The same goes for everything that has to do with virtual reality and synthesized models. Digital and programmed, the real does not even have time to happen. It is sanitized (prophylactisé), pulverized, short-circuited in its shell like the crime in Minority Report. Thinking itself is anticipated by models of artificial intelligence. Time itself, the time already lived out that has no more time to take place, is captured and spirited away by virtual time, which we choose, mockingly no doubt, to call “real time.” The historical time of the event, the psychological time of affect and passion, the subjective time of judgment and will, all are being questioned simultaneously. We will not even give time to time.

Last but not least: by some strange surgical operation, language, in its digital version, has been purged of its symbolism, of everything that allows language to be more than what it means. Any absence, any vacuum, any literalness in it – anything that prevents its meaning from being brought into focus – has been eliminated like the negative in a synthesized image. Such is the integral reality of language.

It is also the death of the sign. Integral language does not contain any signs – the sign and its representation have disappeared. Now it is precisely when the sign and the real are no longer exchangeable that reality, now left alone and meaningless, veers off exponentially and proliferates infinitely. The death of the sign paves the way to integral reality.

We often hear that the real has disappeared because of the hegemony of the sign, the images and the simulacrum, that reality has been erased by the artifice. This analysis underlies the concept of the Société du Spectacle. We need to reverse this overly common analysis and say: We have lost both the sign and the artifice for the benefit of the absolute real. We have lost everything: the spectacle, alienation, distancing, transcendence, abstraction – everything that was defending us from the onset of integral reality, of the immediate realization of a world with no reprieve.

With the disappearance of the simulacrum as such, a later stage in the process of simulation has been reached, namely the simulation of a real more real than the real, the simulation of a hyperreal.

What does then make the exchange impossible if not the abstract transcendence of the value? What makes the exchange of language possible if not the abstract transcendence of the sign? All this is now liquidated, pulverized. The value as well as the sign is affected by the same dizziness of deregulation. It is not the real but the sign and, with it, all the universe of meaning and communication, that is subjected to the same deregulation that affects the markets (maybe this came even before the deregulation of the world market).