Free Empire V by Victor Pelevin Page B

it?’
    â€˜Yes, Glamour does promise miracles,’ said Jehovah. ‘But the promise obscures the complete absence of the miraculous in life. Changing clothes, disguise and concealment through masking are not merely technology, but the unique content of Glamour. And of Discourse as well.’
    â€˜Are there, then, no circumstances in which Glamour is able to produce a miracle?’
    Jehovah thought for a while.
    â€˜As a matter of fact, there are some circumstances.’
    â€˜What are they?’
    â€˜For example, in literature.’
    This seemed very strange to me. Literature was as far removed from the sphere of Glamour as it was possible to imagine. Also, as far as I knew, it was a field in which no miracles had occurred for a very long time.
    â€˜After the writer today finishes a new novel,’ explained Jehovah, ‘he devotes a few days to trawling through glossy magazines in order to incorporate brand names of expensive motor cars, neckties and restaurants. The result is that his text assumes a reflected simulacrum of high-budget expenditure.’
    This exchange with Jehovah I transmitted to Baldur:
    â€˜Jehovah says that this is an instance of a Glamour miracle. But what is so miraculous about it? It seems to me a classic piece of masking.’
    â€˜You didn’t understand what he said,’ replied Baldur. ‘The miraculous transformation takes place not in the text but in the author. We have transformed engineers of the human soul into unpaid advertising agents.’
    I found I could apply this bipolar questioning technique to almost any query. But sometimes it produced more, rather than less, confusion. Once I asked Jehovah to elucidate the meaning of ‘punditry’, a word which I was coming across almost every day on the Internet, reading about some ‘media pundit’ or other.
    â€˜Punditry is neurolinguistic programming in the service of the anonymous dictatorship,’ intoned Jehovah.
    â€˜Come, come,’ grumbled Baldur, when I appealed to him for comment. ‘It’s a good, resonant phrase. But in real life it’s very hard to say who serves whom – punditry serving the dictatorship or the other way around.’
    â€˜How is that?’
    â€˜The dictatorship, even though it is faceless, pays hard cash. But the only tangible result of neurolinguistic programming is the salary earned by professors of neurolinguistic programming.’
    The following day I was to regret bitterly having asked my question about ‘punditry’: Jehovah brought in to the lesson an entire rack of test tubes labelled ‘Media Pundits Nos. 1–18’, every one of which I was forced to sample. I wrote in my notebook in the interval between tastings:
    Any intellectual today, peddling his ‘expertise’ in the marketplace, is doing two things: sending out signals, and prostituting meaning. These activities are in fact dual aspects of a single act of will, which is the sole raison d’être of any work by any philosopher of today, or any culturologist, or expert of any description. The signals announce the expert’s readiness to prostitute meaning, while the prostitution of meaning is the means whereby the signals are sent out. The new generation intellectual often has no idea who the future commissioner of his work is going to be. He is like a plant growing on the pavement whose roots feed on unseen sources of moisture and nourishment and whose pollen is dispersed beyond the limits of the monitor. The difference is that the plant does what it does without thinking, but the new generation intellectual believes that he is being awarded life-giving nourishment in return for his pollen, and engages in complicated schizophrenic double-entry accounting. Such calculations are the true roots of Discourse – damp, grey, moss-covered, stagnating in stench and darkness .
    Before many days passed I knew the word ‘culturologist’.