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wars. The combatants no longer bear the arms of any offensive or defensive idea. They move
forward camouflaged as facts, data, and events. They present themselves as messengers from
a "reality." Their uniform takes on the color of the economic and social ground they move
into. When they advance, the
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terrain itself seems to advance. But in fact they fabricate the terrain, simulate it, use it as a
mask, accredit themselves by it, and thus create the scene of their law.
European anti-nuclear demonstrations, German or Italian terrorism, ghetto riots, Khomeini,
Carter, etc.: these fragments of history are organized into articles of doctrine. "Be quiet," says
the TV anchorman or the political representative, "These are the facts. Here are the data, the
circumstances, etc. Therefore you must...." Narrated reality constantly tells us what must be
believed and what must be done. What can you oppose to the facts? You can only give in, and
obey what they "signify," like an oracle, like the oracle of Delphi.20 The fabrication of
simulacra thus provides the means of producing believers and hence people practicing their
faiths. This establishment of the real is the most visible form of our contemporary dogmas. It
is thus also the one most disputed among the parties.
This institution of the real no longer has its own proper place, neither seat nor ex cathedra
authority. An anonymous code, information innervates and saturates the body politic. From
morning to night, narrations constantly haunt streets and buildings. They articulate our
existences by teaching us what they must be. They "cover the event," that is to say, they make
our legends (legenda, what is to be read and said) out of it. Captured by the radio (the voice is
the law) as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long through the forest of
narrativities from journalism, advertising, and television, narrativities that still find time, as he
is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of sleep. Even more
than the God told about by the theologians of earlier days, these stories have a providential
and predestining function: they organize in advance our work, our celebrations, and even our
dreams. Social life multiplies the gestures and modes of behavior (im)printed by narrative
models; it ceasely reproduces and accumulates "copies" of stories. Our society has become a
recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories (recits, the fables constituted by our
advertising and informational media), by citations of stories, and by the interminable
recitation of stories.
These narrations have the twofold and strange power of transforming seeing into believing,
and of fabricating realities out of appearances. A double reversal. On the one hand, the
modern age, which first arose out of a methodic effort of observation and accuracy that
struggled against credulity and based itself on a contract between the seen and the real, now
transforms this relation and offers to sight precisely what must be
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believed. Fiction defines the field, the status, and the objects of vision. The media,
advertising, and political representation all function in this way.
To be sure, there was already fiction in earlier ages, but it was in circumscribed, esthetic, and
theatrical places: it pointed to itself (for example, by means of perspective, an art of illusion);
it provided, along with the rules of its game and the conditions of its production, its own
metalanguage.21 It spoke only in the name of language. It narrativized a symbolic order,
leaving the truth of things in suspension and virtually secret. Today, fiction claims to make
the real present, to speak in the name of the facts and thus to cause the semblance it produces
to be taken as a referential reality. Hence those to whom these legends are directed (and who
pay for them) are not obliged to believe what they don't see (a traditional position), but rather
to believe what they see (a contemporary position).
This reversal of the terrain on which beliefs develop results from a mutation in the paradigms
of knowledge: the ancient postulate of the invisibility of the real has been replaced by the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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