The caves of Lascaux offer an almost trivial example of this confusion. The original caves having been closed for a long time, visitors line up in front of a replica, a simulacrum of the caves, Lascaux II. Most visitors do not even know that what they are seeing is a replica as there is nowhere any indication of the existence of the original caves. What awaits us is a kind of prefiguration of the world: the replica is so perfect that we will no longer know that it is a replica. Now, what happens to the original when the replica stops being a replica? Such is the ironical dialectics of the simulacrum at a later stage of disappearance. Even the original is equal to the artifice. There is definitely no more God who can recognize His own (from that point of view, one may at least say that God is indeed dead). Here we have a kind of justice, the privileged and the underprivileged ones are now equal in an artificial world. As soon as the original becomes an allegory among others in a technically completed world, democracy is then realized.

As well, what becomes of the arbitrariness of the sign when the referent stops being the referent? Without the arbitrariness of the sign, there is no differential function, no language and no symbolic dimension. As it stops being sign, the sign becomes a thing (chose) among other things. It becomes something of a total necessity or of an absolute contingency. Without the instanciation of the meaning by the sign, only the fanaticism of language remains – this fanaticism that Ferlusio defines as an “absolutist inflammation of the signifier.”

My hypothesis is that a kind of radical fetishism, resulting from the eclipse of every process of meaning, underlies the transformation of the real into pure information and the cloning of the real by virtual reality.

What hides behind the immateriality of the technologies of the virtual, of the digital and of the screen, is indeed an injunction, an imperative that McLuhan had already spotted in the television and media image: an imperative of reinforced participation, an interactive investment that may turn into fascination, into the “ecstatic” implication that we see everywhere in the cyberworld.

Immersion, immanence, and immediacy characterize the virtual. No more gaze, no more stage, no more imaginary, no more illusion even, no more exteriority, no more spectacle: the operational fetish has absorbed all exteriority, all interiority and even time in the operation of “real time.” It is the realization of utopia.

We are this way getting closer to the real world, a world “integrally” realized, affected and identified as such. We are talking about the real world not about the world-as-is, which is totally different The world-as-is is in the nature of appearances (or even of integral illusion because there is no possible representation of it) or as Nietzsche says “while suppressing the true world we have also suppressed the world of appearances.”