The Society of the Debacle. Critique of Adulterated Reason

Now that the historical figure of the bastard has emancipated into an 
esteemed member of the single parent family, he can grow up in all 
innocence and turn 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 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 has been a long time 
since there has been a slot for him in official statistics. Instead, he 
returns as a therapeutic case. Child of circumstances, product of 
shredded families, this miscarriage 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 metalegal. 
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 Aryan, 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 expression to an anxiety that has changed today into a desire 
for miscegenation. Hitler was right about his mulatto kingdom, and so 
much the better. His passionate warnings are completely out of date. They 
show that he was still struggling with his own dubious origins. This is 
true of all interest in the corrupted. Higher or lower, fatter or 
thinner, darker or lighter, shorter or longer, stronger or weaker: have 
fun and good luck with the assembly of your "own" identity!

When biological science carried out more exact investigations, it turned 
out that even today 10 percent of children do not owe their genes to 
their legal fathers; a healthy situation, one might say. At present the 
race needs fresh, wild genes from the outside to stay in shape. The blood 
bastard is fully emancipated and has advanced from genealogical impurity 
to the enrichment of a genetic landscape that would otherwise be stunted 
and dissicated (and degenerated, or so the dominant ecological discourse 
would have it). If you can't sit in the sun any more owing to the ozon 
hole, you simply adopt a few darker genes into the bloodline. As a 
professed anti-racist remarked on TV: "In the coming years, all Europeans 
will simply become a little browner."

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 is 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 is not 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's own actions. "I'm PC, you're PC": the dawn of 
psychocracy. From today on one cannot 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 will 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 explanation follows the promotion to higher culture.

But there is the obvious question of actually existing miscegenation and 
defilement. This explains why the concept of the bastard will never 
disrupt the existing order. Impure thought does not observe the limits 
imposed on cross-fertilization. It parasitizes the beauty of its own 
impurity. Mixed intelligence lives off of the grace of forgetfulness, 
morbid fascination, false arguments, and impure motives. It does not 
promote change but realizes it without being particularly aware of the 
fact; codes are never decoded but perverted. The bastardized intellect is 
shaking the bars caging the strong concept. Negativity, as long as it 
cannot be implemented or arrive at consensus, can carry it a long way and 
leave existent conditions behind. Clear ideas are of no particular 
interest to the bastard. Rather he fiddles around in order to cause a 
short-circuit, always on the lookout 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 fashions, 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, 
handicaps, superfluities, lack of motivation, and poor PR techniques. 
Catastrophe no longer hits us but simply passes by. The bastard 
interrupts the great lines and muddies the clarity of future dreams. He 
is at the edge of failure, tilting the perspective of good - not from joy 
in the certainty of failure but from devotion to the transit of the 
Occident as it smears the pristine purity of boundary-lines.

After the fascination with evil of the 1980s, we now face the 
failure-hype. 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 1960s and was magnificently 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 never occurred, 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, and this does not 
stimulate illegal visualizations. 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 
proclaimed end of history is lacking. Spectacular society plunges us 
unexpectedly into the society of the debacle. "We learn from Guy Debord."


The heathen faith in new media, project management, production control, 
flexible planning, retraining, improvisation, image, and identity is the 
tried and true method for introducing new techniques. At first, the 
functioning of all those curious machines and concepts causes amazement. 
But once they are generally accepted and actually do their jobs, 
attention shifts to the moments in which methods and techniques fail, and 
then they are immediately written off. Once normality is achieved, every 
cyber technology loses its nimbus and can be routinely employed. Once 
hard and software fail to fulfill their promise, consumer rage turns 
against the machine and their producers. It is magnificent to give way to 
rage and to throw all the miscarried machinery out of the window, heaps 
of them piled on the street!

Grunge and generation X 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, could not foresee 
that bungling would win out. To be sure, self-organizing principles like 
chaos, artificial life, fractality, Internet, complexity, biosphere II, 
and turbulence are opimistically engaged, but are stuck in their 
advertising 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 provided 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 programed ahead of time. The inherent 
disappointment that unfolds is not a bug that can be removed from the 
program. In the age of overorganization and a social experiential 
surplus, 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, Intel's Pentium Chip, Microsoft's 
Windows 95, Philips's CD-I, atomic power, the reunification of Germany 
... they all turned out strong concepts which, though not unpromising, 
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 loser pose 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 is not structured like language after all. Too bad for an 
entire generation of doctoral students. Now all we are waiting for is a 
study about Nietzsche's complete wash-out - the eternal return is not 
possible at all! The superman is merely a bastard. Sometimes it is said 
of Marx ex cathedra that he was mistaken ... But what is to remain of 
Ryle's concept of mind if John Garang decides to use it as the basis for 
his Southern Sudanese government? The age of random thinking is at hand.

Total falsification does not deminish the possible value of disavowed 
theory. At close examination, thinking is not concerned with the question 
how the world is put together but how it organizes itself when observed 
in a particular manner. The present intellectual climate 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, is it marketable, is it convincing at 
all, is it all really true, can one score with it? The problem with 
Foucault's notion of "discourse" is that it is unbeatable (or so the 
cover tells us). Discourses may weaken, digress, take a radical turn, 
spread out over the entire field of reality, penetrate the most intimate 
places, be suppressed, seize power or become a counterforce, but they 
cannot be exposed by lie detectors. They always exude more of the same 
truth. In general, discourse is not dealt with publicly, but slyly 
operates backstage. Will the media discourse ever fail or founder 
completely, so that everybody will suddenly decide that they have better 
things to do? You can bet it will.
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