La societe des debacles

Critique of Bastard Knowledge 

By Adilkno (Agentur Bilwet), Amsterdam



Now that the historical figure of the bastard has cut himself loose

from his role as an esteemed member of the one parent family, he can

grow up in all innocence and turn himself into a fairly grand aesthetic

category. Cruelty gives way to beauty. The United Bastards of Benneton.

By definition seduction incarnate, the bastard is the visible result of

an irresponsible high. The modern bastard self-confidently radiates the

harmony of a novel genetic, cultural, and technological disposition.

The illegitimate kid as prototype of the Artificial Child (AC) is a

figure from the age of the the bourgeois family. The 19th century was

populated by cast-off serving girls and governesses. Sanctimony made

sure that a slip in marriage was covered up in the cloak of love.

Evoking the tender memory of the possibility of innocent love, the

bastard is, in the official version, a victim of rape, racism, double

moral standards, or world history. Nonetheless, it's been a long time

since there's been a slot for him in official statistics. Instead, he

returns as a therapeutic case. Child of circumstances, product of

shredded families, this miscarrage of a failed marriage is searching

for his own father and mother, his own land and language. Is all this

really so lamentable? Christianity provides us with the basic model of

the organized bastard. Jesus of Nazareth had a mother, to be sure, but

who's the father? Trying to answer this tricky question evolved into a

world religion. The savior, as provided for by tradition, has blond

locks and blue eyes. To complete this picture, it should be noted that

he was born in a barn and brought to Egypt on a saddle, mere pedantic

details. The illegitimate status of the Christ Child functions as a

bridge to the sacred, the meta-legal. Normally we can only expect a few

saints per time-space package. As soon as the crisis breaks out, they

are allowed to utter their prophecies.

The crooked-legged bastard arian, Adolf Hitler, is an expert in this

field: "The stronger must rule and must not merge with the weaker

which fritters his own magnitude away." Elsewhere he postulates  "the

valid thesis that "all racial mixing will sooner or later cause the

bastard's fall so long as the superior element of this crossing

remains clean in a context halfway resembling a race." Hence he judges

the political situation in the=  following manner: "the race is

`negrotized' at such a rapid rate that one can really speak about the

origination of an African state in Europe. A mighty undivided

European-African mulatto state is growing up from the Rhine to the

Congo."

Hitler gave words to an anxiety that has changed today into a desire

for miscegenation. Hitler was right about his mulatto kingdom, and this

is right so. His passionate warnings are completely out of date. They

show that he was still struggling with his own dubious origins. This is

so for every interest in the bastard-like higher and lower, fatter and

thinner, dark or light, shorter or longer, stronger or weaker--the fun

and success of your 'own' identity!

When biological science carried out more exact investigations, it

turned out that even today 10 % of the children don't have their genes

from their legal fathers. And this sounds quite healthy. At present the

race needs fresh, wild genes from the outside to stay in shape. The

blood bastard has his emancipation behind him and has advanced from

geneological purity to an enrichment of a genetic landscape that would

otherwise be stunted and dissicated.....and, according to the dominant

ecological discourse, degenerate. If we can't sit in the sun any more

owing to the ozon hole, we simply take in a few darker genes in the

blood-line. "In the coming years, simply all of us in Holland will

become a little brauner," as a professed anti-racist remarked on TV.

The bastard comes from the concept of racial purity and functions as a

counterpoint to the cultic family performing rites at the front door.

The bastard stands for the realistic recognition that there's no way

to hold back nature and that we must consciously live with the

consequences of the raceless species. Taking up the testator from the

second line into our midst insures that private pragmatism can unfold.

From this point on the bastard isn't disadvantaged from the outset but

has to prove himself like everybody else. Now that the family as the

highest form of nepotism is also faced with its decline and fall, one

can devote oneself to purifying one own actions. "I'm pc, you're pc":

the dawn of psychocracy. From today on one can't push the blame on the

forefathers with their nature and nurture. This is the time of

submission to the dictatorship of the future. Fate no longer chases you

but you have to chase it yourself. If you wait passively, you'll be

passed right and left and nothing will happen at all: the condition of

millions of parked lives. Now the cultural bastard gets to work

realizing himself, and has problems with the question of authentic

ethnicities. He must always represent his mixture. Cultural criticism

remains fixed on the analysis of individual influences in order to

raise them to an ethnic, humanistic, and religious plateau. After the

declaration follows the promotion to higher culture.

There's also the rap about real existing miscegenation and defilement, 

a case that doesn't have to be pled anymore--which is why it happens

that the bastard is not a concept that will shake up relationships.

Impure thought doesn't maintain the limits imposed on mixing. It's a

parasite on the=  beauty of its own impurity. The mixed intelligence

lives off of the grace of the leaky memory, morbid facination,

unworkable arguments, and impure motives. It doesn't represent any

change but realizes it without being particularly aware of the fact;

everything coded is not decoded but perverted. The bastardized

intellect is shaking the bars caging the strong concept. Negativity, as

long as it can't be implemented or arrive at consensus, can carry it a

long way and leave existent conditions behind. A clear idea has no

special interest for the bastard. Rather he fiddles around in order to

cause a short-circuit, always on watch for those flashes of thought

which are necessarily followed by thunder, on occasion effecting a

direct hit or refreshing creativity. The bastard feeds on decaying

modes, not with the intention of recycling them but with the conviction

that the whole is always the untrue. Contaminated knowledge recognizes

that truth has its weaknesses, its handicaps, its superfluities, its

lack of motivation, is awkwardly staged. The catastrophes can't attack

us any more but pass on by. The bastard interrupts the great lines and

muddies the clarity of future dreams. He's at the edge of failure,

tilting the perspective of good--and not from joy in the certainty of

failure but from devotion to the transit of the west as it smears the

pristine purity of boundary-lines.

After the fascination with evil in the 80s, we are concerned today with 

the interest in failure. We no longer read about seduction, simulation,

perfection, glamour and passion as pure self expression. Evil had to

delete all of the good of the 60s and was magificently successful (cf.

the breakthroughs of 1989). But later something else came after all.

The triumph of the dialectic, the historical synthesis of market and

democracy didn't occur, nor could a new antithesis be found. Good

socialism rightly gave way to the capitalism of failure. The system and

its serfs underwent a revaluation of all values, and in the meantime

nothing has changed. An indefinite situation in which nobody was

concerned any longer to express the world and one's own ego (and

everything related to them) in words. Chaos rules--which is also

unsuitable for lawless visualization. Timeless struggle in the guise of

destructive private initiative takes place in the midst of rotting

cement and bankrupt governmental structures. Here the heroic appearance

of the declaimed end of history is lacking. The spectacular society

plunges us unexpectedly into the society of the debacle. "We learn

from Guy Debord."

The heathen faith in new media, project management, surveillance,

flexibilization, relearning, improvisation, imago, and identity is the

tried and true method for introducing new technics. In the beginning

one is amazed that all of these curious apparatuses and concepts

function. But once they're widespread and really do work, attention

shifts to the moments in which methods and techniques fail, and then

they're immediately written off. Once normality is achieved, every

cybertecho loses its nimbus and can be routinely employed. Once hard

and software fail to fulfill their promise, consumer rage turns on the

machines and their producers. It's magnificent to give way to rage and

to throw all fo the miscarried machines out of the window, heaps of

them piled on the street!

Grunge and generation niX have mobilized the authenticity of elementary

failure against the spandex-shine of revoked success. The breakthrough

of stagnation is the surprising turn that history has completed since

1989. As long as the end of progress was still being announced, nothing

happened. But the philosopher of liberation, Fukuyama, couldn't

foresee that bungling would win out. To be sure, self-organizing

principles like chaos, artificial life, fractals, internet, complexity,

biosphere II, turbulance are opimistically engaged, but are stuck in

their advertizing phase. Consequential cancerous metastasis is not

achieved and they remain models. Failure on the contrary is in

principle not a model, much less a strategy. In this respect, it

distinguishes itself from everything that the 80s privided by way of

ideas. Downfall is not fate: fate approaches from the outside while the

fiasco comes from within without having been able to be programmed

ahead of time. The inherent disappointment that unfolds is not a bug

that can be removed from the program. In the age of over-organization

and social surplus of experience avoiding a flop has turned out to be a

swamp in which thoughts of success have bogged down. Attempts are still

made to redefine failure as an educative moment, but Omo Power, the

Pentium-Chip from Intel, Windows 5.1 from Microsoft, CD-I from

Phillips, atomic power, the reunification of Germany . . . . all strong

concepts which were not unconvincing but which led to nothing.

One is mistaken on two fronts: one can accept the wrong position to

the correct object or grab the wrong theme by the scruff of the neck

and stretch the correct theory over it. After pop-culture's pose of the

looser we now have insight into the failure of theory. Derrida

confesses that "my Grammatology missed the point." Just like Lacan,

who admits that the unconscious isn't structured like language after

all. Tough for an entire generation of doctoral students. Now we're

waiting for a study about Nietzsche's complete wash out--the eternal

return is not possible at all! The superman is merely a bastard.

Sometimes it's said of Marx ex cathedra that he was mistaken....But

what will remain of Ryle's concept of the mind when John Garang uses it

to set up his government in South Sudan? The age of thought as

brainstorming breaks upon us.

Total falsification doesn't deminish the possible value of the theory

revealed as a lie. Seen in the daylight, thought isn't concerned with

the question how the world is put together but how is organizes itself

when observed in a particular manner. The present climate of thought is

dominated by a sceptical consumption of discourse: can anything be done

with it, does it represent anything, is it about anything, can

something practical be done with it, are there any pictures, is it easy

to read, isn't it too complicated, does it lead anywhere, does it sell

well, is it convincing at all, is it all really true, can one win

points with it? The problem with Foucault's concept of discourse is

that it can't break down (at least according to the jacket cover). To

be sure, discourse can become weaker, digress, assume radical turns,

spread out over the entire field of reality, penetrate the most

intimate places, be supressed, take power or formulate an opposing

power, but it cannot be detected by a lie-detector. The same truth

ooses out continually. In general discourse is not dealt with

publically but slyly operates backstage. Will media discouse ever fail,

go completely wrong, so that everybody decides at once to do something

more reasonable? You can bet on it.