture enjoyed by those who were
surprised in this way and how those who were charmed in this way enjoyed the total
deprivation of their freedom. We need only note the currently popular term,
charming, whose genuine meaning is now hardly understood by anyone, in order to
understand what I am referring to. And it shows good breeding to pay very high prices
for charming depictions. Nietzsche was the first, and until now almost the only
person, who discerned the dubiousness of this charm and who expressed it in words.
Certainly, the charm of that time, which saw its consecration in Bayreuth, was still
absolutely human compared to todays charm, since the idea of the total work of art
still had as its presupposition the old and honorable idea of man; that is, man was still
recognized as a being, who even in his surprised and charmed condition could claim
to create a unitary work in itself, that is, to be one; and the one still deserved a defeat
that would still be homogenous in itself.
This remnant has been lost today. The discrete principle of the most pure addition is
entirely sufficient. What is normal today is the simultaneous supply of completely
disparate elements; not only physically disparate, but also disparate with regard to
feeling; disparate not only with regard to feeling, but also with regard to scale: no one
would be surprised to see, while eating breakfast, while reading the comics, a girl in
the jungle being stabbed between her lovely ribs with a knife, while your ears are
caressed with the three part harmony of the sonata of Claire de Lune. No one has any
problem accepting both at the same time. Up until recently psychology could still
question the possibility of such a simultaneous consumption of two contents and
feelings that are so disparate. The fact, demonstrated tens of thousands of times every
minute these days, seems to make this possibility more plausible.
36

Up until today, the cultural critic had seen the destruction of man exclusively in the
latters standardization, that is, in the fact that the individual, transformed into a massproduced being, was left with only a numerical individuality. Now he has even lost
this numerical individuality; this numerical remnant itself has been divided,
the individuum has been transformed into a divisum, it has been decomposed into a
multiplicity of functions. Undoubtedly, the destruction of man cannot go any farther;
man cannot become more inhuman. In this sense, the rebirth of integral perspectives
celebrated by todays psychology with such zeal and confidence is all the more
abstruse and hypocritical; it is in fact only a maneuver to conceal under the academic
toga the theory of the fragments of man.
Section 14
All of reality is becoming phantasmagorical, everything that is fictitious is becoming
real. Deluded old women are knitting clothing for phantoms. And they are trained for
idolatry.
After that long, but not superfluous, digression on the divisibility of disoriented
man, we shall once again return to our more narrowly defined topic: the threat posed
to man by radio and television.
As we have discovered, what is sent to man, right into his home, is ontologically so
ambiguous that we cannot answer the question as to whether we must treat it as
something that is present or absent, as reality or image. This is why we have given this
ambiguity another name, all its own: phantom.
The theory of ambiguity has been challenged, however, by our hypothetical adversary.
According to the latter, to ask about the meaning of presence or absence is pointless,
because broadcasts comprise anesthetic appearance and thus our attitude is also
esthetic; and the problem of appearance in esthetics was formulated in a satisfactory
way a long time ago.
To argue in this way, however, is just putting new wine in old bottles. The old
categories no longer function. No objective observer, no matter what his attitude may
be towards his radio or television, would ever entertain the idea of claiming that he
obtains his enjoyment from an esthetic appearance. But he does not do so because
he is incapable of it, that is, because the essential characteristic and what is most
disturbing about these broadcasts consists in the fact that they circumvent the
alternative of being or appearance. It is indeed true that events are becoming
phantoms by being broadcast; it is not the case, however, that they thereby acquire the
as if character of art. The attitude with which we view the broadcast from the point
of view of a political process is fundamentally different from the attitude we adopt
37

with regard to the performance of the trial scene in Bchners Danton. To describe it
without ambiguity is difficult, not only because our theoretical concepts of the new
reality are still incomplete and awkwardwhich indeed they arebut because the
positive intention of these broadcasts is precisely to produce ambiguous attitudes:
what has been produced is non-serious seriousness or a serious lack of seriousness,
that is, an oscillating or fluctuating situation, in which the difference between
seriousness and lack of seriousness is no longer valid and in which the listener can no
longer respond; he cannot even propose the question: in what way is the broadcast
material of interest to him (whether as being or as appearance, as information or
as fun) or in what precise capacity must he receive the supply that is delivered to him
(whether as a moral and political being or as a mass consumer).
The ambiguity of seriousness and joking is fully manifested in radio and television
broadcasts, that is, where it is a matter of continuing to utilize the concept of
appearance, which comes from the theatrical tradition. There, dialectically, it so
happens that affairs conceived as fiction (insofar as they are transmitted with the same
technologies, which convert real occurrences into phantoms) function as if they were
real. Just as, where life functions as a dream and dreams function as if they were life,
so too, in this case, every phantom becomes real, because all of reality is presented as
a phantom. Where every real event is granted something of the nature of the apparent
by way of its transmission, the apparent occurrence (from the invented dramatic stage
scenery) must sacrifice in its transmission its specific apparent esthetic character. In
fact, this character is no longer observed, or it is hardly ever noted that the fictitious
event makes us believe that we are its real witnesses, its real visitors, its real victims. I
am thinking above all of the radio adaptation that Orson Welles broadcast of H.G.
Wells War of the Worlds, which was about the invasion of the earth. Just as on that
occasion, in a crude adoption of Hamlets principle of the theater within the theater,
the broadcast represented a radio news report (in the production of this beautiful
appearance this aspect is allegedly what comprised its artistic merit), it could by no
means be distinguished from a real radio news report. We shall not address the
question of whether it attempted to differentiate itself from a real news report and, if
so, what was a more important factor: stupidity or a lack of scruples. Furthermore,
even the occasional explanations of the theatrical character of the broadcast would
have been useless, because, among the listeners, who thought that such an invasion
was possible, once they heard the catastrophic news that the Martians are here, none
of them would have been capable of just sitting calmly in his easy chair to await the
upcoming explanation. In any event, the apparent appearance is brought to us in part
as a real event and in part as real information, pertaining to that event, concerning that
event, and therefore it provoked real panic. Furthermore, it was the first solitary mass
panic, because each instance of panic took place inside four walls, without direct
contact with that of the neighbors; and it had just as much in common with the
38

esthetic attitude as the cry of terror in a burning house has with that of joy at a
campfire.
This case, however, a classic in the history of radio, is not unique. What is true
about it is also true of all radio drama, at least of all those broadcasts that, rather than
stylized portrayals of the past, are about the present, even of those that, with regard to
their content, seem to be completely inoffensive, since these too mix being and
appearance, interest and apparent interest, in a way that deceives the listener with
respect to the possibility of being serious. I do not want to be misunderstood here: in
this case, the lack of seriousness does not reside so much in the fact that the serious is
used and consumed in a non-serious way, but in that the non-serious is offered and
received in a way that is too serious. It is this seriousness that supposedly makes the
joke funny. I am referring to those serial broadcasts, certainly not gruesome, often
even sentimental, in which the everyday lives of the members of fictitious families are
followed for years on end and which are anything but harmless. In the United States I
am acquainted with a good number of elderly single women whose social circle, that
is, whose world, is exclusively composed of these non-existent beings. These
elderly ladies are so deeply interested in the state of health of these phantom members
of the family that, when one of them dies or falls in love, they cannot sleep. Their
relations are with phantoms; and the meaning of their lives consists in this: without
them they would have nobody, life would not be worth living. In the winter they make
mittens for their phantoms; and if, along the way, a baby phantom makes its
appearance, the radio network offices are inundated with packages full of diapers, knit
rompers and caps, which later, behind the backs of the donors, are donated to
completely anonymous, but real, hospitalized children.
***
How is Walt?, someone asked one of these poor creatures in 1943.
Prisoner of War in Germany, she responded without hesitation.
The person who asked the question was confused. In Germany? I thought he was in
the Pacific.
Oh, you mean that Walt! Why didnt you say so at first? I thought you meant Walt.
Walt was a nationally well known figure in the soap opera Portia Faces Life and in
a way a member of the family for any radio listener.
***

39

To many people, these hard working old ladies might seem merely comical or
pathetic. To me, they are depressing; with their knitting needles, they are like the Grim
Reaper in our world of phantoms. If we previously defined as unilateral the
contradictory situation in which man experiences a supposed world, but without being
capable of controlling it; while, on the other hand, the world just ignores man,
although it talks to him endlessly, these Grim Reapers embody in the most shocking
way the absurdity of this situation: on the one hand, they are not even at the level of
unilaterality, since, otherwise, they would not knit anything; on the other hand,
however, they seem to have accepted this as something normal: not even once have I
ever heard them complain that their family of phantoms never did anything for them,
that they just treat them like air, that there is no real contact and that they have
accepted the role of the listener who listens to her own misfortunes on the radio. What
is most regrettable and scandalous about this situation lies in the fact that the fictitious
family really succeeds in replacing the real family; that it really can provoke,
encompass and satisfy the anxieties and tenderness of the mother and grandmother
that are expressed in the real family; a family that, on the other hand, being
completely imaginary, does not take the least notice of the existence of its fans, that
is, it makes fun of the real feelings that anyone can experience (and which it produces
massively, in order that they be consumed in solitude).
Now I see that someone will object: Why not? Why should we prevent these old
ladies from enjoying such agreeable feelings? Is it not something good to have
feelings? And are not the emotions that we experience good things? And are
their sensations also phantoms and deceptions? To this one can only respond, with a
love of the outmoded truth and without any other basis, that whoever still lives with
such real and agreeable feelings, which develop in a vacuum, that is, to which nothing
real corresponds, is even more radically and scandalously deceived than someone who
only lives on false opinions; and that lies are not better because those who are
deceived, even with complete good faith, accept them as truths; lies have no other
purpose and it is precisely by this means that they achieve their goal and their
triumph. However, these addicts of phantoms are deceived with respect to their
existence as persons, since for them subjectivity and world are definitively separated.
And it is hard to decide what is the most scandalous thing about this: the fact that here
a handful of sensations and the very love for ones own grandchild is mechanically
and massively produced and imposed on millions of women; or that all of these
women need to love only the grandmothers love instead of her grandchild (which
in fact does not exist), that is, to be sensitive and sentimental.
The abuse that is inflicted here on the human dignity of feelings is depressing; the
transformation of people of any age into receptors of sensations or into radio listeners
or voyeurs is odious; and, finally, it is altogether disheartening that criticism of these
phenomena should be considered to be a sign of spiteful envy.
40

For millennia, idols were capable of provoking and claiming (the abuse of) real
feelings: respect and humility. This appears to have come to an end. So that now the
place of the idols of the gods is occupied by imitations of men. The little knit rompers
that are piling up in the headquarters of the radio broadcasters for children who do not
exist are hardly different at all from the idolatrous offerings that in other times were
deposited on the steps of the false altars. The abuse that is today inflicted on feelings
is not less now than it was then. It is incomprehensible why indignation concerning
this contemporary form of abuse should be any less vigorous and justified than the
indignation directed at the abuses of the past.11
Section 15
Modern ghost stories: the phantom world and the real world collide. A phantom is
threatened.
The foolish old grandmothers, however, who are not really of this world anymore or
who are only clinging to it because it is here that they have the opportunity of
experiencing phantom feelings, represent a special case, one that is too pure. Only
exceptionally do phantoms manage to fully overcome reality as a competitor, entirely
replace it, and assure the monopoly of the emotions of the consumers. Usually
something different happens, an intermediate case: the creatures of the two different
worlds bump into each other, collide, compete, and merge. Of course, they are from
two ontologically different worlds, not like in the stories (compared with the fantastic
reality of todays stories without imagination) of science fiction, creatures from two
different planets. In short: the normal cases are ghost stories. I am not using this
expression figuratively, since what perfectly applies to the essence and non-essence of
the ghosts is the fact that, abandoning the society of their equals, they cross the
threshold of their world, they come to our world and enter into conflict with the real.
And that is what they are doing today. In fact, at every moment and in the world of
each person, ghostly battles are being waged. If they often pass unnoticed it is not just
because they are now a part of our everyday lives (just like the battles between the
spirit and the flesh), but also because many of the creatures who compose the real
world have been definitively overcome by phantoms, they are reproductions of
phantoms, exactly the same as phantoms; therefore, because the diversity of the
contenders has been disfigured by the victory of the phantoms. We do not have to
offer proofs of the fact that innumerable real girls have adopted the appearance of
images from the motion picture industry, because, if they had resigned themselves to
appear for what they really are, they would be incapable of competing with the sex
appeal of the phantoms and, in a consummately non-phantom way, that is, in their
pitiful real lives, they would be relegated to a second rate existence.

41

A particularly noteworthy example of a collision between phantom and reality, that of

the conflict between a television phantom and a citizen of London, was published not
long ago in the newspapers. It went as follows:
There wasor still isin London a woman, a petty bourgeois housewife, who was
fascinated by a handsome television star, so much so that she never missed a chance to
watch him on television at home. No department store sale could deter her, no threat
from her husband could intimidate her: every morning, at a certain hour, after having
bathed and washed with her Sunday soap and after having put on her best dress, even
if only for a lover in effigie, her miserable little kitchen-dining room was transformed,
for a heavenly fifteen minutes, into the main room of the house; and the whole
business was very real for her.
If someone had asked her, of course, she would not have denied that she had to
compete with a hundred thousand other women; but since she always watched the
television program in private, that is, in solitary mass consumption, the experience
of shared property (which would inevitably have been formed in the theater or the
cinema) remained completely rudimentary. Briefly, she had something going on
with him, something that was to her all the more pleasant insofar as it was he who had
started it and had come calling upon her; he, who came to her every day and spoke
with her; although on the other hand she would not have been able to deny that
the affaire had something of a voyeuristic quality about it and that he was never going
to profess his love for her; this alone makes it clear that the question is quite
complicated and completely phantasmagorical. But we must also add that it involves a
lover whose gallantry, charm, perpetual good humor and inexhaustible repertoire of
flirtatious advances should have made it clear to her real husband (who worked at a
low-level, high-stress job at the gas plant, and with whom she had up until that time
lived without too much enthusiasm, but not especially miserably, either) that he could
not logically entertain even the thought of successfully competing with such a rival.
Before he discovered the truth, this real husband had begun to get on her nerves: she
soon began to hate him as a matter of course, not only because he, evidently out of
malice, when he came home from work, hungry, only demanded his food, just when
her lover (who, due to his phantom nature, possessed the incomparable virtues of not
ever requiring food or shouting at her) was getting ready for their evening rendezvous. Thus, the real man and the phantom confronted one another, the collision took
place, regardless of whether it was merely a phantom or semi-phantom collision, since
the real man was gnashing his teeth while the phantom was still speaking in a tranquil
and sweet tone and he treated her like air [that is, ignored her]; the real man had to
contemplate how his woman was hanging on every word of the other man and the
phantom did not have to do anything; the real man was defenseless because the other
was nothing but a phantom; the phantom, on the other hand, was sovereign, for that
very same reason. Thus, the stage of the confrontation between husband and lover was
42

prepared for a clownish conclusion. He attempted to suppress his hatred; she threw
fuel on the flames; and this not just once, but repeatedly: it was the regular theatrical
prelude to what soon became a furious rage. The temptation to teach her a lesson
once and for all was naturally very strong; but he could not do so, because he owned
the television; and not only for that reason, but because it was his most precious
possession, his pride and joy, his status symbol and, above all, he had not yet paid
even half the installments; not to mention that watching it was his exclusive
occupation and his only consolation in the evenings. Venting his rage would therefore
be contrary to his own interests. Since there is nothing that conveys more malice than
the fierce silent struggle between interests devoted to destruction and interests devoted
to possession, nothing so productive of furious rage as repressed anger, in short, since
he had to lash out at something, it was best to do so against something of little value
which, at the same time, was yet more solid than the television; that is why he hit her.
But this, too, was of no avail, since she absorbed the blow in silence, with the look of
a martyr directed at her lover (who had not entered the room and was still talking
sweetly); she was able to do this because, as the subsequent testimony before the court
confirmed, her attacker had evidently never forgotten the fact that the womans power
of resistance was limitedand thus its value had to be underestimatedthat is, he did
not hit her as hard as he could have. So he was unable to prohibit her from receiving
further visits from the phantom; much less go back to her and inculcate their old love
in her by force.
It is probable that for this uselessly infuriated man it would have been a hundred times
better to find her with a living rival, with a proper competitor from the real world,
even with one who had really seduced his wife, but one whom he could have really
thrown down the stairs, rather than to see her with this immaterial entity to whom it
was not prohibited to break up the peace of the home, a thing that infested the home,
which, even though it did not eat, made you lose your appetite, which even, although
not capable of love, destroyed his marriage, and if it had been a living rival he would
not have seen his wife, who was once so simple, turned into such a nervous wreck. It
is not surprising that, in the end, the desperate husband had no other remedy than to
send an ultimatum to the accursed phantom, that is, to write a threatening letter
saying, get out or else. Since this alternative implied a death threat and the post
office, unacquainted with the subtle difference between phantoms and real men, sent
the letter to actor X, who had never even heard of the existence of his lover but
nonetheless had to seriously concern himself with his non-phantom life, the epilogue
of the whole affair was the Courts judgment, which was published in the English
press. But the jury is still out.
Section 16

43

By means of its small format, television transforms every event into a synchronized
stage set of bibelots.
To produce in the consumer a non-serious seriousness, as we said, and a serious
lack of seriousness, is the positive intention of production, since only if the consumer
is insidiously accustomed to this indecisive and oscillating situation, can he also be
sure of himself as a mass-man, that is, as a man who is no longer capable of making
any decisions. The indecision between being and appearance, which may itself be an
incidental phenomenological property of the broadcast, is used to morally opportune
effect.
How the fictitious is transformed into something horrible or half-serious has already
been demonstrated by the Old Ladies, who are knitting rompers for phantoms, and
Orson Welles radio broadcast; how the fictitious as something half-serious comes into
conflict with the real and, also, how it can even imply real and quite serious
consequences, has been illustrated by the example of the phantom who received a
death threat. Now we must show, conversely, how the real is transformed into
something non-serious and innocuous, that is, how it is banalized. We shall thus return
to the phenomenon we previously discussed so that we will now fully understand it.
But unlike our first analyses, here we do not have to make any general diagnoses
about banalization, but instead we have to reveal the nature of a technical ruse
employed by the latter; the ruse to which we refer is the small format of the images
that appear on the screen.
It will naturally be objected that the small format is not a technical ruse at all, but a
technical shortcoming; and, furthermore, provisional, since this problem can be
solved. And this is true. But it is doubtful whether anyone would want to do this or
that it will ever be done.12 And this is because its minuscule character, even though
this was not its original intention, has proven to be highly opportune, awelcome defect,
since it has performed a very specific task: circulating the macrocosmos as
microcosmos and transforming every world event into a stage set of bibelots.13 I say
bibelots, because the miniature format of the screen now performs the function that
was in other times performed by bibelots. Those little porcelain busts of Napoleon, for
example, that were displayed on the fireplace mantels of our great-grandparents, did
more to dilute the effect of the catastrophe of the Grande Arme than the most
voluminous historical tomes. Today, however, the same process is achieved more
easily and quickly, since if you want to make someone believe that there is a naive
existence in an innocent world, you do not use the most nave version a posteriori, but
at the same time as the event, as a synchronic bibelot (when not even in advance
and, for reasons of prophylaxis, before the event). As soon as we sit in front the little
screen, we are immediately caused to wear spectacles that, just like opera glasses in
reverse, allow us to see any scene of this world as innocent and scaled to human
44

dimensions; or more preciselysince the majority of todays gifts are camouflaged

obstacleswe are incapacitated for seeing in any other way, that is, they prevent us
from recognizing that the world, events, decisions, outrages, of which we are
transformed into the witnesses and victims, are incalculable, and indescribable. What
this gives us is a false general view; false, not because by its means we overlook (in
the sense that we do not see) this or that particular event, but to the contrary,
because it makes us believe that, by its means, we take in at a glance (in the sense of
mentally grasping) the incalculable immensity of the world. Even if the screen
could optically deliver what the philosophical systems of the past tried to offerthat
is: the totality of the worldthis totality of the world would not be, in the Hegelian
sense, the real; and this, because it would be the totality, that is, because it would
conceal [and distort] the magnitude of our world and the immensity of our actions due
to the panoramic model. The television screens are certainly not the only artifacts that
commit this fraud of proportion: maps seem to do the same thing. But maps present
themselves honestly and clearly as reduced panoramic vistas, while the scenes on
television, which we see at the same time that they are happening, claim to be the
events themselves.
In todays cultural criticism, there is too little emphasis on the fact that, together with
sensationalism, it is true that anti-sensationalism is also a characteristic of our times,
strictly allied with it and no less dangerous; while the former falsely exaggerates, the
latter placates; if for the former every mosquito bites like an elephant, the latter turns
every elephant into a mosquito. As soon as one sits in front of the screen, any attempt
to remove oneself from the conversion of the world into a phantom caused completely
by the ruse of reduction now becomes difficult and for anyone who attempts to
undertake such a procedure, it is an arduous task. Anyone who has ever had the
dubious pleasure of watching an automobile race which is offered up on the screen
like a puppet show, will incredulously have to assert that, until the fatal accident, it
was not so bad: one knows that what one has just experienced there has really taken
place at the very same moment, while you watched it on the screen; but one
only knows this; this knowledge has no life; one cannot connect the diminutive image
with what occurred so far away somewhere, nor can one connect the now of here with
the now of there; that is, one cannot conceive of the now as something really shared
[as one], with a single now-there-and-here; this is why our emotional response is
also small and imaginary, considerably smaller even than the emotional effects that
are produced in us by merely fictitious catastrophes that take place in the theater.
Having said this, this coincidence does not have to take place. What must happen and
does in fact happen is rather that by way of the televised image we are dispossessed of
the capacity for thinking of the latter as real, and, in general, of assuming
responsibility for the fact that in addition, in addition to what is delivered to us,
there is also the real event. The purpose of the broadcast of images, the delivery of the
45

total image of the worldand here we return to a formulation of our first few
paragraphsconsists in turning off the real and doing so precisely with the help of the
supposedly real itself, that is, in making the world disappear under its image.
It is certainly not possible for us to imagine an atomic explosion. But it is equally
certain that the frustrated attempt to imagine it or the despair caused by this frustration
is incomparably closer to the reality, and more suited to the immensity, of such an
event than the perception, seemingly present, of the televised image, which falsifies
the inconceivable, because it is a panoramic view, and it fools us, because it situates
us within the image.
1. In conformance with corresponds to the German preposition nach, which
appears in the German term Nachbild, which we translate as copy, which
follows the model [Vor-bild]. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
2. During the production of a television program I had the dubious good luck to
see and hear an actor who was performing a sketch in a house next door and, at
the same time, his seven projections on television. What was interesting about
this experience was: 1) the fact that, in my sight, the actor was divided into
seven identical brothers, but only had one voice, which echoed in both houses;
2) the fact that the images were more natural than the original, since the latter,
in order to confer a natural aura to the reproductions, had to be made up; and
3) (and this, more than just interesting, was shocking) the fact that the seven
incarnations of the actor no longer seemed strange: this is the kind of normality
that we expect from mass produced products. [Authors note.]
3. Events of subconscious relevance, however much they may be present in our
body, are not present, but only simultaneous; and not because they are not
consciously present, but rather because they are not presented [they are not
data], because they are irrelevant. [Authors note.]
4. Here the author introduces the terms, Welt-freund (equivalent to Menschenfreund, a lover of man, which we have translated as friend of the
world), Zeitgenosse (contemporary of the era) andJetzgenosse (contemporary
of the now). [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
5. Franz Werfel (Prague, 1890 Beverly Hills, 1945). A Czech author who
wrote in German; a Jew, who fled into exile in France and then the United
States. He wrote lyrical poetry of an expressionist type, but he later shifted
towards historical and political realism. [Authors note.]

46

 6. If we are justified to see in the tumor a sui generis disease, i.e.: the situation
in which the central force of the organism is no longer in any condition to
maintain all its cells under its control, so that the latter begin to multiply
independently, then the autonomization of the particular functions that we are
discussing here is the psychic analogon of the tumor. [Authors note.]
7. This expression indicates the passive sense, which is conveyed by the
German construction beschftigt werden. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
8. In this connection, see the work by Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in which the
author causes the actors to put on and take off their shoes and exchange them
with the other actors, so that their hands have something to do. [Authors note.]
9. In this case, to be occupied (besetzt, with military connotations) underscores
even more strongly the passive aspect of being kept busy (beschftigt, which
refers to having something in ones hands, being entertained). [Spanish
Translators Note.]
10. At the same time, in the background of the simultaneously passive player,
completely distorted, of course, one finds the ideal of the maximum output of
work and the principle of economy. Translated to the world of leisure, this
means: by the sweat of ones brow one seeks to provide oneself with as much
leisure as possible; producing at the same time everything that is fun: crossword
puzzles and gum and music on the radio, etc. And this because
otherwise leisure is wasted. [Authors note.]
11. This fraudulent provocation of excitement and the organization of substitute
satisfactions, which flow into a vacuum, recalls a habit that is normal in a
completely different sector of modern life; the principle that lies at the basis of
these two very disparate procedures is identical: as everyone knows, today it is
the usual practice to allow stud bulls to mount, instead of cows, socalled dummies, that is, fakes or fictions. The term, fake [Attrappe] comes
from attrapper=to catch; [and attrapper comes from the same root as the
English word, trap]: so, one allows the bulls to mount the trap, they are allowed
to fall into the trap. And this is because their inclination, while they were in
their primitive state, was to go about this business with a great deal of waste,
that is, in a way that was not profitable; because the process of animal
reproduction had fallen scandalously behind the reproductive ideal of industry,
something that is no longer the case, insofar as the process is
captured,attrapp. The fake is therefore an apparent reality in the service of
commodity production. In this case an apparent piece of meat at the service of
47

the meat industry. In a similar way, today the sensations of men, up until now
squandered, are placed at the service of industry. And when feelings, for a
lack of a partner, have withered, industry produces new feelings, creating fake
imitations of partners, since it knows that these feelings in turn require the
production of new fakes, which keep them active. [Authors note.]
12. Of course, the temptation posed by purely technical possibilities of
improvement is sometimes so irresistible that they are implemented despite the
fact that, in this way, the desired social function is not at all furthered, and is
even undermined. On the other hand, however, large corporations have often
purchased the rights to technical innovations in order to suppress them. The
history of technology is also a history of suppressions, despite the fact that
the public relations image of technology is one of unbridled development.
[Authors note.]
13. Unlike the sublime [the great], which beginning with Longinus became
a topic to be addressed by philosophy, the small has generally gone almost
entirely unnoticed. A strange exception is that of the young Burke, who in a
way, reformulating the meaning of rococo, directly identified the small with the
beautiful. This identification is based on the experience of:
small=inoffensive=open=defenseless=pathetic=beautiful=not a threat to our
freedom. Since freedom, at least modo negativo, is exhausted in its
determination, this beauty evidently preserves a certain affinity with that of
Kant, something that becomes more clear insofar as for Kant the great, that
is, the sublime, which exceeds all human proportion, represents the concept
opposed to the beautiful. In contemporary esthetics the small hardly exists at
all, despite the fact that, as beautiful, gracious or light, it represents for much of
humanity the only esthetic category. [Authors note.]

Chapter 3 - The news

Chapter III
THE NEWS
At the beginning of the previous chapter we asked: In the form of what type of
images are events delivered to our homes? And we gave the ambiguous answer: In
the form of phantoms; in this way we pointed out that they are not presented either as
themselves or as mere images of the events, but as a tertium.

48

Is this really so strange, however? Is it not even an utterly everyday affair, to which
we only attribute a strange appearance by way of a strange expression? And is this
true of any kind of information?
What does this mean?
Let us assume that our coal bin is empty. We are informed of this
fact. What information do we receive here? What is delivered to our home? The
object itself? The empty coal bin?
Or an image of the coal bin that is empty?
Neither the one nor the other, since what we receive is an object sui generis,
a tertium, which in a particular way is found outside of this alternative, that is, the fact
that the coal bin is empty; therefore, afact. That this fact is not identical with the
empty coal bin itself is an obvious phenomenological assertion: the fact itself is not
empty; but it is equally obvious that the fact, which is transmitted to us by the report
that the coal bin is empty, is not exhausted in the being-image.
Thus, what the news brings us is neither the thing nor its image. Would it not be
natural to assume that broadcasts are simply news, due to this structural similarity?
In order to address this question we have to indulge in a digression, that is, we must
first investigate the nature of the news in general. This digression is all the more
urgent insofar as our arguments up to this point have made it apparent that, in an
unjustifiably exclusive way, we have been arguing for the privileges of immediacy.
Section 17
The pragmatic theory of judgment: the informed person is free, since something that
is absent is made available to him; he is not free, because instead of the thing he only
receives its predicate.
What, then, is news? What is its function?
In making something which is absent known to the person being informed; and this in
such a way that the latter, the receiver, knows about what is absent only indirectly,
without any personal experience of it, on the basis of a delegated perception. The
appearance of the term, absent, assures us that we have not abandoned the domain
of our inquiry, which certainly involves the problem of the ambiguity of presence and
absence. The definition of news demands a more profound explanation.

49

To speak means: to speak of what is absent: it means: to present something which is

not present to someone who is not present.
This relation between presence and absence even applies to the most direct form of
speaking, the imperative, since it invites the receiver, that is, the absent one, to listen
attentively and participate and therefore he is invited to presence. But while the
imperative is directed at the recipient from absence, the information transmitted to the
latter is meant to evoke from him that which is ordered. In fact, there is no form of
speech that would be anything but senseless noise, if it were not to concern what is
absent; nothing that takes place behind the backs of the thing or person involved,
the third party, fundamentally absent; nothing that has any other intention than to
make the absent present. Naturally, this relation with the absent has inherited the
language of the act of indicating: dico, for he who indicates refers,
fundamentally, to the present only because that which is absent (absent from the
vision or the attention of he to whom the indication is directed) and solely with the
purpose of bringing to the latter the presence of the object and to provide him with the
possibility of directly experiencing or effectively grasping the object.
This possibility does not appear to be allowed to the receiver: he is neither brought
closer by way of the news to the object, nor is the latter brought closer to him. Or is
it?
It is, since also by way of the news something is made present. Certainly not the
object itself, but rather some property of the object; something about the object; a new
object, a very special one, which is called a factum, and not by chance, because it has
been manufactured from the old object. But the new object is special because,
unlike the first object, it is fundamentally mobile and transmissible. Despite this
difference, however, he who receives the new object, the factum, that is, the receiver,
also has the old one; or more precisely: by way of the new he has something of
the old. And much more:
The news that transmits the factum prepares the receiver to behave as if the object
were present, to include it in his calculations and his practical decisions. The basis
of existence of the news consists in giving the receiver the possibility of guiding his
decisions in accordance with it.
Viewed pragmatically, the news really makes the object present in him and therefore
makes him present in the object. The receiver is up-to-date on the object. And this
word on is not merely a caprice of language; it rather points to a being above
something, the ability to have disposal of something, which the receiver now
has over the object and over the situation that has been changed by this power. At the
root of the report: The coal bin is empty, I am prepared to order more coal. In other
50

words: if the receiver, instead of the absent object itself, only receives something
from it, only something separate, what is received is not a defective substitute, but
precisely what is separated from the object; this moment of the object, that really or
allegedly interests the receiver and towards which he really has reasons to devote his
attention; to which he must accommodate himself.1 Thus, what is important to him is
expressed, elaborated and prepared for him in the news; and he is notified in this
prepared situation. In the language of logic, what serves as a suitable expression on
innumerable occasions for this surprising capacity, but which so seldom surprises the
one who is separated, this prepared person, is called the predicate. The predicate is
therefore a commodity manufactured for the receiver. Given that the news delivers this
manufactured commodity, this fact separated from the original object, it
presupposes a partition; the action of this partition is called judgment.2 For this
reason, the news can be separated into two parts: S [subject] and p [predicate]. Instead
of the single objectcoal bin, the receiver experiences the factum of two parts: The
coal bin is empty. However, the news is not divided into two because it is a
judgment, but because the judgment has two parts because it is news.
In other words: the predicate, which is usually only addressed in formal logic, has a
much more general interest. As we have suggested by emphasizing the on, it
indicates freedom (of choice): someone who, due to the predicate he has received, has
disposal over something that is absent, can incorporate it into his calculations and
accommodate himself to it, he has extended his horizon of presence and power, he has
become independent of the contingency of his being located in a certain place, he is
both here and there. Someone who, by way of the news, receives the relevant (that
which is separated) as something separated, isolated, prepared and predicated, as
a manufactured commodity of the , without having to be overwhelmed by the
weight of the irrelevant, which is born by all objects of perception, is disencumbered
and liberated from his own labor.
On the other hand, howeverand only this second perspective is decisive for usthe
news also represents a privation of freedom. And, surprisingly, for the same reason
that it is an apparatus of freedom; once again, because it does not offer the absent
itself, but something about what is absent, something referring to what is absent.
But now this fact acquires a different emphasis. Now we emphasize: the news
offers only one part of the absent object; exclusively that part because of which
judgment is called judgment; only what is prepared, the predicate. The news places
nothing else at the disposal of the receiver; that is, even before the latter can form a
judgment, it orients him towards a choice, it determines a limine with respect to this
choice, it prepares it. For the person who listens to the news, the predicate does not
disappear in the subject; instead the subject is lost in the part, in the predicate. All
news, as part of what is delivered, is therefore already a prejudice, which can be true,
but also false; every predicate is already a prejudice; and by means of all contents of
51

the news, the receiver is spared the object itself, since it remains in the shadows
behind the predicate, which the only thing that is actually delivered. The receiver is
transformed into a dependant, because he is constrained to a particular perspective
(that of the predicate) and because he has been spared the object, which supposedly
contains the judgment.
Take it or leave it; that is what the news seems to tell the receiver. Either accept part
of the absent, the absent in its version as a divided, pre-judged commodity, or you get
nothing. The messenger becomes the master of the lord.
Generally, the difference between immediate and mediated experience is absolutely
clear. Given that immediate experience, i.e., perception, includes pre-predicated
images, while the mediated experience, by means of the news, is divided into the
form, S is p, there can be no doubt concerning the form of experience or any
confusion of the two forms. Even a bookworm or a reader of newspapers, who lives
on the horizon of mediated experiences and is nourished on them, hardly ever, at least
when engaged in the experience, thinks that he is directly experiencing the mediated
(or vice-versa), however much he may later, when some informational content has
begun to sprout in his storehouse of knowledge, yield to uncertainty regarding the
question of whether this was due to a direct experience or an indirect one.
We shall now address this point.
Section 18
Broadcasts eliminate the difference between thing and news. Broadcasts are
camouflaged judgments.
In effect, what is actually ambiguous about radio and television broadcasts consists in
the fact that, from the start and as a matter of principle, they place the receiver in a
situation in which the difference between living and being informed, between
immediacy and mediation, has been eliminated; which results in his being confused as
to whether he is facing a thing or a fact, an object or a factum. What does this mean?
As we have seen, the characteristic of the factum consists in its difference with respect
to most objects, in its mobility: while the messenger cannot transport a burning house,
he can expedite and transmit to the receiver the fact that the house is burning. Thus, in
broadcasts the objects themselves are expedited, or at least their phantoms: what
comes to me is the symphony, not the fact that someone is playing it; the speaker, not
the factum that he is speaking. Transportability, previously the property of facts,
appears to have infected the object itself. Has it not therefore been transformed into a
fact?
52

The question sounds odd, since the facts, at least the news that conveys facts, are
divided, as judgments, into the two parts S and p. The broadcast images, on the other
hand, do not appear to be thus divided. The speaker, to whom I am listening, is he
himself and not something about him. Is this not true?
It is not.
Let us assume that the candidate Smith appears on television in order to present his
platform to the voters. It will be taken for granted that this Smith will show what kind
of a pleasing personality he is; that he is obliged to smile in the most charming way
possible. With this simple assertion, however, we have not fully described his attitude.
His charm will be highlighted as his exclusive trait in order to make us forget that he
is something more than just this smile. What appears on the screen will therefore be,
despite the fact that the candidate Smith (let us call this S) is apparently fully
presented, exclusively the fact or the claim that he is a pleasing personality (let us call
this p); therefore, it is exclusively the case that S is p and, therefore, p instead of S.
What we are going to see will therefore be the subject that is coterminous with its
predicate, according to the formula that we used in the analysis of the news as
judgment. We could even have the right to see only this p, since it is not rare for
this quid pro quo of subject and predicate to become a reality; that is, that in the
end, S is transformed into his own predicate, that he is notnor can he beanything
but his predicate; therefore, that, condemned to be p, he functions effectively as a
professional smile. Frequently, the history of the lie ends up imposing the lie as truth.
The presentation of the candidate achieves precisely the same thing as the news. No,
even more, because it is a kind of news that is intended to adorn the fact that it
represents a pre-established judgment. And this is in fact a powerful addition, since in
this manner the effects that, as we just saw, correspond fundamentally to the judgment
are concealed: and with them, therefore, what forms part of the prejudice and the
privation of freedom. To persuade the consumer that he will not be persuaded,
judgment, transformed into an image, renounces its form of judgment; but by
apparently being transformed into the S that acts and which is the object of attention
(in the S, whose vivacity does not betray its partition into S and p), it does so in no
case as explicitly as normal judgment.
This procedure, although it takes place every day, is philosophically very amazing,
since it represents a reversal of the normal sequence. Whereas generally, and basically,
the news follows the event that it announces and is accommodated to it, here
the factum is accommodated to the judgment. The following phrase has
precedence: Senator Smith is a pleasing personality; S recedes behind it and therefore
also the image of S, which acts as if it were the man himself, that is, as something that
is still not subject to judgment. Actually, however, he is the same man, S, not as p, but
53

himself in his decorated version, which no longer permits any hint of the structure of
judgment. What serves as the pretext (in the sense of to allege) for the judgment
transformed into an image is thus no pretext at all (in the sense of prepare,
predict, pre-judge). That is why the expression, adorn is completely fitting,
because the adornment, which is brought about here, is negative: the judgment
surrounds itself with an apparent nakedness, it adorns itself with the ornament of the
predicates it lacks.
Section 19
Commodities are disguised judgments. Phantoms are commodities. Phantoms are
disguised judgments.
But now it will be claimed that our example is not at all characteristic of the totality of
such phenomena. It will be objected that not every phantom is the exhibition of a p,
or advertisingsince our example belongs to that categoryor even a judgment or a
prejudice. It must be admitted that not every phantom is engaged in advertising in as
penetrating a manner as the candidate Smith, imagined for that purpose. What
remains, however, is the fact that all phantoms, as they are delivered to the home,
are commodities. And this is decisive because it is as such that they are judgments.
Once again, this sounds odd. What does judgment, which pertains to logic, have in
common with the commodity, whose place is in the economy?
The answer is: the predicate.
Every commodity, insofar as it is displayed and offeredand it is a commodity only
as such, as an offeris its own judgment and, furthermore, its own self-praise. Its
mere appearance already recommends it; in the display case it is already encountered
as the visible prejudice of its own quality. Certainly, however: it is no more
susceptible to being broken down into the phrase, S is p than our candidate Smith;
its quality is not enunciated, at least not necessarily (although it often is enunciated in
the text of print advertisements); but in any case it is decorated. And decoration
indicates that its p(that is, what is separated, its real or alleged quality) is separated
from it and, as an enticing bait, is highlighted and emphasized in such a way that all
that is visible is its enticing character and not the commodity as a whole. What it
offers to the spectator is therefore, first of all the perspective, from which the spectator
must take into consideration this commodity, which is already determined and
provided in advance before it is delivered.
The commoditys character as a judgment is thus undeniable. While in the previous
paragraph we demonstrated that the negative efficacy of the news consists in
54

curtailing the freedom of the receiver, in orienting the latter with regard to the point of
view from which he has to take what is absent into consideration, in establishing by
means of the predicate and transmitting this point of view as a manufactured
commodity; this also describes the function of the commodity on display. Now,
instead of the receiver, we have the customer, who is still separated from the
commodity by the television screen, and who is still absent, and who must be
snatched from his absence and attracted by way of the p displayed to transform him
into a buyer. But this difference does not obviate the parallel.
At the beginning of our investigation we noted that events transformed into phantoms
and delivered to peoples homes are commodities. What is valid for any commodity,
that is, that it is a judgment, even if a decorated one, is also valid for them.3 They, too,
are assertions about events, despite the fact that, displayed in their nakedness and
adorned with the ornament of the predicates that they lack, they are offered as the
events themselves. Since no judgment is so perfectly faithful, so simple, so seductive
as the one that, supposedly, is the thing itself, its power of deception consists in its
renunciation of the Sis p schema outlined above. What we are consuming when we
sit down in front of our radio or television is, instead of the scene of its preparation
and the alleged thing S, its predicate p; in short: aprejudice that is presented in the
form of an image, which, like every prejudice, conceals its character as a judgment;
however, since that is still what it secretly is, it spares the consumer from having to
take the trouble to make any judgments. Actually, the consumer does not consider this
idea, no more so than he would with regard to the other prepared commodities, for
example, pre-cooked canned food, which he buys so he does not have to cook it
himself. What is true of the news, that is, that it transforms us into dependants,
because it shows us (or it even might not show us) the absent only in its version as a
manufactured commodity, excused, prepared and predicated, is even more valid for
broadcasts: we are exempted from making our own judgments; and much more
radically insofar as we cannot exempt ourselves from accepting the supplied judgment
as reality itself.
1. The theory, which is today so vehemently promoted, that the transposition of
the truth in the judgment is eo ipso a distortion of the concept of the truth, must
be reduced at the moment when by judgment we really understand that which
lies at its origin: news. By way of its function as news, that is, by way of that
which prepares the absent to be ready to accommodate itself to the present, that
is, to treat the absent as the present, the judgment delivers a decisive deoccultation. Only the exchange of news, that is, speech, opens up the world,
constitutes the truth of man as society and serves as the basis, finally, for
universalism, which corresponds to logic. [Authors note.]

55

 2. This argument has an etymological basis because in German, judgment

is Ur-teil and partition, Teilung; both words have a common root in the
word, teil. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
3. It would be pointless to speak of broadcasts which openly present themselves
as advertising broadcasts for soap or gasoline. [Authors note.]

Chapter 4 - The matrix

Chapter IV
THE MATRIX
Section 20
The totality is less real than the sum of the realities of its parts. The realistic
whitewash of models has the purpose of modeling experience.
Of course, what is prepared to be sold are not the only things that are broadcast. Under
certain circumstances, the broadcast is not even prepared and objectively real; in fact,
this is true of many of them; and since to the lie, nothing is more pleasing than an alibi
of the truth, or at least of a partial truth, they even prefer this. No self-respecting lie
contains falsehood. What is prepared in the end is rather the image of the world as a
totality, composed on the basis of individual broadcasts, and that total type of man,
who is nourished exclusively on phantoms and frauds. Even if every particular thing
was broadcast faithfully as such, the totalityeven if it were only because much of
what is real is not displayedwould be transformed into a prepared world, and the
consumer of the totality would be transformed into a prepared man. This totality is
therefore less real than the sum of the realities of its parts; or, modifying the famous
Hegelian saying: The totality is the lie; especially the totality. The task of those who
supply us with the image of the world thus consists in deceiving us by composing a
totality on the basis of many truths.
What is presented as the totality is not, of course, a theoretical, but rather a
pragmatic image of the world; and this expression does not necessarily mean only that
what is offered to us an alleged world, instead of truths, does not conclude1 in a mere
subjective world-view, but it represents a practical apparatus, an apparatus of
practices [of training], whose purpose is to mold our action, our resignation, our
conduct, our free time, our tastes and, along with these things, our praxis in its
entirety; in any event, an apparatus that, in order to conceal its deployment as an

56

apparatus, presents itself at the same time disguised as world. It is an instrument in

the form of a pseudo-microcosmic model that, in turn, pretends to be the world itself.
This formula sounds quite obscure, but an analogy will help to clarify what I mean
here. In planetariums we find objects of this same type, since they are, on the one
hand, apparatuses, since their purpose is to encourage us to train our understanding
(the world of the stars) and our praxis (identify the stars); on the other hand, however,
they are presented as microcosmic models and, as micro-models, they are meant
without any malice, of courseto give rise to the illusion that it is the star-filled sky.
The comparison with a pseudo-planetarium would be completely justified, with an
astrologer for example, that, although incorrectly claiming to be the model of the starfilled sky, would want to train us to see the real world of the stars according to its
image. An object of this particular type is therefore the world, which is constructed
and transmitted to us by way of broadcasts: a stimulating model, with which we must
enter into training, practice behavior patterns with its help, models of forms of
behavior, and induce reflexes; and to do this so profoundly that, by way of this
induction, we shall not be capable of behaving in any other way in the real world
except in accordance with the stimulating model and we will not allow ourselves to be
dealt with and used by the world except according to this model. What is intended is
therefore a congruence of the real world and the model, which, however, must not be
presented in the form of a theoretical affirmation of identity, since such an affirmation
would amount to a concession that there was previously a difference between them,
but as a pragmatic equation, that is, as an effective attitude in the world and as a way
of dealing with the world, in which the suspicion would not even arise that the world
is not congruent or identical with the model, and, if it manages to arise, it will not be
effective. An example of this pragmatic equation is provided by the annals of
National Socialist Germany: for the reader of Der Strmer2 who had experienced by
way of the models of the Jew published in the magazine and, by way of the model of
the Judaized world, his conditioning, his imprinting, the difference between real
Jews and his stimulating model was not just insignificant, but did not exist at all; he
was so ignorant of the fact of the duality of reality and image that he was only capable
of treating real Jewsand, in fact, he did exactly thatas if they were nothing but
their images. One could almost describe this process as magic in reverse, because
whereas the magic spell makes the image what must be produced in the original of the
image, here the reader sought to produce the image within reality, to the extent that it
was still capable of being distinguished.3
In a certain sense, these images in Der Strmer, even though they were very old and
were by no means at the psycho-technical level that National Socialism had already
reached at the time; and it is not unthinkable that the scorn directed at Streicher by
those who carried out his goals of liquidation was due, in the final accounting, to the
primitive backwardness of his method. For the manufacture of stimulating models and
57

controlled reactions nothing is as important as the effective concealment of the fact

that it involves the manufacture of anything. This act of dissimulation, however, was
not performed by Der Strmer; that is, out of contempt for the pretensions of its
consumers, it was not thought to be necessary to conceal the fact that it was lying; a
lazy negligence that caused a scandal even among mass murderers. Expressed
positively: for the model industry it is of the utmost importance to confer upon its
models the highest dose of realism. In order for the model of stimulation to be
effective as a totality, it had to be offered as reality. In fact, National Socialism also
followed this principle; and the photos that it posted for this purpose form part of the
classical stock of models of stimulation that lie in a realistic way.
Today, the obsolete models of the Streicher variety are almost completely out of
fashion.4 In general, it has been accepted as a principle of production that models
attain their maximum effectiveness when they are given a maximum of realism; and
there is almost no illustrated or film magazine and certainly no weekly in which this
principle is not followed. We do not live in the era of surrealism, but in that of
pseudo-realism; in the era of decoration, that is dressed up as an era of
revelations. When one liesand who does not?one no longer does so lightly, but as
if one were photographing oneself; no, not as if one were being photographed, but one
is effectively photographing oneself. The medium of the photograph, as such, is
credible and objective to the point that it can absorb more falsehood and permit
more lies than any other means. That is why anyone who wants to create reality the
way it is created by models realistically conceals his models by means of the
photograph. In order to do so, however, in order to disguise reality with an alleged
image of the real, he needs in turn a special image of the real, the super-real; if you
prefer: surreal; in any case, dazzling; briefly: the sensational image is transformed
into the quintessence of reality, where models have to be produced. This might sound
surprising, insofar as one generally associates the model with something
monotonous. But the thing is not so simple. Instead, the sensational belongs
essentially the model and not only because it is at the service of its recovery and
concealment, but also because, as it is, it tends to be transformed into a model: in fact,
there is nothing that is more stereotypical than what is allegedly new every day and
nothing is so similar to the super-mysterious murderer of the past as the supermysterious murderer of today. Actually, if a historian of a hundred years from now
were trying to piece together a mosaic of our time on the basis of the anthology, which
the illustrated magazines offer as the reality of today, his result would generally be
not only absurd and exceedingly hideous, but also much too boring.
Thus, despite the fact that, as we have said, the manufacturers of models implement
their sensationalist pseudo-realism for the purpose of concealing the fact that they
want to produce a world of models and, therefore, to prevent the customer from
suspecting that he is being fed models, the customer expects, and even demands, very
58

particular types of sur-ralit, of garish reality, that is, of models. This is hardly
surprising, since the type of matricial forms supplied daily has already configured the
demand of the customer; the latter, too, demands sensation and models, both at the
same time and in the same objects. What the buyer of the illustrated newspapers seeks
is the never-before-seen, what was never heard of yesterday and the day before
yesterday and this extremely limited universal world, composed of murderers, stars,
flying saucers and other planetary mechanisms, this world that calls itself the
peoples world, the wide world, the multicolor world, the big world, in spite
of the fact that, as an ingredient, the world has never been so infinitesimal. Anyone
who wants to tryand these attempts fortunately never ceaseto break with
the numerus clausus of these themes and this kind of presentation, has to be
forewarned not just with respect to the exasperated opposition of the manufacturers of
models, against whose rules of the game one would clash, but also with respect to that
of the customers, whose horizon of expectations is now equally petrified, and who
consider as meddling or as falseor else they would not even accept itanything
that crosses the borders of the extraordinary things that are experienced as typical:
most of the time, the atypical is completely not given. And up to this day not only is
there no answer to the questiona question that itself has not even been explicated
sufficientlyabout what method truth must introduce in order to compete with the lie,
that is, so that the truth, too, will be believed: if it is permitted (in case that one is
capable of it) to dress up as a lie, since the world of the lie is composed of truths.
But even the formula spelled out above, When one lies, it is no longer done lightly,
but as if one was photographing oneself; no, not as if one was photographing oneself,
but that one is effectively photographing oneself, is now superseded. The maximum
pseudo-realism is naturally reserved for the phantom of television, since it can
convince its consumers that it is not a reproduction of reality, but reality itself. The
consumer is lost in thoughthow can reality itself be unreal? How can it declare
against itself? The lie never had a better apparatus: one no longer lies against reality
with just the help of false images, but with the positive engagement of the assistance
of the consumers themselves.5
If, faced with pragmatic identification, that is, the identification of the stimulating
model and reality, one was once exposed to certain hesitations and doubtssince
every image, as such, can produce in the spectator a minimum of scepticismtoday
this process functions with an almost ideal ease. Seeing the model, the spectator
thinks he is looking at the world itself; reacting to the model, he thinks he is reacting
to the world itself. Irritated or agitated by the real, so that, when the world is really
presented to himand the models are manufactured as training apparatuses for this
casehe only perceives it the way the models have trained him to perceive it, nor
does he feel anything more than, as feelings, had been prefabricated in him. The
models are, then, aprioristic conditioning forms; but not only of the intuition, not only
59

of the understanding or feelings, but also of behavior and action; that is, matrices of a
range of applications and of a universality of benefits such as the most speculative
philosophers had never foreseen; and definitely, much less for the era of empiricism,
in which we supposedly live.
The only kind of mentality that can be compared with this is that of the primitives,
who (at least to the degree that the assumptions of Frazer, Lvy-Bruhl, Cassirer, etc.,
are true) live in a code of perception and behavior so clearly closed and fixed that they
cannot take into consideration, either theoretically or practically, anything that is not
presented to them by way of this code.
Naturally, the expression aprioristic conditioning forms cannot be understood
literally, that is, in the sense of Kants definitions. It is impossible to imagine any traits
that would be less innate than those produced and branded in men. Nevertheless,
they are indeed aprioristic, to the extent that, as molds and therefore as conditioning
forms, they precede experience, feeling and behavior and condition them. And since
these conditioning forms not only prejudge about the how, but also about the what has
to be experienced, felt, etc., and what not, their power has an extraordinary force and
their field of influence is incredibly extensive. Anyone who has been marked by them
is no longer prepared to do anything but what the broadcasts have prepared him for in
his home: only that is what he sees, thinks, feels, loves and does. It is in this capacity
for producing matrices and trainees that the goal of the broadcasts consists. As we
have seen, however, given the fact that the matricial forms must not betray the fact
that they are matrices, conditioning forms must be presented in the form of things and
matrices as fragments of the world.
This last claim is of fundamental importance for our entire investigation. And this is
for two reasons:
1. The alleged ontological ambiguity of these broadcasts, their nature as phantoms,
which occupied our initial considerations, is thus stripped of its enigmatic aspect:
since the manufacturer of matrices wants to conceal the fact that the models are
models and the conditioning forms are conditioning forms, he offers them as world
and as things. But this means: as phantoms, because phantoms are nothing but
forms, presented as things. The phantom character of broadcasts is revealed, then, as a
desired effect, and its alleged ontological ambiguity is revealed to be merely the
phenomenal
form
of
a
moral
ambiguity,
that
is,
a
fraud.
2. The concept of idealism, which we introduced at the beginning of our
investigation, by virtue of our subsequent reflections acquires a necessary
complement. Recall that we depicted as idealist every possessive attitude towards
the world, every attitude for which the world appears as only my world because I
effectively appropriate it. But there is a fundamental difference between the fact that a
60

conqueror (or, as in Hegel, a predatory animal) makes it his own, and that the
world should be made mine and how it could be made mine. Many things can be
mine, even the number tattooed on the arm of a prisoner in a concentration camp. If,
as it has been described, the world is supplied to the mass-man in the form of a totality
of models, instead of the world a totality of representations is introduced; but it is only
his because it has been branded on him. That my representation should be for you
the world, says the will of those who produce matrices. That is the kind of thing
Hitler used to say. It would have been unthinkable for a follower of Hitler to claim:
The world is my representation. And not because, as a mass-man, he considers his
representation as his world, but because what was for him the world had been
imagined by another person and had been delivered to his home.6
Section 21
The imprint of needs. Offers: todays orders. Commodities are thirsty, and we
experience thirst with them.
What are presented to us are therefore pre-marked objects, whose claim is to comprise
the world and whose goal consists in marking us with their image. By saying this,
however, we are not claiming that this branding process is accomplished violently; in
any case not in such a way that violence, where it is employed, would be perceived as
such or recognized if even in the form of pressure. Usually, the pressure of the
imprinting process is just as imperceptible to us as the pressure of the ocean is to the
fish of the depths of the sea. The more unnoticed is the pressure of the imprinting
process, the more certain its success. That is why the most advantageous circumstance
is when the matrix that is being imprinted is perceived as a desired matrix. If this goal
is to be attained, it is necessary to mark the desires themselves in advance. Thus, it is
part of the task of standardization and production not only to standardize products, but
also needs (thirsting for the standardized products). This takes place in an increasingly
more automatic way, that is, by way of the same products that are supplied and
consumed on a daily basis, since needs (as we have seen) are ruled by what is sold and
consumed on an everyday basis. Not absolutely, however. Often, there is a certain gap
between the marketed product and need: there is never an absolute congruence
between supply and demand. That is why, in order to close this gap help must be
mobilized, which takes the form of nothing other than morality. Of course, even
morality, if it is to be useful as an ally in this battle, must be strictly delineated in
advance, so that anyone who does not desire what he must receive is stigmatized as
immoral, that is, non-conformist, and the individual is compelled by way of public
opinion (that is, by way of its spokesman: its own individual conscience) to desire
what he must receive. And this is indeed the case today. The maxim, to which we are
exposed at every moment of our lives and that wordlessly, although not tolerating any
61

opposition, appeals to our better self, sounds (or would sound, if it were to be
articulated) like this: Learn to need what is offered for sale!
These offers are therefore todays commandments. 7
Viewed from the perspective of the remnants of the customs that have survived from
previous eras, what we have to do and leave undone is defined today by what we have
to buy. It is almost impossible to exclude oneself from a minimum of these purchases,
which are offered and imposed as must-haves, that is, as purchases that must be
made. Any person who would try to do so would put himself in danger of being
considered to be introverted, he might have to sacrifice his prestige, lose his job, be
left without resources, and even become morally and politically suspect, since not
buying amounts to a kind of sabotage of consumption, a threat to the legitimate
demands of the commodity and, in this sense, is not just a passive act of omission, but
a positive behavior, similar to robbery, when not to something even more scandalous:
for the thief, with his stolen goods (in his own way, and certainly not in so many
words) always makes it clear that, just like anyone or like any customer, he faithfully
acknowledges the quality of attraction and the mandate of the commodity and
therefore proves his status as a conformist, and, if he is caught, he can formally take
responsibility for his crimes, whereas the person who does not buy commodities dares
to render himself deaf to the claim of the commodity, to insult the universe of
commodities with his renunciation and then, even to hypocritically invoke the alibi of
negativity, that is, that he had not done anything and, in this way, to escape the strong
arm of the law. Better ten thieves than one ascetic (Molussian saying).
The mere fact that I had no car and therefore could be caught in flagrante not buying
anything and, ultimately, of having no needs, was the cause in 1941 of the following
embarrassing incident in California:
Diary
Yesterday, in the Los Angeles area, while I was walking along a highway, a police car
pulled over in front of me with its siren wailing and blocked my path.
The policeman shouted at me: Say, whats the matter with your car?
My car?, I asked him, not understanding what he was talking about.
Sold her?
I shook my head.

62

At the shop for repairs?

Once again I shook my head.
The policeman paused in thought, since it seemed to him to be impossible that there
should be a third reason for not having a car. Then why arent you driving it?
My car? But I dont have a car.
This simple piece of information also went right over his head.
To help him understand, I explained that I had never owned a car.
Now I really stuck my foot in it. A clear case of self-incrimination. The policeman
stared at me with his mouth hanging open. You never had a car?
Look, no, I said, pondering his powers of comprehension. Thats the boy. And
then I waved to him in a friendly and innocent way and attempted to resume my walk.
But he would have none of that. To the contrary. Dont force me, sonny, he thought
and pulled out his citation booklet, dont tell me any stories, please. The pleasure of
interrupting the dull boredom of his job with the capture of a vagrant almost gave him
a friendly, innocent air. And why havent you ever owned a car?
I thought for a second about what I should not say in response. So instead of saying:
Because it never occurred to me to get a car, I respondedand for added emphasis,
I shrugged my shoulders and assumed a distracted lookBecause I never needed a
car.
This answer seemed to put him in a good mood. Is that so?, he then exclaimed,
almost with enthusiasm. I sensed that I had committed a second, even worse mistake.
And why dont you need a car,sonnyboy?
Sonnyboy shrugged his shoulders, afraid. Because I had more need of other things.
Such as?
Books.
Aha!, the policeman said thoughtfully, and he repeated the word, books.
Evidently he was now certain of his diagnosis. And then: Dont act the moron!,
which is how he made it clear to me that he had discovered that sonnyboy was a
highbrow who was faking imbecility and that, in attempt to simulate an inability to
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understand that offers were orders, pretended to be an idiot. We know your kind, he
thought, giving me a friendly poke in the chest. And then, with a sweeping gesture
that indicated the distant horizons: And where do you want to go?
This was the question that I most feared, since I still had sixty-four kilometers of
highway until San L; and once there, I had nowhere to go. If I had tried to define for
him the absence of a goal for someone who is on the road, I would definitely have
seemed like a vagrant. God knows where I would be sitting now if, at that very
moment, L. had not arrived, truly like a deus in machina, if he had not pulled up
alongside us with his imposing six-seat sedan, if he had not stopped suddenly and
gestured to me, inviting me to get into his car, something that not only left the
policeman flabbergasted, but also seriously challenged his philosophy.
Dont do it again!, he snapped, as I got into our car.
What is it that I am not supposed to do again?
Evidently, I must not refrain from buying what is offered in the form of a command to
everyone.
When in these offers you recognize the commandments of our time, one is no longer
surprised that even those who cannot afford to do so also end up buying the
commodities that are offered. And they do so because they are even less capable of
affording not following orders; that is, not buying the commodities. And since when
has the appeal to duty [Pflicht] respected those without resources? And since when
has duty [Sollen] ever exempted the have-nots from its commands? Just as, according
to Kant, one must comply with ones duty even when, or especially when, it is
contrary to ones inclination, so today one has to comply even when it is contrary to
ones own responsibility. Especially today. In the same way, the mandates of the
offers are categorical. And when they announce their must-have, to appeal to ones
own precarious situation of duty-and-responsibility would be pure sentimentalism.
Of course, this analogy is a philosophical exaggeration, but it nonetheless contains a
kernel of truth, since it is no metaphor to truly claim that today there is hardly
anything in the spiritual life of contemporary man that plays as fundamental a role
as the difference between what one cannot afford and what cannot be afforded; and
this difference furthermore becomes real in the form of a battle. If for the man of
our time there is a characteristic conflict of duties, it is none other than the no-holdsbarred, ferocious and exhausting battle that takes place in the hearts of customers and
within the bosom of the family. True, no-holds-barred, ferocious and exhausting,
because the fact that the object of the struggle can make us stupid and the battle itself
could take place as a comical version of real conflicts, does not at all detract from its
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bitterness and must suffice as the fundamental conflict of a contemporary bourgeois

tragedy.
As everyone knows, this tragedy usually ends with the victory of the mandate of the
offer; that is, with the acquisition of the commodity. But this victory is dearly bought,
since from that very moment the customer begins to experience the servile
compulsion of paying in installments for the acquired object.8
But it makes no difference whether he pays in full or pays in installments: from the
moment that the buyer has the object, he also wants to enjoy his possession. And since
he can only enjoy it by using it, he uses it because he has it and, in this way, it
becomes his creature [as an instrument without any will]. But not just for that reason.
Because he now has the object, morally there is no question about the fact that its
possession implies getting the most out of it. In principle, to do otherwise would be
like buying bread but not eating it. Turning on the television only now and then, or
using the radio only occasionally, would mean voluntarily renouncing something that
is already totally paid for or being paid for on installments, without benefiting anyone,
that is, wasting it. And naturally this is hardly ever the case. If someone
uninterruptedly endures the products delivered by the radio and television and allows
himself to be marked by them, at least he does so for ethical reasons, too.
But this is not sufficient, either, for once you have something, not only do you use
it, but you also need it. Once you go down the path of using something, this use
demands that you continue along that same path. In the end, one does not have what is
necessary, but needs what one has. Each situation of ownership is consolidated and
psychologically established as the normal situation. This means: once one lacks a
popular consumer item, one experiences not just a lack, but hunger. But we are
always lacking something, since all commodities, for the advancement (and by way of
planning) of production, are goods that, although they may not be consumable in the
strict sense of the word, like bread and butter, are ordinarily used and their lack
concerns their user; if the latter has an object and uses it, he tends to need it: need
grinds its heel in the face of the consumer. And in a certain sense, drug addiction is
the model for todays needs; which is to say that needs owe their existence and their
nature to the physical existence of particular commodities.
The most refined of these commodities, however, are those that fortuitously
produce cumulative needs. The idea that God or nature has implanted in man
a fundamental need for Coca-Cola will not even be claimed in the country where it is
produced. There, however, peoples thirst has become accustomed to Coca-Cola; and
thishere we come to the main questiondespite the fact that its ultimate secret
function does not consist in quenching thirst, but in producing it; moreover, in
producing a thirst that is transformed into a specific thirst for Coca-Cola. Thus, here
65

the demand is the product of the offer; the need, the product of the product; but at the
same time the need created by the product functions as the guarantee of the further
cumulative production of the product.
This last example shows that, if offers are described as todays commandments, one
cannot underestimate their imperative character. The essence of this character does not
lie only in the expressed imperative propositions or merely in the noisy mandatedemand: Buy your Mozart underwear! Buy it immediately! It is a must!, to which in
the end one can offer some resistance with a little self-control, despite the fact that one
was treated in advance as if you already owned these things. The imperative lies rather
in the possession of the product itself. Its orders, although silent, do not in fact tolerate
any opposition. Every commodity, once obtained, in order to continue to be usable or,
at least, in order not to become immediately unusable (also for reasons of prestige: in
order to be surrounded by objects of its own class), demands the purchase of more
commodities; each commodity hungers for another commodity, no, for other
commodities. And each one also makes us hunger for others: buying commodities is
not hard, but it is very hard to possess them, since the owner of the commodity must
himself become the hunger for that commodity (the hunger for soap, for gasoline).
And as hard as it might be to feed the hungry mouths of the growing family of objects
that have been transformed into his property, he has no other choice than to accept
their needs; and this is what he does, even before he knows he is doing it. Whoever
needs A also needs B; and whoever needs B, also needs C. He does not just need,
therefore, to buy A over and over again (as in the case of Coca-Cola), but must buy
instead the entire succession of commodities: Bdemanded by A, Cdemanded
by B, Ddemanded by C, and so on in infinitum. With each purchase he sells himself:
each purchase is a form of adopting a growing family of commodities, which
reproduce like rabbits and that he must financially support. On the one hand this
implies a certain convenience, that is, the fact that he hardly needs to worry about his
way of life, or about making his own decisions, since what he must do every day is
proclaimed by the hungry members of the family of commodities; and time goes on.
On the other hand, however, it also means that he is organized, tutored, and hounded
by these thousands of family members, that keep him going; that he spends his life
subject to a dictatorship; that he has discarded in advance his right to choose future
needs; that is, he never has the time or the freedom to make known or even to perceive
his own needs.
The naf will warn about the danger of allowing oneself to be led by this kind of
hungry commodity; naturally, however, this is derisory, because there are no
commodities that are not hungry. And there are no such commodities, because it is not
the individual commodity that is hungry, but the universe of commodities as a whole;
because what we call the hunger of things is nothing but the interdependence of
production, that is, the fact that all products are interrelated and refer to one another. It
66

is of course impracticable to remain outside of this universe of commodities and

production, as any attempt to remain outside the world would also be, and therefore,
any attempt to be, but not to be in the world. And if a madman were to perform the
experiment of making himself independent, even if only from a few of these gadgets
that constitute our world, electricity for example, he would quickly perish. No gaps
can be allowed in the system, in which one participates nolens volens when you are
born these days, for otherwise the system would be utterly lost.
The fact that all commodities, which are offered to us as commands and are thus
purchased, in turn conceal needs, which become our needs, represents the climax of
the matricial phenomenon, for our needs are nothing but the copies or reproductions
of the needs of the commodities themselves. And what we are going to need tomorrow
is written neither in the stars nor in our hearts; nor is it in our stomachs; but in the
refrigerator, which we bought the day before yesterday, or in the radio, which we
bought yesterday, or in the television, that we bought today; and tomorrow we will be
at the beck and call of the dictates of their needs, with a palpitating heart.
Section 22
The first axiom of economic ontology: that which only happens once does not exist.
Digression on photography.
We just said: the fact that not only our experiences, but even our needs, are molded,
represents the maximum service of the matrix. And this is certainly correct, insofar as
we see ourselves as objects and therefore as victims of this molding process, since
there is no deeper stratum than that of our needs. Even with this observation, however,
we still have not comprehensively described the capacities of the matrix.
This is because the matrices mold not just us, but the world itself. This claim would
appear to be stating the obvious, since it seems only to refer to the fact of assembly
line production. But it will be clearly seen that it is not so obvious when we return to
our original set of examples, to the production of phantoms in radio and television.
From that perspective, our claim means that the artificial models of the worldand
the transmissions that come to us as their reproductionsnot only mold us and our
image of the world, but the real world itself; that this molding process has a
boomerang effect; that the lie really lies to itself; in short: that the real is transformed
into the copy of its images.
In order to understand the specific procedure by which the real is transformed into a
copy of its images, we have to begin very much ab ovo.

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At the beginning we observed that the real or alleged events delivered to our homes,
just because they are delivered, become commodities and, insofar as every event is
delivered to our homes in the form of innumerable individual specimens, all of them
are transformed into mass commodities. The relation between event and transmission
is therefore a particular case of the specific relation between model andreproduced
commodity.
Yet if one asks which is realreal in the economic sensethe model or the
reproduction, the answer is: the reproduction, the reproduced commodity, because it is
only thanks to it that the model exists. And the commodity becomes all the more real,
as more specimens of it are sold; for its part, the model is real only to the extent that,
thanks to its quality as a model, it makes possible the realization of the maximum
number of sales of its reproductions. If there was such a thing as an academic
ontology of economics, that is, a theory of being based on how the latter appears from
the perspective of contemporary production and consumption, its first axiom would be
something like this: Reality is produced by way of reproduction; existence is only in
the plural, only as a series. And its negative form: One time is no time at all; what is
only unique does not exist; the singular still belongs to non-being.9
This axiom sounds absurd and it is in fact hard to grasp. And this is because what is
acknowledged as existent is neither the universal nor the particular, but
a tertium: the series; that is, because it involves something that intersects with the
classical alternative of nominalism/realism, something with which we are familiar.
However, this does not prevent the axiom from being instilled into our very bones
these days, and especially those of us who are far from being philosophers:
Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to watch travelers, especially those from the
most highly industrialized countries, in Rome or Florence, will have noted how
irritated they are when they are confronted with unique things,10 that is, when they
come face to face with those great historical objects, which survive as specimens of
the unique in the world of the assembly line. In fact, for the most part these tourists
bring along with them a remedy against this annoyance: a kind of syringe, the use of
which provides them with the immediate reestablishment of their peace of mind; more
precisely, a device, with the assistance of which they can immediately transform any
unique object into a theme, which for its beauty or its ineffable nature would be too
irritating to them, and enables them to transform any too-individualized article into an
indefinite article, that is, into an object which, in the universe of reproduction, can
have a legitimate existence as a reproduction; in sum: all these travelers are equipped
with a camera. And like magicians who do not even need to touch their targets, they
tour the world en masse, without pause, pour corriger sa nature: to eliminate the
defect, which every work of art, due to its uniqueness, represents within the assembly
line world; to find a place for it, by means of reproduction, in the assembly line
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universe, from which it was excluded up until now; that is, to capture it
photographically. Once they have taken their snapshots, they are at peace.
This capture, however, also means embrace, since what these magicians achieve by
way of their reproduction is, at the same time, possessing the objects. We do not need
to add, only in effigie. The mode by which these objects are possessed is the very
same mode of possession to which our tourists are accustomed. It is only because they
possess the objects in effigie that they possess them. And since they know no other
way of existence than the one that prevails among effigiesthe assembly line
commodities of their world among, with and from which they live are generally
reproductions, copies of modelsthe copies are real to them. Since they do not
photograph what they seesince what they see, they only see to photograph, and
what they photograph they only photograph in order to possesswhat they
photograph is not the real. For them the real is instead the photograph, that is, the
individual specimens of assembly line reproduction, embraced in the universe of
series and transformed into its property. Expressed ontologically: they have replaced
the esse=percipi with an esse=haberi.11 For them, it is not the Piazza San Marco in
Venice that is properly real, but the Piazza that is in the photo album in Wuppertal,
Sheffield or Detroit. In this way, it can be said at the same time that that what counts
for them is not being there, but only having been there. And this is so not only because
having been there increases their prestige in their fatherland, but because only what it
was represents a secure possession. While the present, due to its fleeting nature,
cannot be possessed and remains an inconsistent, unreal, unprofitable good, that is,
it does not endure, what has been is the sole reality, insofar as, as an image, it has been
transformed into a thing and therefore into property. Formulated
ontologically: existence is only having been. Ifand this is highly improbable, since
to photograph and to philosophize seem to be mutually exclusiveamong these
magicians we were to discover one who did not behave like this, but who was very
well aware of what he was doing, who justified his past life by shooting photographs
in the following way: Because in my life there has never been anything superfluous,
wasted or unprofitable, I have transformed each past event into a reproduction and
thus into a material object; and I have brought home most of them in black and white,
some in color and even a couple of motion pictures, so that now I can always continue
to possess them: each thing is, because it endures; each thing is, because it is an
image. To be therefore means has been and to be reproduced and to be an image and
to be property.
Any attempt to provide more details concerning the close relation that exists between
the techniques of reproduction and memory (which, not without reason, is called
reproductive) would lead us too far afield. Here we shall only point out that it is
ambiguous: on the one hand, we are remembered by way of photos; but on the other
handand this is more importantthe souvenirs transformed into things have
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atrophied memory, as feeling and capacity, and have replaced it. To the extent that
contemporary man still concedes any value to conceiving of himself as a life, to
obtaining an autobiographical image of himself, he composes it on the basis of photos,
which he has himself taken. The images of what he had been no longer need to be
remembered: they are mounted in an album; nor do any of them need to stand out
from the others: at most by being at the end of the album. Here and only here is where
his past resides, just like the Basilica of San Marcos. Only with the help of the
snapshots mounted in the album, and therefore secured against oblivion, he
reconstructs his past; and he keeps his diary only this form, as a photo album. To him
it is merely an unimportant coincidence that his life, reconstructed in this manner, is
composed almost exclusively of trips and journeys and that all the rest of it does not
seem to count as life.
This is basically the museum principle, which has now triumphed as the
autobiographical principle: each persons life is presented to him in the form of a
series of images, as a kind of autobiographical gallery; but in this way, no longer as
something past, since the past has been projected to the sole realm of being an image,
available and present. Time, where is thy sting?
If one were to offer Mister Smith a trip to Italy, but only on the condition that he not
take any photographs under any circumstances, that is, that he not prepare any kind of
record for tomorrow, he would reject the invitation as a terrible waste, that is, as an
almost immoral proposal. If he were forced to go on such a trip, he would be the prey
of panic, since he would not know what to do with the present and with all the things
worth seeing all ready to be photographed; in short: he would not know what to do
with himself. That is why it is only rational that the travel agencies do not attempt to
seduce their customers with the invitation, Visit lovely Venice, but with Visit
unforgettable Venice. It is already unforgettable even before you have seen it. You do
not have to visit it because it is beautiful, but because it is unforgettable; just has you
have to buy a pair of pants because it will not wear out. It is not unforgettable because
it is beautiful, but because the traveler can be confident that it is beautiful because he
is guaranteed that it is unforgettable. Thus, for anyone who travels in this manner the
present is degraded to a means to procure this what will have to have been,12 on the
pretextit is hardly worth the trouble to speak of itof the only valid commodity of
reproduction of the future perfect; that is, of something unreal and phantom-like. It
would be superfluous to point out that this is not the only way to travel.
Section 23
The second axiom of economic ontology: that which is not profitable does not exist.

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In the same way that, in the view of our putative ontologists of economics, the dignity
that corresponds to the unique specimen is indeed slight, so too is the ontological
dignity of unproduced things in general just as minimal, that is, that of natural
objects; especially that of the unusable natural elements, which are discarded in
assembly line production. These elements are considered to be so much dead weight
that, because it has no economic value, does not deserve anything better than nonexistence either, that is, it deserves in effect to be annihilated. This is why the second
axiom of economic ontology states as follows: That which is not profitable does not
exist; or it does not deserve to exist. Our times show with sufficient clarity that
anything can be condemned to this absence of value, to become disposable dross,
depending on its economic situation: and people are just as much subject to this rule
as nuclear wastes.
Compared to the real existence of assembly line products, intended to satisfy needs (or
which foresee these same needs that they will then satisfy), in the view of the
ontologist of economics, nature as a totality, despite its immensity, lies outside the
boundaries of the foreseen, outside the boundaries of what for him represents the field
of providence. For him, nature is in itself only , only accidental,
although, as a raw material for products, it, too, participates in existence and
value, but both only in the form of loans, that is, that they are borrowed in advance
by the products, which can acquire part of them. However, what nature really conceals
that is unprofitable, that is, those pieces that the producer not only cannot use, but
which he cannot even eliminate, the excess of the universe, for example, the Milky
Way, represents in the view of this ontologist, to the extent that he will admit its
existence, a metaphysical scandal, a material outrage, that nothing can justify,
installed without any reason and, in a certain way, only explainable by entrepreneurial
incompetence on a cosmic scale. Probably, the current nihilist complaint about the
meaninglessness of the world is the expression, at least, of the cosmic sorrow of the
industrial era; a cosmic sorrow that is precisely founded on the suspicion that, when
all is said and done, the excess of the universe is neither usable nor profitable, it is
superfluous, a waste and it exists for nothing; and obviously it has nothing else to do
but to metaphysically loaf around in space, which has been put at its disposal for
incomprehensible reasons.13
But I have qualified this notion: To the extent that the ontologist will admit the
existence of the unusable, since he almost never accepts the existence of the
unusable, any more than the classical systems of theodicy accept the existence of
, for example, in Plotinus, in that which is accepted14 in a certain place within
the system and, in this way, is stripped of its negative quality. Naturally, this analogy
does not have to mean that the economic ontology has given way to a regular
theodicy, and that it has affirmed explicitly as a dogma that there is nothing that
cannot be used. Explicit dogmas do not suit it. Its activity, however, much more
71

convincing than any theory could ever be, seems to be inflamed by an almost
sportsmanlike ambition to cleverly deceive nature: by the ambition to show it, to
point out to it that its metaphysical indolence serves no purpose and that its
affectations, its resistance, its pretense of independence with respect to the universe of
production, are useless; by the ambition to violate it, to impregnate it, to compel it by
force to be fertile and to prove to it ad oculos that it can be exploited to the very end
(and hopefully this will be achieved by way of the invention and production of the
most absurd needs, which will even adapt natures dregs). However perfectly sure of
itself and overwhelming this provocative attitude may seem, it is not completely free
of fear and trembling. Even the Titan feels the cosmic dread of the industrial era and
the fear of not being capable of meeting his challenges and that his victim (despite
perhaps frigidly and mockingly retaining her maximal fertility) can have her revenge
by way of an excess of yield. The struggle, accompanied by this fear, then adopts a
restless form; and just as the violated one (that is, the world of nature) seems to
emerge from each embrace with a new virginity and with each morning springs back
as if it did not even notice what had been done to it, the struggle is becoming more
violent and is even beginning to take on the wrathful aspect of the struggle of
Sisyphus.
But we shall leave aside this audacious and not altogether credible mythological
image. The greatest possible effect is, in any case, the following: There must not be
anything that is not usable! And its positive imperative version: Everything must be
usable! In a certain sense, the economic ontology is at the same time an ethics, which
is proposed as the task of redemption of the chaos of the world from its situation as
raw material, its sinfulness, its inauthenticity, that is, its goal is to transform the
inauthentic into the authentic, and chaos into a universe of products; in short: to
establish an aetas aureaof manufactured products, so that at the end of the days of
chaos, with millions of mature, fine and golden forms, it comes forth (as) a
completely fermented and red-hot Apollonian picture.15
With the expressions used here it has been suggested that in this manner economic
ontology is also a doctrine of justification: what previously only existed as a
contingent and unfinished world, is nowjustified, since it is shown to be the
indispensable material for elaboration and for finished products.16 And with this also
the existence of the human producer himself, since without his labor, realized by the
sweat of his brow, the transformation and salvation of the world would not take place.
In the view of economic ontology, then, our mission is to cause the world to return to
itself [to be itself] and, to help it to fulfill its destiny, to bring it to us: in the steel
mills, the factories, the electric and nuclear power plants, radio and television stations.
The latter are the houses of being in which man attempts to submit the world as a
whole to this process of transformation: a task so immense that the classical definition
of homo faber no longer fits a humanity swept away by this fever for transformation.
72

The classical homo faber was content to use parts of the world to produce his own
world, one that was not provided by the world directly and in this he saw his destiny
and his freedom. What he did not need for this purpose he left alone. Contemporary
man, on the other hand, sees the whole world as eo ipso merely a material; he prefers
to impose new needs upon himself, rather than to leave what exists intact and without
use; and he wants to remake the world as a whole, transform it and finish it. His
pretension is not, of course, either less or more universal than that of the religious or
philosophical-systematic schools of thought. He is the blacksmith of existence; or at
least, its shepherd.
It will surely be surprising to encounter this expression here, in this truly nonHeideggerian context; it is true that the abyss between shepherd and blacksmith,
that is, between Heidegger, who assigns17language as a home to being, and
economic ontology, which brings the world of the above-mentioned sorrows and
massacres right into our homes, is enormously wide. That being said, however, it is
undeniable that they have something in common: the particular basic assumption
that existence needs our help, since as it is it needs to be inhabited, without us it
cannot live for even one instant nor can it be properly set in order and it has to find its
stable and its place in us. In both cases one sees the effort to provide idealism (in
the sense of our definition) with a realistic source and a justification; and this
prescription to the world or to being itself of the need that it should become my world.
The basis of both philosophies is the desire to procure for man a metaphysical
mission, to make him believe that he has a purpose, that is, to justify ex post facto, as
a mission, what he does anyway. This desire is by no means incomprehensible. In both
cases we are dealing with a protest against the current position of man in the
cosmos or, more precisely, against the fact that man does not occupy any position at
all in the cosmos; that, degraded by naturalism to being a part of nature amidst
millions of other parts of nature, he has been dispossessed of the illusion of his
anthropocentric privilege. Both philosophies show how extraordinarily difficult it is to
respond to and to endure this lack of privilege, since in both an attempt is made to
introduce by the back door, as if it were contraband, a special position, a mission, the
worlds absolute need for man. The shepherd is, precisely, the center of the flock
and, as such, he is not a sheep. If man is the shepherd of existence or of the world,
then he is not such a shepherd only in the same sense as the world, but in another,
different and special sense; and the glory of his metaphysical distinction in turn
becomes resplendent. The same thing is true of the blacksmith of the world. In both
philosophies it is therefore a matter of a shame-stricken anthropomorphism, of a new
variety, since what they affirm is precisely not that the world is there for man, but, to
the contrary, that man is there for the world. In both, the role attributed to man is that
of a cosmic altruist, that of acosmic manager, who does not belong to that which he
looks after, and whose only concern is the good of the world and of existence.
73

Although it might seem fascinating to note that two such disparate contemporary
philosophies
share,
as modern-day philosophies,
fundamental
theoretical
underpinnings, that have nothing in common with any previous philosophies, what is
decisive for our inquiry is naturally only economic ontology, that is, the conviction
that the world, as it is, is not a finished world, nor a real world: properly speaking, it
even is not; that it will only really be to the degree that, re-elaborated by us, it will be
finished and put into circulation, that is, that it should disappear in reality as world.
For this philosophy, the idea that there should be events that are not used, reelaborated and put into circulation, and that they should not be referred to man, that
they should be anonymous, emerge for no reason, develop and then disappear into
nothing, is simply unbearable; it is just as unbearable for it as the notion that maybe,
somewhere, there might be wheat fields or orchards of fruit trees whose grain and
fruit would mature and then rot, without being harvested, would be to us. What merely
exists, is as if it did not exist at all. What only exists, is a waste. If it had to have been,
it has to be harvested. And this harvest, the harvest of the event and of history, takes
place largely in the form of broadcasts: the moribund, if it is broadcast, is given a new
lease on life; defeat, if it is reproduced, is turned into victory; private speech, if it is
reproduced thousands of times, becomes public. Only here and now, they are. But
what they were before being transformed into something common disappears into
vain appearance.
Section 24
Phantoms are not only matrices of the experience of the world, but the world itself.
The real as reproduction of its reproductions.
Thus, in the sense of economic ontology, neither the individual nor nature, but only
the sum of the finished products is really existent in the form of series of
reproductions. It is essential for these products not to be addressed except with regard
to their function (the satisfaction of a need), and this only consists in the quality that
makes them marketable and usable. No product fully achieves this goal: due to its
volume, weight and capability of being consumed, each one drags along with it a
sinful burden of attributes, in which the buyer is not interested. Irreverent in a way,
each one, just like the soul, seems to be ashamed to be chained to a body, to belong to
nature. The idea that is pursued is to reduce this corporeal remnant to an infinitesimal
minimum, and to achieve an angelic or semi-angelic state of existence.18
This is the case not only with regard to material products, but for all products; not
only for the physical substance, from which the material products are manufactured,
but for all productive processes involving the re-elaboration of a product; it therefore
74

also applies to the substance itself, which is elaborated in broadcasts, that is,
to events.
Insofar as these events are accepted as parts of nature and as particular events, they
are worthless; they are raw material; they drag along with them a sinful burden of
attributes, which cannot be used; they cannot pass the censorship of economic
ontology. In order to have any validity they have to be multiplied; and, since the
multiplication of matter without qualities would not have any meaning, they have to
be processed, worked over by the selection machine, that is, sifted. They are only
valid in this processed condition. The question concerning what or how the event
really was or is, is rendered impertinent, since we are dealing here with a
commodity. One does not ask about what fruits have been passed through the
machinery in order to be able to manufacture the jam you are about to eat. Instead,
one comes face to face with the product: This is the real thing, if it functions in its
use; if it is presented as something that one needs; and if it verifies its credentials by
disappearing by being used.
This concept of the truth of the product and the commodity, that is, of their
accreditation, is most completely fulfilled in connection with events, which come in
their processed condition as radio or television broadcasts: they do not bear the
burden of any dead weight; nor any kind of burdens that the consumers have to take
upon themselves: neither journeys, nor efforts, nor dangers. They are so perfect that
even after being consumed, there is no remnant left over, not a pit or any hair or
bones; not even the product itself (as is the case with the book after one has read it).
The consumer good disappears in consumption, as takes place with pills. Without
taking into account the invisible effect, which consists in the fact that the consumer,
through the commodity, once again becomes a mass-man, everything continues as
before. Nothing needs to be arranged or washed; nothing has happened, nothing has
been left over, nothing is left; the absence of consequences is complete. In the end
there is a danger that the consumer can be required to be supplied with undesired
cultural goods. There is no threatening education [Bildung].
This explanation, however, is insufficient. Not only is our bread an artificial product,
but so, too, is its raw material, the grain, which, although it grows, does so in a
manner that is most favorable for its use as a product. As for culture, especially the
current mass-produced form of culture, what is essential is not just the supplementary
elaboration of the substance offered by destiny, but the manipulation of this same
substance. In fact, there is no kind of production that does not involve intervention in
the raw substance as soon as possible, that is, that does not allow it any time to remain
mere raw substance and that does not strive to fix it and transform its development
in the first stage of production. And this is also true of the broadcasting industry: its
raw material consists largely of events; that is why an attempt is made to cultivate
75

them, that is, to see to it that they take place in such a way that they are prepared for
their function of being finished commodities; an attempt is made to confer upon them
as soon as possible or in advance an optimal disposition for reproduction; that is, to
endeavor to make them serve without difficulty as the basis for their own
reproduction. The realthe alleged modelhas to be in conformance with its
eventual copies, so it can be recreated in the image of its reproductions. Everyday
events have to be adapted in advance to their copies. There really are numerous events
that only take place as they do in order to be usable as broadcasts; and there are even
some that only take place because they are desired or needed as broadcasts. In such
cases, one can no longer determine where reality ends and the play begins. When
judges, witnesses and lawyers have to perform their activities while aware of the
fact that perhaps millions of people are watching them, the temptation to indulge in
theatrics must be overwhelming (statement of judge Medina, quoted in the New York
Herald, September 13, 1954). Of course, the question about where reality ends and
appearance begins is already badly posed, because radio, television and the
consumption of phantoms are also such concrete social realities that they can compete
with most of the other realities of our time and even determine what is real and
how it really happens. The lines of Karl Kraus, with which he thought to provoke a
scandal:
In
the
beginning
and then the world appeared

was

the

press

are now completely banal, since today we have to say:

In
the
beginning
For which the world takes place.

was

the

broadcast

This upside-down, not to say perverted, model, of the relation between the model and
the reproduction is certainly nothing new to us: compared to their millions of
reproductions, the models, the real stars of the motion picture industry, are worth
nothing; and the same way that they, the real stars, traverse Hollywood in flesh and
blood, they are actually nothing but poor phantoms of their reproductions: phantoms
that vainly seek to rise to the level of their original blueprints.
Today, many events have a lot in common with Hollywood stars: football games,
trials, political demonstrations, which are hardly seen at all, and are unreal in
comparison with their broadcasts that are heard and seen by millions; they would be,
in any event, if their superfluity was not predetermined because they are reproduced
and rebroadcast. They are already conceived in advance not for those who originally
participate in or attend them, but for the millions of persons who listen to and watch
their reproductions. Many of these events, for example, are not important enough to
76

be broadcast; they are only important enough to be broadcast, they only acquire a
historical reality through the broadcast and are organized solely because the broadcast
is important. Theatrum mundi.
Today, then, to an ever-greater extent, the real original is nothing but the excuse for
its copies. And to really participate in these original events excites our
contemporaries no morewho have in turn been transformed into copiesthan it
would excite the reader of a book to be brought into the presence of the typeset
original of a book, or for the inhabitant of Platos cave to get hold of the idea.19
***
Here we are, then, the seated brotherhood of a contemporary Lynceus, born to see,
destined to contemplation, and we watch attentively. But Lynceus does not seem to
be our pattern, our model. And we do not look at things the way he does; but, by not
leaving our home, we expect the prey to fall into our net, like the spider. Our home
has been transformed into a trap. But what is trapped in it is for us the world. Outside
of this, there is nothing.
Here we are, then, sitting down and a piece of the world flies into our net and it is
ours.
But what flew to us did not really fly; it was thrown to us. And what was thrown to us
was not really a piece of the world, but a phantom. This phantom, however, was not a
copy of the world, but prey driven into our nets by the matrix. And this driven prey
is ours only because it must be converted for us into a matrix, because we must
recreate ourselves in its image. And we have to recreate ourselves so that we cannot
call anything else ours, nor shall we have any other world besides this.
Here we are, then, seated before our prey, which claims to be a phantom, a copy, the
world. And we consume it and we make ourselves like it.
So, if there were to be someone among us who, being a veritable Lynceusborn to
see, destined to contemplatewere to try to unmask this lie and were to set himself
on the path of really seeing what is distant and seeing what is near, he would soon
enough abandon his quest and return to his previous state of complete deception, since
he will encounter nothing but the models of the images, which had to model his soul,
the models modeled according to these images, the matrices necessary for the
production of matrices. And if we were to ask him about what there really is that
remains of the real, he would respond that its destiny is merely to become truly real in
the unreality of its hunting drives.
77

 1. The individual images, which at the end of the 19th century and the
beginning of the 20th century articulated and denominated world-views, were
merely inoffensive and modest precursors of todays stimulating models
[inducers]. No other world-view has been able to survive. Only those worldviews have survived which were able to clearly establish themselves as
stimulating models, which actually renounce even the appearance of a worldview, however much they might tolerateas a superfluous luxury, of course
the fact that academic world-views might be derived from them. [Authors
note.]
2. Der Strmer was an anti-semitic weekly published in Nuremberg by Julius
Streicher. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
3. Because the idea of the millions of people murdered is unimaginable, the
added intuition that this annihilation took place because of, or as a substitute
for, images, can hardly increase our horror. The basic idea that at a certain
moment became obvious to us from the faith in the progress of humanization as
the fruit of education; the idea that humanity was implanted at the worldhistorical moment, when human sacrifice was carried out in the form of an
image, that is, when Isaac was replaced by the ram, in a much more fruitful
way than by sacrificing men instead of images, this idea cannot be betrayed.
[Authors note.]
4. This fact is related, by the way, to the international decline of caricature and
satirical magazines: making fun of powerand real caricature always consisted
in thishas simply become an all-too-delicate enterprise. It is true that the
sketches in Der Strmer were not real caricatures or satires, because they chose
only victims as such for their depictions. [Authors note.]
5. The model of this lie structurally corresponds to that of all contemporary
counterrevolutions, which have to win with the help of those against whom
they are directed. [Authors note.]
6. That this is true, is generally accepted today. It is true that it is not true as a
philosophically relevant fact, as was the case in Marx, since for the latter what
he called ideology arose by way of a particular ensemble of idealism and
the Hegelian master-slave schema; for him, ideology meant the
representation of the world of the master, which eo ipso was also valid for the
slave without class consciousness; that is, the representation, which naturally
was not the property of the slave, but of his owner. This is all he is referring to
with his thesis that the philosophy of an era is always that of the ruling class.
78

This Marxian schema is not applicable in its original form to the contemporary
relations of mass society; this is because every commodity, regardless of
whether we are talking about cigarettes, movies or world-views, is produced
from its inception in such a way as to promise the maximum consumption; that
is, that in advance the real or alleged desires of the consumer have to be taken
into account. And because the producers are also consumers of commodities
(cigarettes, movies or world-views) produced by themselves; which has the
dialectical consequence that the ruling class is equally marked by mass
products, which were not made for it, but for the masses. Instead of the
Hegelian The master becomes the slave of the slave we would have to
inscribe the formula: The master becomes one slave among other slaves.
[Authors note.]
7. These days one often hears justifications for molding man by connecting him
with existing moralities. For example, anyone who opposes this molding is
stigmatized as unchristian or undemocratic. The argument goes as
follows: anyone who does not participate demonstrates a lack of humanity, that
is, a lack of Christianity, or else he is claiming an extra ration, that is,
privileges. In Links famous book, The Return to Religion, any person who,
instead of consuming the guilty conscience supplied directly to his home, has
scruples of conscience, is considered to be introverted, that is, socially ill.
Concerning this book, which is not one of the more edifying treatises ever
published, but was a bestseller in 1936, and was printed in eighteen editions in
nine months, by one of the best publishing houses, and in which Christ is
presented as a model of extroversion, see my review in Zeitschrift fr
Sozialforschung, 1938 (1 and 2). [Authors note.]
8. By way of this mode of payment the renunciation of freedom is completed,
which began with obedience to the mandate of the offer: the buyer, who still
owes the remaining balance of his payments, feels that he is constantly in debt;
and not only to the seller, but also to the supplied commodity. He even
considers his possession as something undeserved; as he uses it, however, he
does not have a free relation with it. And since he lives the good life by having
such a commodity, he must spend the rest of his life working harder so he can
remain at the exalted level thus attained; and in this way he begins to forfeit the
possibility of being his own master. [Authors note.]
9. In a certain sense, this axiom is supported by the exact sciences: for the
latter, what is real is only what continues to exist under the same conditions,
that is, what is regular. Their maxim could be: What cannot be repeated, I will
not consider to be existent. The arrogant pride of the intellectuals of the 19th
79

century that was marshaled against religion (identified with miracles), the
pride of the scientist that was directed against history, consists of nothing but
the equation of being with plurality, that is, the norm. [Authors note.]
10. The possession of an object, which only exists as a single specimen, for
example, a work of art, certainly represents a value and, as a monopoly, is a
display of wealth and confers a sense of aristocracy. Artisanal creations and
mass products cohabit intimately today. The more mechanized his products
become, the more their producer surrounds himself with products of ancient
manufacturing technique. [Authors note.]
11. The specifically most fascinating feature of the photograph is based on the
fact that it unites within itself two of todays most crucial activities:
reproduction and acquisition. We must in addition point out that anyone who
acquires in this way has to take into account, just like the fisherman or the
hunter, only the necessary tools, since what he acquires (that is, views) is freely
available which, in todays commodity-based world, simply represents a
fabulous exception. It is not by chance that in English, you shoot a
photograph, as if the theme was a hunted animal. What is fascinating about
photography is the fact that it is simultaneously acquisition and fun, that is, a
kind of leisure activity, which makes leisure pleasant for the illiterate because it
has the form of an apparent occupation, and often even as a kind of job or, in
short, it is presented as a hobby. The hobby, in turn, belongs to the circle of
problems of the world of the phantoms, since it is a kind of relaxation that is in
some respects similar to work; or even a sort of a job, which is undertaken in
order to relax after ones real job. It is not necessary to delineate the
connections between all of these phenomena here, since they are obvious upon
even the most cursory examination. [Authors note.]
12. Es wird gewesen sein: this involves the Futurum II or the future perfect,
like one who claims, for example, with respect to an action: I had to have
written it. [Spanish Translators Note.]
13. Too
much.
Too
much
water
flows
completely
superfluous
since
last
night.
Too
much,
yes,
too
much
world
was
made,
Too
many
coastlines,
that
want
to
be
mentioned,
Too
many
winds,
that
blow
uselessly.
Who
will
count
or
praise
so
many
things?
What
cartographer
marks
the
anonymous
coral
reefs,
which
are
at
the
bottom
of
the
sea,
80

the
seams
of
gold,
that
no
one
has
yet
seen,
the
constellations,
that
still
do
not
have
a
name?
Without
meaning,
to
ridicule
and
only
to
emerge
all
that
excess
abundance
is
there.
And
is
there
a
man,
who,
without
error,
can
recite
everything
that
is
there
without
fail;
who
will
count
it
all
to
the
very
end
and
who
will
catalog
it
in
the
lists?
Where would his gratitude be? Where would even one person hear him?
Even
he,
too
much!
His
eulogy,
mere
noise!
Too
much!
Open
the
curtains
for
me
and
let
the
candles
burn
out!
(From: Der fiebernde Columbus [Columbus Delirious].) [Authors note.]
14. This term means, first of all, as well as conceded, yielded, that is,
withdrawn before the overwhelming power [bermacht] of the real, to which
one gives up ones own place. I establish myself by accommodating myself to
it. In a second stage one overcomes this lack of freedom, at least in part:
religion and philosophical systems are the means by which one yields to it its
own space, its own place, in which, by way of localization, it is acknowledged
and, at the same time, limited; the divinity becomes the prisoner of his temple,
is imprisoned in its place in the system. Today, finally, accept means
only to accept something in such a way that it should be at my disposal and not
a bothersome nuisance. I adapt it to my needs. [Authors note.]
15. This surprising statement, in a passage from a letter written by the young
Rilke (1904), in fact sounds like a description of the eschatological situation in
which the substance of all unshaped things will assume its forms. Rilke, of
course, describes this in a very vague and obscure way, since he conceals the
process of production, by means of which he thinks that he can attain this
situation, that is, to guide our associations in a positively false direction: he
makes us think of aged wine or goldsmiths, that is, of process of production
that are as delicate as they are impersonal. Nonetheless, his dream is nothing
less than that of the total violation of the substance of the world. And if in him
as well, the alchemical representations of the golden age seem to be
passionately renewed, this is only possible because they recall precisely the
eschatological representations of economic ontology. In fact, such affirmations,
especially the Nietzschean idea of the Apollonian (which, as Erich Heller
correctly points out, is the almost literal source of the quote from Rilke), have
to be reinterpreted in the light of the background of economic ontology. The
fact that Nietzsche gave a totally new version of the discussion of the pair
81

substance and form with his introduction of the mythological pair

Dionysian-Apollonian, would remain obscure if we were not to take into
account the fact that, in the era of industrialization, substance (=the world of
unqualified matter) and form (=product) began to assume a universal
significance, which the first metaphysicians did not even dream of. (The
passage from Rilke is taken from Erich Heller, Enterbter Geist, Suhrkamp,
1954.) [Authors note.]
16. The authors argument rests upon the concept of finished [fertig]. Thus,
justification [Recht-fertigung], which is a theological concept, indicates
plenitude in the sense that the justified existence is the full and
finished existence; and, in the same sense, the finished product
[Fertigware] is such as the fruit of a process, the elaboration [Verfertigung]
of the shapeless or unfinished material (substance). [Note of the Spanish
Translator.]
17. This assumption is not only completely unfounded, but also an
anthropomorphism, which, by being presented in disguise, is no better but only
more strange. For it is strange that man, with no place to lay his head, should
be imputed to be his own need for shelter and home, that he would deceive
himself because, no longer being the guest of existence, he has to be its
shepherd or its landlord. No, whoever wants to have a home is always and
fundamentally only the individual, whether we are talking about a snail, a man
or a family; only the separate, the individual, preciselybecause he is separated
and, in the vast world, is defenseless, lost and too small in his home. Thus,
never the world itself, not to speak of its existence. The world (insofar as it
could have any preoccupations) has other worries than looking for and finding
a home. [Authors note.]
18. A considerable amount of abstract painting imagines these angels of the
industrial era, that is, incorporeal paintings. The popularity of todays sketches,
whose outlines are distinct lines that leave the internal part of what is
represented completely empty, would be incomprehensible if this style were to
have arisen solely from an artistic taste. [Authors note.]
19. Concerning this reference to Plato, see the first chapter of this book. Today,
in the United States, everyone knows from their own experience how little it
matters for hundreds of thousands of people to really be present at a boxing
match or a football game, because the original events have something unreal
about them, since they are organized in such a way to dazzle the spectators and,
like Platos ideas, need to be realized; in short: because they find their ideal
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realization in their best reproductions. Naturally, there will always be experts

who, scorning the copies, will still take pleasure only in the original bloody
nose; just as there are experts who, ridiculing the reproductions, can only
view Giottos in Padua. But these snobs only prove the rule. [Authors note.]

Chapter 5 - Stepping up to a more general

level
Chapter V
STEPPING UP TO A MORE GENERAL LEVEL
Let
me
appear
until
I
Let me actually be until I can appear. (V.)

can

actually

be. (Mignon)

Section 25
Five consequences: The world is adjusted. The world disappears. The world is
post-ideological. Only those who are already marked will be marked. Existence in this
world is not free.
We shall once again summarize the function of the matrices. As we have seen, the
matrices mark things in two ways:
1. They mark real events, which, take place in advance as the basis of reproduction,
since they only possess social reality as reproduced things and can only become
real as reproduced
things.
2. This reality, in turn (as daughter matrix)1 marks the souls of the consumers.
Thus, if events take place marked in advance; and if, on the other hand, the consumer
is already marked in advance, that is, he is prepared to receive the commodity, five
consequences may be deduced that are decisive for the description of our era:
I. The world is adjusted to man; man to the world, like glove to hand and hand to
glove, trousers to legs and legs to trousers.
The definition of todays products or men as commodities not made to measure
[that is, standardized and ready-to-wear] is a commonplace. But our comparison
with articles of clothing leads to something completely different and more
fundamental: the determination of the class of object, to which todays world belongs.
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It is of the essence of clothingand this feature transforms it into a particular class

to not be in front of us, but to drape us, adjust us and mold us with so little
resistance that, by using it, it is no longer noted or experienced as an object.
As everyone knows, Dilthey used the existence of resistance in his argument in favor
of the reality of the external world. In view of the fact that the relation of man with
the world takes place as a collision and as more or less uninterrupted friction, and not
as a neutral relation with something (which, according to Descartes, would be
revealed to be a phantom that we have made ourselves believe in), it is of
extraordinary importance to highlight the worlds character of resistance.
And it is all the more important insofar as all mans activities can be deduced from
this fact, that is, as attempts, always renewed, to reduce the friction between man and
the world to the minimum, that is, to produce a world that would be better adapted
for man or perhaps even fit him just like clothing.
And today it seems that this goal is closer to being realized than ever before. In any
event, the adaptation of man to the world and of the world to man is so complete that
the resistance of the world has become imperceptible; and that
II. The world is disappearing as world. This new formulation now makes it clear that
even our reference to the class of objects comprised by clothing can only serve as a
provisional reference, since it is also of the essence of clothing that it should remain
imperceptible as an object, since in its use it does not effectively disappear. For only
those objects that belong to one class disappear: the class of edible products, whose
sole purpose is to be annihilated, that is, to be absorbed. The world of the broadcast
belongs to this class.
The idea of a world that belongs in its entirety to this class is not new. As a materialist
fantasy of an aetus aurea it is even very ancient. Its name is the Land of Cockaigne.
This Land of Cockaigne, as you will recall, is totally edible, even the hair and the
bones, precisely because it no longer has hair and bones, that is, it does not contain
any inedible parts.2 And the last resistance, which is usually represented by the
spatial or financial distance of the commodity from the consumer, has also
disappeared here, since the objects, the roasted pigeons are also transmitted, that
is, they fly right into our open mouths. Because the pieces of this world have no other
purpose than to be ingested, consumed, assimilated, the Land of Cockaignes reason
for existence consists exclusively in losing its character as an object, that is, not to be
there as world.

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This constitutes a description of todays transmitted world. If this world comes

flying right into our eyes or ears, it has to disappear by being introduced into us
without any resistance, as received without static; it has to be ours, it is even
transformed into us.
III. Our contemporary world is post-ideological, that is, it has no need of ideology. By
this I mean to say that it is more a matter of arranging false views of the world a
posteriori, views that differ from the world, that is, ideologies, because the things that
happen in the world itself now take place as a pre-arranged spectacle. Where the lie,
constantly repeated, is transformed into truth, the explicit lie is superfluous.3
What takes place here is, in a way, the opposite of what Marx had foretold, when, in
his eschatological speculations on the truth, he expected a post-ideological situation:
whereas he counted on the eventuality that it would be the realization of truth that
would bring philosophy (and the latter was for Marx eo ipso ideology) to an end,
what has now been realized is, contrary to his expectations, the triumph of falsehood;
and what has rendered explicit ideology superfluous is the fact that false assertions
about the world have been themselves transformed into the world.
Naturally, the claim that world and worldview, that the real and the interpretation
of the real, no longer have to be different things, sounds very strange. This strangeness
is dispelled immediately, however, when this claim is viewed in connection with other
similar phenomena of our times. For example: the fact that bread and slices of bread
(since bread is sold only in the form of sliced bread) are not two different things. Just
as we cannot bake bread and slice it in our homes, we cannot really grasp or
ideologically interpret an event, either, which comes to us in an ideologically presliced condition, interpreted and digested in advance; nor can we make our own
images at home from what takes place ab ovo as an image. I said that we cannot;
for such a second elaboration is not only superfluous, but unrealizable.
Thus, this not being able is an extremely particular kind of incapacity; and it is
completely new:
When, in the old days, we were incapable of understanding or interpreting this or that
part of the world, it was because the object escaped us or opposed to us a resistance
that we could not overcome. Now, of course, we have seen that this resistance is not a
factor. Yet, surprisingly, it is just this absence of resistance on the part of the
transmitted world that impedes the understanding and interpretation of the world. Or
maybe this should not be so surprising: we do not understand the smooth little pill that
we swallow so easily, but we do understand the piece of meat that we have to chew.
The transmitted world that is received without static is like the pill. Or to use
another image: since this world has proven to be too easy (in a certain way like
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a ralit trop facile, similar to femmes faciles), it is too obliging and the minute it
appears it gives itself up, we cannot properly take it nor can we even try to take
either it or its meaning.
IV. Only those who have already been marked will be marked. What is true of the
transmitted world, that is, that within it the duality that is ordinarily assumed to be one
of its obvious features is eliminated, also goes for us, the consumers of the pre-marked
world. It is characteristic of the current situation of conformism that man adapts to
the world, just as the world adapts to man; it is moreover the distinction between a
situation of the consumer as a tabula rasa who exists in a certain time, and a process,
in which the image of the world is impressed upon this tabula. Now, the consumer is
always mutilated in advance, ready to be modeled and prepared to receive a matrix; he
more or less always assents to the form that will be impressed upon him. Each
individual soul is ready to adjust to the matrix, almost like a bas-relief with respect to
its corresponding engraved form; and since the matricial seal does not only make its
impression exclusively on the soul or the cut of its vestments, because the soul is
cut in accordance with the latter, so the soul does not leave its mark on the matrix,
since the latter has already been engraved.
The coming and going between man and world takes place as an exchange between
two imprints, as the movement between reality and the consumers, both marked with
the form of the matrix; that is, in a distinctly phantasmagorical way, since in this
exchange phantoms circulate with phantoms (produced by phantoms). However, it can
nevertheless not be claimed that life becomes unreal because of the phantasmagorical
nature of this process. To the contrary, it is really terrible. Yes, really terrible.
V. Therefore, existence in this post-ideological Land of Cockaigne is not
free. However undeniable it may be that thousands of events and pieces of the world,
from which our predecessors were excluded, today come flying into our ears and eyes;
and despite the evidence that we are permitted to choose which phantoms we want
among those that are flying towards us, we are nonetheless deceived, since we find
ourselves in the hands of the supplier, once it is there, and we have been stripped of
the freedom to approach or take any position towards it. And we are deceived in the
same way by the phonograph records, which not only convey this or that music, but at
the same time the applause and the capricious interruptions, in which we must
recognize our own applause and our own exclamations. Because these records
distribute not only the object itself, but also our reaction to it, we supply ourselves to
ourselves through them.
What takes place shamelessly in the case of these phonograph records, can also take
place somewhat more discreetly in other kinds of transmissions; but the difference is
only one of clarity; the same thing happens in all transmissions: there is no phantom
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transmitted that does not possess, as an inherent property and as an integrated and
indissoluble aspect, its meaning, that is, what we must think and feel about it; none
that do not simultaneously transmit, as an added bonus, the reaction that they demand
of us. We do not, of course, notice this, because the daily uninterrupted glut of
phantoms, which is presented as the world, prevents us from ever feeling the hunger
for interpretation, for a particular interpretation; and because the more we are stuffed
with this pre-digested world, the more profoundly do we forget this hunger.
Thus, the fact that the lack of freedom is presented to us as obvious, that we do not
notice the lack of freedom or, should we notice it, we do so tranquilly and with
equanimity, does not make the situation any less disastrous. To the contrary: since the
terror is delivered in the form of a thousand little cuts, and definitely excludes all
images of any possibility of a different situation, or any idea of opposition, it is in a
way is more fatal than any privation of freedom, open and acknowledged as such.
We began our investigation with a little story: the fable of the king who gave a
carriage and horses to his son who, against the kings will, was becoming acquainted
on foot with the whole region of the kingdom; he accompanied the gift with these
words: Now you no longer need to go on foot. The meaning of these words was:
Now you are no longer permitted to do so. The consequence, however: Now you
cannot do so.
And this cannot is the point that we have now so felicitously attained.
Section 26
Tragicomic resistance: modern man produces resistance in the form of objects of
pleasure.
We have pointed out that, because the world of the Land of Cockaigne is now
presented to us in a manufactured version, ready to enjoy, we cannot remake it.
However, despite the fact that it is convenient, this impediment is not bearable and
acceptable in its plain and unadorned form. In the final accounting, because we are by
nature creatures of need, that is, we are not constitutionally prepared for a world that
is perfectly adapted to us, for a Land of Cockaigne existence; we are instead formed
for satisfying our needs, to obtain what we lack: to set things in order that are
unfinished and refractory, in order that they can be adapted to us. We were born not
only with the need to satisfy ourselves, but also with the second need to take part in
obtaining this satisfaction. It is unbearable for us to not only be without food, but also
without a way to obtain it.
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Ordinarily, of course, we are entirely unaware of this second need. We do become

aware of it, however, if we are unable to satisfy it; while we may be content with the
satisfaction of the first need, if it is no longer the result of our own efforts, we feel
cheated not of the fruit of our own labor, but of the labor required to obtain our
fruit; and we do not know what to do, since we expect that, in life, we should for the
most part obtain our own livelihood; to sum up: the second need, the second
hunger, supervenes: not hunger for prey, but for hard work; not for bread, but for
obtaining it by our own efforts; not for a goal, but for the road to the goal, which then
becomes the goal.
Everyone knows that among the leisure classes, who are exempt from hard work,
the urge for hard work often arises. Neither the fox-hunter, however, nor the weekend
fisherman, have an urge for trophies; in any case, it is not their primary concern; they
are, instead, eager for the activity itself. They do not seek the prey itself, but the
opportunity to participate in the hunt. And if they kill a fox, a deer or a sturgeon, it is
often only because, just as the enjoyment of aiming is inseparable from the target, so
the enjoyment of the activity of hunting cannot be obtained without the hunted animal.
The goal is the excuse for the activity and journey.
This situation has now become generalized, because today (however incredible it may
sound) everyone, and even every worker, belongs to the leisure class, something that
must not be misunderstood, since by this we are only pointing out that what one needs
to live is nowadays entirely at ones disposal. Even the poorest cotton-picker of the
Deep South buys his pre-cooked green beans, that is, ready-to-enjoy green beans. Yes,
especially him. So that today it is just as true today as it was in the 19th century: the
fact that the worker does not enjoy the fruit of his own labor is no less true today, in
the 20th centuryand if we were to fail to draw attention to this correspondence the
image of our century would remain incompletebut he does not participate in the
labor that supplies him in his home with the objects he enjoys, either (especially the
objects of leisure). His lifeall of our livesis doubly alienated: it consists not just
of fruitless labor, but also of fruit without labor. A Molussian proverb says: To eat
fish you have to hunt rabbits; and to eat rabbits you have to go fishing. Tradition does
not relate that those who hunted rabbits never ate rabbits.
This second alienation between labor and its fruit is the characteristic trauma of our
Land of Cockaigne situation. It is thus not at all surprising that the urge for hard work
emerges in this situation; the need to enjoy, once in a while or at least once, fruit
which one has grown oneself; to reach a goal that one has oneself worked to reach; to
use a table that one has built oneself; the urge to encounter resistance and the effort to
overcome it.

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And now modern man satisfies this urge. And he does so in an artificial way, that is:
by producing the resistance himself, producing it so that it can be overcome and in
order to enjoy the victory over it.Resistance has now become a product.
This procedure is not at all rare. To a great extent, sports (which, not by chance, grew
in parallel with industry) has served as this kind of medium of enjoyment. We set
ourselves the obstacle of some unclimbable mountain peak (which does not at all
intimidate us, but to the contrary, we must keep trying), in order to be able to
overcome it and enjoy the process of doing so.
However, incomparably more characteristic of our times is that relatively new hobby,
which is wreaking havoc under the slogan, Do it yourself; millions of people are
spending their leisure time by placing obstacles in their own paths: they construct
technical devices, they reject the entertainment facilities of the era or else they build
things themselves that they could buy at the corner store. Already, in 1941, I was
employed in a workshop where hand weaving looms were mass-produced by
machines; these hand looms were bought by women, who at that time had a hunger to
savor, after they got home from work, the pleasure of complicated hand-labor. For
men, on the other hand, any broken electric gadget in the home or loose screw in their
car is welcome, because it represents the promise of some hard work, which will
sweeten their Sunday. And it is not by chance that the pocket watch is a standard
feature in the comic strips: the only method that remains to this child of our times,
deserving of our sympathy, to make anything himself, consists in taking apart a
finished product (since his world of finished commodities does not offer any other
kind of raw materials); and, condemned to demolition, after producing raw material
from another finished good, to remake it in the form of a second creation; in this way
he procures the little pleasure of having made it himself or, at least, almost by himself.
The type of difficulty, which he addresses with his own efforts, is identical to that of
puzzles, since the creative act goes no further than composing on the basis of finished
elements in the style of Hume. The popularity of these games, which are also played
by adults, forms part of the same complex of phenomena.
However, he expects full happiness (and he has the right to this happiness, for is it his
fault that he was born in such an unhappy time and that his attempts to liberate
himself have all misfired?), if he can go on a trip in his car on the weekend to build a
fire by himself with a device that is guaranteed to produce sparks in the most
primitive manner; so that he can on his own, in the Robinsonian manner, roast his
frankfurters, which he has stored on dry ice; or, in the manner of the pioneers, he can
set up his tent all by himself; or even set up on his own the folding table for his
portable radio.

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That this juvenile movement of adults, this yearning, whose purpose is to free
themselves of the supplies of finished commodities, of returning to a previous stage of
production (which belongs to the few tragicomic features of the era and which could
serve as an authentic theme for a contemporary Vaudeville act) must be sterile, we
have made clear enough. These millions of people who vainly wear themselves out
after their hard days work, since naturally industry has taken advantage of this retro
movement, which it has itself stoked, as rapidly as any other movement, which by
creating new needs makes new markets for new products. Even before the Do it
yourself craze reached its peak, businesses were marketing commodities in the form
of prefabricated materials, camping gadgets, for example, and suchlike things, that is,
objects whose paradoxical purpose consists in making the activities of the hobbyists
as comfortable as possible, who feel the urge to unwind by putting obstacles in their
paths and doing things themselves. And naturally the customers, transformed
overnight into independent contractors, can no longer free themselves from the
habit, instilled into their very bones, of what is proclaimed to be the most practical,
that is, what saves time and effort; this means, they actually buy finished
commodities, which are theoretically the most practical ones, for their new activity,
by means of which is naturally lost, in the blink of an eye, the enjoyment of doing it
by yourself, since as if by magic their pioneer style tent is already complete, since
they have at hand already prefabricated the necessary parts to do it themselves, and
their contribution is reduced to merely following the instructions on the box. They no
longer have anything else to do. The void envelops them once again. So it was a true
blessing to have the radio with them and to be able to once again evoke their
phantoms. If this is not dialectical, I do not know what is.
The movement that goes by the name of Creative Self-Expression belongs in the same
context, which has already been around for some time: for example, creative
painting or creative writing;4 a movement that inspires thousands of people to do
something themselves after work or on Sunday or in their twilight years of old age (if
one is no longer suited for a job, dont worry: life begins at seventy); that is, to devote
oneself to activities that, for once, now, labor and fruit of labor are visibly
interconnected. Naturally, this movement is also a measure against the uninterrupted
supply of finished products, especially of already interpreted images of the world; it is
also an attempt to smuggle a little hardly consolatory effort into the absence of hope
of existence in the Land of Cockaigne. It, too, however, is naturally condemned to
fail. I do not want to speak of the young people of this movement who, in part from
boredom, in part for hygienic reasons, in part simply because it is considered to be
amust, have suddenly become creative and hardly have any kind of work that
matters to them; nor do I want to speak of the fact that the only thing that matters to
them is that they express something. What is decisive is the fact that creative
existence is taught in courses for the masses, in tele-courses over the radio (how to
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get creative); that is, the prefabricated elements of creativity are also supplied directly
to the home. To summarize: this tragicomedy is in no way different from that of the
artificial Robinson. It, too, is an excursion, undertaken with the whole panoply of
luxury of finished commodities of modernity, by the obsolete man towards an
obsolete stage of existence and production; an excursion that, naturally, can never
reach port, since the type and style of the journey contradict its very goal.
Section 27
Once again: the real as copy of its copies. The metamorphosis of the actress V. into a
reproduction of her reproduction.
The most shocking claim of our entire investigation was the conclusion that today the
real is stage managed in view of its reproductions, even in honor of them; that it has to
be adjusted to its reproductions, since the most immense social reality is adjusted to
them and, thus, it becomes the reproduction of its reproductions.
In order to prove that this claim is not just a theoretical paradox, I shall conclude with
the description of a very concrete event: the fact that the metamorphosis of the actress
V. into a reproduction of her reproduction does not proceed from the domain of radio
or television, but from the motion picture industry, does not presuppose any essential
difference. In our concluding paragraphs we have on various occasions extended the
horizon of our examples; and intentionally, since it would have been wrong to
consider the categories of phantom and matrix to be the only ones that interest us,
as the monopoly of radio and television, which is where we originally began our
inquiries. The domain of the application of these categories is much wider; and the
validity of our results is much more general than we had foreseen at the beginning of
our specific investigation.
Here are some excerpts from my California diary:
When, about six months ago, the producer M. saw V.s screen test, he thought: Just
for once, sweetheart, be more photogenic. Then well see. What he was thinking was:
until you have used our phantoms more effectively than you can with the matrices of
the way you really look, before you have molded yourself in accordance with their
model, you cannot be considered as any kind of phantom that really counts.
V. had always been proud of her absolutely unique look, but her longing for a career
as a phantom was incomparably more vehement. With the help of what was left of her
familys savings, a family that she had forgotten long ago, and of her former friends,
also long abandoned and scorned, and with disregard for all the pleasures of life, she
devoted herself to the task of molding herself with ascetic single-mindedness. And
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since no one can do this alone, she enlisted the help of all the specialists of the applied
arts (which constitute a kind of career here), who consider a real human being as bad
material that needs to be improved, while they devote all their attention to the
phantom as it should be and therefore they make their daily bread on the difference
between reality and phantom, that is, they make a business out of the longing of those
who, like V., want to subject themselves to an operation to eliminate this difference.
So V. began to dash from beauty salon to masseur, from masseur to beauty salon; she
put herself into the hands of weight-loss institutes and specialists in the elimination of
wrinkles, and even surgeons; and all to her ruin, as she was to see, and for their profit;
she let them reconstruct her from top to bottom, inside and out; she faithfully slept the
requisite hours by the sweat of her brow, sometimes here and sometimes there; she
weighed the leaves of her salad, instead of savoring them; instead of smiling at me,
she smiled at her mirror; instead of doing it for the pleasure of doing it, she did it out
of duty; in short, she had never worked so hard in all her life; and I doubt that the
initiation rites that the virgins of the Vedas had to undergo were more atrocious than
those that V. had to submit to in order to be solemnly accepted in the world of
phantoms. It is not at all surprising that she soon became nervous, not to say
unbearable, and that, as if she already enjoyed the privileges of a phantom, she began
to take vengeance on the surrounding world, she treated us as if we were air, since as
air she had every right to breathe us in and expel us again. She led this kind of life for
about six months and they reworked her old Adam or her old Eve to such a degree that
nothing was left of them; and then, when the new human, the phantom, emerged from
her with an unsuspected radiancethe epiphany took place about two weeks ago
she once again went to see her phantom agent. Actually, it is not entirely true to say
that it was she who went to see him. With her new hair, her new nose, her new figure,
her new walk, her new smile (or maybe with some old hair, worn by someone else a
long time ago, and with her nose and her smile that are seen everywhere these days),
she was a finished commodity, an indefinite article, completely different;
Everythings different.5 So much the better, she says; and she is right, for she told
us after her second screen test, that the dealer in phantoms had not recognized her and
that she immediately considered this to be a good sign and (if this expression is fitting
in this context) she had more self-confidence in this second test. And today, after
two weeks, behold, everything worked out for the best, the news is in, the improbable
has occurred, the second test was accepted as o.k., she fulfilled her lifes dream; and
this fulfillment would be contractually confirmed. In other words: She has risen to the
status of a matrix of matrices, she can serve as a matrix for those cinematic images,
which in turn will serve as matrices for our tastes. Naturally, she claims that she is
incredibly happy because of this. I am not so sure that this is true. The process of
molding has so seriously deteriorated her that it is hard for me to say that it is
actually she who is happy. Maybe the other one, the new one, is happy; but I do not
know her and I could walk right by her without recognizing her. And since only she
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exists, since the woman who is walking down the street at my side moves like the one
who passed her screen test and whom I can expect in the future; that is, since today
she has been transformed into the copy of her image, into the reproduction of her
future reproductions, she has disappeared; and the final goodbye, that she will bid me,
although not yet explicitly pronounced, is only a matter of days.
Section 28
It is not the admirer that is admirable, but the admired.
Despite the fact that, as we said above, this metamorphosis does not belong to our
original range of examples, it is nonetheless particularly instructive, since it
demonstrates the recognition of the primacy of the image as opposed to the real as the
vital motive for action and transformation into a matricial image as a vital process.
The thesis defended in our investigation, in the sense that today being an image
amounts to being more existent, is totally clear on the basis of this case; that is why
we shall pause to consider it in more depth.
It would be too easy to dismiss V.s anxious desire to become an image simply with
the terms, vanity or yearning for fame. Vanity and yearning for fame: the yearning
to be spoken of and gazed upon by other people; and the hope to be more or at the
very least to be through that existing in others explain nothing; this yearning and
this hope are instead, in themselves, problems, and furthermore very opaque ones.
Like thousands of other people, V. grew up in a world in which only phantoms
(pictures) were seen as supposedly important and the phantom industry (not without
reason) was considered to be a sensationally real industry. She had been molded by
this world by the matricial power of these phantoms and their prestige. For her, to
exist in some way within this world of images, but as a non-image, as a non-model,
had from the very first become a torment and soon became the cause of an infinite
feeling of inferiority and nullity. We must clarify the etiology of this feeling of
inferiority, since it is the first time that it appears in history, and (although it has not
yet been discovered by individual psychology, which only deals with feelings of
inferiority) it is its current form, since the world of models, which intimidates the
insecure, is not composed of people like us, but of phantoms of men and even of
things.6 V. did not feel inferior to the threatening model of her parents or siblings, of
her rivals at school or the beach, but to the reproduced images. And her neurosis was
not proof of a lack of social adaptation, butin our introduction we have already
referred to a similar casea symptom of a lack of technical adaptation to the world of
images. In a similar way, as it might have been a torment to a bourgeois to live as an
anonymous non-aristocrat and not to count for anything in an exclusively
aristocratic world, to her it was unbearable to live in a world of model phantoms. She
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constantly suffered from the feeling that she was a negligible quantity, or even a
nullity; from the fear of having to realize one fine day (as long as she had not
achieved her ascent, her conversion into a phantom) that she had never existed in the
final accounting: she suffered from the lack of ontological prestige. Thus, by engaging
in her professional struggle, her struggle to transform herself into a phantom, she did
so in order to be more, simply to be. Reversing the expression of Mignon: Let me
appear until I can be, she would have said: Let me be until I can appear; to be
capable of being apparent.
We cannot more clearly formulate her anxious desire to exist by way of appearance
than she did herself with two or three outbursts:
Diary
Her self-transformation had hardly been completed, when she exclaimed (with scorn
for her past life, which showed just how high up the ontological ladder of success she
believed she had climbed): My God, what was I until now! What she was certainly
thinking was: I was a nothing; and a nothing because previously I had only existed,
I was just there; always only as herself, always only alone and always only where
she had existed. Because she, expressed negatively, as non-manufactured and nonreproduced was not taken into account as an object that was worthy of consideration;
because she had not found any verification of her existence; because there was no
consumer who noticed her existence; because there was no large number of
consumers who, molded by her, had verified her existence en masse. In short: she had
not been a model, or any kind of mass commodity, she had not been a what, but only
an anonymous who. And within the world she inhabited she was right: compared to
the status of existence of a what in the world of Hollywood, anyone who is only a
who is a nothing and is not there.
Naturally, V. did not say this in so many words. But in her view, these arguments
would have been truisms: self-evident facts, which ordinarily do not need to be
expressed. And if she accepts as an axiom of economic ontology that the
unmanufactured does not exist, that is, that reality is only produced by way of
reproduction, in reality these are self-evident facts. What V. had done was in fact
merely to have put these axioms into practice, and she had no reason to be suspicious
of them, since in her world they were valid and functioned smoothly.
The fact that I could not allow her exclamation to pass without reply: What was I
until now!, but instead had to argue with her because she believed that she had
attained her genuine existence only at the moment when it was expropriated, that is,
when she had been robbed of her true self, was certainly not altogether decent,
considering how hard she had worked: she who, by the sweat of her brow, had
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succeeded in becoming a what instead of a who, while I, who still had to go hither
and thither as a mere who and was even somewhat satisfied about just being there,
must seem to her like a ridiculous troll. And so she made fun of me: You and your
ego!, she mockingly replied. Who cares about such things anymore? And because,
with that last expression, she converted demand into the measure of value and into the
criterion for existence, she silenced me.
I said that she felt, in the world of images, like a bourgeois in an exclusively feudal
world: like air, like nobody. And really, when I attempted to get used to her new
style of behavior: her gestures, her tone of voice, the way she walked, I could only
compare it with the conduct of a snob who has achieved and exaggerated her
belonging to the nobility. It is not by chance that the Greek term that denotes noble
is , which is derived from the same root as to exist and designates he who
counts as existent, whose degree of existence is superior to that of the others. In this
sense, the degree of existence of V. was superior to that of the others, since she was
there (she existed) as a manufactured product, as the prospective model for
innumerable copies, as a mass-produced commodity, while before, in her shameful
prehistory, she existed as an unprocessed raw material and as a one-of-a-kind loser,
she only formed part of the obscure background, of the miserable plebs of the
consumers.
Naturally, it sounds odd to say that her ascent to the level of a mass-produced
commodity is what conferred nobility upon her: mass and nobility are mutually
opposed. But if we were to formulate it in this way: Her ascent to the world of
matrices, in which she transformed herself into a model; or the ascent to the world
of images; or the ascent to the world of mass-produced commodities, it all amounts
to the same thing, since only models are transformed into images by means of their
massive multiplication.7
Moreover, the superiority of mass products has another origin: a considerable part of
todays commodities are not actually there for us; instead, we are ourselves, as buyers
and consumers, those who are there to assure their further production. Thus, if our
need to consume (and, as a result, our lifestyle) has been createdor at least marked
so that commodities can be sold, we are only means, and, as such, we are
ontologically subject to the ends. But someone like V. who manages to raise herself up
from this obscure background to the luminous heights where, instead of living on
consumer goods, she is herself taken into consideration as a consumer good, she is
only worthy of consideration insofar as she forms part of a different way of
existence.

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This being taken into consideration, this being worthy of consideration, was especially
plausible in the case of V., since she, as part of the Motion Picture Industry, had been
transformed into something that really had to be seen (=considered).
Diary
Since she is taken into consideration only to be seen (=considered), naturally she can
no longer have anything to do with a devil like me, who, at the very most, is on rare
occasions taken into account as a consumer of phantoms. The connection with
something real is, for a phantom, a real mismatch, simply impossible, between a
commodity and a consumer. In order to find companionship, V. would have to seek to
be surrounded by her peers: phantoms; or she does not have to, since the circle of
phantoms is a world in itself (which everyone can see, but no one can enter), in which
she will be accepted automatically. There she will undoubtedly find someone, a
something, who will also be a that; something that, just like her, lives exclusively
for the universal being seen, something that also had a heart like a maggot, with
whom she can be a commodity-heart and a commodity-soul and who would be for her
a considerable match.
If in these cases it were simply a matter of formal intelligence, V. would not have been
entirely incapable of understanding what I was thinking, since she was not without
intelligence. But such understanding does not depend only on intellect, but on the
status that one adopts. The status of nobility, to which she now belonged, prevented
her from understanding something of this kind anymore: if it was beyond her, she
would not be able to understand not because it was above her, but, to the contrary,
because it was beneath her; that is, because she was too far above me for her to be
capable of understanding me. This is why it was so indecent of me to accuse her of
malice or to get in an argument with her. It was not she who was doing these things;
she only went along with everyone else. And it would have been almost conceited for
her to swim against the current and to deny the assumption that everyone in her circle
acknowledged as normal and obvious: that to become a commodity represents a
promotion and that being enjoyed as a commodity is a proof of existence.
1. This expression is derived from the phonograph industry, which displays
better than any other the horrifying chaos in which the relation between the
original and the copy is found today. In this industry there is the so-called
mother-matrix, which is the reproduction of a voice, which, in turn,
reproduces a composition. This reproduction of the reproduction, however, as is
demonstrated by the expression mother-matrix (and therefore, mothermother), actually counts as the original compared to the daughter matrix,
despite the fact that it is a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction, it
becomes a master matrix, that is, the mother of all the records based on it in
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the mass system and which are put on the market in order to become the
matrices of our taste. [Authors note.]
2. The German expression mit Haut und Haaren indicates the totality; in our
case, in the context of the edible, we have translated it with this expression,
even the hair and the bones, since the author will again refer literally to this
idea in order to point out that this fantasy is incorporeal. [Note of the Spanish
Translator.]
3. Wo sich die Lge wahrlgt, ist ausdrckliche Lge berflussig, in the
German text. [Note of the Spanish Translator.]
4. We do not have to be intimidated by this word, creative: faced with the
pretext of the habitual consumption of finished commodities any modest
attempt to do something by oneself is felt as an act of creation, at least
comparable to the art of Michelangelo. [Authors note.]
5. Given the fact that the number of those persons who, like V., allow their
differences to be eliminated, is incomparably greater than the small number of
matrices that are needed in the motion picture industry, in California there are
thousands of phantoms, whom one would never suspect were once other
persons in a previous life, or have any idea what they once looked like. Since
they never had the good luck to be transformed into matrices, however, and
since they will still have the look of phantoms for a while and will always have
the illusion that they will be able to perform as illusions, they provisionally
work as drugstore-girls or as hop-girls, until the day-to-day grind wears them
down and causes their old natures to re-emerge from under the glamour of
phantoms. [Authors note.]
6. See the first chapter of this volume. [Authors note.]
7. On the other hand, every mass-produced commodity is also a copy, that of its
model. And every model, in turn, is a model only for its reproductions; and it is
all the better a model, the more numerous are its copies, that is, the more
success attends its mass production. [Authors note.]

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