Vaucanson's Paradox
The Artifice is the opposite of the simulation and it is devoid of reality. Isn’t this the purpose of the perverse ritual? The voiding of content for the sake of form, the quality of form in its oscillating duration as the territory of fluid dispersion necessitating the suspension of any symbolic content. Thus, the stupidity of psychoanalytic accounts, for the psyche is only residual to the general programme of these singular aggregates of matter. The fetish and the ritual demarcate a space of life without fiction. The only content of the Phantasm and Artifice is the force of indiscernibility, which would be voided in the concretion of formal properties. They may carry ‘resemblances’ in the Images they produce or feed upon but these have no simulative property let alone a representational one. The Artificial is the territory which is devoid of positive knowledge, the quality of an Image in its monstration not its significance. The Image precedes the sign and its signifiance. There is a general problem of relation with the artifice. Connections are difficult to make, it is detached. As we saw with the case of empathy, an android would look and react like a human being but would never emit the emotion, such a connection is impossible. But emission isn’t enough either, even psychopaths make every display of empathy, and frequently have an acute understanding of the psychology of others, without feeling it. Perhaps, as Celine once said of his father, I know he had feelings and I had feelings too but life isn’t about feelings. Feelings are something which oppose themselves to life as the ultimate simulation. The ambient world has become a second skin for people. They do not even recognize their own stench. The mise en scene of their organism has become invisible, that is the way of the feeling consciousness.
--excerpt from Beyond Love
