Any meaning history has "we" shall have to give it by our actions. Yet the fact is, although we are all of us within history, we do not all possess equal powers to make history. To pretend that we do is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility. It is nonsense because any group or any individual is limited, first of all, by the technical and institutional meansof power at its command; we do not all have equal access to the means of power that now exist, nor equal influence over their use. To pretend that "we" are all history-makers is politically irresponsible because it obfuscates any attempt to locate responsibility for the consequential decisions of men who have access to the means of power.From even the most superficial examination of the history of the western society we learn that the power of decison-makers is first of all limited by the level of technique, by the means of power and violence and organization that prevail in a given society. In this connection we learn that there is a fairly straight line running through the history of the West. That the means of oppression and exploitation, of violence and destruction, as well as the means of production and reconstruction, have been progressively enlarged and increasingly centralized.
As the institutional means of power and the means of communication that tie them together have become steadily more efficient, those now in command of them have come into command of instruments of rule quite unsurpassed in the history of mankind. And we are not yet at the climax of that development. We can no longer lean upon or take soft comfort from the historical ups and downs of ruling groups of previous epochs. In that sense Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.
America--a conservative country without a conservative ideology-- appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendency, and the political vacuum of modern America.
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not the result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society.
C. Wright Mills
The Power Elite, 1956
Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was for time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.Paul Valery
Pieces sur l'Art
"La Conquete de l'ubiquite," Paris
It is the persistent clinging to the object; the insistence on the continued production of artefacts qua fetishes required by bourgeois collectors absorbed in rituals of phallus-worship that implicates Art as a co-conspirator in the exploitive domination of the world by western phallogocentrism. To the extent that artists are successful in magically transforming the limp body-and-mind of the bourgeoisie into an attentive agent whose swollen will-to-power is able to confer feelings of marvellousness and uncanniness upon the horrors of its apparatuses, and the banalities of its worlds, they are guilty of complicity. What is left of creativity would be best utilized in efforts to violently reaffirm the real as real and to smash everything resembling "aesthetic thinking". Within the real there is no Power, there is no Art, there is no recognition of the vanity of seductively dressed abstractions.Camille Grainetier
Puppets, Mannequins, and Dolls, 1989
To conspire, or "to breathe together", is a form of intimacy that still occurs because we continue to share a common, albeit abused, atmospheric envelope; however, it requires little imagination to envision a future in which only the power elite responsible for fouling the planet's atmosphere will be able to afford the luxury of clean air.Imagine a sci-fi landscape of geodesically domed cities to house the super-rich, surrounded by a barren wasteland whose monotonous grey surface is broken only by the barbed wire and chain-link fences and blank facades of cyber- industrial work camps in which mutant human drones and bionic-humanoid robots produce luxury without benefit to themselves. Hardly inspiring...but it does offer itself as a not improbable mise-en-scene. Afterall, bondage has been a common practice throughout history, and continues to exist within the "first" world under the guise of wage-slavery and, more overtly, in the "third" world as neo-colonialism. (How much more barbaric can the process of dehumanization become than the present reduction of populations in underdeveloped countries to "cheap labor," and even worse, to the status of spare parts for the spoiled bodies of the western rich.) The degeneration of the meaning of conspiracy from a communitarian responsibility that is both local and global in scope to an exploitive scheme of betrayal of the many by the few illustrates the general tendency of Power (despite its being an illusion) to corrupt whatever obstacles, including language, may lie between itself and its goal of self- indulgence. This tendency to corrupt and to pollute is the power of Power, and the salient factor contributing to the "fallen" character of human history. That such a tendency has come to be regarded as natural history is undoubtedly the tragedy of humankind. Unfortunately, there is more that is difficult to think about...
Serious conversations, how? Is there life after death? Confident- ially, there isn't. Everything must be settled before death. There's a heap of things to do, day and night.... Better to amuse yourself than to redeem humanity. As I said, life has to be settled before death. More information gladly given. Don't be so serious, my boy.Erich Kastner Fabian. (1931: reprint 1976), pp. 64-65
That the many have been betrayed and are being betrayed is unarguable; what creates a fuss is asking "by whom?"...In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in the place of old ones.Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
The first step that visibly separated the human being from the animal was that to invention. Invention itself rests on the discovery of sly tricks and ruses whose application facilitates the struggle against other beings for life.Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf, p.494.
Contrary to accepted myth, the victory of the Allies at the close of World War II did not insure the victory of democracy over fascism. Rather, the elements of the modern military state erected by the fascists were dismantled by the victors and transported home...Blance Wiesen Cook
Surveillance and Mind Control, 1978
When Baudrillard remarks that seduction is stronger than production, it sounds more surprizing than it really is. In its mass-consumption phase, capitalism can move much more smoothly with the aid of seductions (i.e., pampering, stupefaction, brothelization of minds) than if it used naked force. Fascism was only a thunderstormn: seduction by the rapist. Consumerism is seduction by the pimp.Peter Sloderdijk
Critique of Cynical Reason, 1987
Attempts to answer the question regarding "who is betraying us" with any certainty are made difficult, if not impossible, by the collapse of reality and fiction into information (where information is understood to be pure numerization, or the reduction of everything to a digital order of the visual). Our awakening to the virtual worlds and "artificial realities" of this new information domain, or cyberspace, is not unlike the revelation of "thrownness" (geworfenheit) described by Heidegger, but must be understood to be proceeding with an exponentially growing dread that goes beyond the fear of naming nothingness as a possibility of Dasein to an understanding of the necessity of a radical affirmation of nothingness as Dasein.
To be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to be against every formation of sediment; to have sat for a moment on the chair means: to have brought danger into life.dadaistisches manifest (leaflet, 1918)
This affirmation (or negation--if you prefer) constitutes yet another beginning--from degree zero--and is the immanently necessary project of thinking the unthought--a project that is doomed from the start to uncertainty and its assortment of attendent neuroses (and psychoses). Along with this uncertainty (-ties) and its accompanying pathologies, comes not only increased fear and anguish, but a suspiousness of others that often shades into paranoia at a time when rage toward authority would be less dysfunctional.
...the CIA has been mixed up in domestic spying activity every single day since its inception. The revelations by the New York Times about 10,000 files on civilians, or about this or that proprietary front, uncover only one small corner of what's under the rug. In just a few days casual research, I have been able to come up with easily more than fifty instances, involving hundreds of institutions and corporations and thousands of people, in which the CIA operated in clandestine, often illegal, ways within the borders of the United States. We must remember that when one of these instances gets "exposed" by prominent papers like the New York Times and there is a resulting flap in Congress and the media, this situation is a reflection much more upon the state of the nation at that particular time than it is upon the CIA. The CIA is always doing these things. Public attention just depends upon when the powers that be are going to be shocked about it all.Kirkpatrick Sale
Spies with and without Daggers, 1978
To add to the perplexing intricacies of the emerging new world order, a mind-machine hybridization is evolving that threatens to occult (some would say totally abandon) our awareness of our humanness in favor of techne. There is speculation that the hyper-complexity of this bio-machine may eventually place corporality in jeopardy (for better or for worse?) and lead to an endgame in which the inhuman is the only player.Already, at least in principle, delocalization and depersonalization have advanced to a point where any place and any subject are interchangeable with any-other-place and any- other-subject within a matrix of burgeoning communication networks. The schizoaffective adaptation or acculturation to what Baudrillard has called the "blank obscenity of [these] promiscuous networks" (through which the unlimited possibility of transvidual communication produces a kind of over exposure, [see Raulet, "The New Utopia: Communication Technologies", Telos, #87, or R. Cheatham, "Filling in the Pseudo-Sublime", in this issue of Perforations]) is generating not only the possibility of an increased communicability but a sublime terror, an epiphany of pure potentiality, equally as intoxicating as any other form of illumination or ecstasy, but also equally as blinding.
It is precisely here/there in the blindspots of our greatest illuminations, past and present, that the dangers and difficulties of the unthought become entangled with the repressed to produce that abstracted suspiciousness whose inherent undecidability and distractedness cloaks the mundane and the everyday in a mantle of eerie normalcy. alloing conspiracies the necessary cover to take root and spread.
Whether he knows it or not, whenever an Amnerican travels on a commercial airline, reserves a room at one of the national hotel chains, rents a car, he is likely to leave distinctive electronic tracks in the memory of a computer that can tell a great deal about his activities, his movements, his habits and associations.Unfortunately, few people seem to appreciate the fact that modern technology is capable of monitoring, centralizing, and evaluating these electronic entries, no matter how numerous they may be, making credible the fear that many Americans have of a womb-to-tomb dossier on each of us.
Arthur Miller
Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 92nd Congress, 1st Session, Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights (23-25 February, 2-17 March 1971) Part I, pp. 213, 267, 861.
Plotting the coordinates of a particular conspiracy within the complex fields of networked domains requires the sophistication of a technology capable of tracing the obscure, chaotic wake of the covert across the transparent surfaces of propagating simulations while determining the extent to which any attempt to create, or recreate, the plot also obscures or effaces what is being plotted. Attempts at data reconstruction or deconstruction for purposes of verification of origins, or for authentication of originality, i.e., of uncovering or revealing the uncontaminated "facts" in order to provide reassurances to those who have been thrown off by the identity of digital copies, or unnerved by the ease with which they can be altered without evidence of tampering, only serve to cloud consciousness and to further mystify interpretation of the data in question. This evaporation of objects into the realm of numerical processing renders images divested of the false unity of symbols, yet strangely suggestive of the unavailable: images that function neither as mirrors nor as vessels, but allegorically, as generative masks.As the uncertainty(-ties) and undecidability of the postmodern continue to give way to the pathologies of the amodern (which is both pre-modern and post-modern in its autistic auto-modernity and its atopian blankness) no one survives the vertigo of possibilities. Hope, which seems to reside in the epistemological fragments we continue to pile up, is merely a wish that our few shards of knowledge will somehow pay off in a miracle of redemption. That faith and belief have been displaced by a general paranoia does not suggest that "they" are not "really" out to manipulate and exploit us, only that we are aware of it and made sick by it.
This neat state causes the schizophrenic's terror: the overwhelming proximity of everything, the foul promiscuity of all things, which touch him, invest him, penetrate him without resistance.
Baudrillard
Les Strategies fatales, pp.96 ff.
The schizoid collapse of the subject/object distinction, of inside and outside, characteristic of the amodern is a critical illness, or, otherwise, the beginning of another paroxysmal health. At the moment it is a paradox. A condition (or, perhaps, also a precondition) of excremental culture in which our continuous evacuation of experience results in a claustrophobic, constipated nothingness on the verge of eruption. Nonetheless, it is exactly the working toward a working through of this paradox (whatever that might mean) that would make a radical metamorphosis rethinkable as the transmutation of a becoming-this into a becoming-that.Art, as Baudrillard so astutely put it, "continues to make believe that it is disappearing when it is already gone." The same might be said of the passive masses who, having forfeited history and embraced television, pretend to be living when they are already dead (and gone); and by further extention, one might include concepts such as "self", "justice", "freedom" and all other profundities emptied of meaning by an immanently manipulative capitalist system of abstract communication.
In this dissociative there or elsewhere in which we now dwell, Art has disappeared, as have we? What remains is attempting to organize itself creatively within the hyper-dimensions of cyberspace, beyond time and consciousness, senselessly, indeterminately, certainly without benefit of a traceable genealogy. Here there is acceleration and the spontaneous generation of theory after theory that make us tipsy and giddy with poetry and polemics, often to the point of blind drunkeness. We revel in our whirling like dervishes, dancing deliriously in the rapture of self-referencing metaphors. We are seeking something through a nightmare of unthinkable, incomprehensible ecstasy, falling toward a total perversion of history...there is no turning back; we have no choice but to go on.