ALIENATED CONTESTATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Alienated contestation
    The whole theological, theophilic and prototheocratic alienated contestation movement of the modern social organization, divided in its various, more or less propitious, more or less archaic (royalists, nationalists, racists, fascists, neo-nazis, traditionalists, conservatives, corporatists, petit-bourgois, rappers, mystics, artists, sects, priests, tibetan monks, moralists, puritans, misogynists, functionalists, etc.) or “progressist” forms (trade unionists, leftists, communists, troskyst-leninists, stalinists, anarchists, “citizens”, hippies, punks, feminists, blacks, minorities, homosexual and vegetarian militants, ecologists, pacifists, engaged intellectuals, sociologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and other cops), is only the modern inclusive theocracy’s accomplice of in the maintenance and acerbation of its domination on all aspects and moments  of life.
    Fundamentally reformist, alienated contestation decreases or accelerates (“humanizes” in the “progressist” jargon), depending on the cases and periods, capitalism’s development in order to preserve it from its self-destruction tendency and to extend its empire constantly and everywhere. False contestation reinforces society’s alienating cohesion. It increases profitability, output and renders consumption even more “desirable”.  For that it diversifies and increases the supply and demand of theologies, by transforming dissatisfaction into a commodity and introducing alienated qualitative into the commodity to give it more value. Its aim is to prevent individuals from speaking together and from abolishing the current order of things, by spectacularly occupying the terrain of thought by the false dialogue dialoguing with itself. It presents the spectacle of opposition to reinforce the illusion of choice and freedom. It concentrates dissatisfaction on partial objectives and thus makes this same dissatisfaction easier to satisfy, by using only partial critics and reforms so that the totality may never be called into question. It only takes part in the rivalries for the maintenance of a unique domination.
Archaic and “progressist” contestation
    By that, alienated contestation shows how much it’s unable to understand its epoch but also, by the same occasion, how much it’s accomplice to it and thus, how much it’s perfectly of its epoch. For the naive, to put on the same level an anarchist and a neo-nazi, feminists and misogynists, archaism and “progressism”, will perhaps seem shocking, but the truth of their particularities lies in the universal system which contains them. The image that they have of themselves or that is given of them or the degree of violence which historically differentiates the activity of certain currents of alienated contestation, are of little importance.
    “Progressism”, a manifestation specific of theocratic inclusivity, differs fundamentally from archaism only in one point. Whereas archaism wants to impose theologies whose time has passed, “progressism” is the repossession - resorption, recuperation ? of the real negation of the current state in a theological form. We will not describe the characteristics of archaism, its theologies are so vulgar that they liquidate themselves and, besides, we do not intend at all to tire ourselves in order to convince the simple minded who still grant even the slightest credit to archaisms. “Progressism”, on the other hand, practices an art of falsification which aims at creating confusion. Because whereas archaism would have, in general, tendency to want to eliminate quite simply and directly any form from otherness, “progressism” practices a much more effective method to get the same result; it passes off as otherness. We will thus have to linger a little on it and evoke its principal features.
“Progressism”
    “Progressism” is divided into two subcategories, openly reformist “progressism” and
for those among the “progressists” who still have the pretension. The overall description of “progressism” which we are going to undertake applies to both forms, the revolutionary variation is only of a more grotesque villainy. We will thus only devote the following paragraph to its lank particularities.
Revolutionary “progressism”
    Revolutionary “progressists” endeavor to mask their reformism under a muck layer of phraseology with revolutionary consonance. These “progressists” in red or black uniforms arrange their reformism with spurious radical criticism. They vaguely speak of abolition of money and state while ceaselessly demanding only wage increases, work time reduction and tutti frutti, they make meager attempts at a self-management theory while fighting day and night only for the conservation of what they name “social rights”; or the most fallaciously revolutionary “progressists” claim not to want anything else than the total transformation of society, and perhaps want it indeed, but, they want to totally transform capitalist theocracy into a society as totally heteronomous. Their outline of a critique of totality, often called by them, in a revealing way, ideal or ideology, is only a pious wish, an abstract varnish covering their essential truth, practically as well as theoretically, and is the clear denial of their alleged critique of social conditions, exactly like modern society, which speaks of equality and freedom but whose truth lies in its social relations and real activity. Incapable of radical criticism, through revolutionary display, they implicitly live capitalist theocratic time as the only possible time.
Reformism
    In view of the most elementary definition of the word “progress”, one realizes how important it’s to handle it with tweezerlike quotation marks when one ventures to discourse on these “progressists” who all only practice stationary progress. “Progressists” have monopolized the social image of progress and contestation by emptying them of all their content. “Progressism” is never a progressive passage towards an autonomous society, it’s the discussion without end of alienation’s modalities and thus the perfect justification of the unjustifiable. By reformism, “progressists” are ensured to preserve the status quo as long as it’s possible to invent reforms, i.e. ad libitum. To attack only partial and secondary aspects, by always forsaking the problem’s core, is an implicit recognition of the totality’s righteousness. They are prepared to reform everything as long as nothing changes. But the abolition of alienation cannot be achieved by successive steps; it’s all or nothing. The “progressists” have chosen the big modern nothing. If indeed class struggle has gradually imposed to capitalism, by successive reforms, the rise of the wage level, unemployment limitation, the reduction of the work life, year and day, the increase of public expenditure, and thus a continuous widening of its internal outlets, these objectives are now accepted by capitalism itself, which rightly sees in them not mortal threats, but the very conditions of its functioning and survival.
Fragmentary criticism
    Correlatively, each group of “progressists” clenches a spare part of the social puzzle. To the extreme division of work in the modern world corresponds the similar division of their thought. Veritable chain-work thinker, each “progressist” super-specializes on one or two crumbs of alienation but this taylorism of contestation will never assemble, at an hypothetical end of the assembly line, a global social critique, by agglomerating its multiple atomized and fragmentary critiques; in any event, this isn’t even its intention. Some “progressists” band together for the duration of a village fair in an attempt to convince themselves of their “union in resistance” consequently provocating a cacophony of demands, a Babel of alienatedrevolt. These specialists of separated thought refuse to understand society as a whole and have thus fordised social criticism into a multitude of alienated and torn partial critiques, autonomy into multiple abstract and absurd pseudo-freedoms. To each pseudo-freedom they invent corresponds a deeper degree of alienation and enslavement fed with illusion. The pseudo-freedom with which the wage laborer disposes of his work force founds the capital and is the first of pseudo-freedoms, the first “progressism”. “Progressism” is a fundamental component of the inclusive theocracy, because the latter’s principal device remains disguising itself with the ideology of freedom. The “progressists” want to expand our cages to better extend our chains. Never would they think of doing away with the prison.
Invented problems
    But the “progressists” don’t only know how to fragment problems into crumbs, they can also invent some. Hence, whereas our period is dominated by diffuse heteronomy, the “progressists” endlessly hold up the rhetorical and mythological scarecrow of “always imminent fascism” in order to mask the true problem: theocratic inclusivity which achieves its ends by other means that fully totalitarian or exclusive means.
Harmony of alienations
    In their desire to reconcile social contradictions, “progressists” do not question if the very base of these contradictions should be overthrown. This quest for a harmony of alienations consists in compensating or substituting a particular alienation by another. Counterbalancing capitalist exploitation by bureaucratic regulation, state arbitrariness by the pseudo-freedom of trade, old religions by new superstitions. In the same way, in the XVIIth century, herds of meager thinkers were busy finding the magic formula to balance the social orders, the nobility, the king, the parliaments, and the following day, there was neither king, neither parliament, nor nobility. The fitting balance of social relations was the upheaval of all social relations.
Miserabilism
    We shall always spit at the face of those poorly disguised saviors of capitalism who, with tears in their eyes or a somber demeanor, curse the current social organization by only condemning its most vile aspects such as child labor, industrial pollution and destruction of nature, miserable wages in dangerous work conditions, homelessness, arbitrary exercise and abuse of power, assassinations and other political plots, genocide, nationalist, racist, sexist and class justice and division of labor, slavery, famine, the subordination of the most elementary aspects of survival to the imperatives of the commodity, prostitution, speculation, accumulation of capital, profit, excessive exploitation and profits, censorship, greed and other spectacular consequences of modern theocratic societies.
    The critique which only speaks of misery is simply a miserable critique. Miserabilism has eyes only for sorrow and privation; incapable of a radical critique of everyday life, of alienation in every moment of life, it doesn’t understand the misery within abundance and the poverty of luxury, the true want which founds theocratic logic entirely. It only wants an arrangement of misery. The “progressists” are almost all miserabilists; by their exclusive criticism of misery’s excesses they justify miserable routine. Misery and the fear of misery are the language of the dominant ideology: the language of survival. By limiting their critique to misery they limit the social horizon to the existing relations only. To get them to denounce poverty it has to be stark so that they may deign show an interest in it, when they attack exploitation they need it to be wretched or else it can only indifferentiate them. It’sn’t the afflictions of the world which justify miserabilism but miserabilism which pleads to reinforce the afflictions of the world. It’s the auto-erotic contemplation of its own spectacle which demands all the abominations of the world.
Fetishism of distribution
    The exclusive concentration of the social question around the distribution of wealth, quantitative poverty, i.e. in the same terms as capitalist theology, rises partly from the miserabilism which runs through “progressism”. If “progressists” always make such a fuss about the redistribution of goods, it’s because they do not understand that at all epochs, the distribution of the objects of consumption derives from the way in which the conditions of production are distributed. Distribution is a property of the mode of production itself. In the capitalistic mode of production, for example, the material conditions of production are allotted to the non-workers in the form of capitalist, land or state property, while the mass has only the personal conditions of production: their work force. If the elements of production are distributed in this manner, the current distribution of the objects of consumption necessarily ensues. May the material conditions of production be the property of the producers themselves, a distribution of the objects of consumption different from that of today will follow likewise. The fetishists of redistribution have inherited from the bourgeois economists the habit of considering and treating distribution as something independent from the mode of production and presenting for this reason the social question as essentially revolving around distribution. The real relations having been elucidated a long time ago, what good is it to go backwards.
Technique fetishism
    The superstitious understandings of technique as intrinsically alienating or emancipating are the two sides of the same erroneous reasoning. The “progressist” antitechnique and capitalist-state protechnique fetishisms are the negative and positive conclusions of the first sophism; the “progressist” protechnique fetishism is their mirror image.
    The level of autonomy - or conversely of alienation, as well as of political or historical change in general - can not be determined by the state of productive forces, the technical development of economy, stages of emancipation from nature or the degree of “wealth” - or of abundance. The illusion of technique as the determining factor of the social-historic or of autonomy is contradicted by the facts. Extremely similar “technical ensembles” happen to correspond to cultures and histories of a limitless variety - the immense diversity of primitive and historical cultures (Asian for example) built “on the same technical basis”. Reciprocally, very similar cultures in other aspects display very different “technical ensembles”. Moreover, heteronomy exists within societies of a “primitive” technical level.
    Alienation or autonomy aren’t intrinsic to technique but to the theocratic or antitheocratic form of society’s organization, relations and institutions. A theocratic society produces a technology which reinforces social heteronomy whereas an autonomous society will necessarily create a technology which reinforces its autonomy. It’s the capitalist-bureaucratic system and the masses’ deficiencies of determination to revolutionary autonomy which are the only current obstacles to autonomy and produce a specific technology in the image of this heteronomy and its correlative resignation.
    Technique fetishism, of whatever sort it’s, wrongfully postulates the need for alienating structures at this technical stage. This supposedly inevitable alienation being presented in turn negatively by the “progressists” and positively by the capitalist-state theologists in the form, for the latter, of an apologetical or resigned fatalism in front of hierarchy.
    Technology, science or the coordination of complex productive processes, requiring highly qualified and specialized technicians, aren’t intrinsically alienating or emancipating, nor history’s determining factors, nor the system’s core and thus do not in themselves compromise the possibility of a generalized autonomy.
    The question of the technical level of development is an ideological diversion masking the true question: that of the direction of technical means. Although technique fetishism is contradicted by the facts, it remains a persistent belief because it derives from the myth of progress constitutive of modern society’s dominant theology.
    For “progressist” technique fetishism all social transformation depends on a transformation of the productive forces. If mankind must do the revolution, it isn’t to transform its institutions, organization, relations, but the technique on which they depend; or, since technique determines history, it’s technique which is revolutionary.
    “Progressism” draws two interpretations from this fetishism which it shares with the dominant ideology: the myths of an emancipation of mankind either in the radiant future of technique or in the return to an antediluvian technical stage. These myths are the same incapacity to understand the present. In one case it’s technical backwardness and in the other advance which is thought as liberating; in all cases, these theologies enable to adjourn social liberation to an increasingly remote future or past.
Antitechnique fetishism
    “Progressist” antitechnique fetishism - Luddism, the refusal of all complex technique, and pro-primitivism - shares the bourgeois ideology of a necessity for fictitious technocrats at this technical stage and the belief that more technique becomes advanced - or complex ? more it’s necessarily alienating. However, decisions concerning the life of communities aren’t, cannot and will never be taken by technicians as such, because they aren’t technical questions. If the use, strictly speaking, of techniques requires technical skills; on the other hand the evaluation of their social necessity, the general why and of how of their use - to know if it’s necessary to reduce waste or to increase productivity for example - requires a global comprehension of the these techniques’ implications but are never, in the last resort, technical questions; moreover, more technique becomes complex more technicians only have a limited and specialized competence which doesn’t enable them in any case to make overall decisions as technicians. It’s thus a question of replacing a theocratic decision-making represented “on earth” by dominant minorities - capitalists and bureaucrats - a “technique” of domination which technical complexity doesn’t justify in any way, by an autonomous decision-making by communities and individuals on their own business; an autonomous empowerment which doesn’t in any way eliminate technique or technicians. This “progressist” reasoning is generally an idolatry of “primitive” communities and thus a fascination for archaic forms of heteronomy.
Protechnique fetishism
    In the magic belief of protechnique “progressism” - “scientific socialism”, marxism - human liberation depends on a greater development of the productive forces because the more technique becomes advanced the more it necessarily leads to emancipation; capitalist technical development is the inevitable passage towards liberation. This implies a belief in the “rationality” of the existing technique, in its “neutrality”, since it’s emancipating. But the current technique is neither “rational”, nor inevitable. It can be “rational” as for the machines’ energy output coefficients, but this fragmentary and conditional “rationality” is without interest and significance in itself. Capitalist technology is a concrete materialization of the scission within society, a step further towards the production process’ autonomisation from the producer. It’sn’t automation which makes autonomy possible. The autonomous self-management of need is necessary to autonomy. This fetishism of capitalist “rationality” postulates that freedom exists only apart from need and thus the need for work and its alienation. But the project of autonomy isn’t a request for the installation of a hobbies’ sphere above a survival infrastructure. Real life isn’t elsewhere but everywhere. Alienation being in the heteronomous form of social relations, their autonomy requires the autonomy of social relations globally, in “unproductive” as well as “productive” social expenditure. Autonomy is necessary as much for conditions of lack as of opulence. The abolition of alienation isn’t abolition of survival but of the socially organized shortage at the core of theocratic prosperity.
Illusions of use value and need
    But, more profoundly, there is no dichotomy, neither objective nor subjective, between “primary” needs and “secondary” ones. Human activity cannot be divided into a survival relative to the first on one side and a freedom relative to the second on the other.
    Anthropological minimum living conditions are only an abstraction, they are defined residually by the fundamental urgency of an excess. It’s impossible to determine in the absolute “what people need to live”.  As appalling as it can be, human misery has never had a sufficient influence on societies so that the need for preservation, which gives production an apparent end, may overcome the one for “unproductive” expenditure - of course, the catastrophic possibility, not completely unimaginable at the present stage of bureaucratic capitalism, of a tragic lack of water or food on a global scale would probably be the best guarantee to maintain the “natural selection” which is so familiar to us, but in the past four thousand years of history famines have especially been and ended up only being the expression of a prosperity much too immense.
    A society can exist only if a series of functions are constantly accomplished (production, child bearing and education, management of the community, resolution of disputes, etc), but it cannot be reduced to that, its ways of facing up to these problems aren’t dictated once and for all by its “nature”, it invents and defines new ways of meeting its needs as well as new needs.
    It’s unacceptable to mix the examination of history with biological “need” or the self-preservation “instinct” and socially universal functions which are the abstract and universal presuppositions of all human societies, and all living species in general, and can tell us nothing on any in particular. It’s absurd to want to base on the permanence of a self-preservation “instinct” or of certain social functions, by definition identical everywhere, history, by definition always different. It’s true that there are “obligatory” solutions; but it’s as essential to observe that there are no obligatory problems. There isn’t one or several human problems determined once and for all, and to which humans might give, through the ages, gradually improved “obligatory” solutions; there isn’t a fixed point of human needs. The abyss which separates the needs of man as a biological species and the needs of man as a historical being is dug by the imagination and the creative activity of humanity.
    Each culture institutes values which are specific to itself and fabricates individuals according to them. These fabrications are practically all-powerful - obviously no culture can raise individuals to walk on their heads or to fast eternally but within these limits, in history one encounters all the types of social fabrications one can imagine - because there is no “human nature” to resist them, because, in other words, man isn’t born with the definite direction of his life already in him. Consumption, power or holiness aren’t objectives innate to humans, it’s the culture in which they grow which teaches them that they “need” them. For the individual it’s undoubtedly society which constitutes reality: the law or the given organization of economy imposes itself upon him in an irrefutable way. But what is steel for the individual is soft wax for history which has created and continues to create an apparently limitless variety of social forms. Society is confronted with unsurpassable realities, external as well as internal realities but their consideration only leads to banalities and since they are established once and for all, bring nothing to the understanding of the different reality which society constitutes at each time. It isn’t the unsurpassable need for a given amount of calories per day which enables to understand the infinite variety of actual food systems; no society has language, they each have their language; the idea of law as such doesn’t tell us anything on effective systems of regulated social organization. Human needs aren’t natural, they are of social nature and consequently of a relative nature.
    Because no need is universal to mankind, no universal use value can be deduced from it. When speaking about commodity fetishism, for the fetishist of need or use value this implies the existence of an authentic subject, a hardly more sophisticated substitute of the “naturally good” or selfish man. Alienation isn’t alienation of a human essence, of the ideal phantom of a “natural” conscience or individuality, of a “true” objective status of the world or of “true” desires but always alienation of autonomy, of the possibility for individuals to freely use the world as they see fit - to be, to have and to appear in an autonomous way. The alienated world isn’t unreal. Men are born neither free, neither non-free, neither equal, nor non-equal.
Myth of social transparency
    No line traces an absolute limit between alienation and autonomy, collectivity and individuality, dispossession and freedom. The phantasm of a society from which all resistance, all thickness, all opacity, would be removed; which would be pure transparency to itself; where everyone’s desires would concord spontaneously or to agree, would only require an aerial dialogue never weighed down by symbolism’s glue; which would discover, formulate and carry out its collective will without going through institutions, or whose institutions would never be a problem; where law would be surpassed by its general interiorization, completely resorbed in the individuals’ effective behavior, where all differences between private and public would be eliminated, as well as between instituting society and instituted society, where one would return to a (supernatural) naturalness of man which, being no more a prisoner of “abstraction”, would immediately become a tangible universality, a “total man” - this is only an incoherent daydream, an unreal and unrealizable state, a mythical formation equivalent and analogous to that of absolute knowledge, or of an individual whose “conscience” would have resorbed the whole of being. One cannot confound the question of a radical revolution and explicit auto-institution of society, with the question of the possibility of a society without explicit institutions.
    Society will never be totally transparent, first because the individuals who compose it will never be transparent to themselves, since eliminating the unconscious is impossible. Next, because society doesn’t just imply individuals’ unconsciouses, nor even simply their reciprocal intersubjective inherencies - the relations between people, consciouses and unconsciouses, which could never be given completely as content to all, unless one introduces the double myth of an absolute knowledge equally possessed by all - society implies something which cannot be given as such.  There will always be, whatever society’s state of “abundance”, the question of distributive justice, of the definition of what is shareable and of its sharing, since there will always be the question of the delimitation of the individual sphere, of the law and the rights of the individual correlative to his own life and to the means which he has been granted to live it, and establishment of rules relative to the attribution for everyone of their own body and of an autonomous sphere of activity. Autonomy isn’t self-evident. The social-historic dimension, as a collective-anonymous dimension, establishes for each and everyone a simultaneous relation of interiority and exteriority, participation and exclusion, which is impossible to abolish or even to “dominate”.
    The objective of antitheocrats cannot, in any case, be happiness, closure, but a society where the possibility of an indefinite practical questioning may begin. The distance which separates the idea of a radical revolution and an explicit auto-institution of society, and the idea of a society without explicit institutions; is the distance which separates a historical political project from an incoherent fiction. Generalized autonomy doesn’t magically eliminate the world’s obscure side. The speculation which postulates the possibility of an absolute knowledge and on which depends the myth of transparency is only a metaphysical science fiction impotent against heteronomy as it is effectively, and is implicitly its accomplice.
Fetishisms of individual and intersubjective autonomies
    The ideas of individual autonomy, of each one’s responsibility for their own life and of local and interindividual autonomy are mystifications when they are cut off from social context and given as sufficient answers in themselves. Autonomy is neither the inalienable freedom of an abstract subject, neither the domination of a pure conscience on an undifferentiated reality, essentially identical for all and always, rough obstacle which freedom would have to surmount, nor a pseudo-practical and implicitly “nepotic” intersubjective “autonomy”. To look for the conditions of alienation exclusively in individuals’ structure or intersubjective relations is unilateral, abstract and false.
    The subject isn’t the abstract moment of philosophical subjectivity, it’s the effective subject penetrated through and through by the world and others. The I of autonomy isn’t absolute Self. The subject encounters in itself a meaning which isn’t its own and which it transforms by using it; the others are always present as ipseity of the subject.
    Human existence is a collective existence. Collective existence appears as intersubjectivity but isn’t simple intersubjectivity, it’s social-historic, collective-anonymous, human-impersonal, incarnated, instituted, organized existence.
    The individual and the intersubjective are moments and parts of society which they compose and presuppose. Alienation finds its conditions, beyond the individual unconscious and the intersubjective relations at play in it, in the social world.
    Social-practical alienation makes vain any exclusive individual, psychic or intersubjective autonomy. In a theocracy, even for the rare individuals for whom autonomy has a meaning, it can only be mutilated, because it encounters, in the social conditions of material appropriation and in other individuals, constantly renewed obstacles as soon as it must incarnate itself in an activity, develop and exist socially; in addition practice and psychic are reciprocally inherent and imply one another circularly; activity generates new thoughts-imaginations and vice-versa; the psychic isn’t the noble refuge of freedom. Autonomy can only be an unlimited and explicit theoretical-practical project and critique of what exists. No individual or interindividual autonomy can overcome the consequences of this state of the things, cancel the effects of a theocracy’s oppressive structure on one’s life. They are discernible moments and parts of social autonomy but not separable. Whoever says they want autonomy and refuse the institutions’ revolution knows neither what they say nor what they want. Autonomy is conceivable only as social problem and relation. One cannot want autonomy without wanting it for all, its realization can only be fully conceived as a collective endeavor. My freedom starts where the other’s starts.
    The fetishism of individual or intersubjective autonomy is one of the “progressist” corollaries of “individualism”, the dominant monadic ideology correlative to the individuals’ commodity-capitalist privatization within consumption. In its least “ambitious” forms - psychology, psychiatry, sociology - but which are also its least puerile - antipsychiatry, communautarism, fragmentary self-management - it’s only a stubborn reinsertion in the system, an instrument of preservation of the established order.
Realism
    Under the pretense of “realism” hides the dominant ideology’s anti-historic superstition which sees its desires as reality because it only desires the reality of its reign. Realism condemns as unrealizable or infantile everything outside of its vision of history as a horizon limited to the existent only. This ostentatious austerity presents itself as a noble abnegation of intellectual creativity confronted to “realities”, but behind this pseudo-immolation, of an intelligent imagination non-existent in any event, is dissimulated the unavowable and ashamed worship of these “realities”.
Fetishism of action
    Where activity changes into activism, fragmentary struggles, by their diversity and number, maintain the fetishists of practice at all costs in a frenzied animation which they justify in a hypothetically revolutionary perspective which measures up to their incoherence and futility. Thanks to the mythical justification of effectiveness, the pseudo-subversive act is only produced according to its mediatization in the modern spectacle; it’s prerecuperated. An action’s success is only judged by the dominant standards of success.
Populism
    Prepared to all humiliations in order to be heard, the protoadvertisers, such as the “progressists”, fear incessantly being cut off from the masses, not succeeding in reaching them with the same imbecility as the entertainers who pullulate on television.  Considering as nonsense or peroration everything that doesn’t smell of its own fecal odor of tautological common sense, this anti-intellectualism would immensely treasure being able to plunge anew in the great past totalitarian tales but, with the bad conscience of having been partly caught up by history, it will have to either go to the third world in rarefaction where the populace’s capacity of swallowing the most grotesque jokes has not yet been dulled or else satisfy itself with crumbs of these gone sumptuous spectacles in the form of the makeshift inclusive spectacular code’s closure.
Cultural consumption
    The “progressist” cultural consumer - whose dissatisfaction and revolt are materials of a neo-artistic contemplativity - believes that his passive consumption of ideas magically differentiates him from the rest of society and that he has “taste” or a singular thinking since he’s made such unpopular choices among so many spectacles and has made great efforts to select those which were so radically different from the others. What this avant-garde consumer doesn’t understand it that social criticism transformed into culture is the ideal commodity, the one which makes him pay for all others; the unity of all spectacles, whatever they are, is founded on his passivity. Amateur of all prefabricated revolts this cryptoconformism generally has the appearance of the most lamentable nonconformism. But when he thinks he’s understood that wearing a “progressist” celebrity’s effigy is utterly ridiculous it’s to better reproduce the same idolatry with more esoteric methods, thus foolishly thinking that he won’t be detected.
Code fetishism
    More still than by his larval or, in the majority of cases, manifest reformism, one recognizes the “progressist” at his implicit acceptance of the hierarchy of signs, of social imperatives, which proceed from the dictatorial organization of appearances, regurgitated in the form of a pseudo-revolutionary spectacle where excess leads him to conformist extremism which is only an extreme conformism. This interiorization of the implicit norms constitutes the decisive form of social control, much more than the submission to the explicit ideological norms.  It’s the dominant thought’s laws, the exclusive point of view of news, the tacit governing values, which this abstract will of immediate pseudo-effectiveness recognizes, this ostentatious revolt, hierarchical nuance in the social code, whether it be, in the most apparent manner, when it throws itself towards the compromises of reformism or of common action with the pseudo-revolutionary debris or, in the most fundamental way, in its incapacity to radically criticize everyday life. In this fetishism, role among social roles-straight-jackets, it isn’t passion for significations which speaks out but passion for code.