The accusation has frequently been made that the signifier-signified duality of Ferdinand de Saussure is a restatement of the Platonic distinction between the real and the apparent, fortified and emphasized by the logocentrism of western society, metaphyhsics, and religion. Then, regardless of whether we accept the tenets of structuralism, pos-structuralism or post-modernism, it is undeniable that these methodologies or metaphysics, as the case may be, are played out in the field of representation. That representation may be phonocentrism as in the case of Saussure; a denial of the transcendental signified in the case of Derrida (whose écriture makes him a photocentrist, rather than a phonocentrist); a linguistic event at the basis of psychogenesis as is the case of Lacan; or the self as the crossroads of language as in the case of Benveniste. Although, many of these thinkers pay lip-service to Nietzsche, they generally have not drawn his conclusions that "the body is real," for if they did then they might have to conclude that language is real, and that Saussure was right in his phonocentrism--even against the attack that Derrida made against him that he thought it was true language because it vibrated in his head. The fact that phonic language is real because it vibrates in the physical skull goes along with the Nietzschean idea that not only is the body real, but that meaning is a positive creation of the speaker, who does not need any God, any transcendentalism, any signifier chain, any post-structuralist magic to create meaning--and that, in fact, the problem of meaning is western philosophy has always been a bogus problem.

It is certainly pertinent that Gilles Deleuze in his Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia attacks Lacan's idea of the Oedipal-linguistic nature of the self, that he does so in the name of the auto-productive unconscious, and that he invokes Antonin Artaud to do so. (See my manuscript on the web-age, The Quantum Nietzsche, for Deleuze's debt to Nietzsche). Artaud, we remember, was the drama theoretitician who sought to find that culture, or to create that possibility where the theatre is one with human life. He had thought to find it in some primitive Mexican society, but failed to do so. He might have had more luck in modern American spectator sports such as the rodeo, where the participation in a similar life style, political attitude, and general world view of the spectator and the cowboy tend to blur the lines between spectator and actor or even to a lesser extent in organized spectator football and baseball.

But Artaud suffered from mental disease, probably schizophrenia. Deleuze creates thus the idea of a kind of schizo-analysis (schizanalyse) wherein a schizophrenic attitude is supposed to be able to break down the tyranny of the signifier, of representation, and in the end to confound Jacques Lacan by the autoproductivity of the unconscious.

What Artaud was doing, no more and no less, was seeking to destroy the proscenium. By seeking to destroy the proscenium he was going to undo the whole metaphysic of reality and appearance, that whole philosophical baggage we have been dragging along since Periclean Athens. When one contradicts implicitly the whole metaphysical climate of his culture he is perceived as being crazy, and he probably is crazy. Since Artaud, there have been other experiments with the destruction of the proscenium, warping it into a circle in the theatre in the round or encouraging audience participation. Such experimental theatre usually attracts a special clientele, but since I am no doubt a child of my own culture, they have always made me feel uneasy, exposed and threatened. Experimental theatre and film have almost always enraged the bourgeoisie for reasons which were not very clear to them but which they attribute to morality. Actually, it was because of the threat to their world view which they felt but could not explain. Then were offended that the actors did not stay on the other side of the proscenium where they belonged, but insisted on involving the audience as unwilling actors.

For centuries, when one went to the theatre, one had to go to a special place, decorated and arranged so as to emphasize that some special treatment of perception was going to take place there, some particular reinforcing of an ontology of the real vs the apparent. (After all, we were taught in Sunday School that one cannot look on the face of God and live.) Such was the case from the Greek and Roman stone monuments to the Art-Deco of the recent past. We were warned, made ready, informed that two millennia of metaphysics was about to be reinforced and that we were going to be made once again secure by it. Such is merely another way of stating the catharsis theory of drama, a theory which would be largely meaningless without the maintenance of the proscenium. If we find it a means to set the world at a distance, we can be safe from it. In like manner, the priest has to keep his place at the altar, pass out the host from a proscenium line set up between him and the taker of the host, and be the one who is watched drinking the transubstantiated blood of Christ from the theological stage.

The television camera, especially the portable minicam, is thus the victory of western metaphysics because it is a peripatetic proscenium. We can now go about with a portable Plato's cave, secure in the knowledge that what is projected is unreal. We literally go about with a portable proscenium line which turns everything into appearance and vice versa, turns appearance into a specialized kind of reality/unreality. Technology thus sanitizes perception, makes every monstrous scene bearable, even delightful, and blurs the line between appearance and reality.

Everything becomes appearance of a hidden reality. Reduced in size, sealed behind glass and remotely controlled, everything by necessity becomes entertainment and entertainment becomes reality. This explain why, for no apparent reason, an otherwise serious man who describes the arrival of cold fronts, low-pressure areas and snowstorms is impelled to tell irrelevant jokes, makes rotten puns and turn himself into a clown. Newscasters are forced to forego hard information which is couched in linguistic terms inaccessible to the visually oriented. A picture is not worth a thousand words, as our elementary school teachers had led us to believe and Dan Rather can't figure out whether to say good-by, see you tomorrow, oruse the French bon courage.

The speaker of the house smears his face with cosmetics before making a speech on C-Span. Judge Wapner, Judge Judy, Judge Brown, successfully turn justice into amusement by being a real court and a make-believe court at the same time by means of prearranged legal agreements between the participants. The TV show, "Cops," makes real law enforcement into entertainment. Science programs spend a large percentage of their time showing lions chasing down antelopes and biting them in the neck or in the contemplation of the sexual embraces of rhinoceroses, hippos, llamas, and African tree toads. The actual information transmitted by many of these science programs is very small and one could learn more during the hour by reading than by watching. On the medical channel, you can watch an actual hysterectomy in color, or a penile implant. I regret that I do not know how many doctors watch these shows and what they get out of them compared to the layman who watches the breast reconstruction for his own reasons, whatever they may be.

On the late-night talk shows, we find ourselves listening to a singer or an actress express an opinion on some subject on which he or she is totally unqualified to comment--yet, I have found myself listening to what Charo had to say about foreign policy. Rivera, Winfrey, and Donahue let us see and hear people whose claim to expertise lies in some horrible mistreatment that would make Oedipus look like an errant schoolboy. Geraldo recently warned us to get the kids away from the TV set because they might not be able to stand it while he showed scenes of satanism--the same kids who watch "Deathwish III" with delight. Nobody believes any more that Geraldo is really going to show us something real, even if he warns us that he is going to show us something really, really terrible this time.

The most startling result of this blurring of reality and appearance is the election of Ronald Reagan, an actor, to the governorship of California and the presidency of the United States. Such an event is made possible by three generations of Americans reared on movies and television, on the reality of the level of representation, and by the sanitizing of reality by representation. But it is likewise a logical result of the western metaphysic discussed at the beginning of this paper, a metaphysic which provides the model of reality and appearance and provides us a structure and a mechanism of blurring reality and appearance.

If such is the case, then Plato's recommendation to hold the level of appearance in suspicion and to seek t he truth through the application of the rational intellect is a valid approach. If so, it is an ancient solution to an ancient duality which has been exacerbated by an instrument which gives us representation as reality. If Derrida is right, however, and there is no such thing as a signified, or a transcendental signified, only t hat scandalous level of the signifier, the signfier chain and of representation, then true happiness lies in everybody getting a set with a remote, and indulging in the Derridean/Rousseauan masturbation--i.e., the scandalous supplement to the "real" thing, to real life--a supplement which becomes the reality itself in a culture of masturbators.