Dissension or Dissidence?
The middle classes are thus fated to live between hope and deception, between enthuisiasm and disenchantment, in a system that necessasrily gives rise to hopes it cannot totally fulfil. The nature of their condition leads the petty bourgeois to develop two types. Some, in proportion to the capital they possess, have conventional aspirations that are more or less capable of fulfilment. These reinforce their adhesion to the social consensus. Others have aspirations that are heretical, exhorbitant in relation to their actual bank accounts, and therefore likely to be rejected as absurd pretentions. Such aspirations aggravate their frustrations and tend to make them more rebellious.
This schema is valid for all petty bourgeois layers. According to the amount of capital they control, according to their actual situation and social history, each layer, and within each layer, each category, and within each category, each individual, develops alternately or simultaneously specific strategies inscribed in the logic of the double game whose object is to lead a gratifying social existence.
Independent of these variations, it seems difficult to imagine that the middle classes, apart from minorities in radical moments, could mobilize against the system in such a way as to endanger its existence. The contestation, which sometimes takes a violent form, is in general a contestation in the system but not of the system. Whence comes the success encountered among these layers by neoreformism, which holds that all aspects of the functioning of the system can be criticised, but that the question of the system's existence is beyond the bounds of legitimate discussion.
Differently put, the middle classes may very well fight to modify certain rules of the prevailing game, but without ceasing to play the game, which they can't even imagine ceasing to play, in so much as their integration into the system is consubstantial with their social being. The disputations concerning the rules of the game perhaps involve, in the heat of combat, confrontations so spectacular that they give rise to illusions concerning the nature and the intensity of the conflict. [1968, perhaps?I--JC]
But the dissension is not dissidence, and, after wresting certain concessions from the rulers, everyone ends up reconciling with the existing order. The owning and controling classes have long ago learned to manage the thrusts and sommersaults of populations yoked to the chariot of their domination. They have mastered not only the carrot-and-stick technique, but also how to set into motion, when the situation demands it, the strategy of the union sacrée, which, in the name of universal values, assembles the middle classes under the banner of the established order, which it purports to defend against a barbarian and obscurantist enemy. They know how to do this on an international scale.
It would be impossible for the dominant classes to ensure their hegemony without the collaboration of different factions of the middle classes.
It is necessary to insist on this aspect of things, and in particular on the fact that, in performing the task of maintaining the symbolic order that is indispensable to the rule of the powerful, it is necessary that the functionaries of this order convince themselves that they serve the universal values of liberty, justice and humanity. None but the most cynical have any desire or will to serve a system of exploitation, oppression or corruption. In their eyes the system, in so far as it forms an object of explicit reflection at all, is universally beneficial, conforming to the neo-liberal credo with which they are imbued.
Like the majority of the middle class, conditioned in and by the system, they cannot clearly conceive its nature. Their own investment in the system blocks their capacity for objective perception. They cannot conceive it except through a series of clichés which euphamize its pitiless competition and the rule of force.
That which constitutes the force of the established order is not only external to human beings, but is installed at the same time in their heads, in their guts, assimilated, incorporated, become flesh and blood, conscious and, above all, unconscious. To serve the system, it is not necessary to reflect upon it explicitly; it suffices on the contrary to let oneself be carried along by the spontaniety of habits and the logic of investments.
No painful effort is required to think with the system, only to think against it, that is to say, to think contrary to one's conditioning. Such social anaysis is difficult. Few individuals undertake it, and among those who do, few possess the constancy to pursue it. This is because to do so would change the life of the thinker, and upset all the little accommodations that he/she has made with the world.
This truth is most in evidence among the middle classes, whose members at the same time celebrate their social destiny for the possibilities of advancement that it offers and detest it for the ambitions it frustrates (and, conrary to received opinion, what frustrates them the most is not the inability to consume more, but the feeling of being trapped within an inescapable mediocrity).
Most of them, in any case, are content to think about the world and their own experience in ways that will cost them the least, intellectually and materially. They think about it by means of a panoply of myths and commonplaces that are continually being revived and revisited by the mainstream media in a confused intellectual hodge-podge, at once eclectic and lazy, which cnaracterizes the middle classes, and makes them both confederates and vicims of all their impostures.
Middle-class culture, which the daily and periodical press nourishes and thematizes, furnishes a kind of ready-to-think. It bears witness to the demise of the kind of thought that takes account of what the world has become, as if history had arrived at its terminus, and all that is left is to regulate and direct what already exists here and now in the most aesthetic manner. The theoretical and historical poverty of the media is equalled only by that of the political establishment.
What all these spokespersons express is nothing but their social unconscious, or, if one prefers, "the spirit of the system" that possesses them, which thinks through them and speaks with their tongues. It is guaranteed that, with the help of such shamans, the middle classes will never be threatened by an excess of lucidity or heresy. Nor by any excessive desire to change things.