Strategic Reality Dictionary

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Social Science. With his seventy-two keys, Konrad Becker aims to unlock the gates of strategic reality: its construction over centuries, its imposition through stealth and force, its dull and laborious maintenance, and its dissolution and destruction by those who can't take it anymore. The subjects treated here range widely, from Affective Images and Conspired Environments to Hyperreal Estate (a high-profile topic during the credit crunch of 2008), Phantom Induction, Reality Maps, Synthetic Fear, etc. These keys are communicational models of phantasmagoric systems, which unlock and display, for brief moments, the operations of the complex machinery that stealthily attempts to recreate our own perceptions, affects and expressions. Yet unlike the other systems which they so expertly mimic and reduplicate, these have the grace of immediately dissolving into thin air, while durably revealing the smoke and mirrors that appeared to give them substance.