Section 7; The COVID Pandemic did not take place:
“Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society's unreality. In all of its particular manifestations-news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment-the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.” Guy Debord, Society of the spectacle
“The spectacle is the ruling order's nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true character as relations between people and between classes: a second Nature, with its own inescapable laws, seems to dominate our environment.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
The COVID Pandemic: Is it really taking place? We may well ask. On the available evidence, we could suppose an immense promotional exercise like that one which once promoted a brand-name whose product never became known. Pure promotion which enjoyed an immense success because it belonged to pure speculation. The Plandemic is also pure and speculative, to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could or would signify.
The media promote the Plandemic, the Plandemic promotes the media, and advertising competes with the Plandemic. Promotion is the most thick-skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict. It is our Last Judgment. But it is also like a biological function: it devours our substance, but it also allows us to metabolize what we absorb, like a parasitic plant or intestinal flora, it allows us to turn the world and the violence of the world into a consumable substance. So, Plandemic or Promotion? The Plandemic, together with its fake and presumptive epidemiologists, doctors, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watches itself in a mirror: am I pretty enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?
Unlike earlier crises, in which there were political aims of either distraction or domination, what is at stake in this one is crisis itself: its status, its meaning, its future. It is beholden not to have a response but to prove its very existence (this crisis of identity affects the existence of us all). In effect, it has lost much of its credibility. Who, apart from the NPC masses is still capable of believing in it and becoming inflamed by it? Nevertheless, the spectacular drive of crisis remains intact. In the absence of the (greatly diminished) will to power, and the (problematic) will to knowledge, there remains today the widespread will to spectacle, and with it the obstinate desire to preserve its specter of fiction (this is the fate of religions: they are no longer believed but the disincarnate practice remains). Can crisis be saved?
The Zombie Apocalypse did not take place and yet we are already beyond it, as though in the utopian space of a post-Zombie-apocalypse-which-did-not-take-place, and it is in the suspense of this non-place that the present confrontations unfold and the question is posed: can crisis still take place? This one is perhaps only a test, a desperate attempt to see whether a crisis is still possible.
By the force of the media, this war liberates an exponential mass of stupidity, not the particular stupidity of war, which is considerable, but the professional and functional stupidity of those who pontificate in perpetual commentary on the event: all the Bouvards and Pecochets for hire, the would be-raiders of the lost image, the CNN-types and all the master singers of strategy that make us experience the emptiness of the internet like never before.
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