Another form of implosion is the feedback. Integral reality refers to everything that works in an integrated circuit. When everything that happens gets immediate feedback. May ’68 and the radios on the barricades. One no longer does anything unless one sees oneself do it. Even irony is part of the mechanism. Immediate promiscuity of the control screen, even in our head.

Once again it is not a representation but a rotating movement of things that are jumbled together, joined, saturated.

It is a perfect reality, in the sense that it is realized right through (perfectum). In a perfect reality nothing is “verified” unless it is “pasted” on and mistaken for its own image. Feedback best illustrates this process. It affects the visual and mediatic universe as well as the political and intellectual life, the daily and individual life, our movements, our thinking. This automatic refraction of our thoughts affects us deeply in our own perception of the simplest and most natural world. Feedback seals everything by focusing on it, by automatically simulating it. In a way, feedback is the virus of our postmodernity.

Feedback short-circuits the gaze; it short-circuits the representation by, so to speak, duplicating things beforehand and by interfering with their progress. Feedback covers everything with a “performance veil” – a particularly sensitive phenomenon in the photographic universe where beings and things immediately “put on” a context, a culture, a meaning, an idea of themselves while blocking off every vision and creating a sort of blindness that Raphaël Sanchez Ferlosio denounces:

There is a terrible form of blindness that very few notice. It allows you to look at and to see but not to see at once without looking at. It is the way things used to be: one would not look at them, one would just see them. Today everything is caught in duplicity; there is no pure and direct impulse. This is how the countryside has become “landscape,” that is to say a representation of itself….

In this way one may say that our perception itself, our immediate sensitivity have become aesthetic. All our senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste – have become aesthetic in the worse meaning of the word. Therefore any new vision can only result from a deconstruction of this feedback, from a resolution of this counter-transfer that blocks off any vision.

One needs to distinguish the process of confusion with one’s own image from the process of representation where we differ from each other by our opposite image and enter an open form of alienation, an open form of play with the image. It is precisely the mirror, the image, the gaze and the scene that were opening onto a culture of the metaphor.