The CD-Rom games so widespread among the young distract them from dangerous activities like reading and thinking: games do away with those intolerable viruses called ideas.
This strategy adopted by the system, however, seems destined to fail soon. It is the same as the one adopted by Orwell’s Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four or in the film Fahrenheit 451,[65] only in a softer version. A society cannot last long without any sort of positive legitimisation. Turning people’s attention away from the failures of society by treating them as children – ‘Go play and leave Dad alone!’ – is a poor and demoralising strategy that won’t solve the increasingly serious problems of society. Without mobilising objectives, the ruling ideology will not be able to overcome the distance it has created by relying on emptiness and negativity, and on a culture based on insignificance, the entertainment industry, amusement, and permanent distraction.
The Distortion of Sports
The ‘sport gods’ of pre-War mythology are dead and gone. On a global scale, sport has not only become an industry (the turnover of FIFA[66] is greater than the state budget of France) – a cause of widespread corruption, doping, and astronomical earnings – but it is also an essential part of showbiz. For this reason, as a new opium for the masses in a West lacking any religion, it fully contributes to the overall lobotomisation of society.
The spectacle of sport infantilises consciences, conceals social problems and the failings of politics. France’s success in the last Football World Cup is a sensational example of this. It has been presented as the ‘victory of multiracialism and successful integration’ and the ‘symbol of a France that is finally winning’, but this is only mockery, falsehood, and dissimulation.
Here are a few facts: bringing together eleven athletes of different ethnic origins who are paid millions of Francs is a ‘borderline case’ that is not indicative of any real ‘integration’ in the general population – integration in a football team does not prove the level of ethnic integration reached by ‘pluralist France’; on the contrary, through a sham example it helps conceal the utter failure of the Republican melting pot. While it credited North Africans and Blacks with the victory, it forbade their co-religionists from entering stadiums for ‘security reasons’! ‘Coloured’ supporters, particularly girls, filmed by the cameras with faces painted red, white and blue were seen by the intelligentsia as proof of the fact that ‘multiracial France works’: what nonsense! As in Brazil, whose multiracial society is actually a multiracist society, the presence of ‘coloured’ football champions helps conceal reality. As soon as the lights of the sports victory went out, revolts broke out again in the cities, as did bloody brawls on the streets and in schools. In homage to the naturalised Kabyle[67] football player Zinedine Zidane[68] we have seen rows of Algerian flags waving in the Champs Élysées. After two victories of the French national team, ethnic gangs have repeatedly clashed with the police and British supporters in Paris and Marseilles: what an achievement of ‘integration’! A pinnacle of idiocy (and racism) was reached when the newspaper Libération, the official organ of conformist anti-racism, criticised the German team because it only marshalled ‘blonde players’ and no Turkish immigrants or immigrants of other ethnic background on account of the law of blood,[69] thus suggesting that the defeat of Germany was due to its shocking ethnic ‘purity’.
To sum up, the victory of a multiracial football team has served to conceal the concrete failure of integration. Far from favouring multiracialism, it has increased multiracism, as shown by the aforementioned incidents that occurred.
Has the victory of the French team contributed to mend the ‘social fracture’ and fight ‘marginalisation’? Has it served to create new jobs or prevent the flight of French brains to California? Has it strengthened the diplomatic and cultural standing of France in the world (with McDonald’s as a sponsor of the Championship...)? Has multiethnic society shown itself to be superior to the monoethnic? The answer is no. Sport has simply been prostituted to lend credit to political lies.
The religion of football, the collective hysteria it engenders and psychological disturbances it causes (with supporters going bankrupt to buy tickets from scalpers and touts that cost the equivalent of three months of their salaries) illustrate the deviated function sport has now taken on: to create a lucrative economic sector and mass spectacle resulting in the manipulation of people’s political conscience. The system focuses the spirit of the masses on ludicrous events; to be more exact, through sport it turns a neutral spectacle into an event highly charged with meaning.
In such a way, modern sport resumes the role it had in decadent Rome – ‘panem et circenses,’[70] ‘RMI[71] and football’: it tells lies and makes people forget. Modern sport is run according to the same logic – albeit in a softer version, as we are afraid of blood and what is real – that inspired the producers of the gladiatorial games, where adulated and highly paid slaves would fight against one another.
Sport as Circus
A justification given for the sports spectacle is that it serves to prevent wars by staging symbolic and pacific conflicts, thus neutralising nationalistic drives. Yet the history of football shows that just the opposite is the case, with clashes between supporters and hooligans fuelling nationalistic urges. In Europe the nationalism and chauvinism that would seem destined to disappear are instead nourished by the support of national football teams...
It is easy to note the mental dulling and infantile regression caused by this anger in sports. It is disheartening to see the male population – and now the female too – passionately discuss the performance of a team of players that has no impact on their lives or that of their country. Problems of no substance or importance are thus capturing the attention of the general public.
Sport also nourishes a destructive fascination with brute physical force, which is the opposite of physical courage (that of the soldier) or even ‘physical shape’ – for the body of great athletes is often damaged by over-training and doping. Society makes up for its lack of physical courage by fawning upon quantitative physical performances of no interest. This cult of quantified performance, a by-product of unrestrained materialism – an obsession with who is the fastest, tallest, most muscular and enduring, etc. – finds an expression in the undisputed field of records. Athletes who have broken physical records are led to the triumph: a veritable animalisation of man – the negation of his intellectual dimension. For ultimately, any hare, greyhound, horse or ostrich will always beat Ben Johnson at sprint racing; any chimpanzee will beat up Tyson, the world heavyweight boxing champion; and as for high-jump records, who can beat the peregrine falcon, with his 5,550 metres?
One may retort that there are sports which require intelligence, skill and courage, like tennis, skiing or sailing. No doubt: but do two guys throwing a ball at each other over a net really deserve all this media attention? Are the performances of trapeze artists or lion-tamers at the circus not equally admirable? And as for extreme sports – transatlantic regattas, the crossing of the Antarctic on foot (when will it be done on one’s hands?), or of the Pacific in rowboats – there is an air of pointlessness, boredom and emptiness to them. As we no longer know what to do, let us invent something, let us run some (calculated) risks so that sponsors and the media will take notice of us. Once there was a point to the regatta of the four masts on the rum course:[72] to transport this product in the shortest time in such a way as to be the first on the market. Today regattas of this kind are pointless performances, meaning they serve no purpose: they are empty tasks –well-paid shows and nothing more; basically, they are global circus events with no laughing clowns.
Curiously enough, the only interesting sports that remain are ethnic ones, which are not mediatised on a global level, like the Basque pelota. [73]
Should we then condemn sport? Not if it is understood as physical exercise for amateurs, if it serves to improve bodily performances in an intelligent way or to train for combat. In these cases, sport is targe
ted: it has a purpose. The Olympic games of ancient Greece, which today have utterly lost their original meaning, were in no way ‘sporting events’: they were a form of military training. There were no professionals at the Olympics, only amateurs.
The globalised sport spectacle of today has two functions: it stirs false and infantilising enthusiasm for non-events which neutralise people’s ideological and political conscience; and they feed a new sector of the entertainment industry which creates very few jobs but is often infiltrated by mafias, while mobilising huge financial resources from which many profit.
And what place does bullfighting have in all this? Well, it is not a sport. It is bullfighting.
The Return to Celebrations
Always according to the circus-games logic, besides sports the system has also encouraged the staging of celebrations: Gay Pride, Technopride, World Music Day, etc. There is nothing spontaneous in these celebration, which do not stem from folk traditions or civil society, as do the various holidays, carnivals, solstices, processions or dances – such as Siena’s Palio[74] or Munich’s Bierfest[75] – dotted across Europe. These celebrations are consciously and artificially organised and funded by the state, as unstructured outbursts of hubris that serve as collective drugs. They have no meaning and in no way embody expressions of popular joy. Besides, these mock celebrations are systematically controlled by the police and end up in riots.
Religious Anathemas and Inquisitorial Thought
In an article published in August 1998 in Marianne magazine,[76] Pierre-André Taguieff,[77] an out-and-out yet still ambiguous theorist of ‘anti-racism’, engaged in an exercise that perfectly illustrates the clumsiness of his current of thought, which dominates the media. With the excuse of exposing the ‘dangers’ posed by the Front National, he violently attacks the theses of a demographer and economist apparently close to that party, who argues: first, that recent immigrants cost France over 200 billion Francs per year; and second, that the influx of illegal immigrants each year is very substantial. Taguieff presents these claims as fanciful. Yet, nowhere in his article does he base his argument on any scientific facts like figures and statistics; nowhere does he concretely refute his opponent. This is rather amazing coming from a thinker who claims to be rational and scientific. Instead of quoting figures and facts – which he does not have, of course – he resorts to moral accusations of a quasi-religious nature: he argues that to denounce excessive and costly immigration is to pave the way for ‘ethnic cleansing’ – in other words, to prove guilty of the mortal sin of ‘racism’, punished by the secular Republican religion.
As the Inquisitors once did with Galileo, facts are here answered with anathemas and appeals to a dubious transcendental ethic. What an extraordinary historical reversal: the heirs of Enlightenment rationalism are resorting to irrational and magical or quasi-religious arguments; the heirs of the theories of liberty of expression and emancipation are asking for the banning and criminalisation of the theses (and observations) that upset them; the heir of egalitarian democracy, in the name of ‘ethical’ and quasi-metaphysical reason, are denying people the right to have their say on the issue of immigration – as well as many others!
Short of arguments, the ‘enlightened’ elites are using the very weapon they accuse their opponents of resorting to: the obscurantism of tyranny.
On Cinema and American Cultural Hegemony
Like many others, in his last book Godard[78] lamented the domination of American cinema. I have worked for the American cinema industry (in the production of ‘French versions’ of their films) and have seen what this world is like from the inside. Here are a few concrete facts:
1. American cinema dominates the world market because it sees itself as an industry and not merely a form of ‘creativity’. A Hollywood film is not simply a ‘work’: it is also an advertisement for a whole series of products (consider for instance Star Wars or Jurassic Park 1 and 2...). The industrial nature of a work does not necessarily deprive it of its artistic value, as people in France believe.
2. The success of Hollywood blockbusters is due to their imaginative and epic character, their dramatic quality, and the ultra-professionalism of the production and its distribution, as well as the perfect technique behind them... This more than makes up for the frequently poor scripts of these movies, with their often childlike and syrupy clichés. Hollywood is like the Jules Verne of film-making, and its scripts are actually often written by Europeans fed up with the lack of dynamism in European productions.
The French and the Europeans (with the exception of Luc Besson)[79] have lost their taste for epic and fantasy. What prevents us from regaining it? What forbids it? Why has no European thought of dealing (in our own way, which would no doubt be more intelligent and equally dramatic) with the themes found in E.T., Jurassic Park, Armageddon and Deep Impact (collision with an asteroid), Twister (tornados) or Titanic? Financial excuses, as we shall see, do not hold water. The same goes for novels, where translations of American thrillers are flooding the market. What prevents us from taking up the tradition of Jules Verne, Paul d’Ivoi[80] and Barjavel?[81] Where are our Philip K. Dicks,[82] Stephen Kings, Robert Ludlums and Michael Crichtons? What we have instead – as happens with cinema – is a literature that ignores and scorns popular genres and produces snobby, boring works focusing on very limited issues, which do not sell well. To implicitly believe that a popular work must be of inferior quality is to betray Molière.[83] In short, American cultural hegemony in regard to films and novels (hence all popular audiovisual entertainment industries) can be explained, despite the often mediocre quality of these products, on the basis of the epic and imaginative character of their themes. The public prefers a highly dramatic work lacking grand ideas and aesthetic perfection to boring but aesthetically and intellectually charged works. The solution for European producers seeking to stand up to Americans is to create works with a highly dramatic, popular character and with scripts of a high cultural level. Our novelists knew how to achieve this in the Nineteenth century.
3. To explain American hegemony in these fields financial reasons are invoked, as well as the presence of the ‘vast monolingual American market’, which by itself suffices to make productions later exported profitable. But this is sheer sophistry. A blockbuster, promotion included, will cost 100 million dollars at the most. This is a small business investment that Europeans would be perfectly capable of making. It would be less costly than the ‘hôtels de région’[84] generously funded by our taxes, or the extension of a subway line. Suffice to consider that Les Amants du Pont-Neuf[85] – an intellectual and soporific trash-flick that was financed by taxpayers thanks to Jack Lang’s[86] lobbying and which was a complete commercial fiasco – cost as much as a Hollywood blockbuster (the neighbourhood of Pont-Neuf near Montpellier was rebuilt in life size)! We might think we were dreaming, but we’re not: this is all real. We cannot accuse Americans (as Belmondo[87] does) of ‘crushing our cinema’. As for the monolingual American market, it is an argument that does not stand. New technologies have substantially cut down dubbing costs. Films can be shot in any language, knowing that in Europe versions with subtitles will be accepted by the public – something which is not the case in the United States. A French film could easily cover its production costs by being distributed in the non-francophone European market. Provided, of course, it is a popular movie... But few people like the word ‘popular’: it sounds bad and for critics and decision-makers (usually of the Left) it does not suggest quality.
4. Americans often say that ‘the French have amazing talent, but they do not know how to develop it, they are unprofessional’ (for ‘they practice professional amateurism’). It is true that filmmaking in France lacks rigour; cronyism and nepotism are widespread (the offspring of institutional stars, who are usually not very gifted, tend to usurp the place of young talents); financial structures are loose and unclear; the promotion of movies is badly organised, etc. The same problems can be found in the case of no
vels. The result is that talent, when it is found, is wasted and gifted people often have a harder time finding work than mediocre people with friends in high places or who are part of a clique. This is a French malady that was already denounced by La Fontaine[88] (the courtesan syndrome) and Balzac[89] (the need for reference letters).
Here’s an anecdote: in 1995 I met a young French artist who was extremely gifted but could not find a job. He was on the dole and was struggling to get food on his plate. He wasn’t part of any clique or mafia; he was Breton,[90] heterosexual, married, and the father of four children. To put it bluntly, he was a rare fellow indeed in Parisianised France. When he offered his services or asked for an appointment over the phone, he never made it past the switchboard operator. So he changed strategy and stopped contacting French companies... Today, he works as an art director in Steven Spielberg’s studios in Silicon Valley in San Francisco. This small, gifted Breton, rejected by France, has become a key player in the system of American cultural production, to which he adds his French touch. He is now about to become an American citizen.
Culturally, as well as politically and geopolitically, Americans are strong because we are weak, absent and stiff, and we lack dynamism and will. Let us stop moaning: America is only quite naturally occupying the space we have abandoned.
Social Order and the Pleasure Principle
Archeofuturism Page 11