Ideological Foundations of the Nouvelle Droite
Part 9

3,130 words

Critique of the Society of the Spectacle

Given that what characterizes our species is a delayed physiological development, a persistent youth, and the organic deprogramming of its instincts, man needs to equip himself with other “programs,” constituted by culture and institutions. Since man is a being who always takes a position vis-à-vis his environment, both to survive and to modify it, culture provides him with the necessary tools for that mediation (man–world). Each culture possesses its own systems of mediation to represent and interpret the world. [1]

These systems of mediation fulfill two functions: a symbolic function of representation and a technical function of action. When our mediated experience and perception of the world undergo an evolution, our relation with the world is transformed physiologically, for every system of mediation modifies our perception of the world.

Our age is characterized by the multiplication of mediation types; therefore our perception of reality loses coherence. This mediatic environment, by inserting itself between lived experience and reality, produces a distancing effect that leaves increasingly less space for direct perception of existence.

This hyper-mediatization allows man only second-hand experiences. Direct experiences are weakened or suppressed. Yet without direct experimentation, man cannot construct himself and falls into a state of physiological dependency, which translates into organic fragility before the eventual disappearance of techniques of mediatization.

Since each mediatic medium produces its own schema of relation to the world, and the individual lives immersed in an extraordinarily diverse and abundant mediatic environment, he undergoes a succession of artificial, segmented, and disconnected relations with the world. Individuals then lose any referential axis in their systems of representation and action. Hence the decline of coherent worldviews and the decline of consciousness, that is, the perception of oneself in the world.

The heterogeneity of mediation systems reinforces one of the characteristics of mercantilist societies: the instability of life-forms. The kaleidoscope of false impressions furnished by the mediatic environment superficializes social experience and prevents the transmission of cultural values, since rooting in a specific culture becomes impossible when all the cultures of the world may be consumed through the mediatic sphere.

Moreover, our society of the spectacle, devoid of historical consciousness, compensates for the profound inactivity of individual lives through formal agitation grounded in overabundant spectacles. From cultural actor, the individual becomes a passive spectator of a game in which he is no longer an active part. Hence the resignation and incapacity for action that characterize the spectator’s psyche.

Likewise, subjectivism acquires autistic proportions: the individual believes himself, thanks to his domestic mediatization system, to be self-sufficient and separates himself still more from the lived world. This weakens psychological resistance to reality. Any event that departs from normality and escapes mediatization is experienced as a drama. Behaviors of escape come into play, the hypertrophy of the pleasure principle, the rejection of reality and of the aleatory structure of life. The multiplication of pseudo-mediatic experiences introduces us into a dream-life, such that these sub-experiences are incapable of fostering social learning and the teaching of new behaviors through individual “training.” Their effect is domesticating and involutive.

We believe we live in a stressful era because we are excessively sensitive, and the slightest shock unsettles us; yet the contemporary individual does not experience the true pressures of his predecessors, entirely necessary for psychic structuring and the physiological “training” of personality. Confusing the real world and the mediatic world, the individual loses sight of the fact that the socio-cultural environment rests on circuits of effort and on the principle of activity; at the same time, opinion replaces experimentation, and we no longer know things themselves but what is said and deemed fitting to think about them.

In this world of mediatization, in which cultural maturation disappears in favor of micro-shocks that hammer the individual with constant stimuli, passions gain in false intensity what they lose in depth and serenity. Likewise, we live in an age of easy contacts that reflect a commodification of sentiments, along with a mimetism of relational familiarity structures maintained by the mediation systems. Partly because contemporary man experiences a multiplicity of contacts with mediated images—nourishing himself on an overabundance of impressions and information—his psyche projects this type of relational attitude into his personal world.

Community feeling disappears, for the self, hypertrophied both by the consumerist environment and by the illusion of autonomy provided by the mediatic system, loses the experience of the other, yet multiplies relations, since it observes a thousand faces a day but sees none—thus none are integrated into the psyche.

For man, his external environment is always excessively proliferating. To live within it, he requires a “discharge” of impressions and information. Normally it is culture that filters and lightens environmental impacts, selecting those that are useful and meaningful. However, the modern system of mediatization does not fulfill this role; on the contrary, it overloads our perceptions. The excess of impressions obtained from the mediation systems contributes to accentuating the loss of meaning observed in the mercantilist society. The spectator, drowned and bombarded by visual stimuli and an avalanche of insignificant discourses, loses all capacity for classification and hierarchy of his assessments—not only of the messages themselves but also of the world around him. Selective intelligence atrophies, not only because of the mediocrity of messages but because of their rhythmic overabundance, which kills all harmonic sensibility. Individuals, confronted with a universe lacking “discharge” and overflowing with empty messages, lose all critical resources and become unable to select the impressions received from outside. These mediatic systems, far from increasing information, tend instead to neutralize it, stripping it of all meaning through a non-discriminating accumulation of messages that overwhelms them, rendering them floating and transparent. Past a certain threshold, abundance destroys itself as a self-negation of meaning. Excess information leads to exactly the same result as lack of information: when there are too many messages and all have equal value, nothing counts, nothing remains, everything leaves one indifferent.

The mediatic universe produces semi-skilled individuals, very useful for the mercantilist system, thanks to the false certainty of knowledge and competence that the informational message provides to the spectator. Moreover, it tends to desynchronize the individual psyche, since the individual is incapable of deciphering the external world or adequately assessing reality. This destabilization is all the more dangerous because its victims are unaware of it.

The mercantilist society requires the dictatorship of the image to lull the spectator’s critical spirit, distract him, relax him—in other words, make him forget what is essential, pacify him, and depoliticize him. Man, absorbed and digested by the mediatic environment, becomes a being without memory, over whom the faceless totalitarian dictator of advanced liberal-mercantilist society may reign.

Analysis of the New Consumer Society

The New Consumer Society [2] is narcissistic, hyper-individualistic, and conservative. Alongside a reinforcement of social massification, neo-feudal institutions and corporatist practices persist, while an expansion of individual autonomy is combined with an expansion of the mechanisms of control wielded by a highly sophisticated technostructure.

The New Consumer Society presents itself as the integration of the doctrines of the French May ’68 into the mercantilist society and their conscious modification: namely, the reinforcement of its bourgeois character and its mercantilist uniformity. In fact, the New Consumer Society has easily absorbed the demands of May ’68, which challenged established society in the name of its own principles, reproaching it only for having betrayed them.

Although its ideals were formulated in ’68, the New Consumer Society could only begin at the end of the ’70s, when the economic crisis interrupted the great wave of postwar economic euphoria and prosperity.

Hedonism and consumerism have not receded in the new context of economic crisis; rather, they advance in a more sophisticated form. This is now a “responsible” and refined consumerism, accompanied by an intellectualization of consumption, in which each sector of consumable production is tied to a dominant life-concept (for example, food and textiles linked to nutrition and health). This new consumer is reflective, technical, mathematically egotic, for he wishes to maintain his standard of living during crisis by calculating his expenses, rationalizing his tastes, and programming his needs. Sensible and calm hedonism replaces the earlier wasteful consumerism. This psychic disposition belongs to people who have passed through the critique of consumerism and, cured of their pseudo-contestatory disappointments, return to consumption with a mentality more prudent than that of the youth of the ’60s–’70s.

The New Consumer Society seeks to soften the excesses of production and consumption, but by making them bearable and painless, it guarantees a matured and reinforced consumerism. The social body does not react violently to the disappointments of the first consumer society; instead, it sets in motion a strategy for the maintenance and improvement of what has already been acquired. From the ideal of accumulation one shifts to the management of pleasures. The idea of quality of life emerges, but this desire ultimately contains an aspiration to an existence increasingly maternal within the bosom of the welfare state, and increasingly alienated by economicism.

This New Consumer Society appears to be dominated by sociological tendencies. However, lifestyles, tastes, and affinities are defined and shaped by the consumption typologies associated with each one. This sociologism reinforces and camouflages economicism, adopting a new guise: sociological socialism, a form of social-conservatism, a necessity of the maternal apparatus of the welfare state. The new intermediary bodies are nothing more than socioeconomic constructs animated by the ideology of well-being. Regionalism itself is not political, nor even ethno-national, but revolves around social and cultural demands. The sociological is the mask of economicism. Culture and quality of life are consumed, for they become spectacle and commodities.

The ideal of the New Consumer Society, with its mixture of socialism (equality and assistance) and capitalist ideals (consumerist satisfaction), is the logical result of the dogma shared by socialism and liberalism: economic well-being prevailing over everything else.

At the social level, a strange model appears: the social-democratic state, on the transnational level, plays the game of total capitalism, but within the nation it bureaucratizes the economy. Bureaucracy and capitalist liberalism celebrate their union under the sign of mondialism.

This New Consumer Society, as the extension of the classical consumer society to a planetary level, develops psychological antibodies and false differentiation through compensatory mechanisms, in order to neutralize possible rebellions against the macro-homogeneity of the System by making people believe, illusorily, that differences exist.

A curious phenomenon of neo-tribalism emerges, based on false affinities that are neither cultural nor ethno-national, but strictly socioeconomic. Rather than destroying homogenization, it masks and reinforces it under the appearance of segmentation and heterogeneity. The same logic applies to decentralization and the multiplication of intermediate bodies, which, while dispersing the center and destroying the sovereign state, accentuate statist centralization on the social plane. The apparent fragmentation of mass media, their segmentation and specialization, does not weaken the continuous battering of public opinion; it reinforces it by specializing it. This specialization of media also implies the specialization of messages. Hence mass ignorance and growing depoliticization, which serve the System’s domination.

The same neo-tribal process appears in the coexistence of different ethnic groups within the New Consumer Society. The heterogeneity of tribes and ethnic groups generates ghetto effects, and racial difference is devalued, reduced to simple colors or exotic curiosities, with no consciousness of belonging to a people, since, as is well known, for Western society races do not exist.

Society increasingly resembles an unfederated addition of small spheres, all decentralized but without any common center. A human ensemble is truly organic only when values are federated by a global meaning of political or historical nature. To compensate for the death of community and popular cultures, civil society takes refuge in displaced, compartmentalized, semi-marginal cultures—lethargic and ephemeral mini-cultures that follow one another endlessly.

We are confronted with a homogeneous Western mass model at two levels: on the one hand, a single lifestyle, that of the Western System, which touches all aspects of existence; on the other, at the intimate or microsocial level, a proliferation of juxtaposed segments and sealed compartments, with needs and values nevertheless technically defined. These individual units believe they escape economic massification, but their cultural and psychological needs are conditioned by a carefully designed economic supply and distribution. Today, lifestyles approximate each other, contrary to traditional organic societies, and socioeconomic censures soften, but common values dissolve.

The New Consumer Society is characterized by a radical decline of politics. Western societies evolve toward technocratic, managerial, conservative democracies, in which neo-corporatist apparatuses direct all affairs amid citizen indifference. Citizens withdraw into themselves and demand a peaceful, rooted life, increasing egalitarianism, and the simultaneous assertion of individualism and community life. These post-modern generations divide into “integrated” and “displaced.” For the former, the most desirable social values are security, tranquility, private life, and the limitation of work. Their progressivism is “microscopic,” since it fits within the general purpose of constructing a hyper-stable, balanced, harmonious society. The “integrated” reject the macrosocial strategies of their predecessors and prefer micro-communities and the construction of ecological life-spaces. The dominant mentality among them is a reaction against historical values and the creation of depoliticized models. Themes of increasing egalitarianism, decentralization, self-management, and the expansion of free time characterize this “integrated” psychology. The common denominator of this “new conservatism” is a spirit of micro-defense, preservation, and conditioning of life in the narrow sense.

The “displaced” are wholly uninterested in politics and push the “presentism” of the “integrated” to its ultimate consequences. Their dreamy psychic disposition seeks perpetual escape.

This decline of civic spirit and social sense is not accompanied by protest against the welfare state; it is enough for it to maintain a humanitarian and decentralizing discourse, distribute its gratifications, and avoid visible oppression, for subtler forms of intervention to go unnoticed and tolerated. This post-modern generation conceals within itself a terrible force of inertia that may ruin the social system and that, in the event of a severe crisis, would likely retreat into a kind of militant passivity, a strike of energies and efforts. Another, perhaps more plausible, hypothesis is that our society, held in place by highly sophisticated technocratic surveillance mechanisms, would not need popular support. On the contrary, indifference and demotivation would spare managers further complications.

In this generation, one notes a strong decline in ambition and a shift in individual ideals from quantitative wealth toward immaterial goods such as leisure, flexible schedules, and a reduced work rhythm. The new structures of the mercantilist and technocratic society in crisis are admirably suited to providing such services: assistance and security within an atmosphere of zero growth and economic recession. The legitimacy crisis of current democracies may be resolved through the emergence of this psychology of insertion and marginalization.

The welfare state is reproached only for having failed to achieve its objectives; in current critiques of it, the idea of social assistance is not rejected in the slightest. Moreover, the desire for greater social well-being increasingly entails anonymous administrative intervention. There is no objection to fiscal policy and social budgets descending to a decentralized and apparently private level, since the welfare state’s capture of national income continues. Critics of the welfare state do not demand its end but its humanization, meaning the expansion of its gratifications, the refinement of its protections, and the elimination of its inconveniences.

With the emergence of the New Consumer Society, there will be a reinforcement of individualism under the camouflage of social communications, and an aggravation of massification through the simulacrum of communities and tribes. This is the new image of permissive technocratic social-statism, which organizes total individual spaces within social cages where one may do everything except leave.

The New Consumer Society is worse than the first consumer society: to the evils of capitalism it adds those of socialism. To the inconveniences of mercantilism—while eliminating entrepreneurial dynamism—it adds the inconveniences of a protected, assisted society. The only capitalists will be the state, socialized through large enterprises, and tertiary micro-enterprises that create no industrial added value.

The new ideological device legitimizing advanced industrial societies tends to include themes such as environmentalism, the defense of culture, and certain values apparently anti-industrial. This strategy seeks to prepare minds for stagnation and a decline in the standard of living.

Political and ideological struggle gives way to civic indifferentism. From this derives a powerful desire for consensus and social peace at any cost—a doubly objectionable mentality, for internally it leaves the welfare state’s administrative manipulations unimpeded, and externally it prepares mentalities for all compromise and all capitulation.

The future holds for us a strange form of society, at once repressive and gentle, hyper-centralized under the appearance of fragmentation, decentralization, associative proliferation, and micro-centers of decision. A super-technocracy embedded in a social body that will believe itself highly “responsible,” steeped in a kind of pseudo-democratizing and finicky civic spirit. Ultimately, a cold totalitarianism, in which individual permissiveness, moral surveillance, and techno-bureaucratic economy combine. Civil society, dispersed into a nebula of value-systems and ideological centers, will be neutralized. This dispersion and autonomy, far from liberating, accentuate the System’s conservatism. Thus, the legitimacy crisis of current technocratic societies reinforces, rather than weakens, the power of dominant models. People may hold contestatory personal ideas, but if nothing and no one federates and structures this contestation, it will either vanish or become demobilizing.

The New Consumer Society continues without rupture the irresistible rise of mass individualism characteristic of Western, “modern,” egalitarian, democratic, and Christian-shaped civilization. But this corresponds to a new phase of that secular process, the post-modern phase, in which faith in progressivism is dying. The most authoritative representatives of the German Konservative Revolution have called “Interregnum” this period of waiting, during which the destiny of Europe will hover between two possibilities: either this period ends with the triumph of the egalitarian worldview and the end of history, or it gives rise to the regeneration of history. Both mark the final “epochal” moment of Western nihilism, through which one must pass for a regeneration of history to be possible.

The New Consumer Society and post-modernism have the advantage, compared to modernist ideologies, of destabilizing the millenarian faith in the great egalitarian ideals: progress, equality, democracy. Now only the individual remains, conquering his present, his Epicurean ego, without belief in the future. The pre-war and post-modern times are hard to bear, but one must pass through them for a new meaning to emerge. As Heidegger believed, we are at the midnight of the world, and one must go to the end of the night for the dawn to appear.

Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.

Notes

[1] Faye, Guillaume & Rizzi, Patrick: “Vers la médiatisation totale,” in: Nouvelle Ecole no. 39 (Fall 1982), pp. 12-20.

Benoist, Alain de: Nouvelle Ecole no. 37 (Spring 1982), p. 138, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., pp. 99-100.

[2] Faye, Guillaume: La Nouvelle Société de Consommation, Le Labyrinthe, Paris, 1984, pp. 5-59.