From philobarbaras
To those who are annoyed that they can’t understand all the allusions, or who even admit that they have no idea of what I’m really getting at, I will merely reply that they should blame their own sterility and lack of creativity rather than my methods; they have wasted their time at college, bargain shopping for worn-out fragments of secondhand knowledge.
And despite what some would like to believe, we can hardly expect insurrectionary innovations from those whose profession is to monopolize the stage under the present social conditions. It is obvious that such innovations can come only from people who have received universal hostility and persecution, not from those who receive funding or whose project is in fact a business process of procuring and serving customers. More generally, despite the conspiracy of silence on this matter, it can be confidently affirmed that no real opposition can be carried out by individuals who become even slightly more socially elevated through manifesting such opposition than they would have been through refraining. We already have the well-known example of those flourishing political and labor-union functionaries, always ready to prolong the grievances of “the proletariat” for another thousand years in order to preserve their own role as its defender.
Nurse Flesh testifies:
I hereby accuse Dr. Bones of setting his affair on his shadow.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having been so totally deprived of freedom and having tolerated every sort of abuse, such that he deserves less than any other to be treated gently.
I accuse Dr. Bones of glamorizing the dependence of the subject on the object, of obedience to the objective world.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a mere kennel-bred thinker who is favorably marketed at this peculiar stage of commodity decomposition, an indentured servant who cannot disguise the taste of the fodder he has been raised on.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having not even an inkling how ghostly and serious his half-assed “spook-busting” looks when the glowing life of the egoist reveler roars past him.
I accuse Dr. Bones of preaching the gospel of universal harmony, in which each member feels themselves not only united, reconciled, and fused with their neighbor, but as one with them—except here the veil of māyā has been torn aside and now merely flutters in useless tatters before the new heaven, the new standpoint outside the earth, the new—thought, whose power is increasingly more despotic since the mediating priests have been driven out of the temple, and the possessed now have a more direct relation to the object of their determinateness.
I accuse Dr. Bones’ ultimate goal of coinciding with present arrangements.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a simulacrum: a copy without an original.
I accuse Dr. Bones of signing a peace treaty with the system, which granted him a place in its spectacle.
I accuse Dr. Bones of wanting to become an authority within the opposition to this society.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being an actor faithful to the script of ideological determination.
I accuse Dr. Bones of shouting loudly against servitude because I know he’s actually preparing a comfortable perfection for it in the name of the Future Hygienic.
I accuse Dr. Bones of a childish respect for images, constantly oscillating between enthusiasm and disappointment—lacking in taste because he has had no happy or meaningful experience of anything, and refusing to admit his unhappy experiences because he lacks courage as well as taste; which is why Dr. Bones never ceases being taken in by every sort of fraud, general or particular, that appeals to his self-alienated credulity.
I accuse Dr. Bones of hurling defiance with the ferocity of toy guns toward the vaults of our heaven, determined by the colonizing hope to settle a new heaven over the ruins.
I accuse Dr. Bones of all the revolutionary posturing necessary to become a junior partner in the spectacle’s absolutism.
I accuse Dr. Bones of lacking a toughness that stayed with Novatore (whom he idolizes) to the last moment of his life, a toughness that has enabled several of us to remain so lightheartedly at war with the whole world.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having something above him in which to respect.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a mystified ignoramus that nonetheless believes himself to be in the know, who gleefully and willfully welcomes being misled about everything, so he can only spout the most servile absurdities based on his masters’ most obvious lies.
I accuse Dr. Bones of religious seriousness.
I accuse Dr. Bones of providing yet more rational laws out of the bosom of love into this desolate sea of regulations.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being content to subsist on images.
I accuse Dr. Bones of striving for a coherence of the imparted.
I accuse Dr. Bones of taking orders from the board of equity.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a particularly boring example of use without negation, without consuming, without sense.
I accuse Dr. Bones of putting himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention.
I accuse Dr. Bones of necessarily being in league with the henchmen.
I accuse Dr. Bones of crawling like a worm in search of the ideal community, the ideal bond.
I accuse Dr. Bones of adding a new old story to the tower of Babel.
I accuse Dr. Bones of contributing to the maintenance of modernized illiteracy and spectacular superstitions that reinforce the hierarchical power of our masters.
I accuse Dr. Bones’ fire of being extinguished by the progress of his own self-alienation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of taking advantage of an economic development that has given him the means to mystify everything.
I accuse Dr. Bones of refusing to negate what is universally accepted, with a total reflection and care as to the possible consequences of his actions.
I accuse Dr. Bones of the most obvious contempt for his servile audience, in which they are always spoken to like obedient children—always willing to do or think what they are told as long as they are told that they “must” do so, willing to accept the delirious gibberish from the recently concocted paternalistic specializations of their confused leader, which one day tells them one thing and the next day perhaps the very opposite.
I accuse Dr. Bones of operating on a surplus of slave consciousness.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being totally deprived of practical reality through sheer dispossession (those who never had any substance have lost it for the shadow).
I accuse Dr. Bones of identifying with his actual bosses and masters so completely that he doesn’t even recognize their existence.
I accuse Dr. Bones of improving what he ultimately would like to reject.
I accuse Dr. Bones of radiating from the existing images which only reinforce the existing lies.
I accuse Dr. Bones of liking to pretend that he is a connoisseur of everything while in fact Dr. Bones does nothing but justify everything he has been forced to undergo, passively accepting the constantly increasing repugnance of the food he eats, the air he breathes, and the dwellings he inhabits.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being up-to-date just enough to echo a few issues already made fashionable by the spectacle.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a deranged imitation of a deranged life, a commodity skillfully designed to communicate nothing.
I accuse Dr. Bones of allowing his entire life to be dominated by every kind of rubbish (it must be said here that this text was composed out of whatever rubbish was at hand).
I accuse Dr. Bones of being only one striking example of the fatal illness that is currently wiping out all individuals in the name of the absolute dictatorship of spirit, and that illness is in turn only one of the numerous symptoms of material decay.
I accuse Dr. Bones of cowardly procrastination in the avoidance of his own liberation from fixed ideas—which is why he tends to retain at least a few of them, because he finds it terrifying to totally reject, as illusory and worthless, assertions that are universally accepted.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a Vanity Fair well suited to these plebeian spectators.
I accuse Dr. Bones of literary pursuits and political demagoguery guided by concepts, of promulgating bigoted and sentimental mush passed down to him from the reigning hysterics.
I accuse Dr. Bones of believing the effort of his fevered technique could invent ornament enough to hide the breaks in the Cyclopean wall.
I accuse Dr. Bones of dying out under a downpour of plaster nymphs and shepherds he himself has elevated.
I accuse Dr. Bones of caring for the wealth of golden Gyges.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having such a tendency to follow ingrained routines that even when he proposes revolution or insurrection from top to bottom, to make a clean slate and change everything, he nevertheless sees no contradiction in following the course of studies accessible to him and then taking up one or another paid position at his level of competence (or even a little above it).
I accuse Dr. Bones of merely keeping up-to-date with the latest fashion in intellectual lackeydom, as the most modern of moderns.
I accuse Dr. Bones of finding something good, or even merely something worth tolerating, within the present arrangements.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having but two objects: how to serve and bind.
I accuse Dr. Bones of carrying a clanking chain, of hearing voices and tongues crying aloud.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being marked by spectacular fixed ideas more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience.
I accuse Dr. Bones of passive contemplation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of advocating revolution or insurrection with his timid voice and prostituted pen—but from a comfortable distance and with the calm assurance of astronomical observation (but anyone who has actually taken part in such endeavors, and who has escaped the dazzling catastrophes that accompany them or follow in their wake, is not in such an easy position).
I accuse Dr. Bones of being grateful for his education.
I accuse Dr. Bones of building a dainty dish to set before the king.
I accuse Dr. Bones of corrupting the youth, crushing their energy, and wasting his own as it grows pale in the anemia of salvation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a pseudo-intellectual in the service of the system—himself even more obviously in decline than the system itself.
I accuse Dr. Bones of coming from that Ixion grindstone’s ceaseless toil, that turns and turns to give the world a belief or a concept (from which I depart wildly and eagerly peering toward the horizon).
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a sufficient negative demonstration of the movement of our own project.
I accuse Dr. Bones of gossip, banality, impotence, and willful stupidity.
I accuse Dr. Bones of explaining metaphysics to the nation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of striving to discover a community in which all would come under one hat, which means nothing less than the zealous pursuit toward one lord, one tie, one faith.
I accuse Dr. Bones of preferring the easy yoke of servile pomp.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a bungler even in his disgusting trade—botching, patching, leaving still behind something of which his masters fear—cobbling at manacles for all—a tinkering slave-maker who mends old chains.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being an echo from a world of service.
I accuse Dr. Bones of attempting to rigidify our projects into a perfect program that is absolutely admirable and uncriticizable, which will leave him content in his impotence since he would have nothing more to do—except perhaps to declare himself more radical at heart, while abstaining from any activity on the grounds that everything has already been said.
I accuse Dr. Bones of insensitiveness, pushing the world away in the deepest contempt, like a good Christian.
I accuse Dr. Bones of failing to notice that obedience is dead.
I accuse Dr. Bones of plotting to lengthen this day’s existence.
I accuse Dr. Bones of not yet beginning to live, because he is saving himself for “a better time,” and who therefore has such a horror of growing old, waiting for nothing less than a permanent paradise. By locating this paradise in both total revolution and career promotion, Dr. Bones is waiting to access what he has gazed upon in the inverted imagery of the spectacle: a happy eternally present unity.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a virgin grown gray in virtue.
I accuse Dr. Bones of selling pitiful falsified information that misleads him almost as much as it bewilders the spectators under his phantasmagoria.
I accuse Dr. Bones of the belief that he can transform cities and life merely by looking at them.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being weakened by his assertions.
I accuse Dr. Bones of knowing what is fashionable and trendy.
I accuse Dr. Bones of wanting to show himself as an enemy of the spectacle’s rhetoric but ultimately he still uses its syntax.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having unconditional love for spirit.
I accuse Dr. Bones of lugging a tiny king in his elevator.
I accuse Dr. Bones of wanting to make the world a better place.
I accuse Dr. Bones of elevating justice even higher.
I accuse Dr. Bones of the epistolary perfection of ressentiment.
I accuse Dr. Bones of belonging to the class of specialized spectators hired to edify their fellow viewers.
I accuse Dr. Bones of hiding from himself.
I accuse Dr. Bones of taking seriously an illusory opposition created through prestidigitation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of trying too hard.
I accuse Dr. Bones of never taking action and therefore he would like to believe that you can freely determine the quality of your fellow combatants and the time and place where you can strike an unstoppable and definitive blow (but in reality you have to act with what is at hand, launching a sudden attack on one or another realistically attackable position the moment you see a favorable opportunity—otherwise you fade away without having done a thing).
I accuse Dr. Bones of working for Kaiser Wilhelm II.
I accuse Dr. Bones of cowardly respect before the sacred.
I accuse Dr. Bones of essentially following the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with, the one in which he learned how to think and speak with.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being bound to an object, and I predict his movement will henceforth be fully determined in respect to that object.
I accuse Dr. Bones of feeding on our possibilities.
I accuse Dr. Bones of a barking tameness.
I accuse Dr. Bones of needing some alone time.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a parody of himself at the expense of his own freedom.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a lumpy frail machine ordained by the Pope in Rome.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being obsessed with the idea that life has called him to be a priest, a guiding force for all Humanity, who officiates at the altar of the greatest missions.
I accuse Dr. Bones of all the naive innocence and submissiveness typical of a disciple enrolled in divine scholarship.
I accuse Dr. Bones of still being mystified by the stupefying power of ideology in the realm of phantoms.
I accuse Dr. Bones of adoring the sultan.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being taught to enjoy panting.
I accuse Dr. Bones of preparing an effervescent theology in the kettle of duped egoism.
I accuse Dr. Bones of kneeling humbly before a pestilent, filthy, slimy church with an idol to worship as a fetish and an altar on which to sacrifice.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being an altar himself.
I accuse Dr. Bones of pathetically attempting to enlighten the world (the point now is to darken it).
I accuse Dr. Bones of having regard for God’s commandments and the duties that morality prescribes.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being the vulgarest tool that tyranny could want, with just enough of talent and no more, to lengthen fetters by another fixed.
I accuse Dr. Bones of continuing and maintaining biblical traditions.
I accuse Dr. Bones of inventing problems in orderto sell solutions.
I accuse Dr. Bones of wanting to be a fabric.
I accuse Dr. Bones of giving up.
I accuse Dr. Bones of still believing in doctors.
I accuse Dr. Bones of leading his own organization of the possessed (the word “church” is the most popular name for this type of thing).
I accuse Dr. Bones of worshiping the surface of punishment.
I accuse Dr. Bones of promoting the affairs of the state, society, capital, and every other alienating machine.
I accuse Dr. Bones of proclaiming the Rights of Man.
I accuse Dr. Bones of infecting the world with the coin of his servile and alienated intelligence.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
I accuse Dr. Bones of bowing to the dust, awestruck.
I accuse Dr. Bones of presenting himself in the guise of colonized peoples deported behind the screen.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being Coca-Cola. (Perhaps others might argue Pepsi.)
I accuse Dr. Bones of fetishizing “militant action” because his thinking has already been done for him by somebody else. (Militant—this deeply anti-anarchist word!)
I accuse Dr. Bones of presupposing a certain impoverishment of life.
I accuse Dr. Bones of protracted puerile ignorance (it’s time to grow up).
I accuse Dr. Bones of considering himself rather likable.
I accuse Dr. Bones of lacking a method for utilizing creativity.
I accuse Dr. Bones of ending up with nothing but caricatural fragments of an innovating radical creativity that can simultaneouslycomprehend and contest the totality of our era.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being presently incapable of developing hisown ideas.
I accuse Dr. Bones of not even knowing how to skillfully plagiarize ideas developed by others.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a willing dupe of moldy sub-leninist propaganda.
I accuse Dr. Bones of lying prostrate before the Goddess of Knowledge and reciting a cursed prayer.
I accuse Dr. Bones of wanting to determine our intercourse.
I accuse Dr. Bones of finishing everything in perfumes.
I accuse Dr. Bones of trembling with fear in his dark dwellings.
I accuse Dr. Bones of being a merchant laying out his display, awaiting the great silent flocks who browse on words.
I accuse Dr. Bones of painting mobilization posters for the Great Cause.
I accuse Dr. Bones of embracing an imparted domestication.
I accuse Dr. Bones of rediscovering his connections to religion.
I accuse Dr. Bones of existing in mystical non-sense.
I accuse Dr. Bones of sabotaging the detonation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of blossoming into a gross result.
I accuse Dr. Bones of chanting against the tempest.
I accuse Dr. Bones of musical notation.
I accuse Dr. Bones of having no cunning in disobedience—only downright oaths.
Dismounting from my horse, I offered him the wine of farewell and asked him the goal of his journey. Dr. Bones replied: “I have not succeeded in worldly affairs, so I am returning to the southern mountains to seek repose.”