Vast & Perpetual

Create, says Tate. He misquotes to me Barthes: "he used to think of the world as a vast and perpetual conflict of paranoias" (yeah, but he was wrong, all the time it was this great big laundry truck...) A little paranoia never hurt anyone, Tate insinuates, nor for that matter a whole lot. What makes you think of me as paranoid? Could be the way everyone spends his time plotting against you. If they are, I explain, it's because you put them up to it. Let me tell you about my vision, Tate relates, a vision of the End of History. Soon to be a major motion fixture, sez I, with Ronald Reagan as Charlton Heston and NBC as God. All the experience of humankind, Tate orates, is a huge cosmic riddle whose answer is — Hurry up please it's — Don't interrupt: whose answer is Something Out Of Nothing, or the becomingness of being. Gosh, I wouldn't have guessed in a billion years. Nor is this vast achievement complete, Tate estimates, for we have only now entered into the age of autonomous and self-modifying simulacra, the moment of convergence between the IS and the COULD BE. Which is where you come in. ME? sez I. That's right, Tate stipulates, U must engineer a System — or be enraged by another man's. Hang on, I protest, I got this terrible Swarming Sensation...