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accompanied by a clarification of the nature of the act of believing. Today, it is no longer
enough to manipulate, transport, and refine belief; its composition must be analyzed because
people want to produce it artificially; commercial and political marketing studies are still
making partial efforts in this direction.6 There are now too many things to believe and not
enough credibility to go around.
An inversion is produced. The old powers cleverly managed their "authority" and thus
compensated for the inadequacy of their technical or administrative apparatus: they were
systems of clienteles, allegiances, "legitimacies," etc. They sought, however, to make
themselves more independent of the fluctuations of these fidelities through rationalization, the
control and organization of space. As the result of this labor, the powers in our developed
societies have at their disposal rather subtle and closely-knit procedures for the control of all
social networks: these are the administrative and "panoptic" systems of the police, the
schools, health services, security, etc.' But they are slowly losing all credibility. They have
more power and less authority.
Technicians are often not concerned with this problem, since they are preoccupied with
extending and making more complex the mechanisms for maintenance and control. An
illusory confidence. The sophistication of the discipline does not compensate for the fact that
subjects no longer invest and commit themselves in believing. In businesses, the
demobilization of workers is growing faster than the surveillance network of which it is the
target, pretext, and effect. Wasting of products, diversion of time, "la perruque," turn-over or
inactivity of employees, etc., undermine from within a system which, as in the Toyota
factories, tends to become a form of imprisonment in order to prevent any sort of escape.8 In
administrations, offices, and even in political and religious
((180))
groups a cancerous growth of the apparatus is the consequence of the evaporation of
convictions, and this cancer becomes in turn the cause of a new evaporation of believing.
Looking out for one's own interests is no substitute for belief.'
Believing is being exhausted. Or at least it takes refuge in the areas of the media and leisure
activities. It goes on vacation; but even then it does not cease to be an object captured and
processed by advertising, commerce, and fashion. In order to bring back some of these beliefs
that are retreating and disappearing, businesses have begun to fabricate their own simulacra of
credibility. Shell oil produces the Credo of "values" that "inspire" its top administrators and
that its managers and employees must adopt as well. The same sort of thing is found in
countless other businesses, even if they are slow in getting in motion and still count on the
fictive capital of an earlier family, house, or regional "spirit."
Where is the material to be found which can be used to inject credibility into these
mechanisms? There are two traditional sources, the one political, and the other religious: in
the first, the mobility or ebbing away of conviction among militants is compensated for by an
over-development of administrative institutions and managerial staff; in the second, on the
contrary, institutions that are disintegrating or closing in on themselves allow the beliefs that
they long promoted, maintained, and controlled be scattered in every direction.
An archeology: the transits of believing
The relations between these two funds of credibility are strange and ancient.
1. Religiousness seems easier to exploit. Marketing agencies avidly make use of the remains
of beliefs that were formerly violently opposed as superstitions. Advertising is becoming
evangelical. Many managers in the economic and social sphere are disturbed by the slow
breaking up of the Churches in which lie the remains of "values" which the managers want to
recuperate and make use of by rebaptizing them as "up-to-date." Before these beliefs go down
with the ships that carried them, they are hurriedly taken off and put in businesses and
administrations. The people who use these relics no longer believe in them. They nevertheless [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]