What is Hollywood, you ask, dear children? A quorum of whores babbling endlessly on about fucking while the bordello is razed for a penny arcade -- Paul Bern

Friday, December 31, 2010

CORPORATE MYSTIC


Harászti: No one may be so absorbed in his own work that he does it for its own sake. The artist who can accept this condition is allowed to entertain us. The state artist is the mystic of the corporate ethos. Even though he is nothing more than an industrious professional, he remains the possessor of the aesthetic of the common good and of corporate prestige.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

WAVY GRAVY


The critics are raving:

"A gift! Not often that one comes across a truly -- fantastically -- idiotic movie."
-- Jean Pierre Gorin

"A film to make one, without unjust rhetoric, despair of the cinema." 
-- Eric Rohmer

"It is history writ with drugs."
-- President Woodrow Wilson

"Paz de la Huerta is quickly becoming the Joe D'Alessandro of her generation." 
-- her yoga instructor

"Don't show stupid things..." Bresson should have said.  
-- Peter Fonda

"The most pretentious short film in the history of courts-metrages." 
-- Lav Diaz

"If this film would have been at Cannes in 1969, it would have won a small prize. And then oblivion." 
-- Agnes Varda

"If Noé dares to usurp me as Le Roi des Hippies, perhaps the guillotine can't be far behind." 
-- Roger Vadim

Sunday, December 26, 2010

REMEDIAL READING


Neo-scholasticism...

The beauty and advantage of much theoretical writing, particularly in translation (by lesser lights, naturally) of presumably lucid works, is that it becomes "bad writing", and therefore requires a cottage industry of hierophant/interpreters that can smooth out any ambiguities or contradictions in the work so that it becomes more consumable and serviceable in the spectacle. Such writing requires a second mediation; a remediation.

Reading, in this way becomes corporate work, removing it from the  unpleasant engagement with the solitude of private experience. 

They are all in it together.

Monday, December 20, 2010

THE RETURN OF DICKENS


The anxiety that comes out of the post-freudian schizo-identity (as opposed to the traditional mutual confusion of tribe and self; mutual potentialities) naturally benefits the consumerist (ideology of "Choice") constructions of the self.

But this may be transitional phase...

People are becoming stereotypes, but not in a simple way -- that is, they possess an "optical", surrealist dimensionality, but psychology, which is the realm of the weak/wounded and private, the position of resistance, is giving way to the intriguing "flatness" of socio-tribal functionality.

Away from authenticity and back to social stylization of self.

Virginia Woolf: "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens (with his) characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

Zach Campbell: ....the context of emotion is usually left wholly unexamined in mainstream film & TV.  Only a false sense of "contained" emotion is to be respected. Emotions do not build upon each other; they do not have texture - the audiovisual, gestural archive of emotional cues is large enough at this moment to be drawn upon without elaboration, without narrative. We already see what a pouting lip means, what a raised eyebrow might mean, what a threatening posture entails ...the biggest aesthetic threat to competent film & TV acting is that people often hit these cues thoughtlessly and yet treat them as a register of "knowing" performance.
Woolf's "remarks" or strokes are somewhat like the Kata and Mie in Kabuki. They are devices to invite public participation in the spectacle, where the audience too has a role to play in the dynamic exchange. Kata and Mie have the power of artifice because we recognize that we often don't behave as idiosyncratic, withholding Brandos, but as clearly telegraphing types. We may not need for people to applaud the formal perfection of the performative move, but we at the very least want to be recognized. There is a not-that obscure virtue in the sophistication of fulfilling typage in an aristeia with regard to one's culture or audience.
Mahmood refuses the ideals of liberal philosophers who insist that individual choice is the prime value. She describes these Egyptian Muslim women's strong desires to follow socially-prescribed religious conventions "as the potentialities, the 'scaffolding' through which the self is realized", not the signs of their subordination as individuals. She argues that their desire to take the ideals and tools of self-reference from outside the self (in Islamic religious practice, texts, and law) challenges the usual separation of individual and society upon which liberal political thinking rests. She tells us we need to question the (modern American) distinction that underlies most liberal theory between "the subject's real desires and obligatory social conventions".

SMOKE


For a guy who is famous for low tech, in-camera effects, Sokurov is even more striking in the scrupulous way he uses digital effects against Realism, to enhance the ineffability of certain moods.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

NOTES TOWARD A LYSENKOIST AESTHETICS


Why is science feared? Why are people afraid that art might be crushed under obvious productivity and utility of science? Why this inferiority complex? It is true that today we read a good essay with much greater pleasure than a novel. Why do we keep repeating then, horrified, that the world is becoming more mercenary, more utilitarian, more materialistic? Is it not really marvelous that the development of science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology is contributing to the "purification" of art? The appearance, thanks to science, of expressive media like photography and film made a greater "purification" of painting and theatre possible (without invalidating them artistically in the least). Doesn't modern day science render anachronistic so much "artistic" analysis of the human soul? Doesn't contemporary science allow us to free ourselves from so many fraudulent films, concealed behind what has been called the world of poetry? With the advance of science, art has nothing to lose; on the contrary, it has a whole world to gain. What, then, are we so afraid of? Science strips art bare, and it seems that it is not easy to go naked through the streets.
 *************
The development of science, of technology, and of the most advanced social theory and practice has made possible as never before the active presence in the masses in social life. In the realm of artistic life, there are more spectators now than at any other moment in history. This is the first stage in the abolition of "elites." The task currently at hand is to find out if the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents — not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors — are beginning to exist. The task at hand is to ask ourselves whether art is really an activity restricted to specialists, whether it is, through extra-human design, the option of a chosen few or a possibility for everyone.
 *************
The future lies with folk art. But let us no longer display folk art with demagogic pride, with a celebrative air. Let us exhibit it instead as a cruel denunciation, as a painful testimony to the level at which the peoples of the world have been forced to limit their artistic creativity. The future, without doubt, will be with folk art, but then there will be no need to call it that, because nobody and nothing will any longer be able to again paralyze the creative spirit of the people.
 Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything.
 Julio Garcia Espinosa, 1969

The above prophetic reflections show the Romantic Marxist Sublime in full huracan force. 
At the end of progress' rainbow everyone is a starving artist, and paid accordingly.

"In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it .... I need only such people as will obtain the results I need".  T.D. Lysenko

Dear Lysenko was one of the strangest soviet artists. He was doubtless a double agent -- a poet in the clever guise of a scientist. He convinced the cadres that he could advance the future by teaching his wheat and potatoes to vernalize, which like unruly counter-revolutionary peasants, they failed to do. Let's pause here to cry a few crocodile tears (no more than six) for those useless idiots, Lysenko's victims, the Weissmanist-Morganist tools who still clung to the idealism of genetic determinism. The peasant taking his revenge on the intellectuals, people sneered. Lysenko certainly recognized that the only fact that mattered in that time, so unlike ours, was the fact of Stalin. There only needed to be that one color in the paintbox. All the others were illusory refractions of that person Lysenko amusingly called the Protagonist of Science.

Let's be clear, Lysenko was no fool, he was a hard nosed pragmatist. Since nobody (on either side of the iron curtain) had any real idea about how evolution worked at the nuts and bolts level, he launched a surprisingly articulate critique of the weak points of genetic determinism, from the standpoint of revolutionary ideology. Lysenko was slandered as an opportunist, a bootlick, when in reality he is the Machiavelli of science, the ultimate student of the praxis of power in the spectacle. Since contemplative theory was his particular enemy, the only way for him to demonstrate these realist principles was though poetic action. 

Despite the many propagandistic claims of western science as having a finer and more heavenly epistemological basis, today's scientists are in every way closer to Lysenko than they are to old Huxley. And these days, evolutionary geneticists, pursuing the more subtle mechanisms of epigenetics, are sounding more and more like neo-lamarckians, though they would never be caught dead using that blasphemous term. And genetic determinism, having triumphed in pop culture, and good only to scare the children of creationists, is looking at a dismal rout. Why? Because the potential commercial applications of neo-lamarckism are more fundable than a thousand dusty weissmannisms. Michurin: 'It is possible, with man's intervention, to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man. There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him.'  The logic of hyper-production applied to evolution itself. May one hundred Lysenkos and Michurins bloom!!

The organizing myth of science for centuries was the discovery and emulation of those immutables, the laws of nature. Evolutionary genetics, traditionally, is ideologically reactionary and secretly authoritarian: 'Weissmannism-Morganism serves today in the arsenal of contemporary imperialism as a means of providing a "scientific base" for its reactionary politics.' It disarms practice and orients man toward resignation to the allegedly eternal laws of nature, toward passivity, toward an aimless search for hidden treasure and expectation of lucky accidents... This "theory" leads to a passive contemplation of supposedly eternal phenomena of nature, to a passive expectation of accidental variation'. Today's scientific establishment has no need of this false humility -- they deal in commutables, and will tailor their science particularly, at the drop of a hat, or grant money, or to fawn in the presence of technocratic state power.

ARTISTS, like Lysenko, have always willingly served the state or the ruling classes. No shame there. Cultural production is always optimized by a warm fire and a pair of slippers, yes, even for a barefoot scientist. That was the price genius paid for embodying the fawning aspiration of the little man, with their carefully unarticulated proletarian hostilities toward the bondage of culture. The peasants could seek erotic dissolution into something greater than themselves, and the artist could despise the mass that needed to so acclaim them. Culture as barely sublimated hate-fucking. And over time, the efficient carpet bombardment of cultural material through the multiplicative force of technological means has only increased the resentment.

The time for mutual revenge is now.

Now that every person, through conscription, is an artist, even and especially your neighbor in the adjacent cubicle, we should not be surprised to find all of these eager little Lysenkos clawing their way over the pile of bodies to please current masters. And it is good that we can have more puritan vigilance, more hit squads in white lab coats against the fraudulent -- against the stupefying world of poetry. This egalitarian footing for pseudo-cultural activity, call it ArtRoulette for the EveryElites, is a first in human history, and no doubt poor Ayn Rand is turning over in her grave, shuddering at what a sino-guatemalan collective of lesbian filmmakers might produce. After all, ten minutes on youtube can produce a better critical synthesis, history, and destruction of the cinema than that tedious Swiss pedant Jean Luc Godard could produce in a whole lifetime. The beauty of it is... everyone can do it!
Haraszti: Brecht is an example of how even the most unruly minds can bring themselves to enjoy the beauty of power, once they have committed themselves to the planned society. The happiness of preparation is surpassed by the joy of execution. Socialism, contrary to all appearances, does not suppress artists' Nietzschean desires but satisfies them, offering responsibility and a constructive role to those people of quality hungry for power. 
The irresistible allure of "positive" INFLUENCE in the social matrices offered by these technological networks will no doubt corrupt the souls of the largest number of people, good people who under their own recognizance would commonsensically reject the useless bootlicking practices of the artist. The path toward gesamtkunstwerk is highly dubious, and strewn with traps, to say the least. As Haraszti says, when someone offers you dazzling new freedoms of expression, look out! The gilded cage can't be far behind.

SCIENCE FICTION AS THE HUMAN CONDITION

Once upon a time, History was the structure of human cultural activity. We recognize today that this was unprogressive, tedious and retrograde, like frantically trying to row with anchors. There were some quixotic and alchemical attempts by people like Vico, Hegel/Marx, Nietszche and Spengler to derive the future out of the sifted matter of the past. Nonsense, really. The future was once mere rhetoric. No longer. We need to fabricate the future directly by reference to its epistemology, which is science fiction. Applied science fiction is the future as narrative, an enfolding tale, brooking no contradiction, that we are forced to believe in, and inhabit. 

Our new Virgils are Verne, Lem and Lysenko.

"Glass is the symbol of the Future Society, which will be free, luminous, and open--an image derived from the Crystal Palace in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's socialist utopian novel, What Is To Be Done?"

"In other words, science fiction is a kind of realism: but it is a realism of what Deleuze calls the virtual, rather than one of the actual here and now. For Deleuze, the virtual is fully real on its own account; but it is a special sort of reality, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and symbolic without being fictional."

“It was actually quite a problem for writers and artists of that time to even find dramatic situations. Because the future was supposed to be optimistic and great. They found a solution in ceding little pockets of capitalism that somehow travelled in time, or were rediscovered in the future. And they were the source of discomfort or drama – dramatic situations.”

"It's only when you have a future-oriented world that you need the notion of risk, because the notion of risk is a confrontation with the future, essentially. It's about future time and the management of future time. What's happening now is that we live in the most future-oriented society that has ever existed. Therefore, the notion of risk for us infects more or less everything, including personal things, like the decision to get married, say. The decision to get married, where it's an institutional or tribal decision, a kind of transition in life, was a pretty straightforward thing in the past because you knew what you were doing. Now there's a certain sense in which you don't know what you're doing because the nature of marriage and relationships is changing. You have an open environment. You are involved in a kind of risk universe there."

A good soviet bloc joke: “The future is what we put our faith in, because the past is always changing and is so unreliable.”

Thursday, December 16, 2010

DOWN FOR EACH OTHER


1979. Nic Roeg is shooting his Strindberg meets Heisenberg trash-masterpiece, Bad Timing. it stars Art Garfunkel, the "Tom" of the pop duo of the sixties, and one of the chilliest and most mesmerizing performers this side of Henry Fonda. The movie is madness. Schnitzler, De Maupassant, the Luscher Color Test, even the Cold War -- something, finally, about suicide as the ultimate erotic weapon and rite of passage. While Garfunkel is off shooting this film, the woman above, who made a small career of the Gamine who Belongs to No One, traded carelessly between men, for Auteur and Gamine Lover Monte Hellman, makes a successful overdose (1) in Garfunkel's apartment, deliberately blurring the line between film and life. Her ghost is incorporated into the texture of the film.

Most hair raising: Hellman and Garfunkel would come to have the exact same hair, and come to look almost identical in other ways. The whole thing reeks of E.A. Poe.

1. In the 90's, when he was long between pictures, Monte Hellman would insist to anyone who would listen that the police report was wrong. It wasn't quaaludes, but something more sinister: Garfunkel's powdered chest hair.

THE SONGS OF OTHERS

Armin Mueller-Stahl and Katharina Thalbach in Heiner Müller's infamous succes de scandale about the sad lot of songwriters in the GDR
A poignant memo on the legendary old Miramax stationery:

Mein Lieber Florian:

Great talking to you the other day! It's amazing how much the grandson of a Nazi aristocrat (you) and a pair of concentration camp survivors (me and Bob) have in common.

So -- to follow up on our discussion. Your brilliant film has undeniable power, but I think, as we discussed, that American audiences might find the emotions too "internal" and "opaque", etc.  I had a long talk with Bernie Taupin the other day and he finally saw your picture and agreed with me that it would make a TERRIFIC musical. 

He even pitched me some song ideas, nothing set in stone, though. Don't freak out:

"A Simple Servant of the State" and "I've Got You Under Surveillance"  (Gerd) Our protagonist declares his unsweving belief in the GDR system and the romantic power of surveillance.

"A Yellow Volume of Brecht" (Jerska's Lament) -- I see this as a set piece which concludes with the poor man's suicide -- not offscreen, of course.

"Marx has me seeing Blue" (Dreyman) as Georg starts to see the extent the GDR system has compromised his revolutionary ideals.

"Your Hands are Like Ice" (Duet: Christa Maria and Culture Minister Hampf): The rape scene, of course.

"Jokes about Comrade General Secretary" (Colonel Grubitz) sings this barrel polka style as he exposes the cynical workings of the upper reaches of the regime

"Fresh Fish" (A chorus of Stasi Officers and Prisoners) who reel off the litany of "crimes" that have led to their interrogations. Bernie sees this as a Weill-Brecht sort of song, angry and revolutionary.

"The Statistics of Suicide in the GDR" (Dreyman and the Spiegel Editor) Very Melancholy song, accompanied to the sound of -- what else? -- a typewriter.

"Verily, White Lies" (Gerd) sings this jaunty tune as he happily writes his falsified reports on the lives of Dreyman and Christa-Maria.

"You Have Not Betrayed Yourself" (Christa Maria, Dreyman and Gerd) sung as CM lies dying in the street, and she tries to reassure Dreyman and Wiesler that what has happened is not their fault.

"You'll Never Work in East Berlin Again" (Colonel Grubitz) sings this to Gerd as he exiles him to a life of misery

"Tear Down The Wall in My Heart" (Gerd and Dreyman) The closing duet of the film as Dreyman discovers and acknowledges his unknown benefactor.

As I said when we talked, we have to move fast, because Hanks' people are blitzing on Comrade Rockstar: The Musical, which would be a real headache for us. Some merciful soul needs to tell that guy he's too old for the part. Give me a call, day or night, to let me know what you think of these...

Sincerely,
Harvey Weinstein

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

TEEN RIOT STRUCTURE


Oi! You bluddy fucks!! Where's my moderately priced ticket to the bourgy wasteland? Me n the ladz is gonna have to stomp back to GTA: San Andreas if ye fucks don't de-virtualize a bit of reality for the Fetus Army, which is on the march. We fuckin' warned ye.

GEORGES LAUTNER


Ripe for a re-make. Philippe Garrel directs. Or Hong Sang Soo. A cast of dead people. Brittany Murphy, Heath Ledger, and Jean Seberg.

The stroke of genius: Ed Begley, Jr plays his own father.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Sunday, December 12, 2010

DON'T TOUCH THE AXE, EUGENE!

 

My End of the Decade Poll

I've polled myself and it was great...

1. Black Dahlia (Brian DePalma)
2. Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov)
3. Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
4. Bug (William Friedkin)
5. Sex is Comedy (Catherine Breillat)
6. Ne Touchez Pas La Hache (Jacques Rivette)
7. Platform (Jia Zhangke)
8. My Sister Maria (Maximilian Schell)
9. And Now...Ladies and Gentlemen (Claude Lelouch)
10. Twilight Samurai (Yamada Yoji)
11. Mary (Abel Ferrara)
12. Miami Vice (Michael Mann)
13. Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer)
14. La Recta Provincia (Raul Ruiz)
15 & 16.  Ebolusyion / Heremias (Lav Diaz)
17. Spy Game (Tony Scott)
18. The Hire: aka The BMW film (Fincher, et al)
19. L'Intrus (Claire Denis)
20. Welt Am Draht (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

THE WILD HOLIDAY

 
I painted a dirty word on your old man's Mercedes-Benz,  
Cause you told me to do it.
Yeah I got busted, but soon they released me cause the cops were sad, 
and they didn't know how to prove it.

Wikileaks has published only a small fraction of the cables. So they are engaged now in a great "strategic" deployment of information. How exciting! We can dismiss the happy slur of anarchy. These people are not anarchists.

The reasons ultimately aren't very important; these clowns may recognize that the spectacle can only handle a specific amount of factmorsels at a time -- or they may be "analyzing" the data, etc, or keeping certain items in reserve, for their sexy qualities, as a time bomb; Or maybe they just don't have anything left that rises above the usual. The fact is they are withholding their semi-precious information, and at worst are functioning as state agents, and at best, enjoying their 15 minutes as Moral Scolds to the Universe.
The upshot of this seems obvious. They are no doubt primarily concerned with branding and they are behaving no differently than a traditional media outlet. The longer you play the insider Game of the Cherrypick the more corrupting it is, eventually you won't be able to convince anyone, even a cretin with a college degree in political science, that you are on the outside of the process.

Ellul: Authoritarian regimes know that people held very firmly in hand need some decompression, some safety valves. The government offers these itself. This role is played by satirical journals attacking the authorities, yet tolerated by the dictator, or by a wild holiday set aside for ridiculing the regime, yet paid for by the dictator (Friday of Sorrows in Guatemala) Clearly, such instruments are controlled by the regime.
These instruments of criticism serve to consolidate power and make people cling even more to the regime by providing artificial release of tendencies that the state must keep in check. In such situations, propaganda has an almost therapeutic and compensatory function.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

RUBBERNECKING!, PART 2.




These works are fictions about factual events, and that they deploy their "factuality" as a formal strategy, like using medical language in a poem meant to be swooned over by doctors, precisely because they have some theologico-political function to play in the spectacle. In a closed, totalitarian system, the "subversive" artist would have to resort to aesopic language, that is allegorical presentation ala Animal Farm. In contrast, these films, like other media currently in prominence, allegorize using facts or "factuality".

Because of the symbolic freight they have to carry, why not call them factual allegories? Facts are one of the chief currencies of a technocratic state, maybe its’ life "blood". And facts are self evident and atomic, right? They need no decryption, you can't argue with them, they are envois straight from the Real. But they are rather dull and interchangeable, not that sexy. And so it's important today that facts become "sensualized" and textured through images so that people, citizens, can have propulsive, ideally uncontrolled, emotional responses to them. That might be a good working definition of Realism in the cinema: The sensualized, eroticized, fact.

Fact porno. To arouse the never-consummated “lust” of brechtian politics. The politics of froth.

If journalism is the first draft of history, certain filmed images (Images of Convention...) conclude the historic, foreclosing the possibility of analysis, or of reflection. Madonna is Marilyn Monroe and Evita Peron. And Lady Gaga contains Madonna now, in some way. 

I suspect that the russian doll quality of images is antithetical to history.

THE CAMERA STYLO AND THE TIME-IMAGE

"I think he was determined to make his peace with me. I got the impression that there is something precarious about his relationship with the outside world. With me, I believe, Godard felt something he rarely encounters, a meeting on equal terms. We are not in competition, we are working on different planets. He finds that relaxing, and interesting...
At the end I asked him: 'Don't you want to make another film?' He answered: 'Yes, yes, I do. And I want to make it with these.'
He pulled out two gadgets from of his pockets. The first was a ball point pen. He held it up and said: 'Look, this is what spies have today, it has a camera in the head' The second was an alarm clock. It also had a built-in camera."
Ah, the pathos of old spies. Godard knows he's leaving the American Sector.

Friday, December 3, 2010

BAD COUNTRIES!


These days, even a child can see how nicely the IMFication du monde is progressing. National sovereignty, which once was a, perhaps THE guarantor of capitalist prosperity is being consumed in the process of Jüngerian Total Mobilization, like Verne's steamship consuming itself in Around the World in Eighty Days. It's funny now to see the rhetoric of moral failure placed on the obliging western states as they struggle and fail to play the rigged game.

As a corollary: Given the rise of these zombie national economies, under the control of Papa Docs hither and yon, how long, I wonder, will rational economic actors pay (in taxes, in patriotic spirit or conscription) for the past incarnation of a state, or perhaps for the future promise of one?

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

INFORMATION IS ANODYNE. THE INFORMANT MUST BE INTERPRETED.


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.

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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.


For your garden variety megalomaniac, poor Jules Assange seems to have only an elementary conception of propaganda. Ellul says that the texture and ground of propaganda is facts, facts and images like the ones Assange puts out there like sparkly lemmas. Drawing on the myth of Daniel Ellsberg and the hacker’s maxim that information wants to be free, he invokes this pretty fancy pants explanation of what he’s doing, which is playing bass for the Sex Pistols. Assange is literally a Theorist of Conspiracy, which he sees in the usual technocratic way as a NETWORK or a brain… of knowledge/power multiplied through a technological/electrical system. Foucault meets Tom Swift. But he’s not worried about Google or Facebook, naturally, he’s tilting at a far more worthy adversary: the 19th century corporatist nation state. How fucking punk rock, man!


Assange: We can deceive or blind a conspiracy by distorting or restricting the information available to it. We can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating. A conspiracy suffciently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action.


Now leaving aside that intelligence gathering operations already are victims of their own data mining agendas -- remember “Nigerian Yellowcake”? it would seem that an outfit like wikileaks is superfluous. If the ambition is to set up as a sort of Switzerland of Information, affecting an anarchist neutrality and equal opportunity hatred for all power systems, it seems inevitable that wikileaks will soon become a godsend for all the bad guys: a turnstile for all sorts of orphan information that while being technically correct, doesn’t indicate the private agenda behind its revelation, that is, it doesn’t tell you what key to play the notes in, or the tempo, to finally make the music.

In the Spectacular everyone is reduced to the condition of the spy. That is, the omniscient who in truth knows only what he has been given to know, or more precisely what he desires to be the case. The visible “matter” gives way to the dark matter of the invisible, and that is where the real work begins. Espionage is a landscape of mirrors. Angleton. Paranoia. Espionage is like zen poetry -- both "sides" work in unison to create the meaning of events. The real work of spycraft happens in the paranoid mind. A garden of forking quantum paths -- each alternative at every step must be considered as true/false, until that ever deferred moment when it is specularized, crystalized eternally in the non-history of the era.

In these terms, it seems to me the idea of an anarchist spymaster is insane and absurd.  At best Assange is a propagandist who doesn’t really understand how to do it, and is, granted, an unstable and mesmerizing figure because of it. 

He promises some novelty, but he may not deliver it.


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. 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!

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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.
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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: "a possession for all time," 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.

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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.

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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.


All sensible quotes from Debord’s Commentaires. Read the whole thing. Here: