Superhyperultrablogamatics

Although it sometimes reads like it was written by a heavily caffeinated ferret, I like Bogard’s book. As a sci-fi fan, I am forced to assent to the argument that the technological imaginary is a powerful force in shaping the specific character of social fantasies. I’ll just offer a short note on the relation of his idea of the simulation of surveillance to Lacan’s insistence on the future anterior as the “matrix for the historicity of the subject” (Weber, Return to Freud, 7).

Bogard writes that “Simulation technology, for all we hear about the exciting possibilities of its future development, is in fact more about a nostalgia or melancholy for the future; it produces a sense that the future is not ahead, but in some fundamental way already over, in the same way the life of a clone is predetermined, already over from the start, or the way a video game or artificial intelligence machine contains all its possibilities in its program” (23). Incidentally, I think this melancholy can be felt in the examples he uses to illustrate his points throughout the book—isn’t there something extremely anticlimactic in the writing when he pins a theory to an actual (virtual) phenomenon? At other places in the book, Bogard does not refer to simulation technologies as producing nostalgia or melancholy, but rather a kind of satisfaction that all eventualities have been accounted for, and humans possess the means to control, order, and administrate the social world: “some form of coded information (sign-image) anticipates an actual event in order to control its outcome (20). The reason for this ambivalence, or better, the reason that all of these effects are produced simultaneously, is related to the fundamentally uncertain status of the future anterior (future perfect in English), an issue to which I will have returned momentarily. Bogard is arguing that simulation determines the field of possibilities for the emergence of the actual, and thus the actual is always-already fully “virtualized.” What makes the video game in the quotation above different from a novel is that the video game presents us with a scenario in which choice is possible within a limited range of control mechanisms that determine what choices are possible (action must remain goal-directed for instance). In the novel, we just follow a script, and choice is irrelevant. This idea is reminiscent of Zizek’s “mediatization,” which in which control masquerades as choice.

For Bogard, the issue of simulation seems more complex than just outlining the dominant form of control in information societies. Aside from control we have these strange surplus productions: nostalgia and melancholy. At the same time that simulation saps affect from daily life by removing unpredictability and reducing all events to the status of simulacra (Jameson’s “waning of affect”), it creates affect in the form of melancholy (as well as, I’d argue, ecstatic mania). How does this happen? I believe that it is in simulation’s inability to completely circumscribe the real that these remainders are produced. The future anterior (the register of simulation), according to Samuel Weber, “designates a surmise, a conditional prediction, and hence, a proposition bearing on an uncertain state of affairs.” The status of the future as uncertain, as always yet-to-be, haunts the simulation. As Lacan writes, “The subject…always has an anticipatory relationship to his own realization which in turn throws him back onto the level of a profound insufficiency and betokens a rift in him, a primal sundering, a thrownness.” Similarly, it is the “profound insufficiency” of the (actual) simulation that produces a “primal sundering” between it and the (virtual) future. For Lacan, this split is the precondition of becoming a subject in the world: in recognizing a distinction between self and other, to become a subject means to be alienated from a fantasmatic image of pre-subjective wholeness. The subject is forever alienated, in other words, from the object of desire. Temporally, this object maintains an uncertain status: it never really exists except as a fantasmatic construction postulated to have been at some point prior to the subject. Weber explains: “In invoking the future anterior tense, Lacan troubles the perfected closure of the always-already-having-been by inscribing it in the inconclusive futurity of what will-always-already-have-been, a “time” which can never be entirely remembered, since it will never have fully taken place. It is an irreducible remainder or remnant that will continually prevent the subject from ever becoming fully self-identical”

Weber is explaining the status of originary trauma in psychoanalytic discourse. Without going into it too much, we can say that part of the work of therapy includes constructing this trauma (not remembering it) as the origin point of the subject; “memory” in psychoanalytic discourse has the status of a construction—a simulation of the supposed past that helps construct a history of the subject which in turn helps to determine what the subject is in the process of becoming. This is a confusing concept—Lacan explains it more clearly: “What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” What is realized in constructing a history is a “simulation” of what one was for who one will be. This construction always entails a narrative of loss, of the institution of a primal rift. It is not surprising then that simulation produces melancholy (although mourning would be more precise since there is a specific object: the future), since each simulation forecloses a future from actually happening. We might say that the simulation continually prevents reality from ever becoming fully self-identical, to paraphrase Weber, calling our attention to the rift in the social.