by admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:20 pm
XXVIII
NETWORKS of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/ disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favour is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone would call its well-being. This conspiracy is a part of its very functioning.
Provisions for a kind of preventive civil war are already being made, adapted to variously calculated future projections. These are the 'special squads' responsible for local interventions according to the needs of the integrated spectacle. Thus, for the worst scenarios, a tactic has been planned under the name 'Three Cultures', a witty reference to a square in Mexico City in October 1968 - though this time the gloves would be off and the tactic applied before the revolt occurred. Such extreme cases apart, to be a useful tool of government unexplained assassinations only need to be widely influential or relatively frequent simply knowing that they are possible complicates calculations in many different fields. Nor is there any need to be intelligently selective, a d hominem. The entirely random application of the procedure may well be more productive.
The composition of certain fragments of a social critique of rearing has also been arranged, something which is no longer entrusted to academics or media professionals, whom it is now preferable to keep apart from excessively traditional lies in this debate: a new critique is required, advanced and exploited in a new way, controlled by another, better trained, sort of professional. In a relatively confidential manner, lucid texts are beginning to appear, anonymously, or signed by unknown authors - a tactic helped by everyone's concentration on the downs of the spectacle, which in turn makes unknowns justly seem the most admirable - texts not only on subjects never touched on in the spectacle but also containing arguments whose force is made more striking by a calculable originality deriving from the fact that however evident, they are never used. This practice may serve as at least a first stage in initiation to recruit more alert intellects, who will later be told more about the possible consequences, should they seem suitable. What for some will be the first step in a career will be for others - with lower grades - the first step into the trap prepared for them.
In some cases, with issues that threaten to become controversial, another pseudo-critique can be created; and between the two opinions which will thus be put forward - both outside the impoverished conventions of the spectacle - unsophisticated judgement can oscillate indefinitely, while discussion around them can be renewed whenever necessary. Most often this concerns a general discussion of what is hidden by the media, and this discussion can be strongly critical, and on some points quite evidently intelligent, yet always curiously decentred. Topics and words have been artificially chosen, with the aid of computers programmed in critical thought. These texts always contain certain gaps, which are quite hard to spot but nonetheless remarkable: the vanishing point of perspective is always abnormally absent. They resemble those facsimiles of famous weapons, which only lack the firing-pin. This is inevitably a lateral critique, which perceives many things with considerable candour and accuracy. but places itself to one side. Not because it affects some sort of impartiality, for on the contrary it must seem to find much fault, yet without ever apparently feeling the need to reveal its cause, 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 added the organised practice of rumour which we know to be originally a sort of uncontrollable byproduct of spectacular information, since everyone, however vaguely, perceives something misleading about the latter and trust it as little as it deserves. Rumour began as something superstitious, naive, self-deluding. More recently, however, surveillance has begun introducing into the population people capable of starting rumours which suit it at the very first signal. It has been decided here to apply in practice the observations of a theory formulated some thirty years ago, whose origins lie in American sociology of advertising - the theory of individuals known as 'pacemakers', that is, those whom others in their milieu come to follow and imitate - but this time moving from spontaneity to control. Budgetary, or extra-budgetary, means have also been released to fund numerous auxiliaries; beside the former specialists of the recent past, academics and media professionals, sociologists and police. To believe in the continuing mechanical application of past models leads to just as many errors as the general ignorance of the past. 'Rome is no longer in Rome', and the Mafia are no longer thieves. And the surveillance and disinformation services are as far removed from the police and informers of former times - for example, from the roussins and mouchards of the Second Empire - as the present special services in all countries are from the officers of the army general staff's Deuxieme Bureau in 1914.
Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists. When the latest imitations of a recuperated neo-dadaism are allowed to pontificate proudly in the media, and thus also to tinker with the decor of official palaces, like court jesters to the kings of junk, it is evident that by the same process a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state's networks of persuasion. Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centres on the work 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 no end of effort to find a single man.' This is indeed the sense of the revived form of an old quip of Parisian loafers: 'Hello there, artists! Too bad if I've got it wrong.'
Things having become what they are, we can now witness the use of collective authorship by the most modern publishing houses, that is to say, the ones with the best commercial distribution. Since their pseudonyms are only authenticated by the newspapers, they can swop them around, collaborate, replace each other, take on new artificial brains. Their task is to express the ideas and lifestyles of the epoch, not because of their personalities, but because they are ordered to. Those who believe that they are truly independent, individual literary entrepreneurs can knowingly vouch for the fact that Ducasse has had a row with the Comte de Lautreamont, that Dumas isn't Maquet, that we must never confuse Erckmann with Chatrian; that Censier and Daubenton are no longer on speaking terms. It might be best to say that this type of modem author was a follower of Rimbaud, at least in so far as 'I is someone else.'
The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services to play the pivotal role; for it is in them that the features and force of such a society are concentrated to the highest degree. Moreover they are always also the arbiters of that society's general interests, despite their modest title of 'services'. There is no corruption here, for they faithfully express the common morals of the spectacular century. Thus do watchers and watched sail forth on a boundless ocean. The spectacle has brought the secret to victory, and must be more and more controlled by specialists in secrecy who are certainly not only officials who have to different degrees managed to free themselves from state control; who are not only officials.