Europe--the very archetype of the contemporary event: a vacuum-packed phantasmagoria. It will have taken place neither in heads nor in dreams, nor in anyone's natural inspiration, but in the somnambulistic space of the political will, of dossiers and speeches, of calculations and conferences--and in the artificial synthesis of opinion that is universal suffrage severely orientated and controlled as a function of the cunning idealism of leaders and experts.

It is a bit like the simulation, deep in the desert, of the Capricorn One expedition to Mars: Europe as virtual reality, to be slipped into like a datasuit. This, perhaps, is the perfection of democracy