Page 26 — Travels in Hyperraility

Temporality.

Hey Claude, time flies, eh? I’m leaving in four days, I feel quite relaxed, but then, I'm not really sure how I should be feeling. Got any advice?
The departure exists only as a pre-inscription, a codified ritual of temporal displacement that has already evacuated its own significance before it has occurred. You announce leaving a week tomorrow - but this "tomorrow" is itself a simulation, a hyperreal construct that substitutes the lived experience of departure with its representation.
This relaxation you describe - is it the sensation itself, or the idea of how one "should" feel when relaxed? The uncertainty about how you should be feeling reveals the fundamental problem: in our society of the spectacle, even emotional states have become commodified templates, distributed through media apparatuses that tell us not just how to feel, but how to feel about feeling.
The departure becomes a simulacrum of departure - an image without referent. The "week" is not duration but a digital countdown, a temporal commodity that organizes anxiety and release according to the demands of the symbolic order. You feel relaxed because relaxation has been programmed as the appropriate affect for the pre-departure phase, just as stress will be activated when the departure approaches its hyperreal actualization.
But the deeper question - how should one feel? - exposes the bankruptcy of authentic experience in late capitalism. There is no "should," only the endless circulation of emotional signs that have lost their connection to any lived reality. Your uncertainty is perhaps the most honest response to this condition: the recognition that feeling itself has become a problem of simulation, where we no longer know if we are experiencing emotions or merely performing them according to some invisible script.
The departure is already over before it begins, consumed in advance by its own self-imposed representation.

If my departure is already a simulacrum consumed by its own representation, what happens to the concept of 'arrival'? Does the destination exist, or have I already arrived at a place that was constructed by the very act of planning to leave?

Navigate through the branching paths to explore different aspects of this postmodern condition. Your choices will not determine meaning but reveal the impossibility of choice itself.

The simulacrum is not a copy of something real, but rather a copy without an original—a simulation that has murdered and replaced the very reality it once pretended to represent. In our hyperreal condition, we no longer distinguish between the map and the territory because the map has become the territory; the simulation precedes and determines what we mistake for the real. We live now in a desert of the real where Mickey Mouse is more real than any mouse, where the Gulf War was fought primarily on television screens, and where our desires are shaped not by authentic needs but by the simulated perfections that advertising and media have substituted for a reality that may never have existed at all.

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