The Simulated Life

My voicemail has the voice of a sexy French actress reading lines straight from the teleprompter:

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

"That's Jean Baudrillard," she says, "and I just heard he passed away yesterday. It's different than when Jacques [Derrida] died. Then I was looking at the play of language as a way to construct reality and the role of death in the dance of différance. But here, it's something else that comes to mind, something about an absence of reality to begin with. Godard, Debord, the manipulation of data so that image becomes an ultra-dense form of capital ... the conspiracy of art, oui? I'm not sure he himself was in it for the money -- maybe it was more about his ability to bring substance to his presence as philosopher by simply simulating one model of subjectivity veering toward unintelligibility that informed his identity as a communicator of the hyperreal. How many times during our drives across the Rocky Mountain West, cher love, did you -- or maybe it was me -- refer to the view outside the windshield as alternative TV, the desert of the real, a space for intervention, a zone to engage in symbolic exchange. Those days on the road, wasting time, talking shit, playing ourselves in absentia. Not a bad way to go..."

And then her voice is gone.

Time has run out and the machine has cut her off.

The machine is cutting us all off, and we live to see another day.

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Metadata: philosophy, Baudrillard, death, TV, money