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Title: The abyss repopulates itself
Author: Jaime Semprun
Date: 1997
Language: en
Topics: capitalism, crime
Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/abyss-repopulates-itself-jaime-semprun
Notes: Originally published in French: Jaime Semprun, L’abîme se repeuple, Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Paris, 1997. Spanish translation: Jaime Semprun, El abismo se repuebla, tr. Tomás González López, Précipité, Madrid, 2002. Translated from the Spanish translation in September 2013.

Jaime Semprun

The abyss repopulates itself

“Tentacular and all-consuming, disfigured by pollution, the capital of

misery absorbs entire cities as it spreads. Is the world’s largest

megalopolis still governable? It is now a long time since the industrial

dream turned into a nightmare…. Hundreds of thousands without homes live

in the streets, sleeping wherever they can. They kill each other over

any broken down shack, or any lean-to under a highway overpass…. Sao

Paolo is not a Third World city. From many points of view it is even,

with a rate of economic growth of between 4 and 6 percent, an

exceptionally wealthy city that concentrates the country’s largest

incomes. According to an official survey, ‘in the year 2000, the largest

social group will be composed of 4 million adolescents from the poor

neighborhoods, barely literate, malnourished and ill-adapted to the

labor market’.”

Paris Match, February 20, 1997

I

To describe today’s world as a decomposing corpse is not just a facile

rhetorical device. While it is an image, it is one that helps us to

imagine with precision: by fixing it in one’s mind, one more accurately

distinguishes what is before one’s eyes, and all kinds of phenomena,

even the most troubling, become intelligible. Starting precisely with

this universal feeling that it is now useless to try to obtain a more

scientific and detailed understanding of the way world society

functions. No one is interested in knowing exactly how it functions,

except for those who are paid to provide theoretical simulations; first

of all, because it no longer functions. One does not teach anatomy with

carrion in a state of putrefaction that blurs the contours of the organs

and mixes them all together. When the situation has reached this point,

it seems that there are more important things to do: to get away from

the corpse, to try to still find a little fresh air to breath and

recover one’s senses or, if not, as most of us have no other escape, to

so effectively atrophy one’s perception of the foul odor so well, that

one can, in the final analysis, adapt to it, perhaps even obtain some

amusement and even feel a sense of fascination towards so many various

and constantly changing corruptions, unusual fermentations and playful

gurgles that swell the social corpse with their exuberance. An

exuberance compared to which, what remains here and there of real life

in customs seems to be such a tedious stability, that only conservatives

and reactionaries terrorized by change could even consider defending it.

And it is quite clear that no living organism can be as surprising,

unexpected and labyrinthine as that which its own putrefaction can

transform it into within a very short span of time.

It is also this very advanced corruption which, mixing everything

together and disfiguring everything, causes the appearance in the

newspapers of such suggestive collages, and exquisite cadavers

allegorical of the end of civilization. When one reads that the leaders

of the Chernobylized Ukraine have completed the destruction of the

indigenous population by selling to the multinational pesticide

producers the right to test, on millions of hectares, chemical compounds

that are still illegal in less experimental countries, an adjacent news

story informs us as follows: an American “research ecologist” is

planning to disseminate his own program over the Internet, intended to

cause the proliferation and diversification of cooperation and even a

kind of sexual reproduction in a population that displays such behaviors

as parasitism. He hopes that this experience, an electronic version of

the diversification of species during the Cambrian period, will provoke

the birth of unexpected life forms and will help us to penetrate the

mysteries of evolution. Another news story speaks of animals that are

actually living in the wild, but which are riddled with electronic

sensors, inserted into those put to work “for science”, but in reality

to spy on what remains to be exploited of nature. And, on the same page

of the newspaper, some Californians no less immersed in electronics now

discover that they are “super-addicted”, trapped, wherever they may be,

via the instantaneous means of communication, by seeing that no moment

of their lives can now escape from economic exploitation.

In the same way, when one fine day we are told that we do not have to

pay any attention to Orwell’s views, because he had been some kind of

informer for the English secret services, a French newspaper that

published the news under the title, “Orwell as Anticommunist Snitch”, in

a display of utter thoughtlessness, published this story alongside

another that announced that more than seven hundred thousand young

people had taken to the streets in Berlin, “not to remake the world or

to proclaim the insurrection”, it pointed out, but “simply to dance to

the sound of techno music and to have as much fun as they can”. Thus,

one sees simultaneously in action the Ministry of Love organizing under

the name of “Love Parade” these electronic bacchanals of brutalization

and the Ministry of Truth, which, by means of “declassified” archives,

informs us that Orwell is no longer the virtuous enemy of bureaucratic

totalitarianism who was worthy of respect right up until the day before,

but a common snitch.

“Symptomatic”, to use a favorite word of Orwell; these calumnies are

symptomatic of something that can be summarized as follows: the system

of liberties based on the logic of the commodity can now do without any

historical justification, including the reference to its Stalinist

counterpart. This system is based on the ones that the totalitarianisms

of this past century perfected and rests on their results with the same

placid composure with which a gigantic statue of that silicon man,

Michael Jackson, as part of a promotion for a concert whose spectators

were promised that they would “go down in history”, temporarily rested

on the same pedestal that, in the past, once hosted a statue of Stalin.

As a German monthly magazine not at all prone to critical exaggeration

pointed out with regard to the seven hundred thousand zombies massed

together by the “Love Parade” in Berlin: “Techno is machine-music; the

listener (the ‘raver’), a machine-man, a nervous system in motion, who

allows himself to be dragged along by the music until his brain

perceives a feeling of happiness in which only he believes. The

aficionados of techno are the true monuments to German unification.” For

these people, and for all those who have taken their leave of history

and live in technological superstition (in a happiness in which only

they believe), it is not even necessary to inculcate them with the dogma

that any desire to “remake the world” inevitably amounts to an attempt

to establish a totalitarian utopia, an attempt that can only result in

chaos and violence: for they are ready to love this world that is coming

apart at the seams just as it is and soon, perhaps, they will love it

even more as it becomes even more chaotic and violent. For these

atom-individuals, formed by the sensory isolation of industrial mass

society, the essential thing is “to pulsate” and there is no lack of

organizers to provide them with, besides fun, the collective surrogate

roles and programmed demonstrations in which they can, in a totally

spontaneous way, be the actors. “We are one big family” was the slogan

chanted by the convulsionaries of Berlin, but behind this “sign of love

on earth” we can discern compulsory uniformity and hatred of individual

autonomy, just as these same features can be glimpsed behind the

“citizens revolts”, whose generous enthusiasm consists above all in

support for a prefabricated consensus.

In 1995, the English editor of Animal Farm, on the occasion of the

fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, discovered an

unpublished preface to the book. In this preface Orwell described the

difficulties he encountered in getting the book published, its rejection

by four successive publishers, the pressure from the Ministry of

Information and, more generally, the Stalinophile climate of censorship

that prevailed among the English intellectuals of the time. But he also

said that the prevailing orthodoxy could change and become—why

not?—“anti-Stalinist”, without being any less suffocating for

independent thought; the fact that the whole world repeats the same

refrain is not made more agreeable by the fact that one agrees with it:

the minds of the people are not thereby any less reduced to the state of

“gramophones”. This is something that can be perfectly applied to the

democratist unanimity of the moderns, to their teleguided indignation,

to their way of expressing, all together and on command, their

execration towards those who are presented to them as totalitarians,

fanatics, or even racists, terrorists, or, in short, dangerous madmen

opposed to all progress. French intellectuals like to make fun of

American-style “political correctness”, which is a bit rustic and simple

for their refined tastes. In reality, however, they practice a version

of the same political correctness adapted to local cultural conventions,

more hypocritical but faithful to the essence of the phenomenon, the

purpose of which is to bring about a retroactive dissolution of history.

In the United States a purge was carried out in the public libraries,

directed against copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book

rendered suspect to anti-racists due to the fact that a negro appears

within its pages (an escaped slave, it is true) who speaks like a negro

and not like a militant multiculturalist university student of color. In

France we do not experience exactly this kind of purge, but these days a

dictionary cannot include in its definition the insulting connotation of

the word, Jew, as synonymous with avarice, without being exposed to the

fury of the anti-racists. And returning to Orwell, the journalist who

repeated, in the pages of Le Monde, the slanders against the English

author, at the same time distinguished himself as a respectful

interviewer of Régis Debray, the inventor of that mediology that, as

everyone knows, bowdlerizes the critical concept of the spectacle by

stigmatizing it as idealist and unscientific (since “man needs the

spectacle to gain access to the truth”), which, nonetheless, does not

lead him to diminish the vigilance that periodically impels him, in the

name of the “unique nature of the Shoah”, to hurl the accusation of

denialism against anyone who dares to consider the extermination of the

Jews of Europe—whose new name of Shoah henceforth situates it in a

consolatory uniqueness with respect to the rest of contemporary

history—as something that might perhaps have an explanation, certain

causes, or a relation to the existence of the State and classes or to

that of industrial society.

The avalanche of falsifications-revelations that presently organizes the

confusion that prevails with respect to any issue rapidly drags down

with it the will to reestablish the corresponding facts, since in order

to discover these facts it would be necessary that certain general

historical truths that form the context of the events in question should

still have currency; one notes, however, that they have been erased and,

above all, together with the search for historical meaning itself, the

interest in discovering the truth, which was its motivation, has also

been erased. Thus, it is only by understanding the good reasons that

Orwell had after the war to consider Stalinism as the main enemy (which

requires not only some knowledge, but also a certain acquaintance with

historical struggles), that one becomes capable of expressing an

informed judgment concerning the way he fought it. It is undoubtedly

much easier to wait to be informed of the historical truth at the moment

when it is established by recently declassified archives. One will thus

be able to learn that the wretched bureaucrat London, who used to be

considered to be so important, before he was a Stalinist who had fallen

from grace, had been a Stalinist in power, that is, a cop. And since the

archives reveal such evidence, one will also have to admit that they

express the truth about all the rest.

The abolition of history is a kind of horrible freedom for those who

have effectively liberated themselves from any debts with respect to the

past as well as any responsibilities with respect to the future: the

moderns love this freedom, composed of irresponsibility and openness

(openness to everything that domination wants to make of them), more

than the very apple of their eye, whose extinction they have meekly

entrusted to their TV screens. Anyone who criticizes the emptiness of

this freedom, by recalling, for example, the existence of history in the

form of numerous and terrible debts that are now coming due at this end

of the century, as if they comprised the bill that had to be paid for

misusing the world, will be accused of harboring a fascistoid nostalgia

for a pre-technological harmony, or of displaying tendencies toward

religious fundamentalism when not apocalyptic fanaticism. The

intellectuals distinguish themselves from everyone else due to the fact

that, for them, this abolition of history, which for the great mass of

people constitutes only a major lightening of their burden, also implies

work: the work of erasing the traces of real conflicts that have taken

place and possible alternatives that have been proposed, the work of

replacing them with the false antagonisms retroactively required by the

propaganda of the moment (and, in this respect, we can see the

contribution made by leftism, which was their precursor both in

re-writing the past as well as in manufacturing the false struggles of

the present and has been so courageous in helping to knock down what was

already collapsing). What these intellectual agents detest, then, in

Orwell—and this was the case both when they praised him as a moralist of

the same rank as Camus, which used to be fashionable, and when they

slander him, as they are doing now—is the fact that he had always

lucidly participated in the then-decisive conflict whose result would

determine all the subsequent chances for freedom, without thereby

sacrificing to any cause, or to any propaganda, his freedom to subject

illusions and weaknesses to judgment, a judgment from which not even the

best struggles were exempt. Thus, he never thought he was better than

the struggles of his time, and he knew how to participate in them in

order to make them better: this is why he is necessarily viewed with

disdain by incompetents, moralists and esthetes. All of whom are legion,

especially among the intellectuals.

II

In this same unpublished preface to Animal Farm, Orwell observes that

the censorship to which he refers does not necessarily imply any kind of

formal prohibitions and that freedom is, among other things, the freedom

to tell people what they do not want to hear. One might think that

today, with the unprecedented variety of information that is constantly

paraded before everyone, people are ready to listen to anything, and are

indifferent to matters of taste or interest. It would not take one long,

however, to demonstrate that there are many things that people do not

want to know about and that they contrive, when despite all their

efforts such things are brought to their attention, to transform into

mere hypotheses, which they take into consideration among many other

hypotheses, in order to immunize themselves against the truth, and to

accustom their minds to absorb it without reacting. A perfect example of

this is provided by that newspaper story about a television broadcast in

which a “movie preview” served to praise the activity of a multinational

environmentalist group by showing what we could expect “in the year 2000

and shortly thereafter” if this group did not exist: “It is everything

that everyone is afraid of. It more or less identifies the future with

this avalanche of pigsties belching into the skies, greenish substances

that escape through the sewers, nauseating sludge, unbreathable air and

turbid waters.” (Le Monde, June 9–10, 1996). What is remarkable with

regard to the question that concerns us is this: the images utilized

were those of catastrophes that had already taken place and our

telespectator drew the conclusion that this “inexorable degradation of

the environment” might very well take place, someday.

This same newspaper article also spoke of “the intuition that all of us

have of an irremediable loss of humanity in favor of a new kind of

barbarism”. Since the recent upsurge in popularity, among the

intellectuals and the world of the communications media, of the term

barbarism, this word has been made to cover a chaotic and wide ranging

array of facts and behaviors that obviously belie the ideal of social

pacification of democracy based on the commodity. But where has anyone

seen this ideal, we shall not say realized, but only defended, even if

only as an ideal? In other words: where is it not completely subjected

to ridicule? Already the local version that is proposed for us, the poor

“European Union”, has to mobilize to control the flow of toxins that are

being shipped from one place to another (it appears that the prion of

the cows is even found in children’s biscuits). To speak of barbarism

assumes the existence of a civilization that must be defended, and in

order to establish the existence of the latter, there is nothing more

effective than the presence of a barbarism that must be combated.

Barbarism would thus be just outside our gates, but still outside them,

because behind them we zealously guard, digitalized on our CD-ROMs, the

treasures of civilization: the Alhambra and the works of Cezanne, the

Paris Commune and the Anatomy of Vesalius.

Just as certain images that appear in dreams are the result of a

compromise between the perception of a physical reality that tends to

interrupt sleep and the desire to continue sleeping, so the idea of a

civilization that must be defended, however much one may be prepared to

admit that it is surrounded by dangers, is nonetheless quite consoling:

this is the kind of tranquilizer sold monthly by the democrats of Le

Monde Diplomatique, for example. Among the things that people do not

want to hear, and that they do not want to see, when in reality they are

displayed right before their eyes, are the following: the fact that all

the technological improvements that have simplified their lives so much

that almost nothing living remains of them, that they have fostered the

emergence of something that is no longer a civilization, that barbarism

arises, like a natural phenomenon, from this simplified, mechanized,

soulless life, and that, of all the terrible results of this experience

of dehumanization to which they have made such a major contribution, the

most terrifying is their progeny, since the latter is what, in the final

analysis, upholds all the rest. That is why, when the citizen-ecologist

attempts to pose the most disturbing question by asking, “What kind of

world shall we leave to our children?”, he avoids posing this other,

really disturbing question: “To what kind of children shall we leave the

world?”

There can be no doubt that no society in history has ever heaped so much

praise on youth, as a model of behavior and as a way of life, and never

has a society treated real young people so badly in reality, as this

one. Chesterton claimed in The Superstition of Divorce that the profound

meaning of the most advanced pedagogical theories of his time, according

to which it was advisable to consider the child as a complete and

autonomous individual, was the desire that “children shall have no

childhood” (Hannah Arendt expressed this in her own way many years

later). Mass society, by disposing, along with individuality, of the

problem of its formation, finds itself in circumstances conducive to the

realization of this program and, dialectically, to its perfection with

what has been called its “infantilism”, now that it operates in such a

manner that adults do not have an adulthood. If consumers are treated

like children, children can also be treated like real consumers

(“influencers”, as advertisers know, of an increasingly larger share of

the purchases of their parents). Well-intentioned people concerned with

the “protection of childhood” seldom speak of the illnesses and the

diverse pathologies that are provoked by a process of rearing that is

too precociously oriented towards directed consumption. Furthermore, it

is very rare for any of those who express so much concern about

protecting their children to ask themselves why we have such an

abundance of perverts and sadists precisely in the most modern, rational

and civilized societies.

When it is said that young people have never been treated so badly, and

not only in distant lands with whose misery we sympathize, but right

here, in the metropolis of abundance, the usual response is to refer to

the child labor of the 19^(th) century or the teaching methods of the

pre-war era. Like every image that assumes the form of a slogan that

serves to justify progress, these permit one to say nothing about what

progress has in reality brought, or to only say that things could be

worse. In this case, it is more schooling that is erected as a postulate

of happiness and achievement, disregarding the most obvious and

indisputable facts, the least of which is the fact that these so-called

higher studies, for which only a certain percentage of qualified

applicants for the baccalaureate, administratively determined, is

eligible, do not prepare anyone for anything that could merit the name

of a trade. This is not an obstacle to the functioning of a modern

economy, however, since everyone knows that almost the only available

jobs are in that new kind of domestic labor, the “services”, which

includes everything from pizza delivery to socio-cultural program

director. And in any case, it hardly matters whether those who for the

most part will be “educated at the video game console” should be left to

marinate for a longer or shorter period of time in the murky juices of

the national education system. Therefore, with respect to this

maltreatment, this is the essential point: we are witnessing the

emergence of the first generations that have been delivered over to

digitalized life, with nothing or almost nothing that, in the realm of

customs, could impede, even just a little, their complete adaptation to

that kind of life.

Concerning these issues, it is often best to listen to the fanatics of

alienation, who, in their own way, speak like authoritative experts. And

this is how one of them expresses his views, one who has preserved from

his Marxist past a tone of delight when speaking of the horrors that are

overthrowing the “old world”, about the “vast, shady complicity on the

part of a generation which is at last free from adult attention, but is

no longer minded to grow up. An endless, purposeless adolescence….” (one

will appreciate the very modern way of presenting a form of coercion and

poverty—which deprives a person of all the means to become an adult—as

choice and emancipation): “Moreover, this pre-reality-principle,

infantile state coincides strangely with the world of virtual reality,

our adult media world, the post-reality-principle world, in which the

real and the virtual merge. This explains the spontaneous affinity of

the entire younger generation with the new virtual technologies. The

child has a special relationship with the instantaneous. Music,

electronics, drugs—all these things are immediately familiar to him.

Psychedelic isolation does not frighten him. Where real time is

concerned, he is way ahead of the adult, who cannot but seem a retard to

him, just as in the field of moral values, he cannot but seem a fossil.”

(Jean Baudrillard, “The Dark Continent of Childhood”, Libération,

October 16, 1995; English translation published in Jean Baudrillard,

Screened Out, tr. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002, pp. 103–104.)

Indeed, most adults, concerned about not being able to keep up with the

rapid pace of change, feel amazed and vaguely ashamed in contemplating

their children, who feel much more comfortable in the electronic

maelstrom and its instantaneous life and who show themselves, as a

result, to be models of adaptation and opportunist wisdom. Not only do

adults have nothing to teach them, but adults are themselves the timid

students of these pedagogues of modernity, and they envy their children

for not feeling constrained by those old civilized reflections of

morality or taste, which are nothing but so many stumbling blocks to

enjoying the present without restraints. Everything would therefore be

for the best in this best of all virtual worlds, if this happy

adaptation to all the technologies of simulation did not have its

counterpart, in the non-virtual reality, of a shocking inability to

escape from the artificial universe of automatic sensations except by

way of delirium or brutality. Now they have to chemically treat that

category of children, when they too precociously present with the

pathological symptoms common to the “adult media world”: “We are talking

above all about children who demonstrate motor neuron hyperactivity, a

sterile restlessness, an incoherent and disordered activity. These

children also suffer from serious emotional fragility, impulsiveness, an

inability to defer gratification, indifference towards instructions and

directives, a lack of self-control and inhibitions” (“A Medication for

‘Hyperactive’ Children Triggers Controversy”, Le Monde, September 15,

1995).

A very modern imbecile would probably say concerning a clinical profile

of these symptoms that it was probably invented by a repressive

psychiatry, that one has to know how to recognize in these disordered

impulses the blossoming of childhood creativity, etc. One might feel

tempted to respond to such reassurances by pointing out that nothing

really human has ever been achieved in history, even on an individual

scale, without the ability to “defer gratification” (that is, to

elaborate it, socialize it, civilize it, all at the same time); but

since we are not writing a philosophy of history here, we need only

point out that one of the fatal contradictions of commodity society as

it approaches its end is the fact that it does not cease to stimulate

impulses which, at the same time, it must repress in order to create an

illusion of order, and that, by repressing these impulses, it obviously

causes them to assume yet more brutal forms. In this way, humanity will

continue to degenerate by being hardened, while charlatans want us to

identify this process with desire, imagination, sensuousness, and all

the rest, as if the faculties of the soul could exist unaltered under

such conditions, always alert and never deteriorated or mutilated. The

most libertarian ideology of progress can then fully enjoy its intimate

rapport with the spirit of the times, with its false enthusiasms (“A new

style is being born…”, “A mutation is being primed for explosion before

our eyes…”) as well as its sordid ambitions: “Wouldn’t the

sophistication of audiovisual techniques permit a large number of

students to receive individually what schoolmasters used to repeat over

and over until the students had it memorized (orthography, elementary

grammar, vocabulary, chemical formulas, theorems, music theory,

declination...)? Couldn’t one test the degree of assimilation and

comprehension in the form of a game?” (Raoul Vaneigem, Avertissement aux

écoliers et lycéens, 1995.) The merchants selling innovative

“para-educational” products are evidently no less ludic and confident:

“This will work because the parents have understood that their children

experience educational multimedia as if it were a game” (Le Monde,

October 15–16, 1995).

Precocious immersion in the fictitious world that is being organized by

the “new virtual technologies” certainly constitutes a form of

education, but education for what? We may plausibly deduce the answer

from its main characteristics. It is a world of rapid and violent

sensations in which one is alone and in which one experiences a feeling

of omnipotence. In this sense, and because of its habit-forming

character, it is similar to drugs. The space and time of ordinary life

are suspended, replaced by the instantaneity of transmission via the

screen and its worldwide network: considered in this way, it belongs to

the sphere of the game, but it is not a game, since it does not stand

opposed to ordinary life as a higher freedom, not even one that is

transient and limited, but rather as a more complete form of submission,

a test whose purpose is to measure one’s capacity for adaptation to the

purely artificial and technology-saturated environment that will soon be

the only environment one knows (this aspect is also present right from

the origins, which were military, of this virtual reality: flight

simulators, etc.). Some of its other features seem to evoke the world of

dreams, but in these cases it is the desire for submission that we can

discern. It is, above all, a world in which time is reversible and the

past can always be erased, in which, therefore, indifference towards

truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, as well as any notion of good

and evil, is the rule: it is undoubtedly by virtue of this quality that

its most educational features are revealed. This indifference does not

have to be inculcated in reluctant brains; to the contrary, the latter

are in this respect already sufficiently prepared by everything that

they could have learned up until this point; the new machinery only

further reinforces and, as it does so, renders irreversible what had

been initially instilled in our customs by previous machines, which were

only supposed to make life easier for us instead of replacing it. In the

end, however, the loss of consciousness was still incomplete and the

experience of the creation of a totalitarian or “post-historical” man

had to be further elaborated “to enter the third millennium”, and to

make that “mythical leap in time” to which we are beckoned by the

millenarianism of the State.

In order to proscribe even the least hint of a truthful notion

concerning the actual miserable condition of young people, an effort is

therefore underway to obtain a consensus of censorship that unites: 1)

the representatives of the commodity, their various propagandists and

all those whom they corrupt by making them participate in their profits:

those who are the most malleable and manipulable of consumers, those

best adapted to the world of its baubles, because they have never known

anything else, the young people whom they hold up as an example to the

rest of the population; 2) the parents, who have done nothing but

transmit to their children their own acceptance of the happiness based

on the commodity and who see how this acceptance has been turned against

them, magnified by all its pathological consequences, in the form of

these mutants for whom their parents are nothing but “fossils” and

“retards”: in the case of the latter, the censorship functions in the

almost psychoanalytic sense of the term, since it is the entire failure

of their lives which seems to be represented precisely in that part of

their lives in which they believed, dreaming of the domestic life of the

happy family, they had preserved a meager portion of success; 3) the

former leftists of every description who, although not for the reasons

cited above, have every kind of affinity for modernization and strive to

inspire futurist enthusiasm due to their fear of being taken for

archaic, retrograde, or even crypto-Vichyites.

Thus, if so many people have allowed this juvenile orthodoxy to be

imposed upon them, despite the fact that they had known many realities

before they were liquidated or turned into commodities—and therefore

despite the fact that they had to be capable of judging the race towards

decomposition, its champions and its youthful aficionados—this is

because they privately approve of the scorn directed at them by the

representatives of the commodity and the managers of falsification,

which is based on this simple calculation: twenty years from now, those

who had known life as it was lived before will be dead and those who

will then be young people and adults will not have known anything that

could serve them as a vantage point from which to judge the substitutes

imposed in every domain. In the past, one could have said that a

generation was made by its unique historical experience, for example,

its shared view of what the world was like before the Second World War.

Today, each generation (or each half generation or quarter generation;

the cycle of replacing things is now shorter than the cycle of replacing

the human material) is marked by a moment of consumption, a stage of

technology, cretinizing and universal fashions: more than anything else,

each generation is the contemporary of certain industrial products and

it is by way of the evocation of their memories as telespectators that

its members will recognize that each of them has experienced youth in

common with the others. The last generation, in the properly historical

sense of the term, thus includes all those who, having been witnesses in

their youth of the sinking of the world into falsification—in France

during the sixties up until the beginning of the seventies—preferred to

adapt themselves and most even preferred to become enthusiastic

supporters of this development. Thus, despite the fact that they knew a

different reality that they now cravenly want to forget, which is why

they are forced to conceal from themselves the historical stakes of that

decisive epoch, they have no other recourse than to show themselves to

be especially vindictive in their amnesia, identification with

modernization, and hatred of any criticism.

III

For those who lived “when the big door swung on its hinges” (evoking

Fargue, Bernanos: “we are in the shadows of this world, the door has not

yet closed behind us”) and had a presentment of this oncoming

imprisonment within the sterilized world of technological

simplification, it was certainly a difficult task to draw up a precise

balance sheet of the spiritual degradation that this implied. Some,

however, have distinguished certain essential features, like Bernanos,

precisely, or Lewis Mumford in the chapter on “post-historic man” in his

book, The Transformations of Man, or even Adorno, who for his part noted

that “technification” eroded the “kernel of experience” of

pre-utilitarian behaviors, that is, the very basis of all capacity to

pass judgment on it: “One cannot account for the newest human types

without an understanding of the things in the environs which they

continually encounter, all the way into their most secret innervations….

In the movements which machines demand from their operators, lies

already that which is violent, crashing, propulsively unceasing in

Fascist mistreatment.” These observations on the propagation of

brutality due to the demands of mechanized life had wide-ranging

implications; and we have now realized them. It has been fifteen years

since another reliable witness was capable of issuing this warning, in

an Italian city devastated by the proliferation of automobiles: “Nothing

more effectively transmits the feeling of the criminal environment and

the spiritual desert than this vast pileup of metallic shells inhabited

by human faces, condemned to the torture that what used to be called a

street has been transformed into. Every car is a projectile that has

been fired, therefore, it is a permanent war, stupid and without

purpose.”

To speak of war is no exaggeration, if one considers the millions of

deaths already caused by automobile traffic and the devastations that it

has wrought: cities and rural areas mutilated, landscapes laid waste,

etc. Furthermore, this war has always produced a human type that is so

representative that, for those who do not have a good idea of what the

term totalitarian man designates, they only need to look at it to

understand. An example of what humanity becomes under the impact of the

organizational restrictions of industrial society, the motorist is no

less exemplary in this respect when he exercises his last civilized

ambition to play his role as lubricant of technology as well as possible

and drives in a civil, and perhaps even environmentally-friendly manner,

if he has a “clean fuel” car, through the completely accessible desert

that has been made to bloom for him: in any case, he will always be the

vandal that the projectile he drives commands him to be. And when, after

so many “secret innervations” that are, quite logically, the counterpart

of his participation in the anonymous power that crushes him along with

everyone else, he finds it most stimulating to directly assert his

degenerated humanity and unleash his pent-up violence in accordance with

the examples of the movie performances that are offered for the

admiration of the multitudes, he then shows just how pointless it is to

try to distinguish, when speaking of totalitarian man, between the

zealous civil servant who is “following orders” and the sadistic thug

who is also following orders, but with more cruelty. The one is just the

horrible revenge of the other against his own cowardice and it is

precisely the alliance of submission and aggression, conformism and

irresponsibility, which defines the totalitarian mentality. On the other

hand, one can also discern in the motorist the prototype of the

internaut, the even more degraded man who has renounced the material

world in favor of a circulation reduced to signs, who does not even have

to physically move about. Doesn’t the motorist essentially drive through

an informational landscape (with regard to traffic signs, advertising,

tourism, and culture)? And doesn’t he learn how to navigate through all

this information when he sees announced on the side of the road: “The

most precious commodity is you”, while listening to the radio announce

that, after fifty years of chemical warfare against life on earth, the

sperm count of the average consumer has declined by 50%?

A combatant of the freedom to circulate trapped within his metallic

integument, the motorist is therefore on the front line of the never

ending, grueling struggle for a life freed of all effort. But this

struggle causes mayhem everywhere: in reality there is no other mayhem

than this. “The worst are the baling machines that literally swallow the

victim”, one may read in a newspaper concerning the new types of work

accidents in industrial agriculture. After having swallowed the

hedgerows, the country lanes, the small farms, the villages, the

knowledge and the entire tangible reality of the countryside and

therefore all tangible and intelligible reality, mechanization is

swallowing this harried worker that used to be the peasant. The

devouring of humanity by the technological carapace that was supposed to

protect it from the misadventures of the natural world evokes the

ancient Chimera that is depicted on the cover of the first issue of

Encyclopédie des Nuisances. There is, however, something even more

horrible than this image in which, after all, victim and executioner are

still separate: the idea that the interpenetration of man and his

mechanical prostheses, in favor of which he has abdicated his faculties,

has reached the point where they are so intertwined that they will never

be able to be integrally restored. And one can immediately propose a

case of this kind, even if it were only in considering what could happen

to the sense of hearing under the impact of the mass music that promises

a liberating paroxysm based on auditory shocks that are even more

powerful than those of the noise of industry—and only satisfies this

desire so as to immediately frustrate it.

All the tortures and all the torments inflicted by industrial labor are

concentrated and endure in its products, in those objects that are so

banal that one cannot even distinguish between them, but which, suffused

with malignity, disseminate their evil throughout the organs of those

who use them, hardening their hearts and their flesh. Twenty year old

workers, authentic galley slaves in an “industrial polygon” on an island

off the coast of Singapore (“with its high fences, its trenches and its

surveillance cameras”), go blind within two or three years assembling

remote control devices; meanwhile, far away, those who do not know about

these extinguished eyes, inattentively manipulating the remote and

sheltered from that unknown suffering, these other slaves endeavor to

bring down the curtains on their own eyesight before their TV screens,

while all around them the light is fading and the night of reason is

falling. From each technological object evils are thus propagated that

medical science sometimes deigns to recognize and classify in its

terminology of pathological conditions; so we have been informed that

the use of cell-phones will probably increase one’s chance of developing

Alzheimer’s Disease, that the damage inflicted by microwave ovens is not

restricted to lowering the quality of the foods cooked in them, or that

plastic bottles surreptitiously leak toxic substances that are now

slated for further study. In any case, for a healthy humanity it would

have sufficed to judge the whole affair from an esthetic point of view

in order to reject with loathing its fraudulent benefits, and to

perceive that it is leading to the loss of the right rhythm of life on

earth, without which nothing good can exist. It seems that certain

natives in New Guinea ate the brains of their dead with the same result,

but who would have thought that it would have occurred to civilized

people to feed their cows with ground-up sheep carcasses or to inject

extracts from the pituitary glands of cadavers into children, so that

the experts are now confronted by the mystery of “prion diseases”? Where

is the mystery here? It is very simple to understand that nothing is

done without consequences, that one cannot infuse death into life with

impunity and that where the sense of proportion has been lost, other

standards are restored by a system of equilibrating forces and the lex

talionis.

Domination is speaking to us more and more often with a brutal

frankness, as if it was addressing those who, having once been burned,

are twice shy; but it speaks as if it were talking to children, and it

employs the humorous tone of that commercial for a vitamin-fortified

beverage that depicts a kind of massacre of the oranges inspired by

horror movies of the “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” type, before declaring,

in conclusion, this truth: “You Drink It, You Are Accomplices!” In

reality, who, in one way or another, has not been swept away, who has

not been, at one time or another, temporarily, but not without lasting

effects, possessed by the barbaric power of technology, tempted, for

example, while driving their car, to run over pedestrians that get in

their way? With all the electronic gadgets that are routinely used

without a second thought, we become accustomed to that functional

coldness that strikes us when we go to a hospital; all you need to do is

to press a button to immediately obtain satisfaction without effort and

one becomes impatient whenever one does not get immediate and automatic

results; one loses the touch for handling things, just as one loses the

ability to handle relations with one’s own kind, and the utilitarian

brutality that is on the rise is made to pass for emancipation, access

to an independence liberated of all conventions, etc.

As for what is happening to ordinary language under these circumstances,

we need not dwell upon this, since it has long been established that

“all individual or national degradation is immediately revealed by a

strictly proportionate degradation in language”, which may be confirmed

every day by listening to our contemporaries.

IV

The barbarians do not come from a distant and backward periphery of

commodity abundance, but from its very heart. Those who have been able

to some extent to keep their sensibilities intact, and have striven to

reduce their relations with the technologies of alienated life to a

minimum, can be persuaded of this by going among those who have been

formed and deformed since infancy by this apparatus of impoverishment;

they are as far removed from nature as they are from reason, and by

virtue of this hallmark we recognize barbarism. These perceptual

cripples, mutilated by the machinery of consumption, invalids of the war

of commerce, flaunt their defects like medals, their weaknesses like a

uniform, their insensitivity like a flag. What thus radiates from 14- or

15-year old adolescents, roving in gangs through the Paris subways,

often recalls what used to be quite specifically a trait of uniformed

virility (soldiers, athletes, militants of totalitarian movements):

let’s just say it smells like an old-fashioned lynching. Hardened by

contact with their technological surroundings, calloused by the orders

they are always receiving from them, those who have grown up under the

blows and shocks of industrially produced “strong sensations” strive to

display a yet greater hardness, the hardness of people without scruples,

on the model of those heroes of our time who are the hardest among the

hard: economic warlords, indistinctly police or gangsters, captains of

industry or of mafias. Contemplating these militants of market

totalitarianism and its aimless dynamism, one recalls what Chesterton

said about the Nietzschean slogan, “Be hard”: that it really means, “Be

dead”.

Perhaps these observations, which will be judged to be quite

exaggerated, are surprising because an almost complete censorship

concerning this topic prevails; a kind of censorship which in this case

does not mean that the facts are always concealed or denied, but that,

once they are admitted, they are always dressed up, adapted to

reassuring interpretations, and finally whitewashed up to the point of

losing all meaning. It will therefore be objected that the brutality of

juvenile behavior is only a new form of the old generation gap; and even

that it is quite frequently the expression of class hatred, undoubtedly

with little consciousness of its reasons, but that it nonetheless

possesses many good ones in the no less ancient conflict between the

poor and the rich. The first of these objections is the weakest: to

maintain that there is a conflict between generations implies that

generations exist, which is belied by the leveling of all kinds of

experience and behavior. Just yesterday, it seems, the mass society

ruled by the bureaucratic machine tolerated a relative deviation from

the norm among its youth, rather like a test period which would permit

the selection of the most gifted opportunists. Later, this scrap of

sordid bourgeois wisdom (“We were all young once”) disappeared, along

with the consciousness of the passage of the time of life which this

wisdom preserved after its fashion: one must be capable at any age of

whatever is required by the social demand of creative participation in

the dynamism of the economy, considering all the opportunities that

arise and all the ways there are to get rich. There is no way for

individuality or even any individual chronology to subsist in the face

of this demand: a child will speak like a wise old man about his

parents’ income and of their conjugal relations; an old man will play

like a child with his electronic rattles. And what we call “old age” is

revealed to be, by virtue of its attire and its routine, precisely the

road to an endless youth, to a free time that is indistinctly enslaved

by all the products of the entertainment industry.

The second objection deserves a somewhat more lengthy refutation

because, despite the fact that this youth, which is everywhere nourished

on the same images and is truly rabid in its mimicry, is surprisingly

homogenous, massified and conformist, it is also true that among the

poorest people there are some kinds of behavior which resemble the old

illegalism of the dangerous classes. But the fact that they are crimes

in the sight of the law still does not make these gestures subversive:

they are ruthless in the sense of a ruthless capitalism, rather than

wild like a wildcat strike. Leftists have wanted to believe for twenty

years that the proletarian youth retains some kind of revolutionary

essence, always spontaneously subversive, always on the verge of

self-organization to transform society. In reality, no one wants, and

particularly no one among the poorest people, to assume the least

responsibility for the world’s catastrophic course. Everyone, rich or

poor, wants to take a shortcut to the same satisfactions, acknowledged

as such by one and all: this shortcut is just more violent among the

poor. The rift that opened up within society in 1968 concerning an idea

of happiness, and concerning the idea of a desirable life, did not last

long and disappeared under the public relations onslaught of “lifestyle

liberation”. And we cannot content ourselves by repeating, as if nothing

had happened since then, on the occasion of every riot or looting spree,

the analysis of the Watts riots published by the situationists in 1966

(“The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Commodity Economy”), according

to which, by wanting to immediately possess all the objects on display

and interpreting the propaganda of the market literally, the looters

were initiating the critique of and preparing themselves to rule over

this material abundance, in order to reorient it in its entirety. Or,

one may content oneself with repeating this analysis (as was done, for

example, with bombastic lyricism and disjointed rhetoric, by a “Chicago

Surrealist Group” after the 1992 Los Angeles riots), but at the price of

disregarding that which constitutes its rational and historical essence:

the hypothesis that these riots, which rediscovered through pillage and

the potlatch of destruction the use value of commodities, would have

some use for the rioters, insofar as they would help make it possible

for them, on their journey along the road of putting the whole American

Way of Life into question, to join “those who seek what is not on the

market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates”. The distance

to be traveled on this road, which was a long one even then, has become

longer still or, rather, the road has almost been effaced by those who

rig this desolation. “The Watts youth, having no future in market

terms”, who had “grasped another quality of the present”, have turned to

the use of drugs in order to confer intensity upon an empty present, and

incidentally along the way also found a capitalist future in trafficking

in them. It is therefore impossible to speak without imposture in terms

of classes, when it is individuals who have disappeared, which is to say

that everyone, and particularly everyone among the poorest sectors of

the population, limit themselves to the adoption of one of the

prefabricated identities available on the market in order to instantly

be everything which that borrowed personality permits and imposes upon

them. The only luxury is that of rapidly circulating among these roles,

and of frequently changing them; drugs appear as the spiritualized

essence of this instantaneous access to being, reduced to the impact, to

the “flash” of pure change.

The article in the Situationist International about the Watts riots,

after evoking the possibility of revolutionary unification around the

black revolt as a revolt against the commodity, lucidly observed that

“[m]utual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present

situation, once resignation is no longer viable”. Unfortunately, it is

this “other possible outcome” which has prevailed, and not just in Los

Angeles. No sentimental objection can stand up to this fact. In this

regard, there is more truth in certain statistics than there is in

pseudo-dialectical sophisms, whose practitioners are just as ingenious

at going to any lengths to emphasize the facts when they support their

beliefs, as they are in rejecting them as mere appearances when they

contradict their beliefs. Here is what some recent statistics, among so

many others, have to say about crime in the United States: homicide is

the second-leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 15

and 24 years of age and the third-leading cause of death for children

between the ages of 4 and 14; the average age of those arrested for

murder has fallen from 32 in 1965 to 27 today; the number of murders

committed by youth gangs has more than quadrupled between 1980 and 1993.

And to complete the picture, the suicide rate among children has tripled

since the 1950s. The remedy proposed by alarmed commentators consists in

“rebuilding the American family, ensuring that our children understand

the value of life, their own and that of others.” It is a little late

for that, when that which once constituted the value of life is just as

devastated as the family, whether the American one or any other kind;

but it is also too late to see any kind of emancipation or progress in

this disintegration of the family unit, which directly plunges atomized

individuals into the brutality of a desolate life among the desperate

masses of those who belong to nothing and to whom nothing belongs. (It

will be observed that in these conditions, family ties can only survive

by putting themselves at the service of the market, and by adopting the

economic model of the “dynamic small business”).

Any sociologist concerned about humanitarian education and socialization

will normally allege extenuating circumstances: of course these ignorant

young people are not very refined, but the “public safety” propaganda is

over-exaggerated and, besides, what opportunity have they been given to

be good, well-educated men and workers anyway? Leftist humanitarianism,

as always, just as it does not attack what it wants to attack, does not

defend what it tries to defend. If it means to say that the violence of

disinherited youth must not make us forget the violence they have

suffered, then one must not only denounce police violence (“repression”)

but all the mistreatment which technological domination inflicts upon

nature and human nature. In that case, it is necessary to stop believing

in the existence of anything like a civilized society that has failed to

provide the youth with the opportunity to be socialized. It is

necessary, above all, to understand in what respect the disinherited are

really disinherited, and more cruelly than in other times, having been

expropriated of their reason, and imprisoned in their “neo-language” as

much as in their ghettos, without even being capable of founding their

right to inherit the world upon their ability to reconstruct it. So

rather than shedding crocodile tears about the “marginalized” and the

other “useless people of the world”, it would be advisable to seriously

examine the question of whether the world of wage labor and the

commodity can be of any use for anyone who does not profit from it, and

if it is possible to become integrated into it without renouncing one’s

humanity. All of this is too much for the sociologists, even the leftist

ones: after all, these people have the function not of criticizing

society but of providing arguments and justifications to the swarms of

personnel charged with the management of poverty, the so-called “social

workers”. It is therefore logical that their efforts are directed above

all towards the satisfaction of the alleged demands of “identity

politics”, which offer the choice of a role from the dime store of the

mimicry of belonging, the little shop of illusions where you can find

anything, from the Malcolm X baseball cap to the Islamist tunic.

Less disconcerted, because it is free of any practical relation to

reality, the extreme left contents itself with inverting the terms of

police propaganda: where the latter sees barbarians coming from an

underworld foreign to the values of civilized society, the extreme left

speaks of savages, foreign to the world of the commodity and committed

to its destruction. It is the “revolution of the Cossacks”, with the

suburbs replacing the steppes. The most that apologetics of this kind

are willing to concede is that this rejection on the part of the

contemporary savages is only slightly conscious, in any case very poorly

reasoned, although present as an intention. But if we abandon the heaven

of good intentions—leftism lives on good intentions, its own and those

which it imputes to its negative heroes—and come back to earth, the

problem is not that these barbarians reject, although very clumsily, the

new world of generalized brutality; but rather that, very much to the

contrary, they have adapted very well to it, more rapidly than many

others who still cling to reassuring fictions. One can thus effectively

call them barbarians. Where could they have had an opportunity to be

civilized, and how? Watching their parents’ pornographic videos?

Submerging themselves in the ectoplasmic universe of digital

simulations? Imitating the behavior of the celebrities of brutality?

When, all around them, both at the summit of the social hierarchy as

well as in its abysses, they see that a kind of nihilist consciousness

of ongoing historical collapse prevails, on the model of “after us, the

flood”?

For it is the very idea of the continuity of civilization that has

volatilized just like the ozone layer, cracked like the sarcophagus of

Chernobyl, and dissolved like nitrates in an aquifer. All enterprises

with a pretension to permanency having become laughingstocks, the world

now belongs to those who maximize their enjoyment of it as urgently as

possible, without any scruples or precautions of any kind, scorning not

only any general human interest but also any individual integrity. The

main attribute of this kind of enjoyment of the world is the one that

makes possible its hasty and instantaneous character, directed towards

immediate volatilization and, as a result, to mere intensity without any

content: “Time does not respect what is done without it” [“Le temps ne

respecte pas ce qui se fait sans lui”]. Drug use is simultaneously its

simplest expression and logical complement, with its power of breaking

time down into a succession of disconnected instants. (Baudelaire said,

and he was only referring to hashish, that a government interested in

corrupting its subjects would only have to encourage its use.) The

extraordinary clinical profile of what has become, in these conditions

of generalized brutality, something that no one would dare call

eroticism—the atrophy of sensuality and the anxious search for

increasingly more violent stimulations—is itself enough to make it clear

that this social disease has reached its final stage. Everything takes

place, then, as if, thanks to a disaster which is vaguely perceived by

everyone as irreversible, those at the top have been freed from the

responsibility of having to maintain the existing world, and those at

the bottom have been freed from the responsibility of having to

transform it. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes

how mass society creates the human material for totalitarian movements

(“the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality or

backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social

relationships….”, etc.), and how it formed from this social atomization

what she calls “[t]he temporary alliance between the elite and the mob.”

Today we are witnessing the reconstitution of a similar alliance,

without the “revolutionary” dynamic of totalitarianism—the energy which

it had recuperated from the workers movement—but with a more complete

nihilism, in the various mafias. The ways corrupt elites and inner city

gangs settle their feuds amidst the prevailing decomposition are marked

by the same barbarous effectiveness. Mafia-style solidarity is the only

kind which is worth anything when all the other kinds have disappeared.

The “unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty” which

totalitarian movements demanded of their members, and which they were

able to obtain from isolated individuals lacking any other social ties,

who only feel useful by belonging to the party, this loyalty, freed from

all ideology, we once again discover in the oath of total loyalty to the

gang described, for instance, by Kody Scott (Monster: The Autobiography

of an L.A. Gang Member). To get a sense of just how much worse things

have gotten during the last 20 years, one need only compare Scott’s

testimony with that of James Carr (Bad). While the latter embraces the

modern social critique and is almost immediately mysteriously

assassinated, the former, assisted by our epoch, or rather without any

of its assistance, escapes the delirium of the gangs only to join that

of the “Black Muslims” and the other African identity groups.

At the end of a poem by Constantine Cavafy, “Waiting for the

Barbarians,” we find two verses which are quite evocative in this

respect: “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?/They

were, those people, a kind of solution.” This is why, in order to

conceal from itself its real disaster and to exorcise the specter of an

interminable decline, a society finds enemies to fight, objects of

hatred and terror. And just as in 1984, where the obligatory expression

of hatred for the enemy Goldstein serves at the same time as a pressure

valve for hatred of Big Brother, the fabrication of a fearful and odious

“barbarism” is all the more effective the more it takes advantage of a

very real and well-founded fear whose effect is to enhance conformism

and submission. The “suburbs”, as the media use the term to in fact

designate the entirety of urbanized territory (the old historical city

centers, basically dedicated to shopping and tourism, now possess almost

no trace of the happy confusion which is proper for a city), have thus

become, with their barbarian youth, the “problem” which providentially

sums up all the others: “a time bomb” placed under the seats of those

who, for just that reason, can thus believe that they have good seats.

Like so many other “problems”, this one is spoken of not in order to

resolve it (how could it be resolved?) but in order to manage it, as

they say: in other words, in order to let it rot, they are trying with

all the immense means at their disposal to help achieve this end. It is

this kind of modern management that is meant when you hear the name of

the city, “Los Angeles”. When the police and their media spokespersons

speak of the “Los Angeles Syndrome”, they are at the very least

expressing what they are trying to obtain as much as what they are

trying to avoid, what they want and what they fear: which is to say that

they are describing the way they want something that cannot be prevented

to turn out. And everyone knows how modern domination, which has not in

vain been defined as spectacular, has appropriated the techniques of the

entertainment industry on a grand scale, and has for some time been

skilled in the manipulation of mimetic impulses by causing those

feelings that it wants to arouse to have the appearance of having always

existed and anticipating the spectators’ imitation of them, in the

manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way, by virtue of the

mirror effect that is inherent to the spectacle, those whom “one loves

to hate” as modern barbarians are all-too-ready to love being hated

under that name, and to identify themselves with its prefabricated

image. They “have the hate” [J’ai la haine], according to an expression

that does not fortuitously evoke infection by a disease.

V

In 1908 Jack London described in The Iron Heel what he pictured could

happen in the near future, in a capitalism ruled by an oligarchy that

had successfully freed itself of all the hindrances imposed by the old

bourgeois democratic legality. Since the 1920s, this book has been read

as a premonition of fascism, and not without reason, since fascism was

then utilizing all the methods described by London: provocations,

manipulations, assassinations, mass terror, etc. London’s hypothesis,

however, has not ceased to be relevant despite the end of the fascist

state of emergency. Quite to the contrary, it has been seen since then

how the employment of certain fascist methods can be combined with the

preservation of democratic forms. More importantly, however, there is an

aspect of oligarchic domination described by London that did not exist

in fascism—which, to the contrary, sought to impose the appearance of

social unity—and which is of such crucial importance today: the

expulsion beyond the pale of society of large masses of the population,

those who are literally left to rot in material and psychological

poverty. These “people of the abyss”, who are piling up in the ghettoes

of the American cities and in the shantytowns of the Third World, but

also in the French “suburbs”, have up until now, in conformance with

London’s vision of the future, been condemned to sporadic and desperate

revolts, while the oligarchy, for its part, “out of confusion brought

order” and “out of the very chaos wrought its own foundation and

structure”.

In the words of London, “[t]he horrid picture of anarchy was held always

before [the] eyes” of both the privileged and the subject populations

“until they [became] obsessed by this cultivated fear”. However, whereas

in The Iron Heel it was only the members of the oligarchy who, as a

result of this subterfuge, “believed that they alone maintained

civilization”, in today’s reality the frontier between hierarchs and

subjects is much more fluid and unstable than in London’s depiction:

this frontier is constantly being redrawn by way of multiple mechanisms

of cooptation, selection and exclusion; thus, almost everyone must be

convinced that they have to be afraid, above all, of the unleashing of

the “abysmal beast”. The spectacular function fulfilled by the terrorism

attributed to the left during the seventies and the eighties, performing

the role that was previously played, on a larger scale and for a much

longer period of time, by the terrorism of the totalitarian bureaucratic

enemy, now comes to France in the form of “Islamic terrorism”, that

perfect representative of barbarism, whose repulsive intolerance arouses

the reprobation of all the democrats, including the most sensitive ones:

“In confronting the problem of the suburbs and increasing violence, the

enforcement of the law is essential. The law is in itself a form of

resistance against violence.” (Alain Finkielkraut, Le Monde, November

21, 1995.)

Thus, with an erudite tone, the moralists and philosophers, those

salaried employees of the “State of Right”, make a show of reasoning as

if we were still living in a bourgeois and enlightened Europe that was

offering the world, as a model, the system of rights and duties of a

parliamentary democracy. President General Zeroual showed that he was

much more realistic when he responded to the French leaders who were

attempting to give him lessons about how to run an election, that he did

not have anything to learn from them in the matter of political

strategy. For their local traditions, inherited from a past state

splendor, have proven to be poor preparation for these French leaders

for the kind of adventurism that they need now, so that it was rather

they who had to learn from someone like Zeroual, about the way he had

managed to stay afloat amidst all the blood and filth. There can be no

doubt that they are learning, however, whether from Zeroual or from

others, like those Spanish socialists, godfathers of an anti-Basque

death squad; one of these socialists laconically summed up what now

remains of rights and the separation of powers by declaring:

“Montesquieu is dead.” In reality, any Asian ideologue of accelerated

industrial development can prove, with evidence in hand, that such

development has no need at all of the forms of political democracy that

accompanied Europe’s “economic take-off”: now the commodity flies on its

own power, without the need for that crutch, and China will be entirely

devastated without ever having known “political liberties”. When one

sees how these liberties served the Europe that gave birth to them, one

could almost say that it is no great loss.

Currently, domination is not forced to regularly employ “emergency

measures” of the kind described by London, in response to a

revolutionary threat, in the sense of the existence of an organized

social movement that presents a challenge for the control of society.

What is spurring it on towards a rapid transformation, without anyone

being able to exactly predict the form that it will adopt, and even if

it can somehow be stabilized, is instead the objectivity of a

catastrophe that is itself a revolutionary fact, and one that is much

more dangerous than anything that the ruling classes of the past had to

confront (in this society nothing works without the help of increasingly

more expensive prostheses that are pregnant with disasters: even the

species’ ability to reproduce without resort to laboratory manipulations

has been diminished). Evidently, to speak in this manner of “domination”

seems to be a reference to a kind of unified directorate, capable of

determining a strategy to be implemented by an army of executors.

Everything indicates, however, that confusion, instability, and

fragmentation have not spared the leaders, whether they are

representatives of the commodity, statesmen, or both simultaneously: the

means of degradation also affect those who wield them. With the decline

of the institutions and customs of bourgeois society, poisoned by its

own spectacular drugs, we see the emergence almost everywhere (and even

more rapidly where the capitalist class has never been bourgeois, but

only bureaucratic) of a kind of neo-feudalism, whose basis is found in

the “people of the abyss” (gangsters and “clients” of all kinds) and at

whose summit are the mafioso elites of corruption.

This is not to suggest that one cannot legitimately speak of domination,

as one can include under this rubric all those who benefit, in one way

or another, from commodity tyranny, and those who serve it, extend it

and justify it: some poison, others treat the victims; some commit

massacres, others loot; some destroy, others rebuild what was destroyed.

And although there are certain gradations and preeminences among them,

all of them utilize the same human material that is provided to them by

the globalized economy. Obviously, all of them debase themselves by

serving a master of this kind and, for most of them, the profit is

largely illusory, “since no one can say that they are their own

masters”. But for those who derive some advantage from tyranny it is of

little importance whether their condition is viewed as miserable by

those for whom freedom is still useful: they can conceive of no other

condition and derive from it their reason to live. What is new is that

this reason does not have much to do with the old systems of

justification or legitimation and reduces almost all of them to the game

of power, the last value of life in a society without a future.

Since the era when The Communist Manifesto proclaimed that “the

bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the

instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and

with them the whole relations of society”, this permanent revolution has

proceeded so far in its transformation of the general conditions in

which domination has to be exercised, that the old owning class has been

transformed into something that is just as new as those conditions: the

bourgeoisie, as Baudelaire depicted it, has perished where he thought it

existed. “Is it necessary to say that the little that will remain of

politics will consist of a painful thrashing about in the arms of

general animality and that the rulers will be forced, in order to

preserve their rule and to create the illusion of order, to resort to

means that will make our present-day humanity, as hardened as it is,

tremble with fear?” (Fusées) The networks of the commodity oligarchy

that are thoroughly implanted in the state apparatus and “economic

institutions”, legal or illegal, do not need any special precognition,

or accurate “social indicators” to foresee the coming of unprecedented

disturbances, the accumulation of social hatred, and the irreversible

escalation of bloody transformations. Even the least intelligent of the

low level agents of “economic activity” has had to admit that the latter

has a bad side: he sees unemployment expanding, violence increasing, and

diseases spreading, in short, he sees that insecurity is undermining all

the established satisfactions and guarantees; he discovers the kind of

world he is living in and where it is heading. No one hides it from him,

to the contrary, it is openly displayed to him: this constantly

increasing disorder is being constantly paraded right before his eyes,

like a memento mori in which, like a “modern style” allegory, the entire

planet adopts the face of death.

Since domination is no longer in any position to announce its imminent

victory over the bad side of the commodity economy, and is not even in a

position to oppose to this bad side a good side that would justify

everything, at least the latter is no longer the main purpose of its

propaganda. To the contrary, domination increasingly tends to justify

everything with reference to the existence of this bad side, frightening

everyone with the threat of the dissolution of society into barbarism

and each individual with descent into the social abyss. The epoch of

submission represented by the ideal of the Welfare State has now come to

an end: capitalist profits have been restored everywhere to the

detriment of the protection that the modern state once assured and,

above all, promised, in exchange for servitude. (This is what an

American magazine dared to call “the end of the good life”.) But the

demand for protection is always present and is all the more powerfully

expressed insofar as economic violence is exercised from now on without

the existence, as means to cushion the blow—unlike the epoch of the

first “savage capitalism”—of either the enormous pre-capitalist

experience in the domain of customs and social relations, or, in the

still natural world, those seemingly inexhaustible resources of freely

available wealth that used to serve humanity as an emergency reserve

and, both in the strict meaning of the term as well as figuratively, as

an immune defense against the commodity. Thus, we are witnessing the

appearance of all kinds of strange “protectors” cynically preying on

desperation and fear; we are referring to both religions as well as the

new “warlords” who are imposing their protection amidst chaos: we must

recall that this function not only lies at the origins of feudalism, but

also underpins the origins of the various mafias. And amidst this

fragmentation of protection in which businesses are organized like

gangs, religions are organized like intelligence agencies, and gangs are

organized like militias, the state becomes just one protector among

others, and, furthermore, one that is less effective than others. A good

example of this is provided by the way the American state has

disinvested, both in the financial sense of the word as well as with

regard its the military and police connotations, in what were already no

longer real cities, in favor, on the one hand, of gangs who assumed

responsibility for the management of day to day survival, based on the

drug economy, in the inner cities abandoned by the white employees, and

on the other hand, in favor of the new “gated communities” reserved for

the whites, so that they can live guarded from the chaos (forty million

Americans already live in these fortresses, which have their own police,

special laws, and their “homeowners’ dues”). These monstrosities that

epitomize the collapse of urban civilization, a collapse which now calls

to mind other periods of decline (“In other times, the dead abandoned

the city which was full of life; now we, the living, are burying the

city”, as Palladius observed during the last days of antiquity), these

unforeseeable metastases of the illnesses that proliferated in the old

society, in which the precipitous mobilization of defense mechanisms

always leads to new evils; it is these horrors of a generalized

every-man-for-himself attitude which allow us to speak—despite the

inevitable inaccuracy that is entailed when one describes an

unprecedented present condition with the help of terms from the past—of

“neo-feudalism”, for example, or of “warlords”. Regardless, however, of

the imprecision of the terms used, one thing is clear: if capitalism

displays all the signs of having returned to its infancy, that is, to

the blood and the filth of its origins, this must not be confused with a

process of rejuvenation, just as one cannot confuse the puerile facial

expressions of an old man with the energy of youth.

For the project of domestication via fear there is no lack of shocking

realities that can be transformed into images, or of shocking images

that can be used to manufacture reality. Thus, we see the spread, day

after day, of mysterious epidemics that are making deadly comebacks, in

an unpredictable world in which the truth has no value and is absolutely

useless. Tired of beliefs and, ultimately, of their own incredulity, men

hounded by fear who feel that they are the playthings of obscure

processes surrender themselves, in order to satisfy their need to

believe in the existence of a coherent explanation of this

incomprehensible world, to the strangest and most irrational

interpretations: revisionism of every sort, paranoid fictions and

apocalyptic revelations. Just like that new type of television series,

which is very popular among the young telespectators, which depicts a

nightmare world in which there is nothing but manipulations, decoys, and

secret conspiracies, in which the occult forces installed at the heart

of the state are constantly weaving conspiracies to prevent any truths

from being revealed, truths that are, in effect, sensational truths,

because they generally refer to the machinations of extraterrestrials.

The purpose of this kind of modern media version of the Protocols of the

Elders of Zion is not so much to designate an enemy and those

responsible for the plot as to affirm that the enemy is everywhere: it

does not involve, at least for now, mobilizing for pogroms or another

Krystallnacht, but rather immobilizing people in enervation, and in

resignation before the impossibility of recognizing, communicating and

establishing any truth at all. The deliberate extravagances of these

products of the dream factory converted into a nightmare factory are no

more intended to convince anyone than are the extravagances of

propaganda in general. Their purpose is to put the finishing touches on

the destruction of common sense, and to isolate people in a terrified

scepticism: Trust no one; the message could not be more explicit.

Concerning what was at that time merely a simple individual defect,

Vauvenargues made the following observation that may be applied to the

mass psychology of the era of suspicion: “Excessive distrust is not less

hurtful than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is

unwilling to risk being deceived.”

Such sinister fictions can only be viewed as if they were documentaries,

because all of reality is now perceived as a sinister fiction. For those

who have lost “the whole domain of communal relations that impart sense

to common sense” it is impossible to reasonably distinguish, in the

midst of the surge of contradictory information, between what is

plausible and implausible, what is essential and what is accessory, what

is accidental and what is necessary. The abdication of judgment,

considered to be useless in the face of the dismal arbitrariness of the

technological fatum, discovers in this idea that the truth is out there

[the Spanish translation literally says, “the truth is somewhere

else”—Tr. note] the pretext to renounce the liberties whose risks one no

longer wants to assume, beginning with the freedom to seek truths with

which one would have to do something. The suspicion of generalized

manipulation is then a last refuge, a comfortable way of not confronting

the total irrationality of the decline by attributing to it a secret

rationality. We have seen this take place when the usual corruption of

the food industry attains the status of news: to maintain that all of

this was nothing but a media decoy intended to terrify the population,

or, in its more prosaic form, a plot by the French food industry against

its English competitors, allows one to childishly deny the shocking

reality and to armor oneself in the assurance that one will not let

oneself be taken for a fool. The anxiety-filled world of paranoid

fiction thus serves as a protection against the anxiety of the insane

real world, but it also expresses, whether with grotesque fantasies for

the use of the masses or rather more sophisticated scenarios for a

pseudo-elite of initiates, the quest for a more effective protection,

and submission in advance to the authority that will guarantee it, the

illusion of being coopted, in short, the desire to be in on the secret.

The popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was already due

not only to the repulsiveness of but also to fascination with the

techniques of world conspiracy that they depicted and which the Nazis

endeavored to put into practice.

In the most recent of these end-of-the-world TV series (Millennium), a

secret organization leads the struggle against an international of

psychopaths united to exterminate humanity, and when the hero declares,

“all of this violence the newspapers report cannot be the result of

chance”, the journalist from Libération who reviewed the series

qualified this declaration as “a personal and paranoid view of our

times”. For the mental health of a journalist consists in not seeing

anything but a form of chance in the fact that the world is collapsing

in this manner. Speaking of violence reported by the newspapers,

however, let us consider Los Angeles, its gangs and the need for their

existence. When the Attorney General of California proclaims that the

Cripps and the Bloods have replaced communism as the greatest domestic

subversive threat, it is easy enough to denounce (in the manner of the

environmentalist-leftist sociologist Mike Davis in his book, City of

Quartz) the “security” propaganda that manipulates the fears of the

middle class by brandishing the specter of a general uprising of those

who have been allowed to sink into poverty, etc. (A typical sentence:

“This very real epidemic of youth violence, with its deep roots (as we

shall see) in exploding youth poverty, has been inflated by law

enforcement agencies and the media into something quite

phantasmagoric.”) And when it is reported in the media that the CIA, in

order to finance its activities in Nicaragua, supplied crack to these

same gangs in Los Angeles for ten years, it is quite normal to think,

especially if one had imagined this to be the case even before the

appearance of any press revelations of this kind, that the unspoken

benefit of this operation was not just financial, but that it also

involved helping the black youth to precipitate their own

self-destruction. Such half-truths sometimes become lies when they are

utilized to conceal the fact that the youth recruited and fanaticized by

the gangs are in the vanguard of regression towards a world in which the

putrescence of all the old forms of life in society can only be

forestalled by way of the establishment of the most brutal coercive

measures. Not only does the openly nihilist violence of these storm

troops of barbarism pose no threat to domination, not only does it serve

domination as a stalking horse to justify its own violence, but it is

also a model of adaptation to the new conditions in which survival will

increasingly entail extermination and a precarious security will only be

purchased at the price of renouncing all individual autonomy.

Similarly, with respect to the recent incidents in France, attributed to

Islamists, one can, easily enough, parade one’s noble humanist soul by

denouncing the “devastating identification” of Islamism with the

futureless youth of the cities as the pretext for an intensification of

repression, etc. If one wanted to be a little more discriminating, one

could also claim, without any further qualifications, since the Paris

Match itself has reported this, that “it has been confirmed that

Algerian secret agents are capable of provoking crimes and attacks in

the name of the G.I.A.”, that what is actually taking place is an

instance of secret deals between the French state and the Algerian

state, a type of pressure enforced by the latter on the former in order

to obtain stronger support for the war against the Islamists. (It is

known that the French authorities once relied on the Islamists to

control the youth in the cities, a job that used to be performed by the

Stalinists.) But these denunciations of state repression and

manipulations stop where the real historical problem begins to be posed,

that is, when we must consider the shocking susceptibility of the youth

of the abyss to every kind of manipulation, and its avid desire to adapt

to the illusory models manufactured by its enemies: one speaks of

repression in order not to speak of decomposition. The most that anyone

wants to concede is, as a pamphlet distributed after the first wave of

attacks in the summer of 1995 said, that “those who have been passed

over by life, penned up in an existence limited to the walls of a city,

some youths believed they found in Islam … an identity” and that “some

of them”, therefore, “could have been manipulated by the bombers”. What

no one wants by any means to lucidly articulate is the way that the

immense majority of these young people, outside of any particular

manipulation, is in a way self-manipulated, conditioned and directed by

the “identities” that have been fabricated for it and which it embraces

with so much enthusiasm. To address this question, one would have to be

prepared to see how, due to their atomization, individuals exposed to

the need to adapt from one day to another, subjected to the alternation

between a sudden shock and a sudden forgetting, lose, together with the

ability to have a continuous experience of time, the ability to offer

the least resistance to the mechanisms of depersonalization that are

crushing them. And, in this sense, it hardly matters that the

representations that they latch onto, in order to provide themselves

with borrowed personalities, are those of the ghetto-rebel youth, which

are just as disingenuous and as false as all the others.

It is understandable that leftism would prefer to speak of other

matters. This is, for example, how the anonymous preface to a recent

edition of The Poverty of Student Life magisterially opposes the

lucidity of the “hooligans of the cities” to the last illusions of those

who think that, as a result of their studies, they can escape

marginalization: “The children of the cities, those Palestinians of the

triumphant spectacle, know well that they have neither anything to lose

or anything to expect from the world as it is. With one stroke, they

affirm themselves as enemies of the state, the economy and wage labor:

they regularly combat the forces of order, they refuse to work and they

steal all the commodities that they need. They did not choose their

condition and it is logical that they do not like it. But those who have

put them there are going to understand, and now they are beginning to

understand.” This “flattering language” repeats the situationist themes

with such anachronistic aplomb that one may be completely certain that

the author has refrained from going to the cities so that his peers in

radicality will recognize him as “an enemy of the state, the economy and

wage labor”. Only in this exercise of the arts of the preface does he,

nonetheless, come to be recognized as one who is well-versed in the

“Palestinian question” although rather in the form of a lapse of memory:

for the destiny of those whom he calls “Palestinians of the triumphant

spectacle” is indeed similar enough to that of the Palestinians of

Palestine, locked up in their Bantustans under the vigilance of their

own gang leaders; but this is what should prevent him from so glibly

claiming that within a very short time their masters will understand and

even that they have already begun to do so.

“It is not with street revolts that one can regenerate a broken down

world that has lost its way.” This reflection, which inspired Nodier

with a precocious historical disillusionment, has today been transformed

into a practical truth that must be formulated in a yet more precise

manner: the “street revolts” and other outbreaks of unconscious violence

only serve those who want to prolong the decline of a broken down world

that has lost its way. Proof of this lies in the way that the defenders

of the “social” and “national” state against the globalized economy

openly hoped to benefit from the disorders of this type and invoked,

clumsily enough (although other provocateurs were capable of exercising

more tact), “the duty to rebel” and “the right to riot” (Ignacio

Ramonet, “Régimes globalitaires”, Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1997).

VI

The contribution made by leftism to the most modern kind of alienation

has generally been perceived by way of the quite picturesque anecdotes

of certain personal careers, but more with respect to renunciation than

loyalty, although this renunciation of certain superficial aspects of

the leftist ideology has only been comfortable and fruitful due to their

loyalty to a deeper content. For if one leaves aside the revolutionary

disguises that leftism took from the museum of history, this content was

clearly adaptation to the accelerated pace of universal transformation,

the adjustment of false consciousness to these new conditions in which

it had to learn to live under the impacts of mass industrial production.

And the more “spontaneous” this leftism was, the more it agitated for

the subordination of consciousness to immediate sensations and, by

helping to discredit the mediations by way of which individuals are

constituted, it prepared them for the type of reflex reactions that the

unleashing of the economic machinery would require of them. “To live

without dead time, and to enjoy without restraints”; this is something

that today sounds like the slogan of a panic-stricken hedonism, the same

one that we are seeing deployed everywhere, now that the catastrophe is

no longer just anticipated.

The principal feature, and the one that determined all the others, by

which leftism prefigured what would become, thirty years later, the

prevailing mentality among the new generations, inculcated everywhere

and socially validated, is therefore precisely the same one that has

been recognized as a characteristic of the totalitarian mentality: the

capacity for adaptation as a consequence of the loss of the continuous

experience of time. The ability to live in a fictitious world, in which

nothing assures the primacy of the truth over the lie, obviously derives

from the disintegration of lived time into a cloud of instants: the

person who lives in this discontinuous time feels liberated from all

responsibility to the truth, but also of any interest in seeing to it

that the truth prevails. If one loses the sense of truth, everything is

permitted, and this is what can be confirmed. This kind of liberty has

led to the spontaneously conformist and very modern character of those

very numerous youths for whom it suffices to abandon themselves to their

own reactions and obey without hesitation the demands of the moment in

order to commit the abject deeds that their proper integration into the

operation of the social machinery requires of them. The tendency to live

in a personal time that is a succession of present moments without

either memory of the past or real concern for the future, while somewhat

attenuated in the case of the bureaucratic sects by the necessities of

their kind of politics, is on the other hand given full reign in the

most modern factions in which the deprivation of any temporal horizon

was acclaimed as a radical freedom: “And above all this law: ‘Act as if

the future never has to exist’.” (Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre

à l’usage des jeunes générations.) [American translator’s note: I was

unable to locate this quotation in the English translation, The

Revolution of Everyday Life.]

The disintegration of lived time, evidently, is determined, more than by

anything else, by the threshold that has been crossed in the increase of

the organic composition of capital, to utilize the terms of Marx: it is

the entire life of individuals, and not only “living labor”, which is

being crushed by the mechanical velocity of “dead labor”. The

acceleration of industrial productivity has been so dizzying that the

rate at which things are replaced and the material world is transformed

no longer has any connection with the rhythms of human life, with its

all too sluggish flow. (The velocity of circulation of information in

the networks of the megamachine shows each person just how slow and how

tedious a thing the human brain actually is.) It was necessary, however,

to implement a propaganda campaign for adaptation to these new

conditions in which men are nothing but the parasites of the machines

that assure the functioning of the social organization. There can be no

doubt that leftism performed the tasks of this propaganda in a totally

unconscious way, without knowing what it was really doing: it believed

in its poor dream of a pure revolution, total and instantaneous, which

would be realized, so to speak, independently of individuals and of any

effort on their part to recreate themselves along with their world. (And

this was precisely what was occurring.) This provides yet more

convincing proof of their spontaneous affinities with the process of

eradication of the old human qualities that allowed for individual

autonomy. Furthermore, these affinities have become fully conscious in

the furiously modernist posterity of leftism, which is devoted to the

pleasures permitted by mass leisure with genuine satisfaction and in

which the residual “anti-authoritarian” ideology serves the purpose of

eulogizing the decomposition of customs in all their aspects.

To get a fair appreciation of the part played by leftism in the creation

of the new man and in the expropriation of the inner life, we need only

recall that it has been characterized by its denigration of those human

qualities and forms of consciousness linked to the feeling of a

cumulative continuity in time (memory, persistence, loyalty,

responsibility, etc.); by its praise, through its advertising-style

jargon of “passions” and “supersessions”, for the new capacities

permitted and required by a consciousness surrendered to the immediate

(individualism, hedonism, the spirit of opportunism); and, finally, by

its elaboration of the compensatory mechanisms with which this amorphous

time created additional needs (from the narcissism of ‘subjectivity’ to

the vacant intensity of the ‘game’ and the ‘festival’). Because social

and historical time has been sequestered by the machines that store the

past and the future in their memory banks and prospective scenarios,

what remains to man is to enjoy his irresponsibility and his superfluity

in the present moment, in a way that is similar to what one could

experience by destroying oneself more expeditiously under the influence

of those drugs that leftism has never ceased to praise. Empty freedom,

demanded with such a great display of enthusiastic slogans, is precisely

what remains to individuals when they have definitively escaped from the

production of the conditions of their existence: gleaning the scraps of

time that have fallen from the megamachine. This freedom is realized in

anomie and the electronic vacuity of the multitudes of the abyss, those

for whom death means nothing, and life even less, those who have nothing

to lose, but have nothing to gain either, except “one final, awful glut

of vengeance”. (Jack London).

The true vanguard of adaptation, leftism (especially where it was least

bound to the old political lie) therefore praised almost all the

simulations that are now the common currency of alienated behaviors. In

the name of the struggle against routine and boredom it discredited all

sustained effort, all the necessarily patient appropriation of real

abilities: subjective excellence had to be, like the revolution,

instantaneous. In the name of the critique of a dead past and its heavy

weight on the present, it attacked all tradition and even all

transmission of historical experience. In the name of the revolt against

conventions it installed brutality and contempt in human relations. In

the name of freedom of behavior, it rid itself of all responsibility,

and of all consistency and continuity in ideas. In the name of rejecting

authority, it refused all precise knowledge and even all objective

truth: what could be more authoritarian, after all, than the truth?; and

what could be more free and varied than the illusions and lies that

erase the fixed and exact borders between the true and the false? In

brief, it worked to liquidate all those components of human character

that, by structuring the world of each person, helped him to defend

himself from commodity propaganda and hallucinations.

Thus, this clinically hysterical simulation of life (according to

Gabel’s formula: “the ordinary liar is outside of life because he lies;

the hysterical liar lies because he is outside of life”), due to his

anxious search for immediate pleasure, obviously can only become the

slave of all the high-tech paraphernalia that is at least a little more

efficacious than the magic of leftist slogans when it comes to

delivering on the promise of a life that is finally liberated from the

effort to live. The usual career of the former leftist, who exchanged

revolutionary instantaneity (“We want it all and we want it now”) for

commodity instantaneity, is recapitulated, in an accelerated way, by

each hedonist consumer, who affirms the autonomy and uniqueness of his

pleasure only to abandon it by means of a boundless surrender to the

stimuli of mechanized life, to its “ready to live” sensations, to its

frenetic distractions, etc. And since such an unconscious and vacant

subjectivity can only feel that it exists by constantly increasing the

intensity and the velocity of the shocks it receives, hedonist

consumption turns as a result of its own inertia towards that

destructive unleashing to which, for its part, leftism aspired,

perceiving it as the very epitome of emancipation. Those who are

imprisoned within the temporal cage of the present moment, isolated from

both the past and the future, can now only find a way to assert their

humanity by burning down their prison. Thus, by helping to accelerate

the destruction of the world by adding their own precipitous rush

towards the abdication of their autonomy, individuals adjust their

nervous systems to the pace of history and adapt in advance to the

unfolding catastrophe.

When it is manifested in aggressive and delirious forms, this nihilism

is condemned by the defenders of machine civilization as if it were

essentially different from the nihilism that, propagated by the media of

instantaneity themselves, is manifested in the somewhat different form,

which is then valued very highly, of docile support for good causes and

the collective enthusiasms promoted by moralism and political

correctness. But the Days of Love and the Days of Rage mobilize the same

multitudes of malleable individuals, ready for every simplified, mass

produced emotion that promises a positive integration in the

collectivity. The militantism of brutality and the militantism of

tolerance are simply two forms of adaptation by way of the sacrifice of

the ego: not only are they not mutually exclusive, but they go hand in

hand, and are often found in the same individuals, alternating with each

other. It is just that brutality has just as little to do with strength

as sentimentality does with humanity.

Modern domination, which needs interchangeable servants, has destroyed

precisely—and perhaps this is its main achievement—the general

conditions, the social and family environment, and the necessary human

relations for the cultivation of an autonomous personality. (Those for

whom “their trade was their hands”, as they used to say, were less

interchangeable than those who only have a screen in front of their

eyes.) For their histrionics and many other traits, these characters

emptied of anything that could have given them consistency evoke the

diverse forms of destructuration of the personality that, in other

times, were described by psychiatry. Without pausing to examine the

psychopathological considerations that would be necessary to account for

the way yesterday’s illness has become today’s normality (Gabel’s False

Consciousness may be profitably consulted with respect to this

question), it is easy to understand that beings that are so inconsistent

and so much in need of a borrowed personality should necessarily be,

even much more so than the militants of the past (“one only needs to

speak their language to infiltrate their ranks”), the docile instruments

of every manipulation that may be considered useful, of every “Love

Parade” and, when it should be necessary, of every cultural revolution.

Those who are morally outraged by the images of poverty and massacres

that are offered for their contemplation, despite the fact that their

feeling of horror is real, and not just feigned, will soon be made to

understand just how obscene it is to add rhetoric to impotence; for what

else are they seeking besides the narcissistic satisfaction of feeling

like sane and civilized people, and of displaying their good will and

concealing from themselves the anxiety of being trapped in this real

nightmare of the end of the world? In the same way, the masses herded

together by the promoters of this or that Platonic good cause are

concerned above all with admiring themselves for being gathered together

amidst the euphoria of a generous unanimity in which they are so

peaceful, and which has no consequence, for which they do not have to

take the slightest risk. In this sense, there is very little difference

between the good intentions of humanitarian, democratist and anti-racist

propaganda, and the calls for murder issued by the stars of simulated

violence, just as there is little that really distinguishes, with regard

to consciousness, the masses of rioters in the night from those who meet

for other kinds of “urban trances”, in which they become intoxicated

with mimetic identification while throbbing under the blows of the music

of the masses.

When they speak to us of the suburbs as a “laboratory of the future”,

they mean that it is with human material of this kind that domination is

prepared to pursue its career. And since the machinery of the universal

and exclusive commodity relation will throw ever more numerous surplus

masses into the abyss, the mindless neo-harmony of the “Love Parades”

certainly has less of a future than the barbarism of mutual

extermination. It is not in a novel by Jack London, but in testimony

regarding contemporary Algeria where one can read the following: “It is

the realm of confusion. No one knows who is who anymore; one no longer

knows who does what.… There are also self-defense committees, local

mafias that have their own militias, real military units, false

policemen, false Islamists. Usually one does not know who one is dealing

with…. They privatized this war, which has become for many people a way

to earn a living. The state gives money and arms to defend one part of

the territory. Warlords arise. They recruit men in their own families

and have no other concern than to expand their territories…. People take

the side of those who give them something to eat.” (Le Monde, January

19–20, 1997.)

VII

The abyss, then, repopulates itself: in a distant cloud of smoke like

that shown on the television news, entire countries are swept into it by

the modernization that demands an economic flight forward. Right here,

it is driving masses of stupefied people, with an ever diminishing

display of concern, to join all those who are already rotting in the

abyss. In western Europe the rebound effects of the decomposition that

is imposed on the entire planet, and of the planned destruction of all

material and mental independence with respect to commodity relations,

have only recently begun to be felt. The waves of refugees, however, who

are attempting to cross the borders of this very relative European

refuge, herald the news: the outbreak of a kind of worldwide civil war,

without precise fronts or defined theaters, which is inexorably

approaching, from the east, and from the south. Naïve protestors are

disturbed to see how France is betraying its historical traditions,

closing its borders to foreigners, etc. Their protests can be all the

more virtuous insofar as they absolutely ignore the real world and do

not concern themselves for even one second with what the practical

results of the principles they invoke would be (since, after all, it is

not the abolition of the state that they are advocating). In any case,

the problem of knowing whether or not one has to defend Europe or

France, as if it were a besieged fortress, will be elucidated quite

differently, as is usual with regard to this kind of false problem: this

fortress has already been conquered from within, sacked by the same

accelerated course of events before which everyone is powerless, but

which everyone senses to be disastrous.

As it says in the Observations on the Paralysis of December 1995, what

that aborted protest left in its wake is the general feeling that there

will be no “solution of the crisis” and that from now on only calamities

are to be expected from the functioning of the planetary economy; a

feeling, although vague and incomplete, that has been expressed

accurately enough in the book by Viviane Forrester, The Economic Horror.

(A typical sentence from this book: “In such a context, the homeless,

the excluded, the entire disparate mass of those shunted aside are

perhaps the embryonic form of the crowds that might constitute our

future societies if the present patterns are carried on.”) But if there

are many people who have become disillusioned with the promises of

industrial society (automation has not abolished work, it has

transformed it into an envied privilege), not many are disillusioned

with industrial society itself. They merely want to fix the

organizational constraints that currently exist, moderate them, and

maybe even humanize them. They know everything or almost everything

about the inevitable consequences of economic modernization and they

call for “respect”, honest leaders, etc. One is frightened with terrible

possible outcomes (“Yes, we are in a democracy. Yet a threat is on the

verge of utterance; it is already almost being whispered:

‘Superfluous’”, the author worries) in order to finally be soothed, and

made to feel as if one is ensconced in peace and democracy, because this

dictatorship towards which we are heading is not like any form of

dictatorship ever known up until now and catalogued as such by the

democrats. In any case, the content and purpose of industrial

production, the parasitic life that it makes us lead, and the system of

needs that it defines are never attacked; the only thing that is

deplored is the fact that cybernetics has not led to the expected

emancipation: “Inscribed in our habits, its consequences should have

been most beneficial to all, almost miraculous. They have been

disastrous.” And since it is not this mode of production, with the

technologies that it has developed to serve it, which is to blame, it

must be the “new masters of the world” who are responsible for our

misfortunes: these stateless predators (or “transnationals”), cynical

and parasitic, are described as if they were the only ones who live

without any care for the future and are indifferent to anything that

does not serve their immediate satisfaction, as if somewhere, in who

knows what population that is deeply entrenched in its traditions,

honesty, foresight, decency and moderation have been preserved intact,

beyond the reach of commodity nihilism.

These moralizing denunciations of the economic horror are for the most

part aimed at the white collar employees threatened by the acceleration

of modernization, that salaried middle class that dreamed of being

bourgeois and woke up proletarianized (and even lumpenproletarianized).

Its fears and its false consciousness, however, are shared by all those

who have something to lose from the weakening of the old nation-state

whose organization is in the hands of those powers that control the

world market: workers in previously protected industrial sectors, public

servants, various administrators of the system of social guarantees that

has now been sent to the scrap-heap. All of these people form part of

the potential mass base for a kind of nation-state front, an informal

“party of December” which combines every kind of stale leftover in an

anti-globalization ideological sauce: republicans of the

Chevènement-Séguin-Pasqua variety, Stalinist debris, statist ecologists,

left-humanitarians hoping for a militant experience and even

neo-fascists looking for a “social project”. This party of stabilization

maintains only a vague appearance of existing in order to provide a

safety valve for recriminations against the excesses of the supporters

of accelerated growth: its reason for existence is to engage in futile

protest that it knows in advance will be defeated, because it has

nothing to oppose to the technological and social modernization imposed

by the needs of the unified economy. (Besides, every single one of these

so-called enemies of the unification of the world, even the most leftist

among them, is filled with enthusiasm for the possibilities of

tele-democracy offered by the “net”.) Such a representation of dissent

serves above all to integrate protest in pseudo-struggles that

continuously remain focused on the main theme and demand the capitalist

conditions of the previous stage, which propaganda designates by the

name of the Welfare State. This representation is only capable of

assuming any consistency, as a political substitute, in case of serious

disorders, but then it would merely exhibit its complete inability to

restore anything. In reality, the historical role of this nation-state

faction of domination, and its only future, consists in preparing the

population—since, in the last analysis, everyone is resigned to what is

admitted to be inevitable—for more profound kinds of dependence and

submission. Thus, what lies behind all of this, of all these “struggles”

for public service and civic values, is the plea, presented to the

administered society, that the latter should free us from the disorders

that the law of the market, according to which “the state costs too

much”, is spreading throughout the world. And how will this be achieved,

if not by means of more coercion, the only means capable of holding

together these conglomerations of insanities that civilized human

societies have become? What will protect us, after all, from Algerian-

or Albanian-style chaos? Certainly not the stability of the financial

institutions, the rationality of our leaders, the civility of the led,

etc.

Mixed together, however, with these fears and this demand for

protection, there is also the scarcely secret desire that finally

something would happen that will clarify and simplify, once and for all,

even if it should lead to brutality and poverty, this incomprehensible

world in which the avalanche of events in their inextricable confusion

is proceeding more rapidly than any reaction or thought. The idea of a

finally total catastrophe, of a “great implosion”, is the refuge of the

hope that a decisive, irrevocable event, which one can only hope will

happen, will lead us out of the decomposition of everything, of its

unforeseeable combinations, and of its omnipresent and unendurable

effects: the hope that each person will have no other choice than to

exercise self-determination, and reinvent life on the basis of primary,

elementary needs that will then assume the highest priority. To hope

that the fact of crossing a threshold of degradation of life will break

the collective support for and dependence on domination, forcing men to

be autonomous, is to ignore the fact that merely perceiving that one has

crossed a threshold, not to speak of seeing it as an obligation to

become free, would require that people have not been corrupted by

everything that led to this situation; it reflects a desire not to

recognize that habituation to catastrophic conditions is a process, one

that began some time ago, that allows one, in a way, by its own inertia,

when one crosses a threshold somewhat brutally in the midst of

deterioration, to accommodate oneself for good or for ill to this

situation (which has been seen perfectly after Chernobyl, that is, by

virtue of the fact that we have not seen anything). And even a sudden

and complete collapse of the conditions of survival—what emancipatory

effect could this have? The violent ruptures in the daily routine that

will undoubtedly take place in the near future, will instead drive

consciousness towards the available forms of protection, whether of the

state or other kinds. Not only can we not expect a good catastrophe that

would enlighten the people regarding the reality of the world in which

they live (these are approximately the same words Orwell used), but all

the evidence leads us to fear that, faced with the unprecedented

calamities that will be unleashed, panic will reinforce collective

identifications and bonds based on false consciousness. We are already

seeing how this need for protection is resuscitating old models of

social bonds and belonging, of clans, races, or religions: the ghosts of

all the alienations of the past return to haunt the world society that

had once prided itself on having overcome them thanks to the

universalism of the commodity. In reality the internal collapse of men

conditioned by industrial mass society has assumed such proportions that

one can no longer entertain serious hypotheses concerning their future

reactions: a consciousness, or a neo-consciousness perhaps, deprived of

the dimension of time (without thereby ceasing to consider itself as

normal, since it is adapted to the thousand marvels of its imposed life

and, somehow, to it, everything has a reason), is by nature

unpredictable. One cannot reason concerning irrationality. To hope for a

catastrophe, a liberating internal collapse of the technological system,

is nothing but the inverted reflection of the hope that counts on this

same technological system to positively create the preconditions for

emancipation: both cases dissimulate the fact that, under the impact of

technological conditioning, it is precisely the individuals who would

have known how to use this possibility or this occasion who have

disappeared; thus, one is spared the effort of being one of these

individuals. Those who want freedom without effort, show that they do

not deserve freedom.

The latest news, of an eventual “cloning” of humans, threatens to

transform our societies into totalitarian anthills. It is doubtful that

such methods will have to be resorted to in order to obtain this

interesting result, which is, for domination, the constitution of a

homogenized mass of stereotyped anthropoids. As for the problem that is

posed to the ethics committees with respect to maintaining an inviolate

border between animal and man, it is already being solved by way of a

bestialization of humanity that owes nothing to manipulations carried

out in cloistered laboratories, but is instead entirely due to the

conditioning that is taking place right out in the open for all to see.

The humanization that had been begun was left unfinished and its fragile

achievements are being dismantled: man was precisely that being that had

no limits, who was capable of freely reaching his own culminating form,

“like a painter or a sculptor” and, therefore, also of degenerating

towards inferior forms, worthy of the beasts. According to Chesterton,

what motivated the popular hostility of his time towards Darwinism was

less a refusal to admit our simian origins than a presentment concerning

what such a theory of evolution presaged about our simian future: the

idea that man is infinitely malleable and adaptable really provides

reasons to be afraid when the masters of society are the ones that take

advantage of these traits.

To console us, we are told that it is thanks to technology that man has

been humanized and that, with his nuclear power plants, his computers

that store universal history, and his genetic manipulations, he is

simply continuing his humanization. From a false premise (as Mumford,

and, in his own way, Lotus de Paini, have demonstrated), one leaps to an

absurd conclusion, a conclusion that would not be any less absurd even

if the initial assertion were to be perfectly correct. After all, what

would you think of someone who said: “Mister such and such has built a

house with two floors, a spacious dwelling for him and his family. But

he was not content with two floors, he built another forty or four

hundred or four thousand and did not think about stopping there. What

can you say about this? He provided a shelter for his family and

continues to do so.” The insane tower of Mister such and such is

condemned to collapse on its inhabitants at any moment, each additional

floor increases the danger, but he still talks of a shelter. This is

precisely the nature of the discourse of the apologists for infinite

technological development, with this aggravating circumstance, that this

discourse is founded on a pile of rubble: the house, transformed into an

insane tower, has already collapsed. And everything that was gloomy

about this shelter, the dark realities upon which collective

identifications and social blackmail were based, all the parts of

barbarism buried under the edifice of civilization, all of this is once

again emerging from the basements and foundations and is now coming to

light.