The Daily Planet

This part sets out the premises of the official world and describes the emergence of a self-reporting form of society: its cultural technologies and its aesthetic techniques. It defines the epoch of social systems and our indoor social life. The chapter shows how suspense becomes a world principle and stress an aesthetic category. It defines a modern anthropotechnics, or art with humans. It redefines the action zones of a modern world that stages its own conditions and the place of the work of art in it.

The chapter demonstrates how the space and practices of the office--its operations, observations, and ego-technic media—become the switchboard of a self-organizing social order of things. Examples are drawn from the fiction of Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Max Brooks (World War Z), and comic book art. Description of the epoch of social systems, in relation to modern and contemporary art and the social theory of Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, Peter Sloterdijk.