Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord, 1988
In memory of Gerard Lebovici, assassinated in Paris on 5 March
1984, in an ambush that remains mysterious.[1]
"However critical the situation and circumstances in which you find
yourself, despair of nothing; it is on the occasions in which everything
is to be feared that it is necessary to fear nothing; it is when one is
surrounded by all the dangers that it is not necessary to dread any; it
is when one is without resources that it is necessary to count on all of
them; it is when one is surprised that it is necessary to surprise the
enemy himself." Sun Tzu, The Art of War. [2]
I
These comments are sure to be promptly known by fifty or sixty people; a
large number given the times in which we live and the gravity of the
matters under discussion. But then, of course, in some circles I am
considered to be an authority. It must also be borne in mind that a good
half of this elite that will be interested will consist of people who
devote themselves to maintaining the spectacular system of domination,
[3] and the other half of people who persist in doing quite the
opposite. Having, then, to take account of readers who are both
attentive and diversely influential, I obviously cannot speak with
complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to instruct just anybody.
The misfortune of the times thus compels me, once again, to write in a
new way. Some elements will be intentionally omitted; and the plan will
have to remain rather unclear. Readers will encounter certain decoys,
like the very hallmark of the era. As long as other pages are
interpolated here and there, the overall meaning may appear just as
secret clauses have very often been added to whatever treaties may
openly stipulate [4]; just as some chemical agents only reveal their
hidden properties when they are combined with others. However, in this
brief work there will be only too many things which are, alas, easy to
understand.
II.
In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what
the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the
market economy, which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and
the totality of new techniques of government that accompanied this
reign. The disturbances of 1968, which in several countries lasted into
the following years, having nowhere overthrown the existing organization
of the society from which it springs apparently spontaneously, the
spectacle has thus continued to reinforce itself, that is, to spread to
the furthest limits on all sides, while increasing its density in the
center. It has even learned new defensive techniques, as powers under
attack always do. When I began the critique of spectacular society, what
was particularly noticed -- given the period -- was the revolutionary
content that could be discovered in that critique; and it was naturally
felt to be its most troublesome element. As to the spectacle itself, I
was sometimes accused of having invented it out of thin air, and was
always accused of indulging myself to excess in my evaluation of its
depth and unity, and its real workings. I must admit that others who
later published new books on the same subject demonstrated that it was
quite possible to say less. All they had to do was to replace the
totality and its movement by a single static detail on the surface of
the phenomenon, with each author demonstrating his originality by
choosing a different and all the less disturbing one. No one wanted to
taint the scientific modesty of his personal interpretation by
interposing reckless historical judgments.
Nonetheless, the society of the spectacle has continued to advance. It
moves quickly for in 1967 it had barely forty years behind it, though it
had used them to the full. And by its own development, which no one took
the trouble to investigate, it has since shown with some astonishing
achievements that it is effectively just what I said it was. Proving
this point has more than academic value, because it is undoubtedly
indispensable to have understood the spectacle's unity and articulation
as an active force in order to examine the directions in which this
force has since been able to travel. These questions are of great
interest, for it is under such conditions that the next stage of the
conflict in society will necessarily be played out. Since the spectacle
today is certainly more powerful than it was before, what is it doing
with this additional power? What point has it reached, that it had not
reached previously? What, in short, are its present lines of advance?
The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion which has forced
people to lead their lives in an entirely different way is now
widespread; but this is experienced rather like some inexplicable change
in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change about
which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say. What is more,
many see it as a civilizing invasion, as something inevitable, and even
want to collaborate. Such people would rather not know the precise
purpose of this conquest, and how it is advancing.
I am going to outline certain practical consequences, still little
known, that result from the spectacle's rapid deployment over the last
twenty years. I have no intention of entering into polemics on any
aspect of this question; these are now too easy, and too useless. Nor
will I try to convince. The present comments are not concerned with
moralizing. They do not propose what is desirable, or merely preferable.
They simply record what is.
III.
No one today can reasonably doubt the existence or the power of the
spectacle; on the contrary, one might doubt whether it is reasonable to
add anything on a question which experience has already settled in such
draconian fashion. Le Monde of 19 September 1987 offered a felicitous
illustration of the saying, 'If it exists, there's no need to talk about
it,' a fundamental law of these spectacular times which, at least in
this respect, ensure there is no such thing as a backward country.
That modern society is a society of spectacle now goes without
saying. It will soon be necessary to remark those who do nothing
remarkable. One loses count of all the books describing a phenomenon
which now characterizes all the industrialized nations yet equally
spares none of the countries which have still to catch up. What is so
droll, however, is that all the books which do analyze this phenomenon,
usually to deplore it, must sacrifice themselves to the spectacle if
they're to become known.
It is true that this spectacular critique of the spectacle, which is not
only late but, even worse, seeks 'to make itself known' on the same
level, inevitably sticks to vain generalities or hypocritical regrets;
just as vain as the clowns who parade their disabused sagacity in
newspapers.
The empty debate on the spectacle -- that is, on the activities of the
world's owners -- is thus organized by the spectacle itself: everything
is said about the extensive means at its disposal, to ensure that
nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of
the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term 'media.' And by this
they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service which
with impartial 'professionalism' would facilitate the new wealth of mass
communication through mass media [English in original] -- a form of
communication which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby
decisions already taken are presented for peaceful admiration. For what
is communicated are orders; and with great harmony, those who give them
are also those who tell us what they think of them.
The power of the spectacle, which is so fundamentally unitary, a
centralizer by the very weight of things, and entirely despotic in
spirit, frequently rails at seeing the constitution under its rule of a
politics-spectacle, a justice-spectacle, a medicine-spectacle and all
the other similarly surprising examples of "mediatic excess." Thus the
spectacle would be nothing other than the excesses of the mediatic,[5]
whose nature, unquestionably good since it facilitates communication, is
sometimes driven to extremes. Often enough society's bosses declare
themselves ill-served by their media employees: more often they blame
the plebian spectators for the common, almost bestial manner in which
they indulge in mediatic pleasures. A virtually infinite number of
supposed mediatic differences thus serve to dissimulate what is, on the
contrary, the result of a spectacular convergence, pursued with
remarkable tenacity. Just as the logic of the commodity reigns over
capitalists' competing ambitions, or the logic of war always dominates
the frequent modifications in weaponry, so the harsh logic of the
spectacle controls the abundant diversity of mediatic extravagances.
In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important
change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. This has nothing to
do with the perfecting of its mediatic instrumentation, which had
already reached a highly advanced stage of development; it means quite
simply that the spectacle's domination has succeeded in raising a whole
generation molded to its laws. The extraordinary new conditions in which
this entire generation has effectively lived constitute a precise and
sufficient summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid;
and also all that it will permit.
IV.
On the theoretical level, I only need add a single detail to my earlier
formulations, albeit one which has far-reaching consequences. In 1967 I
distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the
concentrated and the diffuse. Both of them floated above real society,
as its goal and its lie. The former, placing in the fore the ideology
grouped around a dictatorial personality, had accompanied the
totalitarian counter-revolution, Nazi as well as Stalinist. The latter,
driving salaried workers to freely operate their choice upon the great
variety of new commodities that confront them, had represented the
Americanization of the world, a process which in some respects
frightened but also successfully seduced those countries where it had
been possible to maintain traditional forms of bourgeois democracy.
Since then a third form has been established, through the rational
combination of these two, and on the basis of a victory of the form
which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated
spectacular,[6] which has since tended to impose itself globally.
Whereas Russia and Germany were largely responsible for the formation of
the concentrated spectacular, and the United States for the diffuse
form, the integrated spectacular seems to have been pioneered in France
and Italy by the play of a series of shared historical features, namely,
the important role of the Stalinist party and unions in political and
intellectual life, a weak democratic tradition, the long monopoly of
power enjoyed by a single party of government, and the necessity to
eliminate an unexpected upsurge in revolutionary activity [since 1968].
The integrated spectacular shows itself to be simultaneously
concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two
has learned to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their
former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards the
concentrated side, the controlling center has now become occult, never
to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse
side, the spectacular influence has never before put its mark to such a
degree on almost the totality of socially produced behavior and objects.
For the final sense of the integrated spectacular is that it integrates
itself into reality to the same extent that it speaks of it, and that it
reconstructs it as it speaks. As a result, this reality no longer
confronts the integrated spectacular as something alien. When the
spectacular was concentrated, the greater part of peripheral society
escaped it; when it was diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The
spectacle is mixed into all reality and irradiates it. As one could
easily foresee in theory, practical experience of the unbridled
accomplishment of commodity rationality has quickly and without
exception shown that the becoming-world of the falsification was also
the falsification of the world. Beyond a still important heritage of old
books and old buildings, but destined to continual reduction and,
moreover, increasingly selected and put into perspective according to
the spectacle's requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in
nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the
means and interests of modern industry. Even genetics has become readily
accessible to the dominant social forces.
The government of the spectacle, which now possesses all the means to
falsify the whole of production and perception, is the absolute master
of memories just as it is the unfettered master of projects that will
shape the most distant future. It reigns unchecked; it executes its
summary judgments.
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labor
suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome
because it coincides with the generalized disappearance of all true
competence. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker
can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can
philosophize on the movements of baking as if they were landmarks in
universal history. Each can join the spectacle, in order publicly to
adopt, or sometimes secretly practice, an entirely different activity
from whatever specialty first made their name. Where the possession of
"mediatic status" has acquired infinitely more importance than the value
of anything one might actually be capable of doing, it is normal for
this status to be easily transferable and to confer the right to shine
in the same fashion to anyone anywhere. Most often these accelerated
media particles pursue their simple orbit of statutorily guaranteed
admiration. But it happens that the mediatic transition provides the
cover for many enterprises, officially independent but in fact secretly
linked by various ad hoc networks. With the result that occasionally the
social division of labor, along with the easily foreseeable solidarity
of its use, reappears in quite new forms: for example, one can now
publish a novel in order to arrange an assassination. Such picturesque
examples also go to show that one should never trust someone because of
their job.
But the highest ambition of the integrated spectacular is still that
secret agents become revolutionaries, and that revolutionaries become
secret agents.
V.
The society modernized to the stage of the integrated spectacular is
characterized by the combined effect of five principal features:
incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy;
generalized secrecy, forgeries without reply; a perpetual present.
The movement of technological innovation has a long history, and is a
constituent of capitalist society, sometimes described as industrial or
post-industrial. But since its most recent acceleration (in the
aftermath of the Second World War) it has greatly reinforced spectacular
authority, by completely surrendering everybody to the ensemble of
specialists, to their calculations and their judgments, which always
depend on their calculations. The fusion of State and economy is the
most evident trend of the century; it has at the very least become the
motor of the most recent economic development. The defensive and
offensive pact concluded between these two powers, the economy and the
State, has assured them of the greatest common advantages in every
field: each may be said to own the other; it is absurd to oppose them,
or to distinguish between their rationalities and irrationalities. This
union has also proved to be extremely favorable to the development of
spectacular domination, which, precisely, from its formation, hasn't
been anything else. The other three features are direct effects of this
domination, in its integrated stage.
Generalised secrecy stands behind the spectacle, as the decisive
complement of all it displays and, in the last analysis, as its most
important operation.
The simple fact of being without reply has given to the false an
entirely new quality. At a stroke it is truth which has almost
everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status
of pure hypothesis that can never be demonstrated. The false without
reply has succeeded in making public opinion disappear: first it found
itself incapable of making itself heard and then very quickly dissolved
altogether. This evidently has significant consequences for politics,
the applied sciences, the justice system and artistic knowledge.
The construction of a present where fashion itself, from clothes to
music, has come to a halt, which wants to forget the past and no longer
seems to believe in a future, is achieved by the ceaseless circular
passage of information, always returning to the same short list of
trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries. Meanwhile
news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes
rarely, and then in fits and starts. It always concerns this world's
apparent condemnation of its own existence, the stages in its programmed
self-destruction.
VI.
Spectacular domination's first priority was to make historical knowledge
in general disappear; beginning with just about all rational information
and commentary on the most recent past. The evidence for this is so
glaring it hardly needs further explanation. With mastery the spectacle
organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately
afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood.
The most important is the most hidden. Nothing in the last twenty years
has been so thoroughly coated in obedient lies as the history of May
1968. Some useful lessons have been learned from certain demystifying
studies of those days and their origins; these, however, are State secrets.
In France, it is a dozen years now since a president of the republic,
long since forgotten but at the time still floating on the spectacle's
surface, naively expressed his delight at "knowing that henceforth we
will live in a world without memory, where images chase each other, like
reflections on the water." Convenient indeed for those in business, and
who know how to stay there. The end of history gives current-day power a
pleasant break. Success is absolutely guaranteed in all of power's
undertakings, or at least the rumor of success.
How drastically any absolute power will suppress history depends on the
extent of its imperious interests or obligations, and especially on its
practical capacity to execute its aims. Ts'in Che Hoang Ti had books
burned, but he never managed to get rid of all of them. In our own
century Stalin went further, yet despite the various accomplices he
managed to find outside his empire's borders, there remained a vast area
of the world beyond the reach of his police, where his impostures could
be laughed at. The integrated spectacular has done much better with very
new procedures and this time operates globally. Ineptitude compels
universal respect; it is no longer permitted to laugh at it; in any
case, it has become impossible to show that one is laughing.
History's domain was the memorable, the totality of events whose
consequences would be lastingly apparent. Inseparably, history was
knowledge that must endure and aid in understanding, at least in part,
what was to come: "an everlasting possession," according to Thucydides.
In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty; and those who
sell novelty at any price have made the means of measuring it disappear.
When the important makes itself socially recognized as what is
instantaneous, and will still be the other and the same the instant
afterwards, and will always replace another instantaneous importance,
one can say that the means employed guarantee a sort of eternity of
non-importance that speaks loudly.
The precious advantage that the spectacle has drawn from the outlawing
of history, from having condemned the recent past to clandestinity, and
from having made everyone forget the spirit of history within society,
is above all the ability to cover its own history of the movement of its
recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had
always been there. All usurpers have wanted to make us forget that they
have only just arrived.
VII.
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat
into a fabulous distance, among its unverifiable stories, uncheckable
statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every
imbecile who has advanced spectacularly, there are only the mediatics
who can respond with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations,
and they are miserly, for besides their extreme ignorance, their
personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's general
authority and the society it expresses, makes it their duty, and their
pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be
damaged. It must not be forgotten that all mediatics, through wages and
other rewards and recompenses, has a master, and sometimes to several;
and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.
All experts are mediatics-Statists and only in that way are they
recognized as experts. Every expert follows his master, because all
former possibilities for independence have been almost been reduced to
nil by present society's conditions of organization. The most useful
expert, of course, is the one who lies. Those who need experts are, for
different reasons, falsifiers and ignoramuses. Whenever individuals lose
the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer
a formal reassurance. Once there were experts in Etruscan art, and
competent ones, for Etruscan art was not for sale. But a period which,
for example, finds it profitable to fake by chemical means various
famous wines, can only sell them if it has created wine experts able to
con connoisseurs into admiring their new, more recognizable flavors. [7]
Cervantes remarks that "under a poor cloak you often find a good
drinker." [8] Someone who knows his wine may often understand nothing
about the rules of the nuclear industry, but spectacular domination
calculates that if one expert can make a fool of him with nuclear
industry, another can easily do the same with wine. And it is well
known, for example, that experts in mediatic meteorology, forecasting
temperature or rainfall for the next forty-eight hours, are severely
limited in what they say by the obligation to maintain certain economic,
touristic and regional balances, when so many people make so many
journeys on so many roads, between so many equally desolate places; thus
they can only try to make their names as entertainers.
One aspect of the disappearance of all objective historical knowledge
manifests itself concerning any personal reputation, which has become
malleable and correctable at will by those who control all information,
those who collect it and also those -- an entirely different matter --
who diffuse it. Their license to falsify is thus unlimited. Historical
evidence, of which, in the spectacle, one does not want to know, is no
longer evidence. When the only fame is that bestowed as a favor by the
grace of a spectacular Court, disgrace may instantaneously follow. An
anti-spectacular notoriety is becoming something extremely rare. I
myself am one of the last people to possess one, having never had any
other. But it has also become extraordinarily suspect. Society has
officially declared itself to be spectacular. To be known outside
spectacular relations is already to be known as an enemy of society.
It is permitted to change a person's whole past, radically modify it,
recreate it in the manner of the Moscow trials -- and without even
having recourse to the clumsiness of a trial. One can kill at less
cost.[9] Those who govern the integrated spectacular, or their friends,
surely have no lack of false witnesses, though they may be unskilled --
but what capacity to detect this clumsiness can remain among the
spectators who will be witnesses to the exploits of the false witnesses?
-- or false documents, which are always highly effective. Thus it is no
longer possible to believe anything about anyone that you have not
learned for yourself, directly. But in fact false accusations are rarely
necessary. Once one controls the mechanism that operates the only form
of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can
say what one likes. The movement of the spectacular demonstration proves
itself simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by
repetition, by constant reaffirmation on the unique terrain where
anything can be publicly affirmed, and be made believed, precisely
because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness. Spectacular
authority can similarly deny whatever it likes, once, or three times
over, and say that it will no longer speak of it and speak of something
else instead, knowing full well there is no danger of any other riposte,
on its own terrain or any other.
For the agora, the general community, no longer exists, nor even
communities restricted to intermediary bodies or to autonomous
institutions, to salons or cafes, or to workers in a single company; no
place where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because
they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of
mediatic discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it.
Nothing remains of the guaranteed relatively independent judgment of
those who once made up the world of learning; of those, for example, who
used to base their pride on their ability to verify, to come close to
what one called an impartial history of facts, or at least to believe
that such a history deserved to be known. There is no longer even any
incontestable bibliographical truth, and the computerized catalogues of
national libraries are well-equipped to better suppress the traces. It
is disorienting to consider what it meant to be a judge, a doctor or a
historian not so long ago, and to recall the imperative obligations they
often recognized, within the limits of their competence: men resemble
their times more than their fathers. [10]
When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is
as if it did not exist. For it has then gone on to talk about something
else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical
consequences, as we see, are enormous.
We believe we know that in Greece, history and democracy appeared at the
same time. We can prove that their disappearances have also been
simultaneous.
To this list of the triumphs of power we should, however, add one result
which has proved negative for it: a State, in which one has durably
installed a great deficit of historical knowledge so as to manage it,
can no longer be governed strategically.
VIII.
Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacular, self-proclaimed
democratic society seems to be generally accepted as the realization of
a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks,
being fragile; and indeed is no longer attackable, being perfect, which
no other society has been. It is a fragile society because it has great
difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a
perfect society to be governed; and the proof is that all those who
aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, maintaining
it almost exactly as it is. For the first time in contemporary Europe,
no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to
change something important. The commodity can no longer be criticized by
anyone: as a general system or even as the particular forms of junk
which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.
Wherever the spectacle rules, the only organized forces are those that
want the spectacle. No one can any longer be the enemy of what exists,
nor transgress the omerta that concerns everything. We have finished
with that disturbing conception, which was dominant for over two hundred
years, according to which society was criticizable or transformable,
reformed or revolutionized. And this has not been obtained by the
appearance of new arguments, but quite simply because all argument has
become useless. From this result we can measure not universal happiness,
but the redoubtable strength of the networks of tyranny.
Never has censorship been more perfect. Never has the opinion of those
who are still led to believe, in several countries, that they remain
free citizens, been less authorized to make themselves known, whenever
it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never has it been
possible to lie to them with a perfect absence of consequences. The
spectator is simply supposed to know nothing, and deserve nothing. Those
who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such
must be the spectator's condition. People often cite the United States
as an exception because there Nixon came to an end due to a series of
denials whose clumsiness was too cynical: but this entirely local
exception, for which there were some old historical causes, clearly no
longer holds true, since Reagan has recently been able to do the same
thing with impunity. All that is never sanctioned is veritably
permitted. Talk of scandal is thus archaic. The most profound summing up
of the period that the whole world entered shortly after Italy and the
United States can be found in the words of a senior Italian statesman, a
member, simultaneously, of both the official government and the parallel
government called P2, Potere Due: "Once there were scandals, but not any
more." [11]
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx described the
State's encroachment upon Second Empire France, then rich with half a
million bureaucrats: "Everything became a subject for governmental
activity, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse, the communal property
of a village community, or the railways, the national property and the
provincial universities." The famous question of the funding of
political parties was already being posed, for Marx noted that, "The
parties that struggled in turn for supremacy regarded the taking of
possession of this immense State edifice as the main booty for the
victor." Yet this may nonetheless sound somewhat bucolic and, as one
says, surpassed, at a time when the State's speculations today concern
new towns and highways, underground traffic and the production of
electro-nuclear energy, oil drilling and computers, the administration
of banks and socio-cultural centers, the modification of the
'audiovisual landscape' and secret arms exports, property speculation
and the pharmaceutical industry, agribusiness and the management of
hospitals, military credits and the secret funds of the ever-expanding
departments charged with running society's numerous defense services.
But Marx unfortunately remains all too up to date when in the same book
he evokes this government, which "rather than deciding by night, and
striking by day, decides by day and strikes by night."
IX.
This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy,
terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than
by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it
is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never
know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to
convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems
rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic.
The modernization of repression has succeeded in perfecting -- first in
the Italian pilot-project under the name of pentiti [12] -- sworn
professional accusers; a phenomenon first seen in the seventeenth
century after the Fronde, when such people were called 'certified
witnesses.' This spectacular progress of Justice has filled Italy's
prisons with thousands of people condemned[13] to do penance for a civil
war which did not take place, a kind of mass armed insurrection which,
by chance, never actually happened, a putsch woven of such stuff as
dreams are made of.
One can remark that interpretations of the mysteries of terrorism appear
to have introduced a symmetry between contradictory views, as if there
were two schools of philosophy professing absolutely incompatible
metaphysical systems. Some would see terrorism as only several blatant
manipulations by the secret services; others, on the contrary, estimate
that it is only necessary to reproach the terrorists for their total
lack of historical understanding. [14] The use of a little historical
logic permits us to quite quickly conclude that there is nothing
contradictory in recognizing that people who lack all historical sense
can easily be manipulated; even more easily than others. It is much
easier to lead someone to 'repent' when it can be shown that everything
he thought he did freely was actually known in advance. It is an
inevitable effect of clandestine forms of organization of the military
type that it suffices to infiltrate a few people at certain points of
the network to make many march and fall. Critique, when evaluating armed
struggles, must sometimes analyze one of these particular operations
without being led astray by the general resemblance that all will
possibly share.[15] We should expect, as a logical possibility, that the
State's security services intend to use all the advantages they find on
the terrain of the spectacle, which has exactly been organized with that
in mind for some time: on the contrary, it is the difficulty of
glimpsing this which is astonishing, and does not ring true.
Judicial repression's current objective here, of course, is to
generalize matters as fast as possible. What is important in this sort
of commodity is the packaging, or the labeling: the price codes. One
enemy of spectacular democracy is the same as another, just like
spectacular democracies themselves. Thus there must be no more right of
asylum for terrorists, and even those who have not yet been accused of
being terrorists can certainly become so, with extradition being
imposed. In November 1978, in the case of a young print worker, Gabor
Winter, wanted by the West German government mainly for having drafted
certain revolutionary leaflets, Mlle Nicole Pradain, representing the
Department of Public Prosecution in the Appeal Court of Paris, quickly
showed that the 'political motives' that could be the only grounds for
refusing extradition under the Franco-German agreement of 29 November
1951, could not be invoked: "Gabor Winter is a social criminal, not a
political one. He refuses social constraints. A true political criminal
doesn't reject society. He attacks political structures and not, like
Gabor Winter, social structures." The notion of acceptable political
crime only became recognized in Europe once the bourgeoisie had
successfully attacked previously established social structures. The
nature of political crime could not be separated from the diverse
intentions of social critique. This was true for Blanqui, Varlin,
Durruti. Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely
political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which doubtless
no one will ever have the occasion to commit, since no one is interested
in the subject any more; except for the professional politicians
themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter no
longer called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social.
But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the
impertinent pretension to still want to change something in this
society, which thinks that it has only been only too kind and patient,
but which no longer wants to be blamed.
X.
According to the basic interests of the new system of domination, the
dissolution of logic has been pursued by different, but mutually
supportive, means. Some of these means involve the technical
instrumentation that has experienced and popularized the spectacle; but
others are more linked to the mass psychology of submission.
At the technological level, when the image constructed and chosen by
someone has become the individual's principal connection to the world he
formerly observed for himself at each place that he could go, one
certainly knows that the image supports everything; because within the
same image anything can be juxtaposed without contradiction. The flow of
images carries everything and it is similarly someone else who governs
at will this simplified summary of the perceptible world; he who chooses
where the flow will lead, and the rhythm of what should be shown, as a
perpetual, arbitrary surprise, doesn't want to leave any time for
reflection, and entirely independent of what the spectator might
understand or think of it. In this concrete experience of permanent
submission, one finds the psychological origin of the general adhesion
to what is; an adhesion that the spectator recognizes ipso facto as a
sufficient value. Beyond what is properly secret, spectacular discourse
obviously silences anything it finds inconvenient. It isolates what it
shows from its context, its past, the intentions and the consequences.
It is thus completely illogical. Since no one can contradict it, the
spectacle has the right to contradict itself, to correct its own past.
The arrogant attitude of its servants, when they have to make known some
new, and perhaps still more dishonest version of certain facts, is to
harshly correct the ignorance and bad interpretations they attribute to
their public, while the day before they themselves were busily
disseminating the error, with their customary assurance. Thus the
spectacle's instruction and the spectators' ignorance are wrongly seen
as antagonistic factors when in fact they give birth to each other. In
the same way, the computer's binary language is an irresistible
inducement to the continual and unreserved acceptance of what has been
programmed according to the wishes of someone else and passes for the
timeless source of a superior, impartial and total logic. Such increased
speed and a vocabulary to judge everything! Political? Social? You must
choose. You cannot have both. My choice is inescapable. They are jeering
at us, and we know whom these structures are for. [16] Thus it is not
surprising that children should glibly start their education at an early
age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they still do
not know how to read, for reading demands making veritable judgments at
every line; and is the only access to the vast areas of pre-spectacular
human experience. Because conversation is almost dead, and soon so too
will be many of those who knew how to speak.
On the level of the means of thought of contemporary populations, the
primary cause of decadence clearly derives from the fact that all
discourse shown in the spectacle leaves no place for response; and logic
is only socially formed in dialogue. Furthermore, when respect for those
who speak in the spectacle is so widespread, when they are supposed to
be rich, important, prestigious, to be authority itself, the spectators
tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, so as to display
an individual reflection of this authority. And finally, logic is not
easy, and no one has desired to teach it to them. Drug addicts do not
study logic, because they no longer need it, because they no longer have
the possibility. The spectator's laziness also that of any intellectual
cadre or overnight specialist, who do their best to conceal the narrow
limits of their knowledge by the dogmatic repetition of arguments with
illogical authority.
XI.
It is generally believed that those who have displayed the greatest
incapacity in matters of logic are precisely those who proclaim
themselves revolutionaries. This unjustified reproach dates from an age
when almost everyone thought with a minimum of logic, with the striking
exception of cretins and militants; and in the case of the latter bad
faith played its part, intentionally, because it was held to be
effective. But today there is no escaping the fact that intense use of
the spectacle has, as we should have expected, turned most of our
contemporaries into ideologues, if only in fits and starts, bits and
pieces. Absence of logic, that is to say, loss of the ability to
perceive immediately what is important and what is insignificant or
irrelevant, what is incompatible or, inversely, what could well be
complementary; all that a particular consequence implies and at the same
time all that it excludes -- high doses of this disease have been
intentionally injected into the population by the spectacle's
anaesthetists/resuscitators. Protesters have not been any more
irrational than submissive people. It is simply that in the former one
sees a more intense manifestation of the general irrationality, because
while displaying their project, they have actually tried to carry out a
practical operation -- even if it is only to read certain texts and show
that they know what they mean. They have given themselves diverse
obligations to dominate logic, even strategy, which is precisely the
entire field of the deployment of the dialectical logic of conflicts;
but, like everyone else, they are greatly deprived of the basic ability
to orient themselves by the old, imperfect tools of formal logic. No one
worries about them; and hardly anyone thinks about the others.
The individual who has been marked by impoverished spectacular thought
more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at
the service of the established order right from the start, even though
subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will
essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one
he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he
would like to show himself as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use
its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of the success
obtained by spectacular domination.
The swift disappearance of our former vocabulary is merely one moment in
this operation. It serves it.
XII.
The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to the
conditions of existence that is concretely submissive to spectacular
norms, and thus more separated from the possibilities of knowing
experiences that are authentic and thus from the discovery of individual
preferences. Paradoxically, the individual must permanently repudiate
them if he wants to be respected a little in such a society. This
existence postulates a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually
disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running
quickly behind the inflation of devalued signs of life. Drugs help one
to conform to this organization of things; madness allows one to flee it.
In all sorts of affairs in this society, where the distribution of goods
is centralized in such a way that it becomes master -- both notoriously
and secretly -- of the very definition of what could be the good, it
happens that certain people are attributed with qualities, knowledge or
even vices, all perfectly imaginary, in order to explain in such cases
the satisfactory development of particular enterprises; and this with
the only aim of hiding, or at least dissimulating as much as possible,
the function of various agreements that decide everything.
Nevertheless, despite its frequent intentions and its clumsy means to
highlight the full stature of supposedly remarkable personalities,
current society more often shows quite the opposite, and not merely in
what has today replaced the arts, or discussion of the arts: one total
incompetent will collide with another; panic ensues and it is then
simply a matter of who will fall apart first. A lawyer, for example,
forgetting that he is supposed to represent one side in a trial, will be
sincerely influenced by the arguments of his opposite number, even when
these arguments are as lacking in rigor as his own. It can also happen
that an innocent suspect temporarily confesses to a crime he did not
commit, simply because he is impressed by the logic of the hypothesis of
an informer who wanted him to believe he was guilty (see the case of Dr.
Archambeau in Poitiers, in 1984). [17]
McLuhan himself, the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be
the most convinced imbecile of the century, changed his mind when he
finally discovered in 1976 that "the pressure of the mass media leads to
irrationality," and that it was becoming urgent to modify their usage.
The thinker of Toronto had formerly spent several decades marveling at
the numerous freedoms created by a 'global village' instantly and
effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been
dominated by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and
repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. And this also
presents the vulgarity of this spectacular planet, where it is no longer
possible to distinguish the Grimaldi-Monaco or Bourbon-Franco dynasties
from those who succeeded the Stuarts. However, McLuhan's ungrateful
disciples are now trying to make people forget him, so as to rejuvenate
his early works and, in their turn, develop a career in mediatic eulogy
for all these new freedoms to 'choose' at random from ephemera. And
probably they will retract their claims even faster than the man who
inspired them.
XIII.
The spectacle doesn't hide the fact that certain dangers surround the
marvelous order it has established. Ocean pollution and the destruction
of equatorial forests threaten the Earth's oxygen renewal; its ozone
layer is menaced by industrial growth; radiation of nuclear origin
accumulates irreversibly. The spectacle merely concludes that none of
these things matter. It only wants to talk about dates and doses. And on
these alone, it succedes at reassuring -- something which a
pre-spectacular mind would have thought impossible.
The methods of spectacular democracy are of great subtlety, contrary to
the brutality of the totalitarian diktat. It can keep the original name
when the thing has been secretly changed (beer, beef or philosophers).
And it can just as easily change the name when the thing itself has been
secretly continued. In England, for example, the nuclear waste
reprocessing plant at Windscale was renamed Sellafield in order to
better allay suspicions, after a disastrous fire in 1957, but this
toponymic reprocessing did nothing to prevent the rise in local
mortality rates from cancer and leukemia. The British government, as the
population democratically learned thirty years later, had decided to
suppress a report on the catastrophe which it judged, no without reason,
would probably shake public confidence in nuclear power.
Nuclear practices, both military and civil, necessitate a far higher
dose of secrecy than in other fields -- which already have plenty, as we
already know. To make life -- that is to say, lying -- easier for the
sages chosen by the system's masters, it has discovered the utility of
changing measurements, to vary them according to a large number of
points of view, and refine them, finally juggle them, according to the
case, with several figures that are hard to convert. Hence, to measure
radioactivity levels, one can choose from a range of units of
measurement: curies, becquerels, roentgens, rads alias centigrays, and
rems, not forgetting the humble millirads, and sieverts which are worth
100 rems. [18] This evokes the memory of the subdivisions of British
currency, the complexity of which foreigners could not quickly master,
back in the days when Sellafield was still called Windscale.
One can imagine the rigor and precision which would have been achieved
in the nineteenth century by military history, and consequently by
theorists of strategy, if, so as not to give too much confidential
information to neutral commentators or enemy historians, one habitually
reported a campaign in these terms:
"The preliminary phase involved a series of engagements in which,
from our side, a strong advance force made up of four generals and the
units under their command, met an enemy force of 13,000 bayonets. In the
subsequent phase, a fiercely disputed pitched battle developed, in which
our entire army advanced, with 290 canons and a heavy cavalry of 18,000
sabers; the confronting enemy alignment comprised no less than 3,600
infantry lieutenants, 40 captains of hussars and 24 of cuirassiers.
Following alternate failures and successes on both sides, the battle can
finally be considered inconclusive. Our losses, somewhat lower than the
average figure one habitually cerified in combats of comparable duration
and intensity, were perceptibly superior to those of the Greeks at
Marathon, but remained inferior to those of the Prussians at Jena."
After this example, it is not impossible for a specialist to gather some
vague idea of the forces engaged. But the conduct of operations is
assured of remaining below all judgment.
In June 1987, Pierre Bacher, deputy director of installations at
Electricite de France, revealed the latest safety doctrine for nuclear
power stations. By installing valves and filters, it becomes much easier
to avoid major catastrophes, like cracks or explosions in the reactors,
which would affect the entirety of a 'region.' Such catastrophes are
produced by excessive containment. Whenever the machine looks like its
going to blow, it is better to decompress gently, showering only a
restricted area of a few kilometers, an area which on each occasion will
be differently and haphazardly extended depending on the wind. He
discloses that in the past two years, discreet experiments carried out
at Cadarache, in the Drome, "have concretely showed that the rejected
matter -- waste gas essentially -- doesn't surpass several units period
thousand, at worst one per cent of the radioactivity in the power
station itself." Thus a very moderate worst case: one per cent.
Formerly, we were assured there was no risk at all, except in the case
of accidents, which were logically impossible. The experience of the
first few years changed this reasoning as follows: since accidents are
always possible, what must be avoided is their reaching a catastrophic
threshold, and that is easy. All that is necessary is to contaminate
little by little, in moderation. Who would not agree that it is
infinitely healthier to limit yourself to an intake of 140 centilitres
of vodka per day for several years, rather than getting drunk right away
like the Poles?
It is indeed a shame that human society should encounter such burning
problems just when it has become materially impossible to make heard the
least objection to commodity discourse, just when domination -- quite
rightly because it is shielded by the spectacle from any response to its
fragmentary and delirious decisions and justifications -- believes that
it no longer needs to think; and truly no longer knows how to think.
Would not even the democrat have preferred to have chosen more
intelligent masters?
At the international conference of experts held in Geneva in December
1986, the question was quite simply whether to introduce a worldwide ban
on the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the gases which have
recently and rapidly made disappear the thin layer of ozone that
protects this planet -- one will remember -- from the harmful effects of
solar rays. Daniel Verilhe, representing Elf-Aquitaine's chemicals
subsidiary, and in this capacity part of a French delegation firmly
opposed to this ban, made a sensible point: 'it will take at least three
years to develop substitutes and the costs will be quadrupled.' As we
know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one and has
no market value. This industrial strategist could thus show his
opponents the extent of their inexplicable disregard for economics by an
appeal to reality: "It is highly dangerous to base an industrial
strategy on environmental imperatives."
Those who long ago began the critique of political economy by defining
it as "the final denial of humanity" were not deceived. [19] One still
recognizes this trait in it.
XIV.
It is sometimes said that science today is subservient to the
imperatives of economic profitability, but that has always been true.
What is new is that the economy has now come to openly make war on human
beings, not only on our possibilities for life, but also those of
survival. Against a great part of its own anti-slavery past, scientific
thought has chosen to serve spectacular domination. Until it got to this
point, science possessed a relative autonomy. It thus knew how to
understand its own portion of reality and thus it made an immense
contribution to increasing the means of the economy. When the
all-powerful economy became mad -- and these spectacular times are
nothing other than that -- it suppressed the last traces of scientific
autonomy, both in methodology and, by the same token, in the practical
conditions of activity of its 'researchers.' No longer is science asked
to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked to
instantaneously justify everything that happens. As stupid in this
field, which it exploits with the most ruinous thoughtlessness, as it is
everywhere else, spectacular domination has cut down the gigantic tree
of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon. So as to
obey this ultimate social demand for a manifestly impossible
justification, it is better not to be able to think too much, but
rather, on the contrary, to be well trained in the comforts of
spectacular discourse. And it is actually in this career that the
prostituted science of these despicable times has, with much good will,
deftly found its most recent specialization.
The science of lying justifications naturally appeared with the first
symptoms of bourgeois society's decadence, with the cancerous
proliferation of the pseudo-sciences called 'human'; yet modern
medicine, for example, had once been able to pass for useful, and those
who eradicated smallpox or leprosy were other than those who basely
capitulated in the face of nuclear radiation or chemical farming. One
quickly remarks that medicine today, of course, no longer has the right
to defend the health of the population against a pathogenic environment,
for that would be to oppose the State, or at least the pharmaceuticals
industry.
But it is not only by what it is obliged to keep quiet that current-day
scientific activity avows what it has become. It is also by what it has
the simplicity to say very often. In November 1985, professors Even and
Andrieu at Laennec hospital announced that they had perhaps found an
effective cure for AIDS, following an experiment on four patients which
had lasted a week. Two days later, the patients having died, several
other doctors, less advanced or perhaps jealous, expressed several
reservations as to the professors' precipitate haste in registering what
was only the misleading appearance of victory -- a few hours before the
collapse. Even and Andrieu defended themselves nonchalantly, affirming
that "after all, false hopes are better than no hope at all." Their
ignorance was too great for them to recognize this argument was a
complete denial of the spirit of science and had historically always
served to cover up the profitable daydreams of charlatans and sorcerers,
long before such people were put in charge of hospitals.
When official science has come to such a pass, like all the rest of the
social spectacle that, beneath its materially modernized and enhanced
presentation, has only revived the ancient techniques of fairground
mountebanks -- illusionists, barkers and stool-pigeons [20] -- it is not
surprising to see which great authority takes up Magi and sects,
vacuum-packed Zen or Mormon theology. Ignorance, which has served the
established authorities well, has also always been exploited by
ingenious ventures on the fringes of the law. And what better moment
than one where illiteracy has become so widespread? But this reality in
its turn is denied by another display of sorcery. From its inception,
UNESCO had adopted a very precise scientific definition of the
illiteracy that it strove to combat in backward countries. When the same
phenomenon was unexpectedly seen to be returning, but this time in the
so-called advanced nations, rather in the way that the one who was
waiting for Grouchy instead saw Blucher join the battle [21], it
sufficed to bring on the Guard of experts; they carried the day with a
single, irresistable assault, replacing the term illiteracy
[analphabetisme] by illettrisme [unlettered-ism]: just as a 'false
patriot' can opportunely appear to support a good national cause. And to
ensure that the pertinence of this neologism was, among pedagogues,
carved in stone, a new definition was quickly passed -- as if it had
always been accepted -- according to which, while the illiterate was,
one knew, someone who had never learned to read, the unlettered in the
modern sense is, on the contrary, someone who had learned to read (and
had even learned better than before, the more gifted official theorists
and historians of pedagogy coolly testified), but who had by chance
immediately forgotten. This surprising explanation might have risked
being more disturbing than reassuring, if, by ignoring the fact that it
was deliberately missing the point, it didn't have the cleverness to
avoid the first consequence that would have come to anyone's mind in
more scientific eras: the recognition that this new phenomenon merited
being explained and combated, since it had never been observed, nor even
imagined, anywhere, before the recent progress of damaged thought, where
explanatory and practical decadence go hand in hand.
XV.
More than a century ago, A.-L. Sardou's New Dictionary of French
Synonyms defined the nuances which must be grasped between fallacious,
deceptive, impostrous, seductive, insidious, captious; and which taken
together constitute today a kind of palette of colors with which to
paint a portrait of the society of the spectacle. It was beyond the
scope of his time, and his experience as a specialist, for Sardou to
distinguish with equal clarity the related, but very different, perils
normally expected to be faced by any group devoted to subversion,
following, for example, this progression: misled, provoked, infiltrated,
manipulated, usurped, inverted. These important nuances have never
appeared to the doctrinaires of 'armed struggle.' [22]
Fallacious [fallacieux], from the Latin fallaciosus, skillful at or
accustomed to deception, full of deceit: the termination of this
adjective is equivalent to the superlative of deceptive [trompeur]. That
which deceives or leads into error in any way is deceptive: that which
is done in order to deceive, abuse, throw into error by a design
intended to deceive with artifice and imposed display most fitting to
abuse, is fallacious. Deceptive is a generic and vague word; all the
genres of signs and uncertain appearances are deceptive: fallacious
designates falsity, deceit, studied imposture; sophistic speech,
protests or reasoning are fallacious. The word has affinities with
impostrous [imposteur], seductive [seducteur], insidious [insidieux] and
captious [captieux], but without equivalence. Impostrous designates all
forms of false appearances, or conspiracies to abuse or injure; for
example, hypocrisy, calumny, etc. Seductive expresses action calculated
to take hold of someone, to lead them astray by artful and insinuating
means. Insidious only indicates the act of artfully laying traps and
making people fall into them. Captious is restricted to the subtle act
of surprising someone and making him fall into error. Fallacious
encompasses most of these characters.
XVI.
The relatively new concept of disinformation was recently imported from
Russia, along with many other inventions useful in the management of
modern states. It is always openly employed by a power, or,
consequently, by the people who hold a fragment of economic or political
authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a
counter-offensive role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must
necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile or at least rival
powers, and must have been intentionally falsified by malevolence.
Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the
authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit
them: that is called psychosis. Unlike the pure lie, disinformation --
and here is why the concept is interesting to the defenders of the
dominant society -- must inevitably contain a degree of truth but
deliberately manipulated by a skillful enemy. The power that speaks of
disinformation does not believe itself to be absolutely faultless, but
knows that it can attribute to any precise criticism the excessive
insignificance which is in the nature of disinformation, and of the sort
that it will never have to admit to a particular fault.
In short, disinformation would be the bad usage of the truth. Whoever
issued it is culpable, whoever believes it is stupid. But who precisely
would this artful enemy be? In this case, it cannot be terrorism, which
is in no danger of 'disinforming' anyone, since it is charged with
ontologically representing the grossest and least acceptable error.
Thanks to its etymology and to contemporary memories of those limited
confrontations which, around mid-century, briefly opposed East and West,
concentrated spectacular and diffuse spectacular, today the capitalism
of the integrated spectacular still pretends to believe that the
capitalism of totalitarian bureaucracy -- sometimes even presented as
the terrorists' base camp or inspiration -- remains its fundamental
enemy, just as the other would say the something about it, despite the
innumerable proofs of their alliance and profound solidarity. In fact,
all the established powers, despite several genuine local rivalries, and
without ever wanting to spell it out, continually remember what one of
the rare German internationalists after the outbreak of the war of 1914
managed to recall from the side of subversion and without great
immediate success: "The principal enemy is in our country." In the end,
disinformation is the equivalent of what was represented in the
discourse of social war in the nineteenth-century as 'dangerous
passions.' It is all that is obscure and threatens to oppose the
unprecedented happiness that this society offers to those who trust it,
a happiness that is worth more than various insignificant risks and
disappointments. And all those who see this happiness in the spectacle
agree that one should not haggle over the price; everyone else is a
disinformer.
The other advantage derived from denouncing a particular instance of
disinformation by explaining it in this way is that there is no
suspicion that the global discourse of the spectacle might contain the
same thing, since it can designate, with the most scientific assurance,
the terrain where one recognizes the only disinformation: all that can
be said and that will displease it.
It is doubtless by mistake -- if it isn't a deliberate decoy -- that a
project was recently set in motion in France to officially place a label
on mediatics 'guaranteed free of disinformation': this wounded certain
professionals of the media, who still like to believe, or more modestly
would like it to be believed, that until now they had not actually been
censored. But the concept of disinformation must obviously not be used
defensively, still less in a static defense, strengthening a Great Wall
or a Maginot Line, that must absolutely cover a space from which
disinformation is supposedly prohibited. There must be disinformation,
and it must be something fluid and potentially ubiquitous. Where
spectacular discourse is not under attack, it would be stupid to defend
it; and the concept would wear out extremely fast if one were to try to
defend it against all the evidence on points which ought on the contrary
to be kept from mobilizing public opinion. Moreover the authorities have
no real need to guarantee that any particular information does not
contain disinformation. And they do not have the means to do so: they
are not respected to that extent, and would only draw suspicion on the
information concerned. The concept of disinformation is only good for
counter-attack. It must be kept in reserve, then instantaneously thrown
into the fray to drive back any truth which has managed to arise.
If sometimes a kind of disorderly disinformation threatens to appear, in
the service of particular interests temporarily in conflict, and
threatens to be believed, becoming uncontrollable and thus opposing
itself to the concerted work of a less irresponsible disinformation,
there is no reason to fear that in this one finds other manipulators who
are more expert or more skilled: it is simply because disinformation now
deploys itself in a world where there is no longer room for any
verification.
The confusionist concept of disinformation is pushed into the limelight
instantaneously to refute, by the very noise of its name, all critique
that has not been sufficiently made to disappear by the diverse agencies
of the organization of silence. For example, it could one day be said,
should this appear desirable, that this text is a disinformation
campaign against the spectacle; or indeed, since it is the same thing, a
piece of disinformation harmful to democracy.
Contrary to what is affirmed by its inverted spectacular concept, the
practice of disinformation can only serve the State here and now, under
its direct command, or at the initiative of those who defend the same
values. In fact, disinformation resides in all existing information and
as its principal characteristic. It is only named where passivity must
be maintained by intimidation. Where disinformation is named it does not
exist. Where it exists, it is not named.
When there were still conflicting ideologies, which claimed to be for or
against some recognized aspect of reality, there were fanatics, and
liars, but there were no 'disinformers.'
When it is no longer permitted, out of respect for spectacular
consensus, or at least for a wish for spectacular glory, to say truly
what someone is against, or equally what one wholeheartedly approves;
and when one often meets the obligation to dissimulate a side of what
one is supposed to admit that one nevertheless finds to be dangerous for
some reason; then one practices disinformation, as if by thoughtlessness
or forgetfulness or by allegedly false reasoning. And, by example, on
the terrain of contestation after 1968, the incapable recuperators who
were called 'pro-situs' were the first disinformers, because they
dissimulated as much as possible the practical manifestations through
which the critique that they flattered themselves to have adopted were
confirmed: and, not embarassed by weakening the expression of this
critique, they never referred to anything or anyone, in order to suggest
that they themselves had actually discovered something.
XVII.
Reversing a famous maxim of Hegel, I already noted in 1967 that "in a
world really inverted, the truth is a moment of the false." The years
since then have shown the progress of this principle in each specific
domain, without exception.
Thus, in an era when contemporary art can no longer exist, it becomes
difficult to judge the classical arts. Here as elsewhere, ignorance is
only produced in order to be exploited. At the same time the meaning of
history and taste are lost, one organizes networks of falsification. It
suffices to hold onto the experts and appraisers, which is easy enough,
to get things to go through, since in affairs of this kind, as in the
others, it is the sale which authenticates all value. Afterwards, it is
the collectors and museums, particularly in America, which, gorged on
falsehood, will have an interest in upholding its good reputation, just
as the International Monetary Fund maintains the fiction of a positive
value in the huge debts of a hundred nations.
The false form of taste, and support of the false, deliberately make the
possibility of reference to the authentic disappear. One even remakes
the true as soon as possible to resemble the false. Being the richest
and the most modern, the Americans have been the principal dupes of this
commerce of the false in art. And they are exactly the same people who
pay for restoration work at Versailles or in the Sistine Chapel. This is
why Michelangelo's frescoes will acquire the bright colors of a cartoon
strip, and the authentic furniture at Versailles acquire the brilliant
quickness of gilt that will make them resemble the fake Louis XIV suites
imported by Texans at such great expense.
Feuerbach's judgment on the fact that his time preferred "the image to
the thing, the copy to the original, represenation to reality," has been
entirely confirmed by the century of the spectacle, and in several
domains where the nineteenth century preferred to keep its distance from
what was already its fundamental nature: industrial capitalist
production. Thus it was that the bourgeoisie had widely spread the
rigorous spirit of the museum, the original object, precise historical
criticism, the authentic document. But today, the artificial tends to
replace the true everywhere. At this point, it is fortuitous that
pollution due to automobile traffic has necessitated the replacement of
the Marly Horses in place de la Concorde, or the Roman statues in the
doorway of Saint-Trophime in Arles, by plastic replicas. In short,
everything will be more beautiful than before, so as to be photographed
by tourists.
The highest point has without doubt been reached by the Chinese
bureaucracy's laughable fake of the great statues of the industrial army
of the First Emperor, which so many visiting statesmen have been taken
to admire in situ. Since one could mock them so cruelly, this thus
proves that in all the masses of their advisors, there was not a single
individual who knew the history of art, in China or anywhere else. One
knows that their instructions were quite different: 'Your Excellency's
computers have not been informed.' This confirmation that, for the first
time, it is possible to govern without any artistic knowledge, nor any
sense of the authentic or the impossible, could alone suffice to make us
conjecture that the naive dupes of the economy and the administration
will probably lead the world to some great catastrophe; if their actual
practice had not already demonstrated that fact.
XVIII.
Our society is built on the secret, from the 'screen companies' that
shelter from all light the concentrated wealth of their members, to the
'defense secrets' that today cover an immense domain of full
extra-judicial liberty of the State; from the often frightening secrets
of shoddy production, which are hidden by advertising, to the
projections of variants in an extrapolated future, in which domination
alone reads the most probable routes of things that it affirms have no
existence, calculating the responses it will mysteriously make. One can
make several observations.
There are always more places, in the great cities as in the spaces
reserved in countryside, which remain inaccessible, that is to say,
guarded and protected from all gazes; which are out of bounds to
innocent curiousity, and well-guarded against espionage. Without all
being properly military, they are on this model placed beyond all risk
of inspection by passers-by and inhabitants; or even by the police,
whose functions have long been reduced to surveillance and repression of
the most commonplace forms of delinquency. And it was thus in Italy,
when Aldo Moro was a prisoner of Potere Due [23], he was not held in a
building more or less unfindable, but simply impenetrable.
There is always a large number of men trained to act in secret;
instructed and practiced only for that. There are special detachments
armed with confidential archives, that is to say, with secret data and
analysis. And others armed with diverse techniques for the exploitation
and manipulation of these secret affairs. Finally, when it is a question
of their 'action' branches, they can equally be equipped with other
means to simplify the problems studied.
While the means attributed to these men specialized in surveillance and
influence continue to increase, they also encounter general
circumstances that favor them more each year. When, for example, the new
conditions of the society of the integrated spectacular have forced its
critique to remain really clandestine, not because it hides itself but
because it is hidden by the heavy stage-management of the thought of
diversion, those who are nonetheless charged with surveilling this
critique and, if necessary, for denying it, can now employ traditional
methods in the milieu of clandestinity: provocation, infiltrations, and
various forms of elimination of authentic critique to the profit of a
false one which will have been put in place for this purpose. [24] When
the general imposture of the spectacle is enriched with the possibility
of recourse to a thousand individual impostures, uncertainty grows at
every turn. An unexplained crime can also be called suicide [25], in
prison as elsewhere; the dissolution of logic allows inquiries and
trials that soar vertically into irrationality, and which are frequently
false, right from the start, through absurd autopsies, performed by
singular experts. [26]
One has long been accustomed to seeing summary executions of all kinds
of people. Known terrorists, or those considered as such, are openly
fought in a terrorist manner. Mossad can kill Abou Jihad[27] from afar,
the English SAS can do the same with Irish people, [28] and the parallel
police of GAL with Basques. [29] Those whose killings are arranged by
supposed terrorists are not chosen without reason; but it is generally
impossible to be sure of knowing these reasons. One can know that the
Bologna railway station was blown up to ensure that Italy continued to
be well governed [30]; and what the 'death squads' in Brazil are; and
that the Mafia can burn down a hotel in the United States to facilitate
a racket [English in original]. But how can we know what purpose was
ultimately served by the 'mad killers of Brabant'? [31] It is hard to
apply the principle Cui prodest?[32] in a world where so many active
interests are so well hidden. The result is that, under the integrated
spectacular, we live and die at the confluence of a very great number of
mysteries.
Media/police rumors instantly, or at worst after three or four
repetitions, acquire the unquestionable weight of secular historical
proofs. According to the legendary authority of the spectacle of the
day, strange characters eliminated in silence can reappear as fictive
survivors, whose return can always be evoked or calculated, and proved
by the mere say-so of specialists. They are somewhere between the
Acheron and the Lethe, these dead people whom the spectacle has not
properly buried[33], supposedly slumbering while awaiting the summons
which will awake them all: the terrorist once again come down from the
hills, the pirate from the sea; and the thief who no longer needs to
steal.[34]
Thus is uncertainty organized everywhere. The protection of domination
very often procedes by false attacks, of which the mediatic treatment
will lose from view the true operation: such was the case with the
bizarre assault by Tejero and his civil guards on the Cortes in 1981,
whose failure hid another more modern, that is to say, more disguised
pronunciamiento, which succeeded.[35] Equally showy, the failure of the
French secret services' sabotage attempt in New Zealand in 1985 has
sometimes been seen as a stratagem, perhaps designed to divert attention
from the numerous new uses of these services, by making people believe
in their caricatural clumsiness both in their choice of target and in
their modalities of operation. [36] And more assuredly, it has been
almost universally accepted that the geological explorations for
oil-beds in the subsoil of the city of Paris, so noisily conducted in
the autumn of 1986, had no other serious purpose than to measure the
inhabitants' current level of stupefaction and submission: by showing
them supposed research so absolutely contradicted on the economic level.
Power is becoming so mysterious that after the affair of the illegal
arms sales to Iran by the US presidency [36], one might wonder who was
really commanding the United States, the strongest power in the
so-called democratic world. And which devil could thus command the
democratic world?
More profoundly, in this world which is officially so full of respect
for economic necessities, no one ever knows the real cost of anything
which is produced: actually, the most important part of the real cost is
never calculated; and the rest is kept secret.
XIX.
At the beginning of 1988, General Noriega suddenly became known
world-wide. He was the unofficial dictator of Panama, a country without
an army, where he commanded the National Guard. Panama is not really a
sovereign state: it was dug out for its canal, rather than the reverse.
Its currency is the dollar, and the true army which is stationed there
is similarly foreign. Noriega had thus devoted his entire career --
precisely like that of [General] Jaruzelski in Poland -- to serving the
occupying power as its chief of police. He imported drugs into the
United States, since Panama was not bringing him sufficient revenue, and
exported his 'Panamanian' capital to Switzerland. He had worked with the
CIA against Cuba and, to provide adequate cover for his economic
activities, had also denounced some of his rivals in the import trade to
the US authorities, obsessed as they are with this problem. To the
jealousy of Washington, his chief security advisor was the best on the
market: Michael Harari, a former officer with Mossad, the Israeli secret
service. When the Americans finally decided to get rid of this person
[Noriega], some of their courts having imprudently condemned him,
Noriega declared that he was ready to defend himself for a thousand
years, for Panamanian patriotism and, at the same time, against his own
people in revolt and foreigners; in the name of anti-imperialism, he
quickly received public approval from the more austere bureaucratic
dictators in Cuba and Nicaragua.
Far from being a peculiarly Panamanian strangeness, this General
Noriega, who sells and simulates everything, in a world which everywhere
does the same thing, was altogether a perfect representative of the
integrated spectacular, and of the successes that it allows the most
varied managers of its internal and international politics: a sort of
man of a sort of state, a sort of general, a capitalist. He is the very
model of the prince of our times[38] and, of those destined to come to
power and remain there, the most able to resemble him closely. It is not
Panama which produces such marvels, it is our era.
XX.
For any intelligence service [service de renseignements], on this point
in accord with the exact Clausewitzian theory of war, knowledge must
become power. From this these services draw their prestige, their
species of special poetry. Whilst intelligence [intelligence] has been
absolutely chased from the spectacle, which does not permit action and
does not say much of the truth about the actions of others, it almost
seems to have taken refuge among those who analyze and secretly act on
realities. The recent revelations that Margaret Thatcher had done
everything to suppress, but in vain, and authenticated by the attempt,
have shown that in Britain these services have already been capable of
bringing down a minister whom they judged politically dangerous. [39]
The general scorn aroused by the spectacle thus, for new reasons,
restored the attraction of what in Kipling's day was called 'the great
game.'
'The police conception of history' was, in the nineteenth century, a
reactionary and ridiculous explanation, at a time when so many powerful
social movements agitated the masses. Today's pseudo-opponents are well
aware of this, thanks to hearsay or some books, and believe that this
conclusion remains true for eternity; they never want to see the real
praxis of their time; because it is too sad for their cold hopes. The
State isn't ignorant of this, and plays on it.
At the moment when almost every aspect of international political life
and a growing number of those aspects that count in internal politics
are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services, with
decoys, disinformation and double explanations (one might conceal
another, or may only seem to), the spectacle confines itself to making
known a wearisome world of obligatory incomprehensibility, a boring
series of lifeless, inconclusive crime novels. It is true that the
realistic direction of a fight between negroes, at night, in a tunnel,
must pass for a sufficiently dramatic motive.
Imbecility believes that all is clear when television has shown a
beautiful image and commented on it with a brazen lie. The demi-elite is
content to know that almost everything is obscure, ambivalent, 'mounted'
by unknown codes. A more exclusive elite would like to know the true,
hard as it is to distinguish in each singular case, despite all the
reserved information and confidences of which it can dispose. This is
why this elite would love to know the method of truth, though their love
usually remains unlucky.
XXI.
The secret dominates this world, and first and foremost as the secret of
domination. According to the spectacle, the secret would only be a
necessary exception to the rule of abundant information offered on the
entire surface of society, just as domination in the 'free world' of the
integrated spectacular would be restricted to only an executive
department in the service of democracy. But no one really believes the
spectacle. How then do the spectators accept the existence of the secret
that alone guarantees that they cannot manage a world, the principal
realities of which they know nothing about, if one were to truly ask
them for their opinions on the manner of managing it? It is a fact that
the secret doesn't appear to hardly anyone in its inaccessible purity
and its functional universality. Everyone accepts that there is
inevitably a small zone of secrecy reserved for specialists; as for the
generality of things, many believe that they are in on the secret.
In the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, La Boetie showed how the power
of a tyrant must encounter many supports among the concentric circles of
individuals who find, or believe to find, their advantage in it.
Likewise, many politicians and mediatics who are flattered that no one
can suspect them of being irresponsible, know many things through their
connections and confidences. Someone who is happy to be taken into
confidence is hardly likely to criticize it; nor to remark that in all
the confidences, the principal part of reality will always be hidden
from him. Thanks to the benevolent protection of the cheaters, he knows
a few more of the cards, but they can be false; and he never knows the
method that directs and explains the game. Thus he immediately
identifies himself with the manipulators and scorns the ignorance which
in fact he shares. Because the scraps of information offered to the
familiars of a lying tyranny are normally infected with lies,
manipulated and uncheckable. [40] They are, however, pleased to get
these scraps, for they feel themselves superior to those who know
nothing. They only know better than the rest so as to better approve of
domination and never to actually comprehend it. They constitute the
privilege of first-class spectators: those who have the stupidity to
believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is
hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed to them!
Domination is at least lucid in that it expects that its free and
unhindered management will very shortly lead to a quite large number of
major catastrophes of the highest grandeur; and this as much as on
ecological terrains (chemical, for example) as on economic terrains (in
banking, for example). It has for some time already been in a position
to treat these exceptional misfortunes by other means than its habitual
handling of soft disinformation.
XXII.
As to the rising number of assassinations over the last two decades,
which have remained entirely unexplained -- because, if one has
sometimes sacrificed some nobody, it has never been a question of going
back to the sponsors -- their character of production in series has its
mark: patent and changing lies in the official declarations; Kennedy,
Aldo Moro, Olaf Palme, ministers and bankers, a pope or two, some others
who were worth more than all of them.[41] This syndrome of a recently
acquired social disease has quickly spread all over, as if, following
the first documented cases, it descended from the summits of the State
(the traditional sphere for this type of attack) and, at the same time,
ascended from the underworld, the traditional place for illegal
trafficking and protection rackets, where this kind of war has always
gone on, among professionals. These activities tend to meet each other
in the middle of the affairs of society, as if the State didn't disdain
from mixing itself up in it and the Mafia elevated itself by attaining
it; thus a kind of junction operates there.[42]
One has heard the occurrence of accidents used to explain this new genre
of mystery: police incompetence, stupid magistrates, untimely press
revelations, crisis of growth in the secret services, malevolent
witnesses, or categorical strikes by informers. But Edgar Allan Poe had
already found the certain path to truth, in his celebrated reasoning in
The Murders in the Rue Morgue:
"It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the
very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution --
I mean for the outre character of its features. . . . In investigations
such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has
occurred,' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before.'"
XXIII
In January 1988 the Colombian drug Mafia issued a communique aimed at
correcting public opinion about its supposed existence. The greatest
requirement of any Mafia, wherever it may be constitued, is naturally to
establish that it does not exist, or that it has been the victim of
unscientific calumnies; and that is its first point of resemblance with
capitalism. But in this particular circumstance, this Mafia was so
irritated at being the only one placed in the spotlight that it went so
far as to evoke the other groupings that wanted to make themselves
forgotten by abusively using it as a scapegoat. It declared: 'We
ourselves don't belong to the Mafia of politicians and bureaucrats, nor
that of bankers and financiers, nor that of millionaires, nor to the
Mafia of great fraudulent contracts, to that of monopolies or oil, nor
to the great means of communication.'
One can without doubt estimate that the authors of this declaration
have, like all the rest, an interest in emptying their own practices
into that vast river of troubled water of criminality and more banal
illegalities, which irrigates the whole of present society; but it is
also just to agree that here we have people who by their very profession
know better than the others what they are talking about. The Mafia
flourishes in the soil of modern society. Its growth is as rapid as that
of all the other products of the labor by which the society of the
integrated spectacular society fashions its world. The Mafia grows along
with the immense progress of computers and industrial food
processing,[43] with complete urban reconstruction and shanty-towns,
secret services and illiteracy.
XXIV.
When it began to manifest itself at the beginning of the century in the
United States, with the immigration of Sicilian workers, the Mafia was
only a transplanted archaism; at the same time, there appeared on the
West Coast the gang wars between Chinese secret societies. Founded on
obscurantism and poverty, the Mafia at that time was not even able to
implant itself in Northern Italy. It seemed condemned to vanish before
the modern State. It was a form of organized crime that could only
prosper through the 'protection' of backward minorities, outside the
world of the towns, where the laws of the bourgeoisie and the control of
a rational police force could not penetrate. The defensive tactics of
the Mafia could only suppress witnesses, neutralize the police and
judiciary, and install as ruler in its sphere of activity the secret
that is necessary to it. Subsequently it found a new field in the new
obscurantism of the society of the diffuse spectacular, then in its
integrated form: with the total victory of the secret, the general
resignation of citizens, the complete loss of logic, and universal
cowardice, all the favorable conditions were united for it to become a
modern and offensive power.
Prohibition in America -- a great example of the pretensions of this
century's States to the authoritarian control of everything, and of the
results that ensue -- left to organized crime the management of commerce
in alcohol. The Mafia, enriched and experienced, moved into electoral
politics, commerce, the development of the market in professional
killers, and certain details of international politics. Thus, during the
Second World War, it was favored by the US government, and helped with
the invasion of Sicily.[44] Legalized alcohol was replaced by drugs,
which then constituted the star commodity in illegal consumption. Then
the Mafia took considerable importance in property dealing, in banking
and in high-level politics and the great affairs of state, and then in
the industries of the spectacle: television, films and publishing. In
the United States at least, it is already in the recording industry, as
in every other activity where publicity of a product depends on a quite
concentrated number of people. It is easy to apply pressure to them,
with bribes and intimidation, since there is obviously quite a great
deal of capital and hitmen who can not be recognized nor punished. By
corrupting the disc-jockeys, one thus decides what will succeed, from
equally wretched commodities.
It is undoubtedly in Italy that the Mafia, in the wake of its
experiences and conquests in America, has acquired the greatest
strength: since the period of its historic compromise with the parallel
government[45], it has found itself in a position to kill magistrates
and police chiefs:[46] a practice it inaugurated through its
participation in the setting up of political 'terrorism.' The similar
evolution of the Mafia's Japanese equivalent, in relatively independent
conditions, proves the unity of the epoch.
One deceives oneself every time one wants to explain something by
opposing the Mafia and the State: they are never rivals. Theory easily
verifies what all the rumors in practical life have all too easily
shown. The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at
home in it. At the moment of the integrated spectacular, it in fact
reigns as the model for all advanced commercial enterprises.
XXV.
With the new conditions that now predominate in the society crushed
under the iron heel of the spectacle, one knows, for example, that a
political assassination finds itself placed in another light; can in a
sense be sifted. Everywhere the mad are more numerous than before, but
what is infinitely more convenient is that they can be talked about
madly. And it is not some kind of reign of terror that imposes such
mediatic explanations. On the contrary, it is the peaceful existence of
such explanations which should cause terror.
When in 1914, the war being imminent, Villain assassinated Jaures, no
one doubted that Villain, though without doubt a somewhat unbalanced
man, had believed he had to kill Jaures, because in the eyes of the
extremists of the patriotic right who had deeply influenced him, Jaures
seemed to be someone who would certainly be harmful to the country's
defense. These extremists had only underestimated the tremendous
strength of patriotic consent within the Socialist Party, which would
immediately push it into "the sacred union," whether or not Jaures was
assassinated or allowed the occasion to hold to his internationalist
position in rejecting the war. Today, in the presence of such an event,
journalists/police officers and well-known experts on the 'facts of
society' and 'terrorism' would immediatelt explain that Villain was well
known for having several times sketched out attempted murders, the
impulse each time seeing men who, despite the variety of their political
opinions, all by chance looked and dressed rather like Jaures.
Psychiatrists would attest to this, and the media, only attesting to
what the psychiatrists had said, would thus attest to, by the same fact,
their own competence and impartiality as incomparably authorized
experts. The next day, the official police investigation would establish
that one discovered several honorable people ready to bear witness to
the fact that this same Villain, considering he had been rudely served
at the 'Chope du Croissant,' had, in their presence, loudly threatened
to take revenge on its proprietor by murdering, in front of everyone and
on the premises, one of his best customers. [47]
This is not to say that, in the past, the truth often or quickly imposed
itself, for Villain was eventually acquitted by the French courts. He
was not shot until 1936, at the start of the Spanish revolution, because
he had committed the imprudence of residing at the Balearic Islands.
XXVI.
It is because of the new conditions of a profitable handling of economic
affairs, at the moment when the State holds a hegemonic part in the
orientation of production and when the demand for all of the commodities
depends strictly on the centralization achieved by spectacular
information/promotion, to which all forms of distribution must also
adapt, that one sees the imperative demand that networks of influence or
secret societies constitute themselves everywhere. It is thus only a
natural product of the movement of concentration of capital, production
and distribution. Whatever does not spread must disappear; and
businesses can only spread with the values, techniques and means of
today's industry, spectacle and State. It is, in the final analysis, the
particular development that has been chosen by the economy of our era,
which imposes everywhere the formation of new personal links of
dependency and protection.
It is precisely here that resides the profound truth of this formula, so
well appreciated throughout Italy, used by the Sicilian Mafia: "When
you've got money and friends, you can laugh at Justice." In the
integrated spectacular, the laws are asleep; because they were not made
for the new production techniques, and because they are outflanked in
distribution by new types of agreement. What the public thinks, or
prefers, is no longer of importance. This is what is hidden by the
spectacle of so many opinion polls, elections, modernizing
restructurings. No matter who the winners are, the amiable clientele
will get what's inferior, because that is exactly what has been produced
for it.
One only continually speaks of a "State of rights" since the moment that
the modern, so-called democratic State generally ceased to be one: it is
not by chance that the expression was only popularized shortly after
1970 and exactly in Italy. In many domains, laws are even made precisely
so that they may be outflanked by exactly those who have all the means
to do so. Illegality in some circumstances -- for example, around the
global trade in all sorts of weaponry, most often concerning the
products of the highest technology -- is only a kind of back-up for the
economic operation, which will find itself all the more profitable.
Today many business deals are necessarily as dishonest as the century,
and not like those once made within a strictly limited range by people
who had chosen the paths of dishonesty.
To the extent that the networks of promotion/control grow so as to mark
and hold on to exploitable sectors of the market, there is also an
increase in the number of personal services which can not be refused to
those in the know and who have not refused their help; and these are not
always the police or guardians of the interests and security of the
State. Functional complicities communicate at a distance and for a very
long time, because their networks dispose of all the means to impose
those sentiments of recognition and fidelity that, unfortunately, have
always been so rare in the free activity of bourgeois times.
One always learns something from one's adversary. It is necessary to
believe that the people of the State have also read the young Lukacs'
remarks on the concepts of legality and illegality; at the moment that
they had to deal with the brief passage of a new generation of the
negative[48] -- Homer said that "A generation of men passes as quickly
as a generation of leaves." Since then, the people of the State have,
like us, ceased to trouble themselves with any kind of ideology on the
question; and it is true that the practices of spectacular society no
longer favor ideological illusions of this kind. Finally, concerning us
all, one could conclude that what has often prevented us from enclosing
ourselves in a single illegal activity is the fact that we have had several.
XXVII.
In book VIII, chapter 5 of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides said,
concerning the operations of another oligarchic conspiracy, something
that has relevance to the situation in which we find ourselves:
Those who took the floor were of the conspiracy and the speeches
that they pronounced had been submitted in advance to the examination of
their friends. No opposition manifested itself among the remainder of
the citizens, who were frightened by the number of conspirators. When
someone tried, despite everything, to contradict them, one soon found a
convenient way of making him die. The murderers weren't found and no
pursuit was made of those one suspected. The people didn't react and
were so terrorized that they estimated themselves happy, even in
remaining mute, if they escaped the violence. Believing the conspirators
much more numerous than they were, the people felt completely impotent.
The town was too large and they didn't quite know each other, so that it
was not possible for them to discover what it really was. In these
conditions, so shameful were the people that they could not confide
their grief to anyone. Thus, one had to renounce engaging in an action
against the guilty ones, because it would have been necessary to address
oneself either to an unknown person or a person of knowledge in whom one
didn't have confidence. In the democratic party, personal relations were
everywhere stamped with scorn, and one always asked oneself if he with
whom one had business wasn't coniving with the conspirators. There were
actually among the conspirators men whom one could never believe that
they had rallied themselves to the oligarchy.
If history should return to us after this eclipse, which depends on
factors still in struggle and thus on an outcome which no one can
exclude with certainty, these Comments may one day serve in the writing
of a history of the spectacle; without any doubt the most important
event to have occurred this century, and also the event that one least
ventures to explain. In different circumstances, I believe I could have
considered myself greatly satisfied with my first work on this subject,
and left it to others to consider subsequent developments. But in the
moment at which we are, it seemed to me that no one else would do it.
XXVIII.
From the networks of promotion/control one slides imperceptibly into
networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly, one only ever
conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor
is a new and rapidly developing trade. Under spectacular domination, one
conspires to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone would call its
progress. This conspiracy is a part of its very functioning.
One has already begun to put in place several means for a kind of
preventive civil war, adapted to different projections of the calculated
future. These are the 'specific organizations' charged with intervening
at several points, according to the needs of the integrated
spectacular.[49] One has thus foreseen, for the worst possibilities, a
tactic that, in a pleasantry, has been called 'Three Cultures,' an
evocation of a square in Mexico City in the summer of 1968,[50] though
this time the gloves will be off and the tactic will be applied before
the day of the revolt. And beyond such extreme cases, it is not
necessary, so as to to be a good means of government, that the
unexplained assassination touches much of the world or returns quite
frequently: the sole fact that one knows that its possibility exists
immediately complicates calculations in a very large number of domains.
It no longer needs to be intelligently selective, ad hominem. The use of
the procedure in a purely aleatory fashion would perhaps be more productive.
One is also placed in a position to compose fragments of a social
critique of rearing, which would no longer be entrusted to academics or
mediatics, whom it is henceforth better to keep apart from the
excessively traditional lies in this debate; but a better critique,
advanced and exploited in a new way, handled by another, better trained
species of professional. In a quite confidential manner, lucid texts are
beginning to appear, anonymously, or signed by unknown authors -- a
tactic moreover facilliated by the concentration of the attentions of
all on the clowns of the spectacle, which makes unknown people appear
exactly the most admirable -- not only on subjects never approached in
the spectacle but also with arguments of which the justness is rendered
more striking by the calculable species of originality, which comes from
the fact that they are never used, despite being quite evident. This
practice can serve at least as a first stage in initiation to recruit
more alert minds, who will later be told a much larger share of the
possible consequences, if they seem suitable. And what for certain
people will be the first step in a career, will be for others with a
lower ranking the first degree of a trap in which one takes them.
In certain cases, on questions that threaten to become controversial, it
will be a matter of creating another pseudo-critique; and between the
two opinions which will thus arise -- both foreign to impoverished
spectacular conventions -- naive judgment can oscillate indefinitely,
and the discussion weighing upon them can be renewed each time that it
is fitting. Most often this concerns a general discourse on what is
mediatically hidden, and this discussion can be strongly critical, and
on some points obviously intelligent, yet remaining curiously
decentered. The themes and words have been artificially selected, with
the aid of computers informed in critical thought. These texts contain
certain gaps, quite hard to spot but nonetheless remarkable: the
vanishing point of perspective is always abnormally absent. They
resemble those facsimiles of a famous weapon, which only lacks the
firing-pin. This is necessarily a lateral critique, which perceives
several things with much frankness and exactness, but places itself to
the side. Not because it affects some sort of impartiality, because on
the contrary it must seem to find much fault, but without ever
apparently feeling the need to reveal its cause, thus to state, even
implicitly, where it is coming from and where it wants to go.
To this kind of counter-journalistic false critique can be joined the
organized practice of the rumor, which one knows to be originally a sort
of wild ransom of spectacular information, since everyone, however
vaguely, perceives a deceptive character in the latter and trusts it as
little as it deserves. Rumor was at the origin superstitious, naive,
self-poisoning. More recently, however, surveillance has begun
introducing into the population people susceptible of immediately
starting rumors that suit it. Here one has decided to apply in practice
the observations of a theory formulated some thirty years ago, and of
which the origins lie in American sociology of advertising: the theory
of individuals known as 'trend-setters,' that is, those whom others in
their milieu come to follow and imitate; but in passing this time from
spontaneity to well-rehearsed. Budgetary, or extrabudgetary, means have
also been released to maintain numerous auxiliaries, besides the former
academic and mediatic specialists, the sociologists and police of the
recent past. To believe that models known in the past are still
mechanically applied is as misleading as a general ignorance of the
past. "Rome is no longer in Rome," [51] and the Mafia is no longer the
underworld. And the surveillance and disinformation services as little
resemble the works of the police and informers of former times -- for
example, the roussins and mouchards of the Second Empire -- as
current-day special services in all countries resemble the activities of
the officers of the Second Bureau of the army's headquarters in 1914.
Since art is dead, it has become extremely easy to disguise police as
artists. When the latest imitations of an inverted neo-Dadaism are
authorized to pontificate gloriously in the media, and thus also to
slightly modify the decor of official palaces, like court jesters to the
kings of junk, one sees that by the same movement a cultural cover is
guaranteed for all the agents or auxiliaries of the State's networks of
influence.[52] Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centers on the
complete works of nonexistent personalities, can be opened just as fast
as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or
novelist-cops. No doubt Arthur Cravan foresaw this world when he wrote
in Maintenant: "Soon we will only see artists in the streets, and it
will take all the troubles of the world to find a single man." This is
indeed the sense of the revived form of an old quip of Parisian
hoodlums: "Hi, artists! So much the worse if I deceive myself."[53]
Things having become what they are, one can now see the use of
collective authorship by the most modern publishing house, that is to
say, the one with the best commercial distribution. Since the
authenticity of pseudonyms are only assured by the newspapers, they can
swap them around, collaborate, replace each other, enlist new artificial
brains. Their task is to express the lifestyles and thought of the era,
not by virtue of their personalities, but because they are ordered to.
Those who believe that they are veritably individual, literary
entrepeneurs can thus vouch for the fact that Ducasse has had a row with
the Comte de Lautreamont, that Dumas isn't Maquet and that we must
especially not confuse Erckmann with Chatrian; that Censier and
Daubenton are no longer on speaking terms. [54] It might be best to say
that this type of modern author was a follower of Rimbaud, at least in
so far as "I is another."
The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services
to play the pivotal role; because it is in them that the characteristics
and means of execution of such a society are concentrated to the highest
degree. They are always further tasked with arbitrating the general
interests of this society, despite their modest title of 'services.'
There is no abuse here, for they faithfully express the ordinary morals
of the century of the spectacle. And it is thus that surveillers and
those surveilled set forth on a boundless ocean. The spectacle has made
the secret triumph, and must always be in the hands of specialists in
the secret, who of course are not all of the functionaries who have to
different degrees made themselves autonomous with respect to State
control; who are not all of the functionaries.
XXIX.
A general law of the functioning of the integrated spectacular, at least
for those who manage its administration, is that, in this framework,
everything which can be done, must be done. This is to say that every
new instrument must be employed, whatever the cost. New equipment
becomes the goal and the driving force of the entire system, and will be
the only thing which can notably modify its progress, each time its use
is imposed without further reflection. Society's owners indeed want
above all to maintain a certain 'social relation between people,' but
they must also pursue incessant technological innovation; because such
was one of the obligations that they accepted with their inheritance.
This law thus applies equally to the services that safeguard domination.
The instrument that has been completed must be used, and its use will
reinforce the very conditions that favor this use. It is thus that
emergency procedures become permanent.
The coherence of the society of the spectacle proves revolutionaries
right, since it has become clear that one cannot reform the poorest
detail without taking the whole thing apart. But, at the same time, this
coherence has suppressed every organized revolutionary tendency by
suppressing the social terrains where they had more or less expressed
themselves: from trade unions to newspapers, towns to books. In the same
movement, one has highlighted the incompetence and thoughtlessness of
which this tendency was quite naturally the bearer. And on the
individual level, the reigning coherence is quite capable of
eliminating, or buying off certain possible exceptions.
XXX.
Surveillance would be much more dangerous had it not been pushed along
the path of absolute control of everyone, to the point where it
encounters difficulties created by its own progress. There is a
contradiction between the mass of information collected on a growing
number of individuals, and the time and intelligence available to
analyze it, or simply its actual interest. The abundance of material
demands summarizing at each stage: much of it will disappear and what
remains will still be too long to be read. Management of surveillance
and manipulation is not unified. Indeed there is a widespread struggle
for a share of the profits, and thus also for the priority of the
development of this or that potential in the existing society, to the
detriment of the other potentials, which nonetheless, so long as they
are all part of the same mix, are considered equally respectable.
One also struggles through play. Each officer is led to over-value his
agents, as well as the opponents' agents with whom he occupies himself.
Each country, not to mention the numerous supranational alliances,
currently possesses an undetermined number of police and
counter-espionage services, along with secret services, both State and
para-State. There are also many private companies dealing in
surveillance, security and investigation. The large multinationals
naturally have their own services; but so do nationalized companies,
even those of modest scale, which no less pursue independent policies at
a national and sometimes an international level. One can see that an
industrial nuclear group will fight against an oil group, even though
both are the property of the same State and, what is more, are
dialectically united by their attachment to maintaining high oil prices
on the world market. Each particular industry's security service combats
sabotage, and needs to organize it against their rivals: a company with
important interests in undersea tunnels will be favorably disposed to
the insecurity of ferry-boats [English in original] and may bribe
newspapers in financial trouble to ensure they mention it on the first
possible occasion and without too much reflection; a company competing
with Sandoz will be indifferent to ground water in the Rhine valley. One
secretly surveills what is secret. Thus each of these organizations,
confederated with flexibility around those who are in charge of the
reason of the State, aspires, for its own account, to a species of
private hegemony of meaning. Because meaning has been lost along with
the knowable center.
Modern society, which, up to 1968, went from success to success, and was
persuaded that it was loved, has since then had to renounce these
dreams; it prefers to be feared. It knows full well that "its innocent
air will no longer return." [55]
Thus, a thousand of conspiracies in favor of the established order
tangle and clash almost everywhere, with the overlapping of networks and
secret questions or actions always pushed harder; and the process of
rapid integration is pushed into each branch of the economy, politics
and culture. The degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation
and special activities continually grows in all areas of social life.
The general conspiracy has become so dense that it is almost out in the
open, each of its branches starts to hinder or trouble the others,
because all these professional conspirators are spying on each other
without exactly knowing why, or encounter each other by chance, yet
without recognizing each other with certainty. Who is observing whom? On
whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain
hidden, and the ultimate intentions can only be suspected with great
difficulty and almost never understood. So that while no one can say he
is not deluded or manipulated, it is only in rare instances that the
manipulator himself can know he has succeeded. And, besides, finding
oneself on the winning side of manipulation does not mean that one has
justly chosen the strategic perspective. It is thus that tactical
successes can get great forces stuck on bad paths.
In the same network, apparently pursuing the same goal, those who only
constitute a part of the network are obliged to be ignorant of the
hypotheses and conclusions of the other parts, and especially of their
ruling nucleus. The quite well known fact that all information on
whatever subject under observation may well be entirely imaginary, or in
large part false, or very inadequately interpreted, complicates and
renders unsure to a great degree the calculations of the inquisitors;
because what is sufficient to condemn someone is not sufficient when it
comes to recognizing or using him. Since sources of information are in
competition, so are falsifications.
It is in these conditions of its existence that we can speak of a
tendency to the falling profitability of control, to the extent that it
approaches the totality of social space and consequently increases its
personnel and its means. Because here each means aspires and labors to
become an end. Surveillance spies on and conspires against itself.
Its principal present contradiction, finally, is that it is surveilling,
infiltrating and influencing an absent party: that which is supposed to
want the subversion of the social order. But where can it be seen at
work? Because conditions certainly have never been so seriously
revolutionary, but it is only governments that think so. Negation has
been so thoroughly deprived of its thought that it was dispersed long
ago. Because of this, it is only a vague, yet very worrisome threat, and
surveillance in its turn has been deprived of the best field of its
activity. These powers of surveillance and intervention are exactly led
by current necessities, which command their terms of engagement, to
operate on the very terrain of this threat in order to combat it in
advance. [56] This is why surveillance has an interest in organizing
poles of negation itself, which it will instruct with more than the
discredited means of the spectacle, so as to influence, not terrorists
this time, but theories. [57]
XXXI.
Baltasar Gracian, that great connoisseur of historical time, tells us
with much pertinency in The Court Gentleman: "Be it words or action, all
must be measured by time. It is necessary to want when one can; because
neither the season nor time wait for anyone."
But Omar Khayyam was less of an optimist. "So as to speak clearly and
without parables -- We are the pieces of the game that plays the sky; --
We amuse ourselves with ourselves on the chessboard of Being, -- and
then we are returned, one by one, to the box of Nothingness."
XXXII.
The French Revolution involved great changes in the art of war. It was
after this experience that Clausewitz could establish the distinction
according to which tactics are the use of forces in battle so as to
obtain victory, whereas strategy is the use of victories to attain the
goals of a war. Europe was subjugated, immediatelt and lastingly, by the
results. But the theory was not established until later, and was
developed unequally. First to be appreciated were the positive features
directly brought about by a profound social transformation: the
enthusiasm and mobility that lived off the land in rendering itself
relatively independent of stores and supply trains, the multiplication
of numerical strength. These practical elements found themselves
counterbalanced by the appearance on the enemy side of similar elements:
in Spain, the French armies encountered another popular enthusiasm; in
the vast spaces of Russia, a land they could not live off; after the
rising in Germany, numerically far superior forces. However, the effect
of a total break in the new French tactics, which was the simple basis
on which Bonaparte founded his strategy -- which consisted of using
victories in advance, as if acquired on credit: conceiving manoeuvers
and their diverse variants from the start as consequences of a victory
that was not yet obtained, but would certainly be at the first onslaught
-- derived also from the forced abandonment of false ideas. This tactic
brusquely obliged an abrupt break with false ideas and, at the same
time, by the concomitant play of the other innovations outlined above,
found the means to achieve such a break. The newly levied French
soldiers were incapable of fighting in line, that is, of keeping ranks
and firing on command. They would thus be deployed as sharpshooters and
practiced firing at will as they advanced on the enemy. Therefore,
firing at will found itself exactly to be the only effective kind, which
really operated a destructive use of musketry, which proved the most
decisive factor in military engagements of the period. Yet military
thinking had universally rejected this conclusion in the century that
was ending, and the discussion on the question continued through most of
the new century, despite constant examples from the practice of combat
and the ceaseless progress in range and rate of fire.
The establishment of spectacular domination is seemingly a social
transformation so profound that it has radically altered the art of
government. This simplification, which has quickly borne such fruit in
practice, has not been fully comprehended theoretically. Old prejudices
everywhere contradicted, precautions become useless, and even the traces
of scruples from other times still hinder this comprehension, which
practice establishes and confirms every single day, in the thinking of
quite a number of rulers. Not only are the subjugated made to believe
that, essentially, they are still living in a world which in fact
disappeared, but the rulers themselves sometimes suffer from the
thoughtlessness of still believing in it. They come to believe in a part
of what they have suppressed, as if it remained a reality and had still
to be included in their calculations. This delay will not last long.
Those who have achieved so much so easily must necessarily go further.
One must not believe that those who have not quickly understood the
pliability of the new rules of their game and its form of barbaric
grandeur will durably maintain themselves like an archaism in the
surroundings of real power. The destiny of the spectacle is certainly
not to end in enlightened despotism.
We must conclude that a change is imminent and ineluctable in the
co-opted cast who manage the domination and, notably, those who direct
the protection of that domination. In such an affair, the novelty of
course will never be displayed on the stage of the spectacle. It will
only appear like lightning, which we know only when it strikes. This
change, which will decisively complete the work of these spectacular
times, will occur discreetly and, although it concerns those already
installed in the sphere of power, conspiratorially. It will select those
who will take part part in it on this central requirement: that they
clearly know what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are
capable. [58]
XXXIII.
The same Sardou also wrote:
Vainly relates to the subject; in vain to the object; uselessly
without use for anyone. One has worked vainly when one has done so
without success, so that one has wasted one's time and effort: one has
worked in vain when one has done so without attaining the intended goal,
because of the defectiveness of the work. If I cannot complete my task,
I work vainly; I am uselessly wasting my time and effort. If the task I
have done does not have the effect I was expecting, if I have not
attained my goal, I have worked in vain; that is to say, I have done
something useless. . . .
It is also said that someone has worked vainly when he has not been
rewarded for his work, or when this work has not been accepted; because
in this case the worker has wasted his time and effort, without this at
all prejudicing the value of his work, which can be very good.
-- Paris, February-April 1988.
Publication history: first published in French by Editions Gerard
Lebovici, 1988. Translated into English by NOT BORED! August 2005. All
footnotes by NOT BORED! except where noted.
[1] For more on the assassination of Gerard Lebovici, see Jean-Francois
Martos, Words and Bullets: the Condemned of the Lebovici Affair (1984),
and Guy Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici
(1985).
[2] Guy Debord's epigraph is taken from the first European translation
of The Art of War, by the Jesuit JJ.L. Amiot (1782). The best available
English translation, by Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford 1963), does not
include this passage. [Malcolm Imrie] And so we have translated directly
from Debord's French.
[3] This might sound meglomaniacal, but it is a fact that, in the early
1970s, the French "Socialist" Party used the situationist demand "Change
Life" as one of his campaign slogans. (See Theses on the SI and Its
Time, thesis 37.) For more on the "Socialist" Party's recuperation of
the situationists, see NOT BORED! review of Jacques Attali's Noise.
[4] In the initial agreement that formed the the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization in 1949, there was a secret clause that required that,
before a nation could join NATO, it must establish its own national
security service capable of "Civil Emergency Planning," that is, of
"intervening effectively [...] in the event of external socialist
aggression or internal political upheavals." Sometimes called "Operation
Stay Behind," this massive network consisted of secret bases, arms
caches, recruitment centers and paramilitary cadres drawn from trusted
anti-communists (mostly neo-Nazis, mafiosi and right-wing special
operatives). The French branch of this network was called Rose des Vents
("Rose of the Winds"). Up until 1974, when the conspiracy was revealed,
the same name (La Rosa Dei Venti) was used in Italy; after 1974, the
Italian part of the network was called Glaudio (a two-sided Roman sword)
and worked out of the "P2" Masonic Lodge. See footnotes [11] and [23].
[5] The French here is le mediatique. Though "mediatic" is not commonly
used in English, we have consistently employed it because Debord's text
is so insistent on its use: a different meaning from the standard and
relatively limited meaning of "media" is clearly intended.
[6] The French here is spectaculaire integre. We have consistently
translated spectaculaire as "spectacular" because Debord's text
carefully distinguishes it from "spectacle." It would appear that the
author's intention in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is to
"detourn" the theory he originally presented in The Society of the
Spectacle.
[7] The French here is des experts en vins qui entra'neront les caves a
aimer leurs nouveaux parfums, plus reconnaissables. Debord's pun on the
two meanings of caves -- wine-cellars (fem.) and hopeless dupes or
suckers (masc.) -- is unfortunately lost in English. The word's
underworld etymology is instructive. It originally referred to anyone
who worked in a legitimate job; hence to someone who did not know how to
live; and hence to any kind of dupe. [Malcolm Imrie]
[8] The proverb is from Don Quixote, quoted by the Duchess in her
conversation with Sancho Panza (vol. II, book 3, ch. 1). The Spanish is,
Debajo de mala capa, suele haber buen bebedor. [Malcolm Imrie]
[9] On the rewriting of a person's past, after he or she has been
assassinated, see Guy Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of
Gerard Lebovici, and Jean-Francois Martos, Words and Bullets: the
Condemned of the Lebovici Affair.
[10] An Arab proverb, dating from the fourteenth century. [Malcolm Imrie]
[11] Although Debord says that the "P" in P2 stands for Potere (Power),
while other writers say that it stands for Propaganda (same in Italian
and English), one is definitely speaking of the same organization.
Founded in the 19th century, P2 was a "covered" masonic lodge: the
identities of its members were not known by anyone, even the Grand
Lodge. In 1964, General Licio Gelli -- a fascist from the Mussolini days
who had been sheltered in Argentina by its dictator Juan Peron --
returned to Italy, took charge of P2 and used his extensive connections
to establish a network of the various drug mafias and neo-Nazi
extremists in Latin America and Southern Europe. After the exposure of
"The Rose of the Winds" group in 1974 (footnote [4]), P2 took up the
burden of maintaining NATO's "Operation Stay Behind" in Italy. In 1982,
the existence of P2 itself was discovered. At the time, the lodge
counted among its members more than 2,400 people, including former-Prime
Minister Giulo Andreotti, the "senior Italian statesman" to whom Debord
refers. In 1990, Andreotti was charged with ordering the assassination
of journalist Mino Pecorelli; in his defense, Andreotti confirmed and
deferred to the existence of Operation Gladio.
[12] A relevant example of an alleged accomplice who "repents" and -- in
exchange for favorable treatment -- turns state's evidence (becomes a
"supergrass") would be Aldo Tisei, a member of the Palladin organization
(see footnote [46]) who murdered Judge Vittorio Occorsio (see footnote
[48]).
[13] On 7 April 1979, the Italian authorities arrested more than 20
left-wing intellectuals, including Antonio Negri. Many more arrests
followed.
[14] Among those who "see terrorism as simply a number of acts of
blatant manipulation on the part of the secret services," Debord would
include Gianfranco Sanguinetti, author of On Terrorism and the State,
which Debord criticized in his 23 February 1981 letter to Jaap
Kloosterman. Among those who "reproach the terrorists for their total
lack of historical understanding," Debord would include Antonio Negri,
Oreste Scalzone and other "doctrinaires of 'armed struggle.'" See
footnote [22].
[15] Another reference to Debord's critique of Sanguinetti's On
Terrorism and the State. Among those "particular operations" to be
analyzed, Debord would include those conducted by "Blanqui, Varlan,
[and] Durruti," to whom he refers in the context of the inseparability
of "political crime" and "social critique." See also Debord's 1980
comments concerning armed struggle in the Basque Country.
[16] "They are jeering at us, and we know whom these programmes are
for." The French here is, On nous siffle, et l'on sait pour qui sont ces
structures. Debord is playing on a famous line from Racine's Andromache,
Act V, Scene 3: Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos tetes?
[Malcolm Imrie] That last French phrase means, "Who are those serpents
jeering at your heads?"
[17] In 1984, seemingly motivated by professional jealousy, certain
colleagues of a Dr Archambeau at a hospital in Poitiers caused the death
of some of his patients in the operating-theater by reversing the oxygen
and nitrogen supplies during resuscitation. Archambeau was eventually
acquitted of any blame, but the real culprits were never discovered.
[Malcolm Imrie]
[18] See the following passage in Abyss, an unsigned essay that appeared
in French the August 1986 issue of L'Encyclopedie des Nuisances and was
translated into English by the ex-situationist Donald Nicholson-Smith:
How many curies, how many becquerels, were now thrust upon us in
order to satisfy our hunger and thirst for knowledge! Not a day would
pass without the authorities producing figures purporting to show that
the (formerly nonexistent) radioactivity level had dropped considerably
and was now "insignificant." They also worried about how difficult it
probably was for us to calculate our chances of survival in so many
different units of measurement, and suggested "standardizing the
definition of the level at which radioactivity begins to present a
threat to human beings" -- in other words, pushing that danger level
high enough to spare us all those endless calculations.
[19] It was Marx who defined political economy as "the final denial of
humanity." [Malcolm Imrie]
[20] The French here is illusionnistes, aboyeurs et barons. Baron, a
word still in common use, refers to a trickster's accomplice, planted in
the crowd, who helps to dupe others either by raising objections which
the trickster can easily refute, or by pretending to buy whatever is on
offer. This was also the nineteenth-century meaning of "stool-pigeon,"
although the word is now used in a different sense. I cannot find a
modern English equivalent, though some American meanings of "stooge"
might be adequate. [Malcolm Imrie]
[21] The battle is Waterloo, the "one," Napoleon. The allusion is to
Victor Hugo's description of Waterloo in his poem "L'Expiation": seeing
the battle was going badly for the French, Napoleon summoned the
Imperial Guard to enter the fray. [Malcolm Imrie]
[22] A reference to Italian writers such as Antonio Negri, Oreste
Scalzone, Franco Piperno, Lanfranco Pace, and Paolo Virno, among others.
[23] Strictly speaking, the ex-Premier of Italy, Aldo Moro, wasn't held
prisoner by Potere Due, but by the Italian State itself. And so, Debord
appears to be making a sarcastic remark, to the effect that there's no
difference between the "parallel" and official governments of the country.
[23] In the summer of 1968, an Italian neo-Nazi and agent provocateur
named Mario Merlino succeded in infiltrating Roman anarchist circles by
forming the "XXII March Group," whose name was a close echo of the "22d
March Movement," the French group from Nanterre that included Daniel
Cohn-Bendit and several enrages who later joined the Situationist
International. One of the first actions taken by the XXII March Group
was the destruction of several cars after a demonstration in front of
the French Embassy in Rome. The Italian press quickly blamed the
violence on the Italian Communist Party.
[25] A reference to the 15 December 1969 "suicide" of the anarchist
Giuseppe Pinelli, who was murdered by Italian police officers during
their investigation into his non-existent role in the December 1969
bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan. Pinelli later became the
protagonist of Dario Fo's famous play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
[26] A reference to the investigation into the 1972 death of the Italian
left-wing publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who supposedly blew himself
up while trying to destroy an electricity pylon.
[27] In early 1988, Abou Jihad, a Palestinian leader, was assassinated
in Tunisia by the Mossad, an Israeli secret service.
[28] Formed during World War II, England's "Special Air Service" (SAS)
became a paramilitary "anti-terrorist" unit in the post-war years. All
through the 1970s and 1980s, the SAS conducted a "dirty war" against the
Irish Republican Army.
[29] Grupo Anti-Terrorista de Liberacion. [Malcolm Imrie] The
"Antiterrorist Liberation Group" was a group of hired killers who, under
the direction of Spain's "security" forces and the Ministry of the
Interior, hunted down and assassinated suspected ETA terrorists who had
fled to or were based in France. Between 1983 and 1987, nearly 30 people
were killed, reputedly with the help of the French Civil Guard.
[30] On 2 August 1980 -- the first day of an Italian national holiday --
a bomb exploded at the Bologna railway station, killing 85 and wounding
over 200 people. Among those eventually implicated in the execution of
the massacre was the neo-Nazi Stefano Delle Chiaie.
[31] Les tueurs fous de Brabant was the media's name for the
perpetrators of a series of murders in Belgium in the 1980s. The murders
were carried out during a number of raids on supermarkets: on each
occasion the gang, armed with military weapons, shot six or seven
people, apparently at random, and stole very small amounts of money.
Recent newspaper revelations have suggested that the choice of victims
may not have been entirely random, and that the murderers may have been
linked to right-wing organizations. [Malcolm Imrie] Between 30 September
1982 and 9 November 1985, the "mad killers of Brabant" murdered a total
of 28 people. No arrests were ever made. Something similar seems to have
taken place in Italy, beginning in June 1976.
[32] Latin for "who profits?"
[33] A reference to the hundreds of striking students who were killed by
the Mexican army in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, on 2 October 1968. It is
thought by some that the bodies were dropped by airplane into the Gulf
of Mexico.
[34] The allusion is to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem." But some of
the references here are more specific. Debord has pointed out that "the
thief who no longer needs to steal," for example, was Francois Besse,
the former accomplice of Jacques Mesrine, who has disappeared without
trace. [Malcolm Imrie] Jacques Mesrine was a notorious French
bank-robber who was killed by the police in 1979. Gerard Lebovici
re-printed his autobiography, L'instinct de mort -- which had been
banned by the Ministry of Justice -- shortly thereafter. For more on
Lebovici, see footnote [1].
[35] On 23 February 1981, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero -- together
with an armed group of 200 officers from the Civilian Guard -- stormed
into the Spanish Congress of Deputies, which was the lower house of the
Cortes. Several hours later, King Juan Carlos held a nationally
televised speech, during which he proclaimed his condemnation of the
coup and his belief that Spain's "democratic" process (the election of a
new Prime Minister) should continue peacefully. At noon, Tejero and his
men surrendered without harming anyone. It is thought that the King
himself ordered the phony coup as a way of increasing his dwindling
power and popularity.
[36] On 7 July 1985, the French secret services blew up the "Rainbow
Warrior," the flagship of the Greenpeace Organisation, while it was
docked in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand. At the time, Greenpeace was
conducting protests against the testing of nuclear weapons by the French
government in the South Pacific.
[37] President Ronald Reagan didn't simply arrange for the secret sales
of arms to Iran (which was then engaged in a prolonged struggle with
Iraq, which was also -- but openly -- receiving arms from the USA).
Reagan and his team of political criminals (CIA Director William Casey,
National Security Council "advisor" Lt. Colonel Oliver North, et al)
took the proceeds from these illegal sales and used them to finance the
"Contras," who were engaged in terrorist activities against the lawfully
elected "communist" government of Nicaragua (the Sandinistas).
[38] A reference to Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, written in Italian
in 1512. The following passage from this classic work is clearly
relevant to Debord's discussion of Noriega's relationship with the CIA:
I shall remind princes who have seized a new state for themselves
by encouraging subversion that they should carefully reflect on the
motives of those who helped him. If these were not based on a natural
affection for the new prince, but rather on discontent with the existing
government, he will retain their friendship only with considerable
difficulty and exertion, because it will be impossible for him in his
turn to satisfy them.
[39] A reference to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who was forced
to resign on 16 March 1976, three years before the next scheduled election.
[40] For example: the relationship between the Bundesnachrichtendienst
(Federal Intelligence Service, founded after World War II by Richard
Gehlen), and the CIA: "The Pentagon absorbed [Gehlen's] organization in
its entirety in the belief Gehlen had an efficient intelligence network
stretching right into the Kremlin itself. As early as 1949, an informer
in one of the emigre organizations used by Gehlen reckoned that about
ninety percent of all intelligence reaching the Americans was false
[...] False intelligence from the Gehlen organization to the Americans
was a major factor in the rise of the Cold War." Stuart Christie,
Stephano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London, 1984). See
recently declassified documents for more information.
[41] The American President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, supposedly
by Lee Harvey Oswald, on 22 November 1963. The former Italian Prime
Minister Aldo Moro was executed, supposedly by the Red Brigades, on 9
May 1978. (For more on Moro, see footnotes [23] and [44].) The Swedish
Prime Minister Olaf Palme was assassinated by an unknown gunman on 28
February 1986. Pope John Paul I died of a very mysterious heart attack
on 28 September 1978, only 33 days after his election. Among "some
others who were worth more than all of them," Debord would surely
include his friend and publisher, Gerard Lebovici (see footnote [1]).
[42] The precise beginning of this confluence might be set in 1942, when
-- in the aftermath of the mafia's destruction of a luxury cruise ship
(the Normandie) that, while docked in New York's harbor, was being
renovated to serve as a troop-carrier -- the Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI) sought out and received assistance from the
imprisoned mob boss Charles ("Lucky") Luciano. Eventually granted early
release from prison, Luciano also helped the ONI negotiate an agreement
with the Mafia concerning the invasion of Sicily. On 9 July 1943, the
Allies landed on the Italian island flying Mafia colors.
[43] In 1981, Debord devoted an essay to this subject.
[44] See footnote [42].
[45] Here Debord makes sarcastic use of the phrase "historic
compromise," which was first used to describe the highly publicized and
ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Prime Minister Aldo Moro to bring the
Italian Communist Party into Italy's ruling coalition. Upon this first
"compromise," Debord has superimposed another one: the secret and very
successful compromise reached between the Mafia and the Italian state,
which is once again identified with or reduced to "the parallel
government" (see footnote [23]). The intent of this superimposition is
itself doubled: to underline the point made about false attacks (see
footnote [35]), and to suggest the degree of collusion between
apparently unrelated and even opposing forces active in the spectacle.
[46] To pick two examples among many: Luigi Calabresi, the Police
Inspector in charge of investigating various terrorist bombings that
took place in 1969, was killed on 17 May 1972; and Vittorio Occorsio,
the judge investigating the Italicus train bombing of 1974, was killed
on 14 June 1976.
[47] Jaures was assassinated in the Chope du Croissant (now the Cafe
Chope du Croissant), 146 rue Montmartre, on 31, July 1914. [Malcolm Imrie]
[48] The "new generation of the negative" to which Debord refers
included the Dadaists.
[49] One example would be the "Palladin" organization (also known as
"The Guerillas of Christ the King"), which was founded in Spain by
ex-Nazi Otto Skorzeny in the late 1960s. Like the GAL (footnote [29]),
Palladin was involved in the assassination of ETA separatists who had
escaped to France. Other "special [death] squads" include the Bolivian
group of ex-Nazis called "The Fiances of Death," and Stefano Delle
Chiaie's international network, "The Black Orchestra."
[50] On 2 October 1968, police opened fire on student demonstrators in
Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, killing many. During the
preceding fortnight, at least fifty more students had been killed during
police attacks on strike meetings and the university campus. [Malcolm
Imrie] See footnote [33].
[51] "Rome is no longer in Rome." The quotation is from a line in
Racine's Mithridate: Rome n'est plus dans Rome; elle est toute ou je
suis. [Malcolm Imrie] That last phrase in French means, "It [Rome] is
everywhere I am."
[52] It is said that one of the reasons why Donald Nicholson-Smith's
1994 translation of The Society of the Spectacle was not "authorized" by
Debord was the fact that he believed that Zone Books (distributed by the
Massacusetts Institute of Technology) was funded by the Central
Intelligence Agency.
[53] The French is, Salut, les artistes! Tant pis si je me trompes. The
old low-life greeting was, Salut, les hommes. Debord has substituted
"artists" for "men." [Malcolm Imrie]
[54] Isidor Ducasse was of course the Comte de Lautreamont. Auguste
Macquet (or Maquet), a historian, was one of Dumas Pere's chief literary
collaborators. Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian (1822-99 and
1826-90) wrote several novels and plays together over some forty years,
many of them set in their native Alsace. Censier-Daubenton is a Paris
Metro station. [Malcolm Imrie] Debord was greatly influenced by
Lautreamont, especially his Poesies (1870), from which The Society of
the Spectacle (1967) plagiarized the following famous passage:
Ideas improve. The meaning of words has a part in the improvement.
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. Plagiarism takes an
author's phrase, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, replaces it
with the correct one.
[55] Debord is quoting from his film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur
igni. [Malcolm Imrie]
[56] According to Luis Manuel Gonzales Mata, a spy in the employ of the
Franco regime: "Agents, when they have no further information to report,
invent some; when there are no more outrages to be prevented, they
provoke some; when there is no longer any extremist organization to
infiltrate, they set some up."
[57] Likely candidates for manipulated theories would have to include
those advanced by the "doctrinaires of 'armed struggle'" (see footnote
[22]); and such "new philosophers" as Bernard-Henri Levy. Note as well
that, in his 1975 film, Refutation of All the Judgments, Pro or Con,
Thus Far Rendered on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle," Debord
refers to "the desolate walls of Vincennes University," and goes on to
say: "Within living memory no Vincennes student has ever come up with a
single theory. This is no doubt why we are currently seeing some of them
advocate 'anti-theory.' What else could they parlay into an assistant
professorship in that neo-university?"
[58] Because of Debord's use of a series of predictions to conclude his
Comments, one feels comfortable in mentioning that, just four years
after his book was published and in the aftermath of the 1991 collapse
of the Soviet Union, some of the people who would later go on to form
the "Project for a New American Century" were trying to convince
then-President George H. Bush that the time was right for the USA to
take over the world. Though these people (Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz,
and Donald Rumsfeld, among them) failed to convince him, they eventually
succeded with his son, George W. Bush, who was the self-avowed President
of the country on 11 September 2001. Ever since then -- with and through
America's military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti -- the
efforts to create a New American Empire have been going full-steam.
To Contact NOT BORED:
Info@notbored.org
ISSN 1084-7340.
Snail mail: POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station,
New York City 10009-9998
