Video, interactive screens, multimedia, the Internet, virtual reality – we are threatened on all sides by interactivity. What used to be separated is now merged; distance is everywhere abolished: between the sexes, between opposite poles, between stage and audience, between the protagonists of action, between subject and object, between the real and it’s double. This confusion of terms, this collision of poles means that there is no more possibility of a moral judgment, neither in art nor in morality nor in politics. With the abolition of distance and of the “pathos” of distance, everything becomes undecidable, even in the physical realm: when the receiver and the source of transmission are too close together, a feedback effect known as the Larsen effect occurs which muddles up the transmission waves; when an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time are too close together, the event becomes undecidable, virtual, stripped of its historical dimension and removed from memory. We are in a kind of generalized Larsen effect.

Wherever distance is abolished, wherever a collision of poles occurs, we get a Larsen effect.

Even in reality TV, where, in the live telling of the story, in the immediate televised acting, we witness the confusion of the existence and its double. No more distance, no more vacuum and no more absence: one enters the screen and the visual image without encountering any obstacle. One enters one’s life while walking onto a screen. One puts on one’s own life like a digital suit.

Unlike photography, cinema, and painting, where there is a scene and a gaze, the video image and the computer screen induce a kind of immersion, a kind of umbilical connection and of “tactile” interaction, as McLuhan said of television. A cellular, corpuscular immersion: one enters the fluid substance of the image in order to possibly modify it, in the same way as science infiltrates itself into the genome, the genetic code, to transform the body itself. One moves as one likes, one makes of the interactive image what one wishes to. Immersion is the price to pay for this infinite availability, for this open combinatory of elements. The same goes for any “virtual” text (the Internet, word processors): it is worked on like a computer-generated image; it has nothing to do anymore with the transcendence of the gaze or of writing. In any case, once in front of the screen, one no longer sees the text as text, but as image. It is only in the strict separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an activity in its own right – never an interaction.

As well, only the strict separation of stage and audience will allow the spectator to be a participant in one’s own right. Everything today contributes to abolishing that separation. The spectator is immersed in a user-friendly, interactive spectacle. Is it the apogée of the spectacle or is it the end of it? When all become actors, there is no action, no scene anymore. It is the end of the aesthetic illusion.