Title: Society of the Spectacle; Author: Guy Debord; Written: 1967; +--------------------------------------+ Translation: Black & Red, 1977; | NOTES | Transcription: Greg Adargo; +--------------------------------------+ Notes: Tresdon Jones; +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Humans participating in the modern mode of production are bound by having a | | Chapter 1 “Separation Perfected” | ---------------------------> | hyper-specialized jobs. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | This is presented to us as something desirable, especially when more capital is | | involved, however this perverse specialization actually strips us of our potential. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to | | Modern workers are effective in only a small sliver of the spectrum of human | | the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation | | activity that the skills we do have are no longer serviceable because we lack the | | to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is | | prerequisite skills to put our knowledge into use. | | sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so | | that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest | | degree of sacredness. - Feuerbach, Preface to the second | | edition of The Essence of Christianity | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 1. | "modern conditions of production" is in reference to the hyper-specialized, | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | capital-focused work that has monopolized 'work' entirely in many places. | | In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, | | | | all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of | ---------------------------> | We can call this mode of production capitalism - an ideology which is already quite | | spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away | | prevalent across the globe and gaining force. | | into a representation. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | We can contrast this with older modes of production wherein if we determined as a | | community we need shelter then we build it, and we have it. | 2. | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The modern mode is that we determine we need shelter, so we make sandwiches, write | | The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a | | software, build houses for others, until we are able to transact for a shelter. | | common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer | | The difference between the old and the new is the production for the utility of the | | be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in | | produced vs the production for the capital associated. | | its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world | | is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the | | liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the | | concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the | | non-living. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 3. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of | | society, as part of society, and as instrument of | | unification. As a part of society it is specifically the | | sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. | | Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the | | common ground of the deceived gaze and of false | | consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but | | an official language of generalized separation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 4. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Guy clears up an understandable misconception that the spectacle is identical to the | | The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social | ---------------------------> | artifacts which we can see in the world - | | relation among people, mediated by images. | | The spectacle encompasses more than that, it determines how people relate to one | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | another as a result of these tangibles. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 5. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world | | of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass | | dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung | | which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world | | vision which has become objectified. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 6. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and | | the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a | | supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is | | the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its | | specific forms, as information or propaganda, as | | advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the | | spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It | | is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in | | production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s | | form and content are identically the total justification of | | the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is | | also the permanent presence of this justification, since it | | occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern | | production. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 7. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the | | global social praxis split up into reality and image. The | | social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is | | also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the | | split within this totality mutilates it to the point of | | making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the | | spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which | | at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 8. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social | | activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle | | which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is | | materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle | | while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving | | it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on | | both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis | | than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within | | the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal | | alienation is the essence and the support of the existing | | society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 9. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment | | of the false. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 10. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great | | diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the | | contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, | | the general truth of which must itself be recognized. | | Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of | | appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social | | life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the | | truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of | | life, as a negation of life which has become visible. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 11. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and | | the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially | | distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the | | spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the | | spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the | | methodological terrain of the very society which expresses | | itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other | | than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic | | formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in | | which we are caught. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 12. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle presents itself as something enormously | | positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more | | than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. | | The attitude which it demands in principle is passive | | acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of | | appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 13. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its | ---------------------------> | "The means of the spectacle are simultaneously its ends" - namely a distracted and | | ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of | | ineffectual proletariat. | | modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | and bathes endlessly in its own glory. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 14. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The society which rests on modern industry is not | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is | ---------------------------> | "The goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other | | fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the | | than itself" - The spectacle has no condition for termination. | | image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 15. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | today, as the general expose of the rationality of the | ---------------------------> | "The spectacle is the main production of modern day society." | | system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the | | main production of present-day society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 16. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more | ---------------------------> | "[The spectacle] is no more than the economy developing for itself". | | than the economy developing for itself. It is the true | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | reflection of the production of things, and the false | | objectification of the producers. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 17. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The first phase of the domination of the economy over social | ---------------------------> | The economy has dominated social life by the "degradation of being into having". The | | life brought into the definition of all human realization the | | passive nature of having leads to a further "sliding of having into appearing". | | obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results | | of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into | | appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its | | immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same | | time all individual reality has become social reality | | directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is | | allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 18. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple | | images become real beings and effective motivations of | | hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one | | see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it | | can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to | | be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was | | for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable | | sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of | | present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable | | with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that | | which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes | | reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the | | opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent | | representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 19. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western | | philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity | | in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is | | based on the incessant spread of the precise technical | | rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle | | does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The | | concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a | | speculative universe. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 20. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of | | separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The | | spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious | | illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the | | religious clouds where men had placed their own powers | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly | | "Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed | | base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and | ---------------------------> | their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly | | unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters | | base." | | within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of | | human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within | | the interior of man. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 21. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream | | becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of | | imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing | | more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian | | of sleep. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 22. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The fact that the practical power of modern society detached | | itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can | | be explained only by the fact that this practical power | | continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with | | itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 23. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The oldest social specialization, the specialization of | | power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus | | a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is | | the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to | | itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most | | modern is also the most archaic. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 24. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse | | about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the | | self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian | | management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, | | purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals | | the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a | | second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our | | environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product | | of technical development seen as a natural development. The | | society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which | | chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in | | the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring | | superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere | | equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the | | very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social | | needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can | | only be satisfied through their mediation, if the | | administration of this society and all contact among men can | | no longer take place except through the intermediary of this | | power of instantaneous communication, it is because this | | “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration | | of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of | | the existing system’s administration, of the means which | | allow it to carry on this particular administration. The | | generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the | | modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within | | society, the product of the division of social labor and the | | organ of class domination. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 25. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The | | institutionalization of the social division of labor, the | | formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred | | contemplation, the mythical order with which every power | | shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified | | the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the | | interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished | | that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has | | been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile | | image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary | | prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still | | largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on | | the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this | | expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the | | possible. The spectacle is the preservation of | | unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions | | of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own | | rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: | | separate power developing in itself, in the growth of | | productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the | | division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are | | then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and | | working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all | | critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which | | the forces that could grow by separating are not yet | | reunited. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 26. | "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | world." - the proletariat points to the class of workers in an economic system which | | With the generalized separation of the worker and his | | has only its labor power to trade. | | products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all | | | | direct personal communication among producers are lost. | | Not owning their own productions, workers become proletarian by definition. | | Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate | ---------------------------> | They may have some money but even this is only a representation of labor-power | | products and the concentration of the productive process, | | either past or future. | | unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the | | | | system’s management. The success of the economic system of | | For instance if somebody pays me $4 to make them a sandwich (labor), I can pay | | separation is the proletarianization of the world. | | somebody $3 to make me some coffee (more labor). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | That person can then go ahead and pay somebody $9 to clean their house or 3 | | cups-of-coffee-labor-units. | 27. | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | We have been reduced to trading labor - this is the proletarianization of the world. | | Due to the success of separate production as production of | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | the separate, the fundamental experience which in primitive | | societies is attached to a central task is in the process of | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by | | "Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, | | non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way | | the fundamental experience which in primitive societies is attached to a central | | liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive | | task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system's development. | | activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the | | by non-work, by inactivity." | | necessities and results of production; it is itself a product | ---------------------------> | | | of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of | | Primitive societies were marked by their success in focusing effort toward a goal | | activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is | | and completing it. Nowadays needs and efforts are too fragmented for a society to | | negated. just as real activity has been captured in its | | define itself by a central task, thus that which becomes common to all is non-work. | | entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the | | This creates further fission in the ability for a society to produce for itself | | present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is | | among itself, bolstering production of the separate. | | in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in | | labor can be regained in the submission to its result. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 28. | The spectacle prefers goods that isolate with a facade of shared experience - cars, | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | TVs, internet, all these goods make us feel as though we're taking apart in a | | The economic system founded on isolation is a circular | | communal experience (traffic, movie plot, memes) even though we're clearly | | production of isolation. The technology is based on | | experiencing these things on our own and for ourself. | | isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From | | | | the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the | ---------------------------> | We can see this in the fact that schools do not teach how to grow food or build a | | spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant | | house, it is presented as more important to learn "marketable" skills to purchase | | reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely | | these isolating goods than to actually share experiences & goals. | | crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | assumptions more concretely. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 29. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | All specific labor, production of goods for the produced good has been abstracted | | The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the | | into "work" which is to say "making money". | | world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle | | | | expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all | | The spectacle, "whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction - reunites the | | specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of | | separate, but reunites it as separate." | | production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose | ---------------------------> | | | mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the | | The spectacle gives us some idea that we're working toward something bigger because | | spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the | | everybody is participating in this vague notion of "work" but as guy has made clear | | world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more | | a few passages ago, there is no termination condition for the spectacle; we are not | | than the common language of this separation. What binds the | | building toward anything but building itself. | | spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | at the very center which maintains their isolation. The | | spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 30. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the | | contemplated object (which is the result of his own | | unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the | | more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts | | recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less | | he understands his own existence and his own desires. The | | externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man | | appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his | | but those of another who represents them to him. This is why | | the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is | | everywhere. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 31. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The worker does not produce himself; he produces an | | "The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. | | independent power. The success of this production, its | | The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an | | abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of | | abundance of dispossession." | | dispossession. All the time and space of his world become | ---------------------------> | | | foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated | | Guy would be taken back by the subscription economy we indulge in now in which we | | products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map | | pay more and more to own less and less. Spotify owns our playlists, Dropbox owns our | | which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which | | files, Netflix owns our movies. | | escaped us show themselves to us in all their force. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 32. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete | | manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the | | expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows | | with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very | | alienation which was at its origin. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 33. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Separated from his product, man himself produces all the | | details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus | | finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more | | his life is now his product, the more he is separated from | | his life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 34. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation | ---------------------------> | The spectacle is a never ending game of trading capital (labor-units) and piling it | | that it becomes an image. | | up or not having enough. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 2 “Commodity as Spectacle” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted | | essence when it becomes the universal category of society as | | a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced | | by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for | | the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted | | by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become | | crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the | | forms in which this reification finds expression.... As labor | | is progressively rationalized and mechanized man’s lack of | | will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes | | less and less active and more and more contemplative. - | | Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 35. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In the essential movement of the spectacle, which consists of | | taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state | | so as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have | | become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative | | of lived value, we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, | | who knows so well how to seem at first glance something | | trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex | | and so full of metaphysical subtleties. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 36. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination | | of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which | | reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the | | tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which | | exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as | | the tangible par excellence. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 37. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The world at once present and absent which the spectacle | | makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all | | that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for | | what it is, because its movement is identical to the | | estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their | | global product. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 38. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular | | language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it | | regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the | | real production which brushes reality aside: the | | commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the | | category of the quantitative. The quantitative is what the | | commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the | | quantitative. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 39. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | This development which excludes the qualitative is itself, as | | development, subject to qualitative change: the spectacle | | indicates that it has crossed the threshold of its own | | abundance; this is as yet true only locally at some points, | | but is already true on the universal scale which is the | | original context of the commodity, a context which its | | practical movement, encompassing the Earth as a world market, | | has verified. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 40. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The development of productive forces has been the real | | unconscious history which built and modified the conditions | | of existence of human groups as conditions of survival, and | | extended those conditions: the economic basis of all their | | undertakings. In a primitive economy, the commodity sector | | represented a surplus of survival. The production of | | commodities, which implies the exchange of varied products | | among independent producers, could for a long time remain | | craft production, contained within a marginal economic | | function where its quantitative truth was still masked. | | However, where commodity production met the social conditions | | of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, | | it seized total domination over the economy. The entire | | economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be | | in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative | | development. This incessant expansion of economic power in | | the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into | | commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an | | abundance in which the primary question of survival is | | undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly | | rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a | | higher level. Economic growth frees societies from the | | natural pressure which required their direct struggle for | | survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that | | they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is | | extended to the entire economy over which it rules. The | | economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a | | world of economy. The pseudo-nature within which human labor | | is alienated demands that it be served ad infinitum, and this | | service, being judged and absolved only by itself, in fact | | acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts and | | projects as its servants. The abundance of commodities, | | namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than | | increased survival. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 41. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The commodity’s domination was at first exerted over the | | economy in an occult manner; the economy itself, the material | | basis of social life, remained unperceived and not | | understood, like the familiar which is not necessarily known. | | In a society where the concrete commodity is rare or unusual, | | money, apparently dominant, presents itself as an emissary | | armed with full powers who speaks in the name of an unknown | | force. With the industrial revolution, the division of labor | | in manufactures, and mass production for the world market, | | the commodity appears in fact as a power which comes to | | occupy social life. It is then that political economy takes | | shape, as the dominant science and the science of domination. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 42. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained | | the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation | | to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world | | one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its | | dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least | | industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few | | star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by | | regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. | | In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a | | continuous superimposition of geological layers of | | commodities. At this point in the “second industrial | | revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a | | duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the | | sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total | | commodity for which the cycle must be continued. For this to | | be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment to | | the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the | | productive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that | | the specialized science of domination must in turn | | specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, | | psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over | | the self-regulation of every level of the process. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 43. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, | | “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” | | who must receive the minimum indispensable for the | | conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in | | his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class | | are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches | | a level of abundance which requires a surplus of | | collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed | | from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the | | varieties of organization and supervision of production, | | finds himself every day, outside of production and in the | | guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with | | zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the | | commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and | | humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must | | dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the | | “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of | | human existence. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 44. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make | | people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with | | survival that increases according to its own laws. But if | | consumable survival is something which must always increase, | | this is because it continues to contain privation. If there | | is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point | | where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond | | privation, but because it is enriched privation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 45. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Automation, the most advanced sector of modern industry as | | well as the model which perfectly sums up its practice, | | drives the commodity world toward the following | | contradiction: the technical equipment which objectively | | eliminates labor must at the same time preserve labor as a | | commodity and as the only source of the commodity. If the | | social labor (time) engaged by the society is not to diminish | | because of automation (or any other less extreme form of | | increasing the productivity of labor), then new jobs have to | | be created. Services, the tertiary sector, swell the ranks of | | the army of distribution and are a eulogy to the current | | commodities; the additional forces which are mobilized just | | happen to be suitable for the organization of redundant labor | | required by the artificial needs for such commodities. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 46. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Exchange value could arise only as an agent of use value, but | | its victory by means of its own weapons created the | | conditions for its autonomous domination. Mobilizing all | | human use and establishing a monopoly over its satisfaction, | | exchange value has ended up by directing use. The process of | | exchange became identified with all possible use and reduced | | use to the mercy of exchange. Exchange value is the | | condottiere of use value who ends up waging the war for | | himself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 47. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The tendency of use value to fall, this constant of | | capitalist economy, develops a new form of privation within | | increased survival: the new privation is not far removed from | | the old penury since it requires most men to participate as | | wage workers in the endless pursuit of its attainment, and | | since everyone knows he must submit or die. The reality of | | this blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the | | illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern | | commodities: use in its most impoverished form (food and | | lodging) today exists only to the extent that it is | | imprisoned in the illusory wealth of increased survival. The | | real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity | | is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its | | general manifestation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 48. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In the inverted reality of the spectacle, use value (which | | was implicitly contained in exchange value) must now be | | explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality | | is eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because | | counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 49. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general | | abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money dominated | | society as the representation of general equivalence, namely, | | of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could | | not be compared. The spectacle is the developed modern | | complement of money where the totality of the commodity world | | appears as a whole, as a general equivalence for what the | | entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money | | which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the | | totality of use is already exchanged for the totality of | | abstract representation. The spectacle is not only the | | servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the pseudo-use | | of life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 50. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | At the moment of economic abundance, the concentrated result | | of social labor becomes visible and subjugates all reality to | | appearance, which is now its product. Capital is no longer | | the invisible center which directs the mode of production: | | its accumulation spreads it all the way to the periphery in | | the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society | | is its portrait. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 51. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The victory of the autonomous economy must at the same time | | be its defeat. The forces which it has unleashed eliminate | | the economic necessity which was the immutable basis of | | earlier societies. When economic necessity is replaced by the | | necessity for boundless economic development, the | | satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an | | uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced | | to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the | | autonomous economy. The autonomous economy permanently breaks | | away from fundamental need to the extent that it emerges from | | the social unconscious which unknowingly depended on it. “All | | that is conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains | | unalterable. But once freed, does it not fall to ruins in | | turn?” (Freud). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 52. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | As soon as society discovers that it depends on the economy, | | the economy, in fact, depends on society. This subterranean | | force, which grew until it appeared sovereign, has lost its | | power. That which was the economic it must become the I. The | | subject can emerge only from society, namely from the | | struggle within society. The subject’s possible existence | | depends on the outcome of the class struggle which shows | | itself to be the product and the producer of the economic | | foundation of history. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 53. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness | | are identically the project which, in its negative form, | | seeks the abolition of classes, the workers’ direct | | possession of every aspect of their activity. Its opposite is | | the society of the spectacle, where the commodity | | contemplates itself in a world it has created. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 3 “Unity and Division Within Appearance” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | A lively new polemic about the concepts “one divides into | | two” and “two fuse into one” is unfolding on the | | philosophical front in this country. This debate is a | | struggle between those who are for and those who are against | | the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions | | of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois | | conception. Those who maintain that “one divides into two” is | | the fundamental law of things are on the side of the | | materialist dialectic; those who maintain that the | | fundamental law of things is that “two fuse into one” are | | against the materialist dialectic. The two sides have drawn a | | clear line of demarcation between them, and their arguments | | are diametrically opposed. This polemic is a reflection, on | | the ideological level, of the acute and complex class | | struggle taking place in China and in the world. - Red Flag, | | (Peking), 21 September 1964 | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 54. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and | | divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the | | disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the | | spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its | | meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while | | the demonstrated unity is divided. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 55. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The struggle of powers constituted for the management of the | | same socio-economic system is disseminated as the official | | contradiction but is in fact part of the real unity–on a | | world scale as well as within every nation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 56. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacular sham struggles of rival forms of separate | | power are at the same time real in that they translate the | | unequal and antagonistic development of the system, the | | relatively contradictory interests of classes or subdivisions | | of classes which acknowledge the system and define themselves | | as participants within its power. Just as the development of | | the most advanced economy is a clash between some priorities | | and others, the totalitarian management of the economy by a | | State bureaucracy and the condition of the countries within | | the sphere of colonization or semi-colonization are defined | | by specific peculiarities in the varieties of production and | | power. These diverse oppositions can be passed off in the | | spectacle as absolutely distinct forms of society (by means | | of any number of different criteria). But in actual fact, the | | truth of the uniqueness of all these specific sectors resides | | in the universal system that contains them: the unique | | movement that makes the planet its field, capitalism. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 57. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The society which carries the spectacle does not dominate the | | underdeveloped regions by its economic hegemony alone. It | | dominates them as the society of the spectacle. Even where | | the material base is still absent, modern society has already | | invaded the social surface of each continent by means of the | | spectacle. It defines the program of the ruling class and | | presides over its formation, just as it presents pseudo-goods | | to be coveted, it offers false models of revolution to local | | revolutionaries. The spectacle of bureaucratic power, which | | holds sway over some industrial countries, is an integral | | part of the total spectacle, its general pseudo-negation and | | support. The spectacle displays certain totalitarian | | specializations of communication and administration when | | viewed locally, but when viewed in terms of the functioning | | of the entire system these specializations merge in a world | | division of spectacular tasks. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 58. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The division of spectacular tasks preserves the entirety of | | the existing order and especially the dominant pole of its | | development. The root of the spectacle is within the abundant | | economy the source of the fruits which ultimately take over | | the spectacular market despite the ideological-police | | protectionist barriers of local spectacles aspiring to | | autarchy. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 59. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Under the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, | | banalization dominates modern society the world over and at | | every point where the developed consumption of commodities | | has seemingly multiplied the roles and objects to choose | | from. The remains of religion and of the family (the | | principal relic of the heritage of class power) and the moral | | repression they assure, merge whenever the enjoyment of this | | world is affirmed–this world being nothing other than | | repressive pseudo-enjoyment. The smug acceptance of what | | exists can also merge with purely spectacular rebellion; this | | reflects the simple fact that dissatisfaction itself became a | | commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend | | production to the processing of such raw materials. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 60. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living | | human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of | | a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the | | seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification | | with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the | | fragmented productive specializations which are actually | | lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living | | and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves | | globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor | | by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it | | as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, | | which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In | | one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in | | another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power | | over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are | | not really global, they are not really varied. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 61. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the | | opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in | | himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a | | model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous | | qualities in order to identify himself with the general law | | of obedience to the course of things. The consumption | | celebrity superficially represents different types of | | personality and shows each of these types having equal access | | to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness | | there. The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock | | of accepted human qualities. Official differences between | | stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the | | presupposition of their excellence in everything. Khrushchev | | became a general so as to make decisions on the battle of | | Kursk, not on the spot, but at the twentieth anniversary, | | when he was master of the State. Kennedy remained an orator | | even to the point of proclaiming the eulogy over his own | | tomb, since Theodore Sorenson continued to edit speeches for | | the successor in the style which had characterized the | | personality of the deceased. The admirable people in whom the | | system personifies itself are well known for not being what | | they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality | | of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 62. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in | | the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles | | and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried | | mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and | | overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities | | meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality. This | | resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and | | racisms which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of | | consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority. In | | this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set | | up again. from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a | | sub-ludic interest. Wherever there is abundant consumption, a | | major spectacular opposition between youth and adults comes | | to the fore among the false roles–false because the adult, | | master of his life, does not exist and because youth, the | | transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of | | those who are now young, but of the economic system, of the | | dynamism of capitalism. Things rule and are young; things | | confront and replace one another. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 63. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | What hides under the spectacular oppositions is a unity of | | misery. Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of | | the same alienation confront each other, all of them built on | | real contradictions which are repressed. The spectacle exists | | in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the | | necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies | | and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more | | than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation | | and fear at the tranquil center of misery. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 64. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The concentrated spectacle belongs essentially to | | bureaucratic capitalism, even though it may be imported as a | | technique of state power in mixed backward economies or, at | | certain moments of crisis, in advanced capitalism. In fact, | | bureaucratic property itself is concentrated in such a way | | that the individual bureaucrat relates to the ownership of | | the global economy only through an intermediary, the | | bureaucratic community, and only as a member of this | | community. Moreover, the production of commodities, less | | developed in bureaucratic capitalism, also takes on a | | concentrated form: the commodity the bureaucracy holds on to | | is the totality of social labor, and what it sells back to | | society is wholesale survival. The dictatorship of the | | bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any | | significant margin of choice, since the bureaucracy itself | | has to choose everything and since any other external choice, | | whether it concern food or music, is already a choice to | | destroy the bureaucracy completely. This dictatorship must be | | accompanied by permanent violence. The imposed image of the | | good envelops in its spectacle the totality of what | | officially exists, and is usually concentrated in one man, | | who is the guarantee of totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must | | magically identify with this absolute celebrity or disappear. | | This celebrity is master of non-consumption, and the heroic | | image which gives an acceptable meaning to the absolute | | exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated by | | terror really is. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus | | be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the | | concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 65. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The diffuse spectacle accompanies the abundance of | | commodities, the undisturbed development of modern | | capitalism. Here every individual commodity is justified in | | the name of the grandeur of the production of the totality of | | objects of which the spectacle is an apologetic catalogue. | | Irreconcilable claims crowd the stage of the affluent | | economy’s unified spectacle; different star-commodities | | simultaneously support contradictory projects for | | provisioning society: the spectacle of automobiles demands a | | perfect transport network which destroys old cities, while | | the spectacle of the city itself requires museum-areas. | | Therefore the already problematic satisfaction which is | | supposed to come from the consumption of the whole, is | | falsified immediately since the actual consumer can directly | | touch only a succession of fragments of this commodity | | happiness, fragments in which the quality attributed to the | | whole is obviously missing every time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 66. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge | | the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it | | were the only one. The spectacle, then, is the epic poem of | | this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall | | of any Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of men | | and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In | | this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, | | unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world | | of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the | | world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what’s | | specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while | | the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 67. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of | | abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of | | their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes | | sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious | | fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities. Waves of | | enthusiasm for a given product, supported and spread by all | | the media of communication, are thus propagated with | | lightning speed. A style of dress emerges from a film; a | | magazine promotes night spots which launch various clothing | | fads. Just when the mass of commodities slides toward | | puerility, the puerile itself becomes a special commodity; | | this is epitomized by the gadget. We can recognize a mystical | | abandon to the transcendence of the commodity in free gifts, | | such as key chains which are not bought but are included by | | advertisers with prestigious purchases, or which flow by | | exchange in their own sphere. One who collects the key chains | | which have been manufactured for collection, accumulates the | | indulgences of the commodity, a glorious sign of his real | | presence among the faithful. Reified man advertises the proof | | of his intimacy with the commodity. The fetishism of | | commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to | | the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old | | religious fetishism. The only use which remains here is the | | fundamental use of submission. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 68. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The pseudo-need imposed by modern consumption clearly cannot | | be opposed by any genuine need or desire which is not itself | | shaped by society and its history. The abundant commodity | | stands for the total breach in the organic development of | | social needs. Its mechanical accumulation liberates unlimited | | artificiality, in the face of which living desire is | | helpless. The cumulative power of independent artificiality | | sows everywhere the falsification of social life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 69. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In the image of the society happily unified by consumption, | | real division is only suspended until the next | | non-accomplishment in consumption. Every single product | | represents the hope for a dazzling shortcut to the promised | | land of total consumption and is ceremoniously presented as | | the decisive entity. But as with the diffusion of seemingly | | aristocratic first names carried by almost all individuals of | | the same age, the objects which promise unique powers can be | | recommended to the devotion of the masses only if they’re | | produced in quantities large enough for mass consumption. A | | product acquires prestige when it is placed at the center of | | social life as the revealed mystery of the ultimate goal of | | production. But the object which was prestigious in the | | spectacle becomes vulgar as soon as it is taken home by its | | consumer–and by all its other consumers. It reveals its | | essential poverty (which naturally comes to it from the | | misery of its production) too late. But by then another | | object already carries the justification of the system and | | demands to be acknowledged. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 70. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The fraud of satisfaction exposes itself by being replaced, | | by following the change of products and of the general | | conditions of production. That which asserted its definitive | | excellence with perfect impudence nevertheless changes, both | | in the diffuse and the concentrated spectacle, and it is the | | system alone which must continue: Stalin as well as the | | outmoded commodity are denounced precisely by those who | | imposed them. Every new lie of advertising is also an avowal | | of the previous lie. The fall of every figure with | | totalitarian power reveals the illusory community which had | | approved him unanimously, and which had been nothing more | | than an agglomeration of solitudes without illusions. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 71. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and | | must change with its base. The spectacle is absolutely | | dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid | | dogma. Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition is | | natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 72. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class | | division on which the real unity of the capitalist made of | | production rests. What obliges the producers to participate | | in the construction of the world is also what separates them | | from it. What brings together men liberated from their local | | and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What | | requires a mare profound rationality is also what nourishes | | the irrationality of hierarchic exploitation and repression. | | What creates the abstract power of society creates its | | concrete unfreedom. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 4 “The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The equal right of all to the goods and enjoyment of this | | world, the destruction of all authority, the negation of all | | moral restraints – these, at bottom, are the raison d’etre of | | the March 18th insurrection and the charter of the fearsome | | organization that furnished it with an army. - Enquete | | parlementaire sur l’insurrection du 18 mars | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 73. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The real movement which suppresses existing conditions rules | | over society from the moment of the bourgeoisie’s victory in | | the economy, and visibly after the political translation of | | this victory. The development of productive forces shatters | | the old relations of production and all static order turns to | | dust. Whatever was absolute becomes historical. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 74. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | By being thrown into history, by having to participate in the | | labor and struggles which make up history, men find | | themselves obliged to view their relations in a clear manner. | | This history has no object distinct from what takes place | | within it, even though the last unconscious metaphysical | | vision of the historical epoch could look at the productive | | progression through which history has unfolded as the very | | object of history. The subject of history can be none other | | than the living producing himself, becoming master and | | possessor of his world which is history, and existing as | | consciousness of his game. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 75. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The class struggles of the long revolutionary epoch | | inaugurated by the rise of the bourgeoisie, develop together | | with the thought of history, the dialectic, the thought which | | no longer stops to look for the meaning of what is, but rises | | to a knowledge of the dissolution of all that is, and in its | | movement dissolves all separation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 76. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Hegel no longer had to interpret the world, but the | | transformation of the world. By only interpreting the | | transformation, Hegel is only the philosophical completion of | | philosophy. He wants to understand a world which makes | | itself. This historical thought is as yet only the | | consciousness which always arrives too late, and which | | pronounces the justification after the fact. Thus it has gone | | beyond separation only in thought. The paradox which consists | | of making the meaning of all reality depend on its historical | | completion, and at the same time of revealing this meaning as | | it makes itself the completion of history, flows from the | | simple fact that the thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of | | the 17th and 18th centuries sought in his philosophy only a | | reconciliation with the results of these revolutions. Even as | | a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not express | | the entire process of this revolution, but only its final | | conclusion. In this sense, it is “not a philosophy of the | | revolution, but of the restoration” (Karl Korsch, Theses on | | Hegel and Revolution). Hegel did, for the last time, the work | | of the philosopher, “the glorification of what exists”; but | | what existed for him could already be nothing less than the | | totality of historical movement. The external position of | | thought having in fact been preserved, it could he masked | | only by the identification of thought with an earlier project | | of Spirit, absolute hero who did what he wanted and wanted | | what he did, and whose accomplishment coincides with the | | present. Thus philosophy, which dies in the thought of | | history, can now glorify its world only by renouncing it, | | since in order to speak, it must presuppose that this total | | history to which it has reduced everything is already | | complete, and that the only tribunal where the judgment of | | truth could be given is closed. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 77. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When the proletariat demonstrates by its own existence, | | through acts, that this thought of history is not forgotten, | | the exposure of the conclusion is at the same time the | | confirmation of the method. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 78. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The thought of history can be saved only by becoming | | practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a | | revolutionary class cannot be less than historical | | consciousness operating on the totality of its world. All the | | theoretical currents of the revolutionary workers’ movement | | grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian | | thought–Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 79. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The inseparability of Marx’s theory from the Hegelian method | | is itself inseparable from the revolutionary character of | | this theory, namely from its truth. This first relationship | | has been generally ignored, misunderstood, and even denounced | | as the weakness of what fallaciously became a marxist | | doctrine. Bernstein, in his Evolutionary Socialism: A | | Criticism and Affirmation (Die Voraussetzungen des | | Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie), perfectly | | reveals the connection between the dialectical method and | | historical partisanship, by deploring the unscientific | | forecasts of the 1847 Manifesto on the imminence of | | proletarian revolution in Germany: “This historical | | self-deception, so erroneous that any political visionary | | could hardly have improved on it, would be incomprehensible | | in a Marx, who at that time had already seriously studied | | economics, if we did not see in this the product of a relic | | of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic from which Marx, no | | less than Engels, could never completely free himself. In | | those times of general effervescence, this was all the more | | fatal to him.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 80. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The inversion carried out by Marx to “recover through | | transfer” the thought of the bourgeois revolutions does not | | trivially consist of putting the materialist development of | | productive forces in the place of the journey of the Hegelian | | Spirit moving towards its encounter with itself in time, its | | objectification being identical to its alienation, and its | | historical wounds leaving no scars. History become real no | | longer has an end. Marx ruined Hegel’s position as separate | | from what happens, as well as contemplation by any supreme | | external agent whatever. From now on, theory has to know only | | what it does. As opposed to this, contemplation of the | | economy’s movement within the dominant thought of the present | | society is the untranscended heritage of the undialectical | | part of Hegel’s search for a circular system: it is an | | approval which has lost the dimension of the concept and | | which no longer needs a Hegelianism to justify itself, | | because the movement which it praises is no more than a | | sector without a world view, a sector whose mechanical | | development effectively dominates the whole. Marx’s project | | is the project of a conscious history. The quantitative which | | arises in the blind development of merely economic productive | | forces must be transformed into a qualitative historical | | appropriation. The critique of political economy is the first | | act of this end of prehistory: “Of all the instruments of | | production the greatest productive power is the revolutionary | | class itself.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 81. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | What closely links Marx’s theory with scientific thought is | | the rational understanding of the forces which really operate | | in society. But Marx’s theory is fundamentally beyond | | scientific thought, and it preserves scientific thought only | | by superseding it: what is in question is an understanding of | | struggle, and not of law. “We know only one science: the | | science of history” (The German Ideology). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 82. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The bourgeois epoch, which wants to give a scientific | | foundation to history, overlooks the fact that this available | | science needed a historical foundation along with the | | economy. Inversely, history directly depends on economic | | knowledge only to the extent that it remains economic | | history. The extent to which the viewpoint of scientific | | observation could overlook the role of history in the economy | | (the global process which modifies its own basic scientific | | premises) is shown by the vanity of those socialist | | calculations which thought they had established the exact | | periodicity of crises. Now that the constant intervention of | | the State has succeeded in compensating for the effect of | | tendencies toward crisis, the same type of reasoning sees in | | this equilibrium a definitive economic harmony’. The project | | of mastering the economy, the project of appropriating | | history, if it must know–and absorb–the science of society, | | cannot itself be scientific. The revolutionary viewpoint of a | | movement which thinks it can dominate current history by | | means of scientific knowledge remains bourgeois. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 83. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The utopian currents of socialism, although themselves | | historically grounded in the critique of the existing social | | organization, can rightly be called utopian to the extent | | that they reject history–namely the real struggle taking | | place, as well as the passage of time beyond the immutable | | perfection of their picture of a happy society–but not | | because they reject science. On the contrary. the utopian | | thinkers are completely dominated by the scientific thought | | of earlier centuries. They sought the completion of this | | general rational system: they did not in any way consider | | themselves disarmed prophets, since they believed in the | | social power of scientific proof and even, in the case of | | Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “How did | | they want to seize through struggle what must be proved?” | | asked Sombart. The scientific conception of the utopians did | | not extend to the knowledge that some social groups have | | interests in the existing situation, forces to maintain it, | | and also forms of false consciousness corresponding to such | | positions. This conception did not even reach the historical | | reality of the development of science itself, which was | | oriented largely by the social demand of agents who selected | | not only what could be admitted, but also what could be | | studied. The utopian socialists, remaining prisoners of the | | mode of exposition of scientific truth, conceived this truth | | in terms of its pure abstract image–an image which had been | | imposed at a much earlier stage of society. As Sorel | | observed, it is on the model of astronomy that the utopians | | thought they would discover and demonstrate the laws of | | society. The harmony envisaged by them, hostile to history, | | grows out of the attempt to apply to society the science | | least dependent on history. This harmony is introduced with | | the experimental innocence of Newtonianism, and the happy | | destiny which is constantly postulated “plays in their social | | science a role analogous to the role of inertia in rational” | | (Materiaux pour une theorie du proletariat). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 84. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The deterministic-scientific facet in Marx’s thought was | | precisely the gap through which the process of | | “ideologization” penetrated, during his own lifetime, into | | the theoretical heritage left to the workers’ movement. The | | arrival of the historical subject continues to be postponed, | | and it is economics, the historical science par excellence, | | which tends increasingly to guarantee the necessity of its | | own future negation. But what is pushed out of the field of | | theoretical vision in this manner is revolutionary practice, | | the only truth of this negation. What becomes important is to | | study economic development with patience, and to continue to | | accept suffering with a Hegelian tranquility, so that the | | result remains “a graveyard of good intentions.” It is | | suddenly discovered that, according to the science of | | revolution, consciousness always comes too soon, and has to | | be taught. “History has shown that we, and all who thought as | | we did, were wrong. History has clearly shown that the state | | of economic development on the continent at that time was far | | from being ripe” Engels was to say in 1895. Throughout his | | life, Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his | | theory, but the exposition of the theory was carried out on | | the terrain of the dominant thought and became precise in the | | form of critiques of particular disciplines, principally the | | critique of the fundamental science of bourgeois society, | | political economy. It is this mutilation, later accepted as | | definitive, which has constituted “marxism.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 85. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally the weakness of | | the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. | | The working class did not set off the permanent revolution in | | the Germany of 1848; the Commune was defeated in isolation. | | Revolutionary theory thus could not yet achieve its own total | | existence. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and | | clarifying it with cloistered, scholarly work, in the British | | Museum, caused a loss in the theory itself. The scientific | | justifications Marx elaborated about the future development | | of the working class and the organizational practice that | | went with them became obstacles to proletarian consciousness | | at a later stage. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 86. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | All the theoretical insufficiencies of content as well as | | form of exposition of the scientific defense of proletarian | | revolution can be traced to the identification of the | | proletariat with the bourgeoisie from the standpoint of the | | revolutionary seizure of power. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 87. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | By grounding the proof of the scientific validity of | | proletarian power on repeated past attempts, Marx obscured | | his historical thought, from the Manifesto on, and was forced | | to support a linear image of the development of modes of | | production brought on by class struggles which end, each | | time, “with a revolutionary transformation of the entire | | society or with mutual destruction of the classes in | | struggle.” But in the observable reality of history, as Marx | | pointed out elsewhere, the “Asiatic mode of production” | | preserved its immobility in spite of all class | | confrontations, just as the serf uprisings never defeated the | | landlords, nor the slave revolts of Antiquity the free men. | | The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the | | bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that ever won; at | | the same time it is the only class for which the development | | of the economy was the cause and the consequence of its | | taking hold of society. The same simplification led Marx to | | neglect the economic role of the State in the management of a | | class society. If the rising bourgeoisie seemed to liberate | | the economy from the State, this took place only to the | | extent that the former State was an instrument of class | | oppression in a static economy. The bourgeoisie developed its | | autonomous economic power in the medieval period of the | | weakening of the State, at the moment of feudal fragmentation | | of balanced powers. But the modern State which, through | | Mercantilism, began to support the development of the | | bourgeoisie, and which finally became its State at the time | | of “laisser faire, laisser passer,” was to reveal later that | | it was endowed with the central power of calculated | | management of the economic process. With the concept of | | Bonapartism, Marx was nevertheless able to describe the shape | | of the modern statist bureaucracy, the fusion of capital and | | State, the formation of a “national power of capital over | | labor, a public force organized for social enslavement,” | | where the bourgeoisie renounces all historical life which is | | not reduced to the economic history of things and would like | | to “be condemned to the same political nothingness as other | | classes.” Here the socio-political foundations of the modern | | spectacle are already established, negatively defining the | | proletariat as the only pretender to historical life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 88. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The only two classes which effectively correspond to Marx’s | | theory, the two pure classes towards which the entire | | analysis of Capital leads, the bourgeoisie and the | | proletariat, are also the only two revolutionary classes in | | history, but in very different conditions: the bourgeois | | revolution is over; the proletarian revolution is a project | | born on the foundation of the preceding revolution but | | differing from it qualitatively. By neglecting the | | originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one | | masks the concrete originality of the proletarian project, | | which can attain nothing unless it carries its own banners | | and knows the “immensity of its tasks.” The bourgeoisie came | | to power because it is the class of the developing economy. | | The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by | | becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of productive | | forces cannot guarantee such power, even by way of the | | increasing dispossession which it brings about. A Jacobin | | seizure of power cannot be its instrument. No ideology can | | help the proletariat disguise its partial goals as general | | goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial | | reality which is really its own. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 89. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | If Marx, in a given period of his participation in the | | struggle of the proletariat, expected too much from | | scientific forecasting, to the point of creating the | | intellectual foundation for the illusions of economism, it is | | known that he did not personally succumb to those illusions. | | In a well-known letter of December 7, 1867, accompanying an | | article where he himself criticized Capital, an article which | | Engels would later present to the press as the work of an | | adversary, Marx clearly disclosed the limits of his own | | science: ” . . . The subjective tendency of the author (which | | was perhaps imposed on him by his political position and his | | past), namely the manner in which he views and presents to | | others the ultimate results of the real movement, the real | | social process, has no relation to his own actual analysis.” | | Thus Marx, by denouncing the “tendentious conclusions” of his | | own objective analysis, and by the irony of the “perhaps” | | with reference to the extra-scientific choices imposed on | | him, at the same time shows the methodological key to the | | fusion of the two aspects. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 90. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The fusion of knowledge and action must be realized in the | | historical struggle itself, in such a way that each of these | | terms guarantees the truth of the other. The formation of the | | proletarian class into a subject means the organization of | | revolutionary struggles and the organization of society at | | the revolutionary moment: it is then that the practical | | conditions of consciousness must exist, conditions in which | | the theory of praxis is confirmed by becoming practical | | theory. However, this central question of organization was | | the question least developed by revolutionary theory at the | | time when the workers’ movement was founded, namely when this | | theory still had the unitary character which came from the | | thought of history. (Theory had undertaken precisely this | | task in order to develop a unitary historical practice.) This | | question is in fact the locus of inconsistency of this | | theory, allowing the return of statist and hierarchic methods | | of application borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The | | forms of organization of the workers’ movement which were | | developed on the basis of this renunciation of theory have in | | turn prevented the maintenance of a unitary theory, breaking | | it up into varied specialized and partial disciplines. Due to | | the betrayal of unitary historical thought, this ideological | | estrangement from theory can no longer recognize the | | practical verification of this thought when such verification | | emerges in spontaneous struggles of workers; all it can do is | | repress every manifestation and memory of such verification. | | Yet these historical forms which appeared in struggle are | | precisely the practical milieu which the theory needed in | | order to be true. They are requirements of the theory which | | have not been formulated theoretically. The soviet was not a | | theoretical discovery; yet its existence in practice was | | already the highest theoretical truth of the International | | Workingmen’s Association. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 91. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The first successes of the struggle of the International led | | it to free itself from the confused influences of the | | dominant ideology which survived in it. But the defeat and | | repression which it soon encountered brought to the | | foreground a conflict between two conceptions of the | | proletarian revolution. Both of these conceptions contain an | | authoritarian dimension and thus abandon the conscious | | self-emancipation of the working class. In effect, the | | quarrel between Marxists and Bakuninists (which became | | irreconcilable) was two-edged, referring at once to power in | | the revolutionary society and to the organization of the | | present movement, and when the positions of the adversaries | | passed from one aspect to the other, they reversed | | themselves. Bakunin fought the illusion of abolishing classes | | by the authoritarian use of state power, foreseeing the | | reconstitution of a dominant bureaucratic class and the | | dictatorship of the most knowledgeable, or those who would be | | reputed to be such. Marx thought that the growth of economic | | contradictions inseparable from democratic education of the | | workers would reduce the role of the proletarian State to a | | simple phase of legalizing the new social relations imposing | | themselves objectively, and denounced Bakunin and his | | followers for the authoritarianism of a conspiratorial elite | | which deliberately placed itself above the International and | | formulated the extravagant design of imposing on society the | | irresponsible dictatorship of those who are most | | revolutionary, or those who would designate themselves to be | | such. Bakunin, in fact, recruited followers on the basis of | | such a perspective: “Invisible pilots in the center of the | | popular storm, we must direct it, not with a visible power, | | but with the collective dictatorship of all the allies. A | | dictatorship without badge, without title, without official | | right, yet all the more powerful because it will have none of | | the appearances of power.” Thus two ideologies of the | | workers’ revolution opposed each other, each containing a | | partially true critique, but losing the unity of the thought | | of history, and instituting themselves into ideological | | authorities. Powerful organizations, like German | | Social-Democracy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation | | faithfully served one or the other of these ideologies; and | | everywhere the result was very different from what had been | | desired. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 92. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The strength and the weakness of the real anarchist struggle | | resides in its viewing the goal of proletarian revolution as | | immediately present (the pretensions of anarchism in its | | individualist variants have always been laughable). From the | | historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist | | anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive | | insistence on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate | | contempt for method. Thus its critique of the political | | struggle has remained abstract, while its choice of economic | | struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion of a | | definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this | | terrain–on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. | | The anarchists have an ideal to realize. Anarchism remains a | | merely ideological negation of the State and of classes, | | namely of the social conditions of separate ideology. It is | | the ideology of pure liberty which equalizes everything and | | dismisses the very idea of historical evil. This viewpoint | | which fuses all partial desires has given anarchism the merit | | of representing the rejection of existing conditions in favor | | of the whole of life, and not of a privileged critical | | specialization; but this fusion is considered in the | | absolute, according to individual caprice, before its actual | | realization, thus condemning anarchism to an incoherence too | | easily seen through. Anarchism has merely to repeat and to | | replay the same simple, total conclusion in every single | | struggle, because this first conclusion was from the | | beginning identified with the entire outcome of the movement. | | Thus Bakunin could write in 1873, when he left the Federation | | Jurassiene: “During the past nine years, more ideas have been | | developed within the International than would be needed to | | save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge | | anyone to invent a new one. It is no longer the time for | | ideas, but for facts and acts.” There is no doubt that this | | conception retains an element of the historical thought of | | the proletariat, the certainty that ideas must become | | practice, but it leaves the historical terrain by assuming | | that the adequate forms for this passage to practice have | | already been found and will never change. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 93. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The anarchists, who distinguish themselves explicitly from | | the rest of the workers’ movement by their ideological | | conviction, reproduce this separation of competences among | | themselves; they provide a terrain favorable to informal | | domination over all anarchist organizations by propagandists | | and defenders of their ideology, specialists who are in | | general more mediocre the more their intellectual activity | | consists of the repetition of certain definitive truths. | | Ideological respect for unanimity of decision has on the | | whole been favorable to the uncontrolled authority, within | | the organization itself, of specialists in freedom; and | | revolutionary anarchism expects the same type of unanimity | | from the liberated population, obtained by the same means. | | Furthermore, the refusal to take into account the opposition | | between the conditions of a minority grouped in the present | | struggle and of a society of free individuals, has nourished | | a permanent separation among anarchists at the moment of | | common decision, as is shown by an infinity of anarchist | | insurrections in Spain, confined and destroyed on a local | | level. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 94. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The illusion entertained more or less explicitly by genuine | | anarchism is the permanent imminence of an instantaneously | | accomplished revolution which will prove the truth of the | | ideology and of the mode of practical organization derived | | from the ideology. In 1936, anarchism in fact led a social | | revolution, the most advanced model of proletarian power in | | all time. In this context it should be noted that the signal | | for a general insurrection had been imposed by a | | pronunciamiento of the army. Furthermore, to the extent that | | this revolution was not completed during the first days | | (because of the existence of Franco’s power in half the | | country, strongly supported from abroad while the rest of the | | international proletarian movement was already defeated, and | | because of remains of bourgeois forces or other statist | | workers’ parties within the camp of the Republic) the | | organized anarchist movement showed itself unable to extend | | the demi-victories of the revolution, or even to defend them. | | Its known leaders became ministers and hostages of the | | bourgeois State which destroyed the revolution only to lose | | the civil war. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 95. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International is the | | scientific ideology of the socialist revolution: it | | identifies its whole truth with objective processes in the | | economy and with the progress of a recognition of this | | necessity by the working class educated by the organization. | | This ideology rediscovers the confidence in pedagogical | | demonstration which had characterized utopian socialism, but | | mixes it with a contemplative reference to the course of | | history: this attitude has lost as much of the Hegelian | | dimension of a total history as it has lost the immobile | | image of totality in the utopian critique (most highly | | developed by Fourier). This scientific attitude can do no | | more than revive a symmetry of ethical choices; it is from | | this attitude that the nonsense of Hilferding springs when he | | states that recognizing the necessity of socialism gives “no | | indication of the practical attitude to be adopted. For it is | | one thing to recognize a necessity, and it is quite another | | thing to put oneself at the service of this necessity” | | (Finanzkapital). Those who failed to recognize that for Marx | | and for the revolutionary proletariat the unitary thought of | | history was in no way distinct from the practical attitude to | | be adopted, regularly became victims of the practice they | | adopted. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 96. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The ideology of the social-democratic organization gave power | | to professors who educated the working class, and the form of | | organization which was adopted was the form most suitable for | | this passive apprenticeship. The participation of socialists | | of the Second International in political and economic | | struggles was admittedly concrete but profoundly uncritical. | | It was conducted in the name of revolutionary illusion by | | means of an obviously reformist practice. The revolutionary | | ideology was to be shattered by the very success of those who | | held it. The separate position of the movement’s deputies and | | journalists attracted the already recruited bourgeois | | intellectuals toward a bourgeois mode of life. Even those who | | had been recruited from the struggles of industrial workers | | and who were themselves workers, were transformed by the | | union bureaucracy into brokers of labor power who sold labor | | as a commodity, for a just price. If their activity was to | | retain some appearance of being revolutionary, capitalism | | would have had to be conveniently unable to support | | economically this reformism which it tolerated politically | | (in the legalistic agitation of the social-democrats). But | | such an antagonism, guaranteed by their science, was | | constantly belied by history. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 97. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Bernstein, the social-democrat furthest from political | | ideology and most openly attached to the methodology of | | bourgeois science, had the honesty to want to demonstrate the | | reality of this contradiction; the English workers’ reformist | | movement had also demonstrated it, by doing without | | revolutionary ideology. But the contradiction was | | definitively demonstrated only by historical development | | itself. Although full of illusions in other respects, | | Bernstein had denied that a crisis of capitalist production | | would miraculously force the hand of socialists who wanted to | | inherit the revolution only by this legitimate rite. The | | profound social upheaval which arose with the first world | | war, though fertile with the awakening of consciousness, | | twice demonstrated that the social-democratic hierarchy had | | not educated revolutionarily; and had in no way transformed | | the German workers into theoreticians: first when the vast | | majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war; next | | when, in defeat, it squashed the Spartakist revolutionaries. | | The ex-worker Ebert still believed in sin, since he admitted | | that he hated revolution “like sin.” The same leader showed | | himself a precursor of the socialist representation which | | soon after confronted the Russian proletariat as its absolute | | enemy; he even formulated exactly the same program for this | | new alienation: “Socialism means working a lot”. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 98. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Lenin, as a Marxist thinker, was no more than a consistent | | and faithful Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary | | ideology of “orthodox Marxism” to Russian conditions, | | conditions unfavorable to the reformist practice carried on | | elsewhere by the Second International. In the Russian | | context, the external management of the proletariat, acting | | by means of a disciplined clandestine party subordinated to | | intellectuals transformed into “professional | | revolutionaries,” becomes a profession which refuses to deal | | with the ruling professions of capitalist society (the | | Czarist political regime being in any case unable to offer | | such opportunities which are based on an advanced stage of | | bourgeois power). It therefore became the profession of the | | absolute management of society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 99. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | With the war and the collapse of the social-democratic | | international in the face of the war, the authoritarian | | ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks spread all over the | | world. The bloody end of the democratic illusions of the | | workers’ movement transformed the entire world into a Russia, | | and Bolshevism, reigning over the first revolutionary breach | | brought on by this epoch of crisis, offered to proletarians | | of all lands its hierarchic and ideological model, so that | | they could “speak Russian” to the ruling class. Lenin did not | | reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a | | revolutionary ideology, but for ceasing to be one. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 100. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in | | Russia and when social-democracy fought victoriously for the | | old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs | | which is at the heart of the domination of the modern | | spectacle: the representation of the working class radically | | opposes itself to the working class. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 101. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | “In all previous revolutions,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Rote | | Fahne of December 21, 1918, “the combatants faced each other | | directly: class against class, program against program. In | | the present revolution, the troops protecting the old order | | do not intervene under the insignia of the ruling class, but | | under the flag of a ‘social-democratic party.’ If the central | | question of revolution had been posed openly and honestly: | | capitalism or socialism? the great mass of the proletariat | | would today have no doubts or hesitations.” Thus, a few days | | before its destruction, the radical current of the German | | proletariat discovered the secret of the new conditions which | | had been created by the preceding process (toward which the | | representation of the working class had greatly contributed): | | the spectacular organization of defense of the existing | | order, the social reign of appearances where no ” “central | | question” can any longer be posed “openly and honestly.” The | | revolutionary representation of the proletariat had at this | | stage become both the main factor and the central result of | | the general falsification of society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 102. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The organization of the proletariat on the Bolshevik model | | which emerged from Russian backwardness and from the | | abandonment of revolutionary struggle by the workers’ | | movement of advanced countries, found in this backwardness | | all the conditions which carried this form of organization | | toward the counter-revolutionary inversion which it | | unconsciously contained at its source. The continuing retreat | | of the mass of the European workers’ movement in the face of | | the Hic Rhodus, hic salta of the 1918-1920 period, a retreat | | which included the violent destruction of its radical | | minority, favored the completion of the Bolshevik development | | and let this fraudulent outcome present itself to the world | | as the only proletarian solution. By seizing state monopoly | | over representation and defense of workers’ power, the | | Bolshevik party justified itself and became what it was: the | | party of the proprietors of the proletariat (essentially | | eliminating earlier forms of property). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 103. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | During twenty years of unresolved theoretical debate, the | | varied tendencies of Russian social-democracy had examined | | all the conditions for the liquidation of Czarism: the | | weakness of the bourgeoisie, the weight of the peasant | | majority and the decisive role of a concentrated and | | combative but hardly numerous proletariat. The debate was | | resolved in practice by means of a factor which had not been | | present in the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy which | | directed the proletariat seized State power and gave society | | a new class domination. Strictly bourgeois revolution had | | been impossible; the “democratic dictatorship of workers and | | peasants” was meaningless; the proletarian power of the | | Soviets could not maintain itself simultaneously against the | | class of small landowners, against the national and | | international White reaction, and against its own | | representation externalized and alienated in the form of a | | workers’ party of absolute masters of State economy, | | expression, and soon of thought. The theory of permanent | | revolution of Trotsky and Parvus, which Lenin adopted in | | April 1917, was the only theory which became true for | | countries where the social development of the bourgeoisie was | | retarded, but this theory became true only after the | | introduction of the unknown factor: the class power of the | | bureaucracy. In the numerous arguments among the Bolshevik | | directors, Lenin was the most consistent defender of the | | concentration of dictatorial power in the hands of the | | supreme representatives of ideology. Lenin was right every | | time against his adversaries in that be supported the | | solution implied by earlier choices of absolute minority | | Power: the democracy which was kept from peasants by means of | | the state would have to be kept from workers as well, which | | led to keeping it from communist leaders of unions, from the | | entire party, and finally from leading party bureaucrats. At | | the Tenth Congress, when the Kronstadt Soviet had been | | defeated by arms and buried under calumny, Lenin pronounced | | against the leftist bureaucrats of the “Workers’ Opposition” | | the following conclusion (the logic of which Stalin later | | extended to a complete division of the world): “Here or there | | with a rifle, but not with opposition. ... We’ve had enough | | opposition.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 104. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy–sole proprietor of a State | | Capitalism–consolidated its power internally by means of a | | temporary alliance with the peasantry (with the “new economic | | policy”) and externally by using workers regimented into the | | bureaucratic parties of the Third International as supports | | for Russian diplomacy, thus sabotaging the entire | | revolutionary movement and supporting bourgeois governments | | whose aid it needed in international politics (the power of | | the Kuonmintang in China in 1925-27, the Popular Front in | | Spain and in France, etc.). The bureaucratic society | | continued the consolidation by terrorizing the peasantry in | | order to implement the mast brutal primitive capitalist | | accumulation in history. The industrialization of the Stalin | | epoch revealed the reality behind the bureaucracy: the | | continuation of the power of the economy and the preservation | | of the essence of the market society commodity labor. The | | independent economy, which dominates society to the extent of | | reinstituting the class domination it needs for its own ends, | | is thus confirmed. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie | | created an autonomous power which, so long as its autonomy | | lasts, can even do without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian | | bureaucracy is not “the last owning class in history” in the | | sense of Bruna Rizzi; it is only a substitute ruling class | | for the commodity economy. Capitalist private property in | | decline is replaced by a simplified, less diversified | | surrogate which is condensed as collective property of the | | bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped ruling class is the | | expression of economic underdevelopment, and has no | | perspective other than to overcome the retardation of this | | development in certain regions of the world. It was the | | workers’ party organized according to the bourgeois model of | | separation which furnished the hierarchical-statist cadre for | | this supplementary edition of a ruling class. While in one of | | Stalin’s prisons, Anton Ciliga observed that “technical | | questions of organization turned out to be social | | questions”(Lenin and the Revolution). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 105. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Revolutionary ideology, the coherence of the separate, of | | which Leninism represents the greatest voluntaristic attempt, | | supervising a reality which rejects it, with Stalinism | | returns to its truth in incoherence. At that paint ideology | | is no longer a weapon, but a goal. The lie which is no longer | | challenged becomes lunacy. Reality as well as the goal | | dissolve in the totalitarian ideological proclamation: all it | | says is all there is. This is a local primitivism of the | | spectacle, whose role is nevertheless essential in the | | development of the world spectacle. The ideology which is | | materialized in this context has not economically transformed | | the world, as has capitalism which reached the stage of | | abundance; it has merely transformed perception by means of | | the police. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 106. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The totalitarian-ideological class in power is the power of a | | topsy-turvy world: the stranger it is, the more it claims not | | to exist, and its force serves above all to affirm its | | nonexistence. It is modest only on this point, because its | | official nonexistence must also coincide with the nec plus | | ultra of historical development which must at the same time | | be attributed to its infallible command. Extended everywhere, | | the bureaucracy must be the class invisible to consciousness; | | as a result all social life becomes insane. The social | | organization of the absolute lie flows from this fundamental | | contradiction. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 107. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Stalinism was the reign of terror within the bureaucratic | | class itself. The terrorism at the base of this class’s power | | must also strike this class because it possesses no juridical | | guarantee, no recognized existence as owning class, which it | | could extend to every one of its members. Its real property | | being hidden, the bureaucracy became proprietor by way of | | false consciousness. False consciousness can maintain its | | absolute power only by means of absolute terror, where all | | real motives are ultimately lost. The members of the | | bureaucratic class in power have a right of ownership over | | society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental | | lie: they have to play the role of the proletariat directing | | a socialist society; they have to be actors loyal to a script | | of ideological disloyalty. But effective participation in | | this falsehood requires that it be recognized as actual | | participation. No bureaucrat can support his right to power | | individually, since proving that he’s a socialist proletarian | | would mean presenting himself as the opposite of a | | bureaucrat, and proving that he’s a bureaucrat is impossible | | since the official truth of the bureaucracy is that it does | | not exist. Thus every bureaucrat depends absolutely on the | | central guarantee of the ideology which recognizes the | | collective participation in its “socialist power” of all the | | bureaucrats it does not annihilate. If all the bureaucrats | | taken together decide everything, the cohesion of their own | | class can be assured only by the concentration of their | | terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides | | the only practical truth of falsehood in power: the | | indisputable permanence of its constantly adjusted frontier. | | Stalin decides without appeal who is ultimately to be a | | possessing bureaucrat; in other words, who should be named “a | | proletarian in power” and who “a traitor in the pay of the | | Mikado or of Wall Street.” The bureaucratic atoms find the | | common essence of their right only in the person of Stalin. | | Stalin is the world sovereign who in this manner knows | | himself as the absolute person for whose consciousness there | | is no higher spirit. “The sovereign of the world has | | effective consciousness of what he is–the universal power of | | efficacy–in the destructive violence which he exerts against | | the Self of his subjects, the contrasting others.” Just as he | | is the power that defines the terrain of domination, he is | | “the power which ravages this terrain.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 108. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When ideology, having become absolute through the possession | | of absolute power, changes from partial knowledge into | | totalitarian falsehood, the thought of history is so | | perfectly annihilated that history itself, even at the level | | of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. The | | totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual | | present where everything that happened exists for it only as | | a place accessible to its police. The project already | | formulated by Napoleon of “the ruler directing the energy of | | memory” has found its total concretization in a permanent | | manipulation of the past, not only of meanings but of facts | | as well. But the price paid for this emancipation from all | | historical reality is the loss of the rational reference | | which is indispensable to the historical society, capitalism. | | It is known how much the scientific application of insane | | ideology has cost the Russian economy, if only through the | | imposture of Lysenko. The contradiction of the totalitarian | | bureaucracy administering an industrialized society, caught | | between its need for rationality and its rejection of the | | rational, is one of its main deficiencies with regard to | | normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot | | resolve the question of agriculture the way capitalism had | | done, it is ultimately inferior to capitalism in industrial | | production, planned from the top and based on unreality and | | generalized falsehood. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 109. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Between the two world wars, the revolutionary workers’ | | movement was annihilated by the joint action of the Stalinist | | bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism which had borrowed | | its form of organization from the totalitarian party tried | | out in Russia. Fascism was an extremist defense of the | | bourgeois economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian | | subversion. Fascism is a state of siege in capitalist | | society, by means of which this society saves itself and | | gives itself stop-gap rationalization by making the State | | intervene massively in its management. But this | | rationalization is itself burdened by the immense | | irrationality of its means. Although fascism rallies to the | | defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has | | become conservative (the family, property, the moral order, | | the nation), reuniting the petty-bourgeoisie and the | | unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by the impotence of | | socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally | | ideological. It presents itself as it is: a violent | | resurrection of myth which demands participation in a | | community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the | | leader. Fascism is technically-equipped archaism. Its | | decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular | | context of the most modern means of conditioning and | | illusion. Thus it is one of the factors in the formation of | | the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the | | old workers’ movement makes it one of the fundamental forces | | of present-day society. However, since fascism is also the | | most costly form of preserving the capitalist order, it | | usually had to leave the front of the stage to the great | | roles played by the capitalist States; it is eliminated by | | stronger and more rational forms of the same order. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 110. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Now that the Russian bureaucracy has finally succeeded in | | doing away with the remains of bourgeois property which | | hampered its rule over the economy, in developing this | | property for its own use, and in being recognized externally | | among the great powers, it wants to enjoy its world calmly | | and to suppress the arbitrary element which had been exerted | | over it: it denounces the Stalinism of its origin. But the | | denunciation remains Stalinist, arbitrary, unexplained and | | continually corrected, because the ideological lie at its | | origin can never be revealed. Thus the bureaucracy can | | liberalize neither culturally nor politically because its | | existence as a class depends on its ideological monopoly | | which, with all its weight, is its only title to property. | | The ideology has no doubt lost the passion of its positive | | affirmation, but the indifferent triviality which survives | | still has the repressive function of prohibiting the | | slightest competition, of holding captive the totality of | | thought. Thus the bureaucracy is bound to an ideology which | | is no longer believed by anyone. What used to be terrorist | | has become a laughing matter, but this laughing matter can | | maintain itself only by preserving, as a last resort, the | | terrorism it would like to be rid of. Thus precisely at the | | moment when the bureaucracy wants to demonstrate its | | superiority on the terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to | | be a poor relation of capitalism. Just as its actual history | | contradicts its claims and its vulgarly entertained ignorance | | contradicts its scientific pretentions, so its project of | | becoming a rival to the bourgeoisie in the production of | | commodity abundance is blocked by the fact that this | | abundance carries its implicit ideology within itself, and is | | usually accompanied by an indefinitely extended freedom of | | spectacular false choices, a pseudo-freedom which remains | | irreconcilable with the bureaucratic ideology. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 111. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | At the present moment of its development, the bureaucracy’s | | title to ideological property is already collapsing | | internationally. The power which established itself | | nationally as a fundamentally internationalist model must | | admit that it can no longer pretend to maintain its false | | cohesion over and above every national frontier. The unequal | | economic development of some bureaucracies with competing | | interests, who succeeded in acquiring their “socialism” | | beyond the single country, has led to the public and total | | confrontation between the Russian lie and the Chinese lie. | | From this point on, every bureaucracy in power, or every | | totalitarian party which is a candidate to the power left | | behind by the Stalinist period in some national working | | classes, must follow its own path. The global decomposition | | of the alliance of bureaucratic mystification is further | | aggravated by manifestations of internal negation which began | | to be visible to the world with the East Berlin workers’ | | revolt, opposing the bureaucrats with the demand for “a | | government of steel workers,” manifestations which already | | once led all the way to the power of workers’ councils in | | Hungary. However, the global decomposition of the | | bureaucratic alliance is in the last analysis the least | | favorable factor for the present development of capitalist | | society. The bourgeoisie is in the process of losing the | | adversary which objectively supported it by providing an | | illusory unification of all negation of the existing order. | | This division of labor within the spectacle comes to an end | | when the pseudo-revolutionary role in turn divides. The | | spectacular element of the collapse of the workers’ movement | | will itself collapse. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 112. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The Leninist illusion has no contemporary base outside of the | | various Trotskyist tendencies. Here the identification of the | | proletarian project with a hierarchic organization of | | ideology stubbornly survives the experience of all its | | results. The distance which separates Trotskyism from a | | revolutionary critique of the present society allows | | Trotskyism to maintain a deferential attitude toward | | positions which were already false when they were used in a | | real combat. Trotsky remained basically in solidarity with | | the high bureaucracy until 1927, seeking to capture it so as | | to make it resume genuinely Bolshevik action externally (it | | is known that in order to conceal Lenin’s famous “testament” | | he went so far as to slanderously disavow his supporter Max | | Eastman, who had made it public). Trotsky was condemned by | | his basic perspective, because as soon as the bureaucracy | | recognizes itself in its result as a counterrevolutionary | | class internally, it must also choose, in the name of | | revolution, to be effectively counter-revolutionary | | externally, just as it is at home. Trotsky’s subsequent | | struggle for the Fourth International contains the same | | inconsistency. All his life he refused to recognize the | | bureaucracy as the power of a separate class, because during | | the second Russian revolution he became an unconditional | | supporter of the Bolshevik form of organization. When Lukacs, | | in 1923, showed that this form was the long-sought mediation | | between theory and practice, in which the proletarians are no | | longer “spectators” of the events which happen in their | | organization, but consciously choose and live these events, | | he described as actual merits of the Bolshevik party | | everything that the Bolshevik party was not. Except for his | | profound theoretical work, Lukacs was still an ideologue | | speaking in the name of the power most grossly external to | | the proletarian movement, believing and making believe that | | he, himself, with his entire personality, was within this | | power as if it were his own. But the sequel showed just how | | this power disowns and suppresses its lackeys; in Lukacs’ | | endless self-repudiations, just what he had identified with | | became visible and clear as a caricature: he had identified | | with the opposite of himself and of what he had supported in | | History and Class Consciousness. Lukacs is the best proof of | | the fundamental rule which judges all the intellectuals of | | this century: what they respect is an exact measure of their | | own despicable reality. Yet Lenin had hardly encouraged this | | type of illusion about his activity, considering that “a | | political party cannot examine its members to see if there | | are contradictions between their philosophy and the party | | program.” The real party whose imaginary portrait Lukacs had | | inopportunely drawn was coherent for only one precise and | | partial task: to seize State power. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 113. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The neo-Leninist illusion of present-day Trotskyism, | | constantly exposed by the reality of modern bourgeois as well | | as bureaucratic capitalist societies, naturally finds a | | favored field of application in “underdeveloped” countries | | which are formally independent. Here the illusion of some | | variant of state and bureaucratic socialism is consciously | | manipulated by local ruling classes as simply the ideology of | | economic development. The hybrid composition of these classes | | is more or less clearly related to their standing along the | | bourgeois-bureaucratic spectrum. Their games on an | | international scale with the two poles of existing capitalist | | power, as well as their ideological compromises (notably with | | Islam), express the hybrid reality of their social base and | | remove from this final byproduct of ideological socialism | | everything serious except the police. A bureaucracy | | establishes itself by staffing a national struggle and an | | agrarian peasant revolt; from that point on, as in China, it | | tends to apply the Stalinist model of industrialization in | | societies less developed than Russia was in 1917. A | | bureaucracy able to industrialize the nation can set itself | | up from among the petty-bourgeoisie, or out of army cadres | | who seize power, as in Egypt. A bureaucracy which sets itself | | up as a para-statist leadership during the struggle can, on | | certain questions, seek the equilibrium point of a compromise | | in order to fuse with a weak national bourgeoisie, as in | | Algeria at the beginning of its war of independence. Finally, | | in the former colonies of black Africa which remain openly | | tied to the American and European bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie | | constitutes itself (usually on the basis of the power of | | traditional tribal chiefs) by seizing the State. These | | countries, where foreign imperialism remains the real master | | of the economy, enter a stage where the compradores have | | gotten an indigenous State as compensation for their sale of | | indigenous products, a State which is independent in the face | | of the local masses but not in the face of imperialism. This | | is an artificial bourgeoisie which is not able to accumulate, | | but which simply squanders the share of surplus value from | | local labor which reaches it as well as the foreign subsidies | | from the States or monopolies which protect it. Because of | | the obvious incapacity of these bourgeois classes to fulfill | | the normal economic function of a bourgeoisie, each of them | | faces a subversion based on the bureaucratic model, more or | | less adapted to local peculiarities, and eager to seize the | | heritage of this bourgeoisie. But the very success of a | | bureaucracy in its fundamental project of industrialization | | necessarily contains the perspective of its historical | | defeat: by accumulating capital it accumulates a proletariat | | and thus creates its own negation in a country where it did | | not yet exist. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 114. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In this complex and terrible development which has carried | | the epoch of class struggles toward new conditions, the | | proletariat of the industrial countries has completely lost | | the affirmation of its autonomous perspective and also, in | | the last analysis, its illusions, but not its being. It has | | not been suppressed. It remains irreducibly in existence | | within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism: it is | | the immense majority of workers who have lost all power over | | the use of their lives and who, once they know this, redefine | | themselves as the proletariat, as negation at work within | | this society. The proletariat is objectively reinforced by | | the progressive disappearance of the peasantry and by the | | extension of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of | | “services” and intellectual professions. Subjectively the | | proletariat is still far removed from its practical class | | consciousness, not only among white collar workers but also | | among wage workers who have as yet discovered only the | | impotence and mystification of the old politics. | | Nevertheless, when the proletariat discovers that its own | | externalized power collaborates in the constant reinforcement | | of capitalist society, not only in the form of its labor but | | also in the form of unions, of parties, or of the state power | | it had built to emancipate itself, it also discovers from | | concrete historical experience that it is the class totally | | opposed to all congealed externalization and all | | specialization of power. It carries the revolution which | | cannot let anything remain outside of itself, the demand for | | the permanent domination of the present over the past, and | | the total critique of separation. It is this that must find | | its suitable form in action. No quantitative amelioration of | | its misery, no illusion of hierarchic integration is a | | lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat | | cannot truly recognize itself in a particular wrong it | | suffered nor in the righting of a particular wrong. It cannot | | recognize itself in the righting of a large number of wrongs | | either, but only in the absolute wrong of being relegated to | | the margin of life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 115. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The new signs of negation multiplying in the economically | | developed countries, signs which are misunderstood and | | falsified by spectacular arrangement, already enable us to | | draw the conclusion that a new epoch has begun: now, after | | the workers’ first attempt at subversion, it is capitalist | | abundance which has failed. When anti-union struggles of | | Western workers are repressed first of all by unions, and | | when the first amorphous protests launched by rebellious | | currents of youth directly imply the rejection of the old | | specialized politics, of art and of daily life, we see two | | sides of a new spontaneous struggle which begins under a | | criminal guise. These are the portents of a second | | proletarian assault against class society. When the last | | children of this still immobile army reappear on this | | battleground which was altered and yet remains the same, they | | follow a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to | | destroy the machines of permitted consumption. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 116. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | “The political form at last discovered in which the economic | | emancipation of labor could be realized” has in this century | | acquired a clear outline in the revolutionary workers’ | | Councils which concentrate in themselves all the functions of | | decision and execution, and federate with each other by means | | of delegates responsible to the base and revocable at any | | moment. Their actual existence has as yet been no more than a | | brief sketch, quickly opposed and defeated by various | | defensive forces of class society, among which their own | | false consciousness must often be included. Pannekoek rightly | | insisted that choosing the power of workers’ Councils “poses | | problems” rather than providing a solution. Yet it is | | precisely in this power where the problems of the proletarian | | revolution can find their real solution. This is where the | | objective conditions of historical consciousness are | | reunited. This is where direct active communication is | | realized, where specialization, hierarchy and separation end, | | where the existing conditions have been transformed “into | | conditions of unity.” Here the proletarian subject can emerge | | from his struggle against contemplation: his consciousness is | | equal to the practical organization which it undertakes | | because this consciousness is itself inseparable from | | coherent intervention in history. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 117. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In the power of the Councils, which must internationally | | supplant all other power, the proletarian movement is its own | | product and this product is the producer himself. He is to | | himself his own goal. Only there is the spectacular negation | | of life negated in its turn. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 118. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The appearance of the Councils was the highest reality of the | | proletarian movement in the first quarter of this century, a | | reality which was not seen or was travestied because it | | disappeared along with the rest of the movement that was | | negated and eliminated by the entire historical experience of | | the time. At the new moment of proletarian critique, this | | result returns as the only undefeated point of the defeated | | movement. Historical consciousness, which knows that this is | | the only milieu where it can exist, can now recognize this | | reality, no longer at the periphery of what is ebbing, but at | | the center of what is rising. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 119. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | A revolutionary organization existing before the power of the | | Councils (it will find its own farm through struggle), for | | all these historical reasons, already knows that it does not | | represent the working class. It must recognize itself as no | | more than a radical separation from the world of separation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 120. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of | | the theory of praxis entering into non-unilateral | | communication with practical struggles, in the process of | | becoming practical theory. Its own practice is the | | generalization of communication and of coherence in these | | struggles. At the revolutionary moment of dissolution of | | social separation, this organization must recognize its own | | dissolution as a separate organization. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 121. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The revolutionary organization can be nothing less than a | | unitary critique of society, namely a critique which does not | | compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the | | world, and a critique proclaimed globally against all the | | aspects of alienated social life. In the struggle between the | | revolutionary organization and class society, the weapons are | | nothing other than the essence of the combatants themselves: | | the revolutionary organization cannot reproduce within itself | | the dominant society’s conditions of separation and | | hierarchy. It must struggle constantly against its | | deformation in the ruling spectacle. The only limit to | | participation in the total democracy of the revolutionary | | organization is the recognition and self-appropriation of the | | coherence of its critique by all its members, a coherence | | which must be proved in the critical theory as such and in | | the relation between the theory and practical activity. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 122. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When constantly growing capitalist alienation at all levels | | makes it increasingly difficult for workers to recognize and | | name their own misery, forcing them to face the alternative | | of rejecting the totality of their misery or nothing, the | | revolutionary organization has to learn that it can no longer | | combat alienation with alienated forms. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 123. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition | | that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human | | practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires | | workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought | | into practice. Thus it demands of men without quality more | | than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified men | | which it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial | | ideological consciousness constructed by a part of the | | bourgeois class was based on the economy, this central part | | of social life in which this class was already in power). The | | very development of class society to the stage of spectacular | | organization of non-life thus leads the revolutionary project | | to become visibly what it already was essentially. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 124. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary | | ideology and knows it. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 5 “Time and History” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!... And if we live, | | we live to tread on kings. - Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 125. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Man, “the negative being who is only to the extent that he | | suppresses Being,” is identical to time. Man’s appropriation | | of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the | | unfolding of the universe. “History is itself a real part of | | natural history, of the transformation of nature into man” | | (Marx). Inversely, this “natural history” has no actual | | existence other than through the process of human history, | | the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like | | the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the | | retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe. History | | has always existed, but not always in a historical form. The | | temporalization of man as effected through the mediation of a | | society is equivalent to a humanization of time. The | | unconscious movement of time manifests itself and becomes | | true within historical consciousness. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 126. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Properly historical movement, although still hidden, begins | | in the slow and intangible formation of the “real nature of | | man,” this “nature born within human history–within the | | generating action of human society,” but even though that | | society developed a technology and a language and is already | | a product of its own history, it is conscious only of a | | perpetual present. There, all knowledge, confined within the | | memory of the oldest, is always carried by the living. | | Neither death nor procreation is grasped as a law of time. | | Time remains immobile, like an enclosed space. A more complex | | society which finally becomes conscious of time devotes | | itself to negating it because it sees in time not what | | passes, but only what returns. A static society organizes | | time in terms of its immediate experience of nature, on the | | model of cyclical time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 127. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic | | populations because they find the same conditions repeated at | | every moment of their journey: Hegel notes that “the | | wandering of nomads is only formal because it is limited to | | uniform spaces.” The society which, by fixing itself in place | | locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized | | places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localization. | | The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure | | return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series | | of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism to | | sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without | | content, the beginning of labor. The agrarian mode of | | production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the | | seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. | | Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here | | on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought | | which guarantees the entire cosmic order surrounding the | | order which this society has in fact already realized within | | its frontiers. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 128. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The social appropriation of time, the production of man by | | human labor, develops within a society divided into classes. | | The power which constituted itself above the penury of the | | society of cyclical time, the class which organizes the | | social labor and appropriates the limited surplus value, | | simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value of its | | organization of social time: it possesses for itself alone | | the irreversible time of the living. The wealth that can be | | concentrated in the realm of power and materially used up in | | sumptuous feasts is also used up as a squandering of | | historical time at the surface of society. The owners of | | historical surplus value possess the knowledge and the | | enjoyment of lived events. Separated from the collective | | organization of time which predominates with the repetitive | | production at the base of social life, this time flows above | | its own static community. This is the time of adventure and | | war, when the masters of the cyclical society travel through | | their personal histories, and it is also the time which | | appears in confrontations with foreign communities, in the | | derangement of the unchangeable order of the society. History | | then passes before men as an alien factor, as that which they | | never wanted and against which they thought themselves | | protected. But by way of this detour returns the human | | negative anxiety which had been at the very origin of the | | entire development that had fallen asleep. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 129. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Cyclical time in itself is time without conflict. But | | conflict is installed within this infancy of time: history | | first struggles to be history in the practical activity of | | masters. This history superficially creates the irreversible; | | its movement constitutes precisely the time it uses up within | | the interior of the inexhaustible time of cyclical society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 130. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | “Frozen societies” are those which slowed down their | | historical activity to the limit and maintained in constant | | equilibrium their opposition to the natural and human | | environment as well as their internal oppositions. If the | | extreme diversity of institutions established for this | | purpose demonstrates the flexibility of the self-creation of | | human nature, this demonstration becomes obvious only for the | | external observer, for the anthropologist who returns from | | historical time. In each of these societies a definitive | | structuring excluded change. Absolute conformism in existing | | social practices. with which all human possibilities are | | identified for all time, has no external limit other than the | | fear of falling back into formless animality. Here, in order | | to remain human, men must remain the same. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 131. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The birth of political power which seems to be related to the | | last great technological revolutions (like iron smelting), at | | the threshold of a period which would not experience profound | | shocks until the appearance of industry, also marks the | | moment when kinship ties begin to dissolve. From then on, the | | succession of generations leaves the sphere of pure cyclical | | nature in order to become an event-oriented succession of | | powers. Irreversible time is now the time of those who rule, | | and dynasties are its first measure. Writing is its weapon. | | In writing, language attains its complete independent reality | | as mediation between consciousnesses. But this independence | | is identical to the general independence of separate power as | | the mediation which constitutes society. With writing there | | appears a consciousness which is no longer carried and | | transmitted directly among the living: an impersonal memory, | | the memory of the administration of society. “Writings are | | the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory” | | (Novalis). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 132. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of | | power and also the instrument that preserves the | | voluntaristic progression of this time from its predecessor, | | since this orientation of time collapses with the fall of | | every specific power and returns to the indifferent oblivion | | of cyclical time, the only time known to peasant masses who, | | during the collapse of empires and their chronologies, never | | change. The owners of history have given time a meaning: a | | direction which is also a significance. But this history | | deploys itself and succumbs separately, leaving the | | underlying society unchanged precisely because this history | | remains separated from the common reality. This is why we | | reduce the history of Oriental empires to the history of | | religions: the chronologies which have fallen to ruins left | | no more than the apparently autonomous history of the | | illusions which enveloped them. The masters who make history | | their private property, under the protection of myth, possess | | first of all a private ownership of the mode of illusion: in | | China and Egypt they long held a monopoly over the | | immortality of the soul, just as their famous early dynasties | | are imaginary arrangements of the past. But the masters’ | | possession of illusion is at that moment the only possible | | possession of a common history and of their own history. The | | growth of their real historical power goes together with a | | popularization of the possession of myth and illusion. All | | this flows from the simple fact that, to the extent that the | | masters took it upon themselves to guarantee the permanence | | of cyclical time mythically, as in the seasonal rites of | | Chinese emperors, they themselves achieved a relative | | liberation from cyclical time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 133. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The dry unexplained chronology of divine power speaking to | | its servants, which wants to be understood only as the | | earthly execution of the commandments of myth, can be | | surmounted and become conscious history; this requires that | | real participation in history be lived by extended groups. | | Out of this practical communication among those who | | recognized each other as possessors of a singular present, | | who experienced the qualitative richness of events as their | | activity and as the place where they lived–their epoch–arises | | the general language of historical communication. Those for | | whom irreversible time has existed discover within it the | | memorable as well as the menace of forgetting: “Herodotus of | | Halicarnassus here presents the results of his study, so that | | time may not abolish the works of men...” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 134. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Reasoning about history is inseparably reasoning about power. | | Greece was the moment when power and its change were | | discussed and understood, the democracy of the masters of | | society. Greek conditions were the inverse of the conditions | | known to the despotic State, where power settles its accounts | | only with itself within the inaccessible obscurity of its | | densest point: through palace revolution, which is placed | | beyond the pale of discussion by success or failure alike. | | However, the power shared among the Greek communities existed | | only with the expenditure of a social life whose production | | remained separate and static within the servile class. Only | | those who do not work live. In the division among the Greek | | communities, and in the struggle to exploit foreign cities, | | the principle of separation which internally grounded each of | | them was externalized. Greece, which had dreamed of universal | | history, did not succeed in unifying itself in the face of | | invasion–or even in unifying the calendars of its independent | | cities. In Greece historical time became conscious, but not | | yet conscious of itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 135. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | After the disappearance of the locally favorable conditions | | known to the Greek communities, the regression of western | | historical thought was not accompanied by a rehabilitation of | | ancient mythic organizations. Out of the confrontations of | | the Mediterranean populations, out of the formation and | | collapse of the Roman State, appeared semi-historical | | religions which became fundamental factors in the new | | consciousness of time, and in the new armor of separate | | power. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 136. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and | | history, between cyclical time which still dominated | | production and irreversible time where populations clash and | | regroup. The religions which grew out of Judaism are abstract | | universal acknowledgements of irreversible time which is | | democratized, opened to all, but in the realm of illusion. | | Time is totally oriented toward a single final event: “The | | Kingdom of God is at hand.” These religions arose on the soil | | of history, and established themselves there. But there they | | still preserve themselves in radical opposition to history. | | Semi-historical religion establishes a qualitative point of | | departure in time (the birth of Christ, the flight of | | Mohammed), but its irreversible time–introducing real | | accumulation which in Islam can take the form of a conquest, | | or in Reformation Christianity the form of increased capital | | is actually inverted in religious thought and becomes a | | countdown: the hope of access to the genuine other world | | before time runs out, the expectation of the last Judgment. | | Eternity came out of cyclical time and is beyond it. Eternity | | is the element which holds back the irreversibility of time, | | suppressing history within history itself by placing itself | | on the other side of irreversible time as a pure punctual | | element to which cyclical time returned and abolished itself. | | Bossuet will still say: “And by means of the time that passes | | we enter into the eternity which does not pass.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 137. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The Middle Ages, this incomplete mythical world whose | | perfection lay outside it, is the moment when cyclical time, | | which still regulates the greater part of production, is | | really chewed away by history. A certain irreversible | | temporality is recognized individually in everyone, in the | | succession of stages of life, in the consideration of life as | | a journey, a passage with no return through a world whose | | meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the man who leaves | | cyclical time and becomes in reality the traveller that | | everyone is symbolically. Personal historical life still | | finds its fulfillment within the sphere of power, within | | participation in struggles led by power and in struggles over | | disputed power; but the irreversible time of power is shared | | to infinity under the general unification of the oriented | | time of the Christian era, in a world of armed faith, where | | the game of the masters revolves around fidelity and disputes | | over owed fidelity. This feudal society, born out of the | | encounter of “the organizational structure of the conquering | | army as it developed during the conquest” with “the | | productive forces found in the conquered country” (German | | Ideology) and in the organization of these productive forces | | one must count their religious language divided the | | domination of society between the Church and the state power, | | in turn subdivided in the complex relations of suzerainty and | | vassalage of territorial tenures and urban communes. In this | | diversity of possible historical life, the irreversible time | | which silently carried off the underlying society, the time | | lived by the bourgeoisie in the production of commodities, in | | the foundation and expansion of cities and in the commercial | | discovery of the earth–practical experimentation which | | forever destroyed all mythical organization of the | | cosmos–slowly revealed itself as the unknown work of this | | epoch when the great official historical undertaking of this | | world collapsed with the Crusades. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 138. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | During the decline of the Middle Ages, the irreversible time | | which invades society is experienced by the consciousness | | attached to the ancient order in the form of an obsession | | with death. This is the melancholy of the demise of a world, | | the last world where the security of myth still counterpoised | | history, and for this melancholy everything worldly moves | | only toward corruption. The great revolts of the European | | peasants are also their attempt to respond to history–which | | was violently wrenching the peasants out of the patriarchal | | sleep that had guaranteed their feudal tutelage. This | | millenarian utopia of achieving heaven on earth revives what | | was at the origin of semi-historical religion, when Christian | | communities which grew out of Judaic messianism responded to | | the troubles and unhappiness of the epoch by looking to the | | imminent realization of the Kingdom of God and brought a | | disquieting and subversive factor into ancient society. When | | Christianity reached the point of sharing power within the | | empire, it exposed what still survived of this hope as a | | simple superstition: that is the meaning of the Augustinian | | affirmation, archetype of all the satisfecit of modern | | ideology, according to which the established Church has | | already for a long time been this kingdom one spoke of. The | | social revolt of the millenarian peasantry defines itself | | naturally first of all as a will to destroy the Church. But | | millenarianism spreads in the historical world, and not on | | the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary expectations are | | not irrational continuations of the religious passion of | | millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in | | The Pursuit of the Millennium. On the contrary, it is | | millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the | | language of religion for the last time, which is already a | | modern revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks the | | consciousness that it is only historical. The millenarians | | had to lose because they could not recognize the revolution | | as their own operation. The fact that they waited to act on | | the basis of an external sign of God’s decision is the | | translation into thought of the practice of insurgent | | peasants following chiefs taken from outside their ranks. The | | peasant class could not attain an adequate consciousness of | | the functioning of society or of the way to lead its own | | struggle: because it lacked these conditions of unity in its | | action and consciousness, it expressed its project and led | | its wars with the imagery of an earthly paradise. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 139. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The new possession of historical life, the Renaissance, which | | finds its past and its legitimacy in Antiquity, carries with | | it a joyous rupture with eternity. Its irreversible time is | | that of the infinite accumulation of knowledge, and the | | historical consciousness which grows out of the experience of | | democratic communities and of the forces which ruin them will | | take up, with Machiavelli, the analysis of desanctified | | power, saying the unspeakable about the State. In the | | exuberant life of the Italian cities, in the art of the | | festival, life is experienced as enjoyment of the passage of | | time. But this enjoyment of passage is itself a passing | | enjoyment. The song of Lorenzo di Medici considered by | | Burckhardt to be the expression of “the very spirit of the | | Renaissance” is the eulogy which this fragile feast of | | history pronounces on itself: “How beautiful the spring of | | life which vanishes so quickly.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 140. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The constant movement of monopolization of historical life by | | the State of the absolute monarchy, transitional form toward | | complete domination by the bourgeois class, brings into clear | | view the new irreversible time of the bourgeoisie. The | | bourgeoisie is attached to labor time, which is liberated for | | the first time from the cyclical. With the bourgeoisie, work | | becomes labor which transforms historical conditions. The | | bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which labor is a | | value. And the bourgeoisie which suppresses all privilege, | | which recognizes no value that does not flow from the | | exploitation of labor, has justly identified with labor its | | own value as a dominant class, and has made the progress of | | labor its own progress. The class which accumulates | | commodities and capital continually modifies nature by | | modifying labor itself, by unleashing its productivity. All | | social life has already been concentrated within the | | ornamental poverty of the Court, the tinsel of the cold state | | administration which culminates in “the vocation of king”; | | and all particular historical liberty has had to consent to | | its defeat. The liberty of the irreversible temporal game of | | the nobles is consumed in their last lost battles, the wars | | of the Fronde and the rising of the Scotch for | | Charles-Edward. The world’s foundation has changed. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 141. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of profoundly | | historical time, because this is the time of economic | | production which transforms society, continuously and from | | top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the | | central activity, the cyclical time which remains at the base | | of society nourishes the coalesced forces of tradition which | | fetter all movement. But the irreversible time of the | | bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner | | of the globe. History, which until then had seemed to be only | | the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was | | written as the history of events, is now understood as the | | general movement, and in this relentless movement individuals | | are sacrificed. This history which discovers its foundation | | in political economy now knows of the existence of what had | | been its unconscious, but this still cannot be brought to | | light and remains unconscious. This blind prehistory, a new | | fatality dominated by no one, is all that the commodity | | economy democratized. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 142. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The history which is present in all the depths of society | | tends to be lost at the surface. The triumph of irreversible | | time is also its metamorphosis into the time of things, | | because the weapon of its victory was precisely the mass | | production of objects according to the laws of the commodity. | | The main product which economic development has transferred | | from luxurious scarcity to daily consumption is therefore | | history, but only in the form of the history of the abstract | | movement of things which dominates all qualitative use of | | life. While the earlier cyclical time had supported a growing | | part of historical time lived by individuals and groups, the | | domination of the irreversible time of production tends, | | socially, to eliminate this lived time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 143. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed on it | | an irreversible historical time, but kept its use from | | society. “There was history, but there is no more,” because | | the class of owners of the economy, which cannot break with | | economic history, is directly threatened by all other | | irreversible use of time and must repress it. The ruling | | class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who | | are themselves therefore a possession of things, must link | | its fate with the preservation of this reified history, with | | the permanence of a new immobility within history. For the | | first time the worker, at the base of society, is not | | materially a stranger to history, because it is now the base | | that irreversibly moves society. In the demand to live the | | historical time which it makes, the proletariat finds the | | simple unforgettable center of its revolutionary project; and | | every attempt (thwarted until now) to realize this project | | marks a point of possible departure for new historical life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 144. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The irreversible time of the bourgeoisie in power at first | | presented itself under its own name, as an absolute origin, | | Year One of the Republic. But the revolutionary ideology of | | general freedom which had destroyed the last remnants of the | | mythical organization of values and the entire traditional | | regulation of society, already made visible the real will | | which it had clothed in Roman dress: the freedom of | | generalized commerce. The commodity society, now discovering | | that it needed to reconstruct the passivity which it had | | profoundly shaken in order to set up its own pure reign, | | finds that “Christianity with its cultus of abstract man ... | | is the most fitting form of religion” (Capital). Thus the | | bourgeoisie establishes a compromise with this religion, a | | compromise which also expresses itself in the presentation of | | time: its own calendar abandoned, its irreversible time | | returns to unwind within the Christian era whose succession | | it continues. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 145. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is | | unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality | | because the entire world is gathered under the development of | | this time. But this history, which is everywhere | | simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within | | history of history itself. What appears the world over as the | | same day is the time of economic production cut up into equal | | abstract fragments. Unified irreversible time is the time of | | the world market and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 146. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The irreversible time of production is first of all the | | measure of commodities. Therefore the time officially | | affirmed over the entire expanse of the globe as the general | | time of society refers only to the specialized interests | | which constitute it and is no more than a particular time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 6 “Spectacular Time” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | We have nothing that is ours except time, which even those | | without a roof can enjoy. - Baltasar Gracian, Oraculo Manual | | y Arte de Prudencia | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 147. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite | | accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is the abstraction | | of irreversible time, all of whose segments must prove on the | | chronometer their merely quantitative equality. This time is | | in reality exactly what it is in its exchangeable character. | | In this social domination by commodity-time, “time is | | everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of | | time” (Poverty of Philosophy). This is time devalued, the | | complete inversion of time as “the field of human | | development.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 148. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The general time of human non-development also exists in the | | complementary form of consumable time which returns as | | pseudo-cyclical time to the daily life of the society based | | on this determined production. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 149. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Pseudo-cyclical time is actually no more than the consumable | | disguise of the commodity-time of production. It contains the | | essential properties of commodity-time, namely exchangeable | | homogeneous units and the suppression of the qualitative | | dimension. But being the by-product of this time which aims | | to retard concrete daily life and to keep it retarded, it | | must be charged with pseudo-valuations and appear in a | | sequence of falsely individualized moments. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 150. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Pseudo-cyclical time is the time of consumption of modern | | economic survival, of increased survival, where daily life | | continues to be deprived of decision and remains bound, no | | longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature | | developed in alienated labor; and thus this time naturally | | reestablishes the ancient cyclical rhythm which regulated the | | survival of preindustrial societies. Pseudo-cyclical time | | leans on the natural remains of cyclical time and also uses | | it to compose new homologous combinations: day and night, | | work and weekly rest, the recurrence of vacations. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 151. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry. The | | time which has its basis in the production of commodities is | | itself a consumable commodity which includes everything that | | previously (during the phase of dissolution of the old | | unitary society) was differentiated into private life, | | economic life, political life. All the consumable time of | | modern society comes to be treated as a raw material for | | varied new products which impose themselves on the market as | | uses of socially organized time. “A product which already | | exists in a form which makes it suitable for consumption can | | nevertheless in its turn become a raw material for another | | product” (Capital). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 152. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In its most advanced sector, concentrated capitalism orients | | itself towards the sale of “completely equipped” blocks of | | time, each one constituting a single unified commodity which | | integrates a number of diverse commodities. In the expanding | | economy of “services” and leisure, this gives rise to the | | formula of calculated payment in which “everything’s | | included”: spectacular environment, the collective | | pseudo-displacement of vacations, subscriptions to cultural | | consumption, and the sale of sociability itself in the form | | of “passionate conversations” and “meetings with | | personalities.” This sort of spectacular commodity, which can | | obviously circulate only because of the increased poverty of | | the corresponding realities, just as obviously fits among the | | pilot-articles of modernized sales techniques by being | | payable on credit. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 153. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular time, both as | | the time of consumption of images in the narrow sense, and as | | the image of consumption of time in the broad sense. The time | | of image-consumption, the medium of all commodities, is | | inseparably the field where the instruments of the spectacle | | exert themselves fully, and also their goal, the location and | | main form of all specific consumption: it is known that the | | time-saving constantly sought by modern society, whether in | | the speed of vehicles or in the use of dried soups, is | | concretely translated for the population of the United States | | in the fact that the mere contemplation of television | | occupies it for an average of three to six hours a day. The | | social image of the consumption of time, in turn, is | | exclusively dominated by moments of leisure and vacation, | | moments presented at a distance and desirable by definition, | | like every spectacular commodity. Here this commodity is | | explicitly presented as the moment of real life, and the | | point is to wait for its cyclical return. But even in those | | very moments reserved for living, it is still the spectacle | | that is to be seen and reproduced, becoming ever more | | intense. What was represented as genuine life reveals itself | | simply as more genuinely spectacular life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 154. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially | | the sudden return of multiple festivities is also an epoch | | without festivals. What was, in cyclical time, the moment of | | a community’s participation in the luxurious expenditure of | | life is impossible for the society without community or | | luxury. When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the | | dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus of economic | | expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated | | by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the | | lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly | | it is exalted. The reality of time has been replaced by the | | advertisement of time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 155. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies | | was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the | | pseudo-cyclical consumption of the developed economy is in | | contradiction with the abstract irreversible time of its | | production. While cyclical time was the time of immobile | | illusion, really lived, spectacular time is the time of | | self-changing reality, lived in illusion. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 156. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | What is constantly new in the process of production of things | | is not found in consumption, which remains the expanded | | repetition of the same. In spectacular time, since dead labor | | continues to dominate living labor, the past dominates the | | present. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 157. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is | | that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events | | which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been | | lived by those informed of them; moreover they are lost in | | the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of | | the spectacular machinery. Furthermore, what is really lived | | has no relation to the official irreversible time of society | | and is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of | | the consumable by-product of this time. This individual | | experience of separate daily life remains without language, | | without concept, without critical access to its own past | | which has been recorded nowhere. It is not communicated. It | | is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false | | spectacular memory of the unmemorable. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 158. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle, as the present social organization of the | | paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of | | history built on the foundation of historical time, is the | | false consciousness of time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 159. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The preliminary condition required for propelling workers to | | the status of “free” producers and consumers of commodity | | time was the violent expropriation of their own time. The | | spectacular return of time became possible only after this | | first dispossession of the producer. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 160. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The irreducibly biological element which remains in labor, | | both in the dependence on the natural cycle of waking and | | sleep and in the existence of irreversible time in the | | expenditure of an individual life, is a mere accessory from | | the point of view of modern production; consequently, these | | elements are ignored in the official proclamations of the | | movement of production and in the consumable trophies which | | are the accessible translation of this incessant victory. The | | spectator’s consciousness, immobilized in the falsified | | center of the movement of its world, no longer experiences | | its life as a passage toward self-realization and toward | | death. One who has renounced using his life can no longer | | admit his death. Life insurance advertisements suggest merely | | that he is guilty of dying without ensuring the regularity of | | the system after this economic loss; and the advertisement of | | the American way of death insists on his capacity to maintain | | in this encounter the greatest possible number of appearances | | of life. On all other fronts of the advertising onslaught, it | | is strictly forbidden to grow old. Even a “youth-capital,” | | contrived for each and all and put to the most mediocre uses, | | could never acquire the durable and cumulative reality of | | financial capital. This social absence of death is identical | | to the social absence of life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 161. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Time, as Hegel showed, is the necessary alienation, the | | environment where the subject realizes himself by losing | | himself, where he becomes other in order to become truly | | himself. Precisely the opposite is true in the dominant | | alienation, which is undergone by the producer of an alien | | present. In this spatial alienation, the society that | | radically separates the subject from the activity it takes | | from him, separates him first of all from his own time. It is | | this surmountable social alienation that has prohibited and | | petrified the possibilities and risks of the living | | alienation of time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 162. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Under the visible fashions which disappear and reappear on | | the trivial surface of contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the | | grand style of the age is always located in what is oriented | | by the obvious and secret necessity of revolution. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 163. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The natural basis of time, the actual experience of the flow | | of time, becomes human and social by existing for man. The | | restricted condition of human practice, labor at various | | stages, is what has humanized and also dehumanized time as | | cyclical and as separate irreversible time of economic | | production. The revolutionary project of realizing a | | classless society, a generalized historical life, is the | | project of a withering away of the social measure of time, to | | the benefit of a playful model of irreversible time of | | individuals and groups, a model in which independent | | federated times are simultaneously present. It is the program | | of a total realization, within the context of time, of | | communism which suppresses “all that exists independently of | | individuals.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 164. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The world already possesses the dream of a time whose | | consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live | | it. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 7 “The Organization of Territory”. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | And he who becomes master of a city used to being free and | | does not destroy her can expect to be destroyed by her, | | because always she has as pretext in rebellion the name of | | liberty and her old customs, which never through either | | length of time or benefits are forgotten, and in spite of | | anything that can be done or foreseen, unless citizens are | | disunited or dispersed, they do not forget that name and | | those institutions... - Machiavelli, The Prince | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 165. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Capitalist production has unified space, which is no longer | | bounded by external societies. This unification is at the | | same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization. | | The accumulation of commodities produced in mass for the | | abstract space of the market, which had to break down all | | regional and legal barriers and all the corporative | | restrictions of the Middle Ages that preserved the quality of | | craft production, also had to destroy the autonomy and | | quality of places. This power of homogenization is the heavy | | artillery which brought down all Chinese walls. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 166. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In order to become ever more identical to itself, to get as | | close as possible to motionless monotony, the free space of | | the commodity is henceforth constantly modified and | | reconstructed. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 167. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | This society which eliminates geographical distance | | reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 168. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a | | by-product of the circulation of commodities, is | | fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see | | what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to | | different places is already in itself the guarantee of their | | equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from | | the voyage also removed from it the reality of space. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 169. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The society that molds all of its surroundings has developed | | a special technique for shaping its very territory, the solid | | ground of this collection of tasks. Urbanism is capitalism’s | | seizure of the natural and human environment; developing | | logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must | | now remake the totality of space into its own setting. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 170. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The capitalist need which is satisfied by urbanism in the | | form of a visible freezing of life can be expressed in | | Hegelian terms as the absolute predominance of “the peaceful | | coexistence of space” over “the restless becoming in the | | passage of time.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 171. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | If all the technical forces of capitalism must be understood | | as tools for the making of separations, in the case of | | urbanism we are dealing with the equipment at the basis of | | these technical forces, with the treatment of the ground that | | suits their deployment, with the very technique of | | separation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 172. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Urbanism is the modern fulfillment of the uninterrupted task | | which safeguards class power: the preservation of the | | atomization of workers who had been dangerously brought | | together by urban conditions of production. The constant | | struggle that had to be waged against every possible form of | | their coming together discovers its favored field in | | urbanism. After the experiences of the French Revolution, the | | efforts of all established powers to increase the means of | | maintaining order in the streets finally culminates in the | | suppression of the street. “With the present means of | | long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has | | proved an even more effective method of keeping a population | | under control,” says Lewis Mumford in The City in History, | | describing “henceforth a one-way world.” But the general | | movement of isolation, which is the reality of urbanism, must | | also include a controlled reintegration of workers depending | | on the needs of production and consumption that can be | | planned. Integration into the system requires that isolated | | individuals be recaptured and isolated together: factories | | and halls of culture, tourist resorts and housing | | developments are expressly organized to serve this | | pseudo-community that follows the isolated individual right | | into the family cell. The widespread use of receivers of the | | spectacular message enables the individual to fill his | | isolation with the dominant images–images which derive their | | power precisely from this isolation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 173. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | For the first time a new architecture, which in all previous | | epochs had been reserved for the satisfaction of the ruling | | classes, is directly aimed at the poor. The formal poverty | | and the gigantic spread of this new living experience both | | come from its mass character, which is implicit in its | | purpose and in modern conditions of construction. | | Authoritarian decision, which abstractly organizes territory | | into territory of abstraction, is obviously at the heart of | | these modern conditions of construction. The same | | architecture appears in all industrializing countries that | | are backward in this respect, as a suitable terrain for the | | new type of social existence which is to be implanted there. | | The threshold crossed by the growth of society’s material | | power alongside the lag in the conscious domination of this | | power, are displayed as clearly by urbanism as by problems of | | thermonuclear armament or of birth control (where the | | possibility of manipulating heredity has already been | | reached). | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 174. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The present is already the time of the self-destruction of | | the urban milieu. The explosion of cities which cover the | | countryside with “formless masses of urban residues” (Lewis | | Mumford) is directly regulated by the imperatives of | | consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile, | | pilot-product of the first phase of commodity abundance, has | | been stamped into the environment with the domination of the | | freeway, which dislocates old urban centers and requires an | | ever-larger dispersion. At the same time, stages of | | incomplete reorganization of the urban fabric polarize | | temporarily around “distribution factories,” enormous | | shopping centers built on the bare ground of parking lots; | | and these temples of frenzied consumption, after bringing | | about a partial rearrangement of congestion, themselves flee | | within the centrifugal movement which rejects them as soon as | | they in turn become overburdened secondary centers. But the | | technical organization of consumption is only the first | | element of the general dissolution which has led the city to | | the point of consuming itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 175. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Economic history, which developed entirely around the | | opposition between town and country, has reached a level of | | success which simultaneously cancels out both terms. The | | current paralysis of total historical development for the | | sake of the mere continuation of the economy’s independent | | movement makes the moment when town and country begin to | | disappear, not the supersession of their cleavage, but their | | simultaneous collapse. The reciprocal erosion of town and | | country, product of the failure of the historical movement | | through which existing urban reality should have been | | surmounted, is visible in the eclectic melange of their | | decayed elements which cover the most industrially advanced | | zones. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 176. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Universal history was born in cities and reached maturity at | | the moment of the decisive victory of city over country. To | | Marx, one of the greatest revolutionary merits of the | | bourgeoisie was “the subjection of the country to the city” | | whose very air emancipates. But if the history of the city is | | the history of freedom, it is also the history of tyranny, of | | state administration that controls the countryside and the | | city itself. The city could as yet only struggle for | | historical freedom, but not possess it. The city is the locus | | of history because it is conscious of the past and also | | concentrates the social power that makes the historical | | undertaking possible. The present tendency to liquidate the | | city is thus merely another expression of the delay in the | | subordination of the economy to historical consciousness and | | in the unification of society reassuming the powers that were | | detached from it. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 177. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | “The countryside shows the exact opposite: isolation and | | separation” (German Ideology). Urbanism destroys cities and | | reestablishes a pseudo-countryside which lacks the natural | | relations of the old countryside as well as the direct social | | relations which were directly challenged by the historical | | city. A new artificial peasantry is recreated by the | | conditions of housing and spectacular control in today’s | | “organized territory”: the geographic dispersal and | | narrowmindedness that always kept the peasantry from | | undertaking independent action and from affirming itself as a | | creative historical force again today become characteristics | | of the producers–the movement of a world which they | | themselves produce remaining as completely beyond their reach | | as the natural rhythm of tasks was for the agrarian society. | | But when this peasantry, which was the unshakable foundation | | of “Oriental despotism” and whose very fragmentation called | | for bureaucratic centralization reemerges as a product of the | | conditions of growth of modern state bureaucracy, its apathy | | must now be historically manufactured and maintained; natural | | ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle of | | error. The “new towns” of the technological pseudo-peasantry | | clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the | | historical time on which they are built; their motto could | | be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever | | has.” It is obviously because history, which must be | | liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the | | forces of historical absence begin to compose their own | | exclusive landscape. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 178. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | History, which threatens this twilight world, is also the | | force which could subject space to lived time. Proletarian | | revolution is the critique of human geography through which | | individuals and communities have to create places and events | | suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their | | labor, but of their total history. In this game’s changing | | space, and in the freely chosen variations in the game’s | | rules, the autonomy of place can be rediscovered without the | | reintroduction of an exclusive attachment to the land, thus | | bringing back the reality of the voyage and of life | | understood as a voyage which contains its entire meaning | | within itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 179. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not | | itself urbanistic, technological or esthetic. It is the | | decision to reconstruct the entire environment in accordance | | with the needs of the power of the Workers’ Councils, of the | | anti-statist dictatorship of the proletariat, of enforceable | | dialogue. And the power of the Councils which can be | | effective only if it transforms existing conditions in their | | entirety, cannot assign itself a smaller task if it wants to | | be recognized and to recognize itself in its world. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 8 “Negation and Consumption Within Culture” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Do you seriously think we shall live long enough to see a | | political revolution? – we, the contemporaries of these | | Germans? My friend, you believe what you want to believe.... | | Let us judge Germany on the basis of its present history – | | and surely you are not going to object that all its history | | is falsified, or that all its present public life does not | | reflect the actual state of the people? Read whatever papers | | you please, and you cannot fail to be convinced that we never | | stop (and you must concede that the censorship prevents no | | one from stopping) celebrating the freedom and national | | happiness that we enjoy... - Ruge to Marx, March 1843. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 180. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In the historical society divided into classes, culture is | | the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of the | | lived; which is to say that culture is the power of | | generalization existing apart, as division of intellectual | | labor and as intellectual labor of division. Culture detaches | | itself from the unity of the society of myth “when the power | | of unification disappears from the life of man and when | | opposites lose their living relation and interaction and | | acquire autonomy... (Hegel’s Treatise on the Differences | | between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling). By gaining its | | independence, culture begins an imperialist movement of | | enrichment which is at the same time the decline of its | | independence. The history which creates the relative autonomy | | of culture and the ideological illusions about this autonomy | | also expresses itself as history of culture. And the entire | | victorious history of culture can be understood as the | | history of the revelation of its inadequacy, as a march | | toward its self-suppression. Culture is the locus of the | | search for lost unity. In this search for unity, culture as a | | separate sphere is obliged to negate itself. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 181. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the | | principle of internal cultural development in historical | | societies, can be carried on only through the permanent | | victory of innovation. Yet cultural innovation is carried by | | nothing other than the total historical movement which, by | | becoming conscious of its totality, tends to supersede its | | own cultural presuppositions and moves toward the suppression | | of all separation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 182. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The growth of knowledge about society, which includes the | | understanding of history as the heart of culture, derives | | from itself an irreversible knowledge, which is expressed by | | the destruction of God. But this “first condition of any | | critique” is also the first obligation of a critique without | | end. When it is no longer possible to maintain a single rule | | of conduct, every result of culture forces culture to advance | | toward its dissolution. Like philosophy at the moment when it | | gained its full autonomy, every discipline which becomes | | autonomous has to collapse, first of all as a pretention to | | explain social totality coherently, and finally even as a | | fragmented tool which can be used within its own boundaries. | | The lack of rationality of separate culture is the element | | which condemns it to disappear, because within it the victory | | of the rational is already present as a requirement. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 183. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Culture grew out of the history which abolished the way of | | life of the old world, but as a separate sphere it is still | | no more than perceptible intelligence and communication, | | which remain partial in a partially historical society. It is | | the sense of a world which hardly makes sense. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 184. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The end of cultural history manifests itself on two opposite | | sides: the project of its supersession in total history, and | | the organization of its preservation as a dead object in | | spectacular contemplation. One of these movements has linked | | its fate to social critique, the other to the defense of | | class power. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 185. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The two sides of the end of culture–in all the aspects of | | knowledge as well as in all the aspects of perceptible | | representations exist in a unified manner in what used to be | | art in the most general sense. In the case of knowledge, the | | accumulation of branches of fragmentary knowledge, which | | become unusable because the approval of existing conditions | | must finally renounce knowledge of itself, confronts the | | theory of praxis which alone holds the truth of them all | | since it alone holds the secret of their use. In the case of | | representations, the critical self-destruction of society’s | | former common language confronts its artificial recomposition | | in the commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of | | the non-lived. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 186. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When society loses the community of the society of myth, it | | must lose all the references of a really common language | | until the time when the rifts within the inactive community | | can be surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical | | community. When art, which was the common language of social | | inaction, becomes independent art in the modern sense, | | emerging from its original religious universe and becoming | | individual production of separate works, it too experiences | | the movement that dominates the history of the entirety of | | separate culture. The affirmation of its independence is the | | beginning of its disintegration. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 187. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The loss of the language of communication is positively | | expressed by the modern movement of decomposition of all art, | | its formal annihilation. This movement expresses negatively | | the fact that a common language must be rediscovered no | | longer in the unilateral conclusion which, in the art of the | | historical society, always arrived too late, speaking to | | others about what was lived without real dialogue, and | | admitting this deficiency of life but it must be rediscovered | | in praxis, which unifies direct activity and its language. | | The problem is to actually possess the community of dialogue | | and the game with time which have been represented by | | poetico-artistic works. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 188. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When art, become independent, depicts its world in dazzling | | colors, a moment of life has grown old and it cannot be | | rejuvenated with dazzling colors. It can only be evoked as a | | memory. The greatness of art begins to appear only at the | | dusk of life. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 189. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The historical time which invades art expressed itself first | | of all in the sphere of art itself, starting with the | | baroque. Baroque is the art of a world which has lost its | | center: the last mythical order, in the cosmos and in | | terrestrial government, accepted by the Middle Ages–the unity | | of Christianity and the phantom of an Empire has fallen. The | | art of the change must carry within itself the ephemeral | | principle it discovers in the world. It chose, said Eugenio | | d’Ors, “life against eternity.” Theater and the festival, the | | theatrical festival, are the outstanding achievements of the | | baroque where every specific artistic expression becomes | | meaningful only with reference to the setting of a | | constructed place, a construction which is its own center of | | unification; this center is the passage, which is inscribed | | as a threatened equilibrium in the dynamic disorder of | | everything. The somewhat excessive importance given to the | | concept of the baroque in the contemporary discussion of | | esthetics is an expression of the awareness that artistic | | classicism is impossible: for three centuries the attempts to | | realize a normative classicism or neoclassicism were no more | | than brief artificial constructions speaking the external | | language of the State, the absolute monarchy, or the | | revolutionary bourgeoisie in Roman clothes. What followed the | | general path of the baroque, from romanticism to cubism, was | | ultimately an ever more individualized art of negation | | perpetually renewing itself to the point of the fragmentation | | and complete negation of the artistic sphere. The | | disappearance of historical art, which was linked to the | | internal communication of an elite and had its | | semi-independent social basis in the partly playful | | conditions still lived by the last aristocracies, also | | expresses the fact that capitalism possesses the first class | | power which admits itself stripped of any ontological | | quality, a power which, rooted in the simple management of | | the economy, is equally the loss of all human mastery. The | | baroque, artistic creation’s long-lost unity, is in some way | | rediscovered in the current consumption of the totality of | | past art. When all past art is recognized and sought | | historically and retrospectively constituted into a world | | art, it is relativized into a global disorder which in turn | | constitutes a baroque edifice on a higher level, an edifice | | in which the very production of baroque art merges with all | | its revivals. The arts of all civilizations and all epochs | | can be known and accepted together for the first time. Once | | this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes | | possible, it is also the end of the world of art. In this age | | of museums, when artistic communication can no longer exist, | | all the former moments of art can be admitted equally, | | because they no longer suffer from the loss of their specific | | conditions of communication in the current general loss of | | the conditions of communication. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 190. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | As a negative movement which seeks the supersession of art in | | a historical society where history is not yet lived, art in | | the epoch of its dissolution is simultaneously an art of | | change and the pure expression of impossible change. The more | | grandiose its reach, the more its true realization is beyond | | it. This art is perforce avant-garde, and it is not. Its | | avant-garde is its disappearance. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 191. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dadaism and surrealism are the two currents which mark the | | end of modern art. They are contemporaries, though only in a | | relatively conscious manner, of the last great assault of the | | revolutionary proletarian movement; and the defeat of this | | movement, which left them imprisoned in the same artistic | | field whose decrepitude they had announced, is the basic | | reason for their immobilization. Dadaism and surrealism are | | at once historically related and opposed to each other. This | | opposition, which each of them considered to be its most | | important and radical contribution, reveals the internal | | inadequacy of their critique, which each developed | | one-sidedly. Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing | | it; surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it. | | The critical position later elaborated by the Situationists | | has shown that the suppression and the realization of art are | | inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 192. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Spectacular consumption which preserves congealed past | | culture, including the recuperated repetition of its negative | | manifestations, openly becomes in the cultural sector what it | | is implicitly in its totality: the communication of the | | incommunicable. The flagrant destruction of language is | | flatly acknowledged as an officially positive value because | | the point is to advertise reconciliation with the dominant | | state of affairs–and here all communication is joyously | | proclaimed absent. The critical truth of this destruction the | | real life of modern poetry and art is obviously hidden, since | | the spectacle, whose function is to make history forgotten | | within culture, applies, in the pseudo-novelty of its | | modernist means, the very strategy which constitutes its | | core. Thus a school of neo-literature, which simply admits | | that it contemplates the written word for its own sake, can | | present itself as something new. Furthermore, next to the | | simple proclamation of the sufficient beauty of the decay of | | the communicable, the most modern tendency of spectacular | | culture–and the one most closely linked to the repressive | | practice of the general organization of society–seeks to | | remake, by means of “team projects,” a complex neo-artistic | | environment made up of decomposed elements: notably in | | urbanism’s attempts to integrate artistic debris or | | esthetico- technical hybrids. This is an expression, on the | | level of spectacular pseudo-culture, of developed | | capitalism’s general project, which aims to recapture the | | fragmented worker as a “personality well integrated in the | | group,” a tendency described by American sociologists | | (Riesman, Whyte, etc.). It is the same project everywhere: a | | restructuring without community. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 193. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must | | also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. | | Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of this tendency, | | has calculated that the complex process of production, | | distribution and consumption of knowledge already gets 29% of | | the yearly national product in the United States; and he | | predicts that in the second half of this century culture will | | be the driving force in the development of the economy, a | | role played by the automobile in the first half of this | | century, and by railroads in the second half of the previous | | century. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 194. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | All the branches of knowledge, which continue to develop as | | the thought of the spectacle, have to justify a society | | without justification, and constitute a general science of | | false consciousness. This thought is completely conditioned | | by the fact that it cannot and will not investigate its own | | material basis in the spectacular system. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 195. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The system’s thought, the thought of the social organization | | of appearance, is itself obscured by the generalized | | sub-communication which it defends. It does not know that | | conflict is at the origin of all things in its world. | | Specialists in the power of the spectacle, an absolute power | | within its system of language without response, are | | absolutely corrupted by their experience of contempt and of | | the success of contempt; and they find their contempt | | confirmed by their knowledge of the contemptible man, who the | | spectator really is. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 196. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Within the specialized thought of the spectacular system, a | | new division of tasks takes place to the extent that the | | improvement of this system itself poses new problems: on one | | hand, modern sociology which studies separation by means of | | the conceptual and material instruments of separation itself, | | undertakes the spectacular critique of the spectacle; on the | | other hand, in the various disciplines where structuralism | | takes root, the apology for the spectacle institutes itself | | as the thought of non-thought, as the official amnesia of | | historical practice. Nevertheless, the false despair of | | non-dialectical critique and the false optimism of pure | | advertising of the system are identical in that they are both | | submissive thought. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 197. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The sociology which began, first in the United States, to | | focus discussion on the living conditions brought about by | | present development, compiled a great deal of empirical data, | | but could not fathom the truth of its subject because it | | lacked the critique immanent in this subject. As a result, | | the sincerely reformist tendency of this sociology resorts to | | morality, common sense, appeals devoid of all relevance to | | practical measures, etc. Because this type of critique is | | ignorant of the negative at the core of its world, it insists | | on describing only a sort of negative surplus which it finds | | deplorably annoying on the surface, like an irrational | | parasitic proliferation. This indignant good will, even if | | genuine, ends up blaming only the external consequences of | | the system, yet thinks itself critical, forgetting the | | essentially apologetic character of its assumptions and | | method. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 198. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Those who denounce the absurdity or the perils of incitement | | to waste in the society of economic abundance do not | | understand the purpose of waste. They condemn with | | ingratitude, in the name of economic rationality, the good | | irrational guardians without whom the power of this economic | | rationality would collapse. For example, Boorstin, in | | L’Image, describes the commercial consumption of the American | | spectacle but never reaches the concept of spectacle because | | he thinks he can exempt private life, or the notion of “the | | honest commodity,” from this disastrous exaggeration. He does | | not understand that the commodity itself made the laws whose | | “honest” application leads to the distinct reality of private | | life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social | | consumption of images. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 199. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Boorstin describes the excesses of a world which has become | | foreign to us as if they were excesses foreign to our world. | | But the “normal” basis of social life, to which he implicitly | | refers when he characterizes the superficial reign of images | | with psychological and moral judgments as a product of “our | | extravagant pretentions,” has no reality whatever, either in | | his book or in his epoch. Boorstin cannot understand the full | | profundity of a society of images because the real human life | | he speaks of is for him in the past, including the past of | | religious resignation. The truth of this society is nothing | | other than the negation of this society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 200. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The sociology which thinks that an industrial rationality | | functioning separately can be isolated from the whole of | | social life can go so far as to isolate the techniques of | | reproduction and transmission from the general industrial | | movement. Thus Boorstin finds that the results he depicts are | | caused by the unfortunate, almost fortuitous encounter of an | | oversized technical apparatus for image diffusion with an | | excessive attraction to the pseudo-sensational on the part of | | the people of our epoch. Thus the spectacle would be caused | | by the fact that modern man is too much of a spectator. | | Boorstin fails to understand that the proliferation of the | | prefabricated “pseudo-events” which he denounces flows from | | the simple fact that, in the massive reality of present | | social life, men do not themselves live events. Because | | history itself haunts modern society like a spectre, | | pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of | | consumption of life in order to preserve the threatened | | equilibrium of present frozen time. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 201. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The assertion of the definitive stability of a short period | | of frozen historical time is the undeniable basis, proclaimed | | consciously and unconsciously, of the present tendency toward | | a structuralist systematization. The vantage point from which | | anti-historical structuralist thought views the world is that | | of the eternal presence of a system which was never created | | and which will never end. The dream of the dictatorship of a | | preexisting unconscious structure over all social praxis | | could be erroneously drawn from models of structures | | elaborated by linguistics and anthropology (and even the | | analysis of the functioning of capitalism)–models already | | misunderstood in this context–only because the academic | | imagination of minor functionaries, easily overwhelmed and | | completely entrenched in the awestruck celebration of the | | existing system, flatly reduces all reality to the existence | | of the system. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 202. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In order to understand “structuralist” categories, one must | | keep in mind, as with every historical social science, that | | the categories express forms as well as conditions of | | existence. Just as one cannot appraise the value of a man in | | terms of the conception he has of himself, one cannot | | appraise–and admire–this particular society by taking as | | indisputably true the language it speaks to itself; “...we | | cannot judge such epochs of transformation by their own | | consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must | | rather be explained in the light of the contradictions of | | material life...” Structure is the daughter of present power. | | Structuralism is the thought guaranteed by the State which | | regards the present conditions of spectacular “communication” | | as an absolute. Its method of studying the code of messages | | is itself nothing but the product, and the acknowledgement, | | of a society where communication exists in the form of a | | cascade of hierarchic signals. Consequently it is not | | structuralism which serves to prove the transhistorical | | validity of the society of the spectacle; it is on the | | contrary the society of the spectacle imposing itself as | | massive reality which serves to prove the cold dream of | | structuralism. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 203. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The critical concept of spectacle can undoubtedly also be | | vulgarized into a commonplace hollow formula of | | sociologico-political rhetoric to explain and abstractly | | denounce everything, and thus serve as a defense of the | | spectacular system. It is obvious that no idea can lead | | beyond the existing spectacle, but only beyond the existing | | ideas about the spectacle. To effectively destroy the society | | of the spectacle, what is needed is men putting a practical | | force into action. The critical theory of the spectacle can | | be true only by uniting with the practical current of | | negation in society, and this negation, the resumption of | | revolutionary class struggle, will become conscious of itself | | by developing the critique of the spectacle which is the | | theory of its real conditions (the practical conditions of | | present oppression), and inversely by unveiling the secret of | | what this negation can be. This theory does not expect | | miracles from the working class. It envisages the new | | formulation and the realization of proletarian imperatives as | | a long-range task. To make an artificial distinction between | | theoretical and practical struggle since on the basis defined | | here, the very formulation and communication of such a theory | | cannot even be conceived without a rigorous practice it is | | certain that the obscure and difficult path of critical | | theory must also be the lot of the practical movement acting | | on the scale of society. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 204. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Critical theory must be communicated in its own language. It | | is the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical | | in form as it is in content. It is critique of the totality | | and historical critique. It is not “the nadir of writing” but | | its inversion. It is not a negation of style, but the style | | of negation. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 205. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In its very style. the exposition of dialectical theory is a | | scandal and an abomination in terms of the rules and the | | corresponding tastes of the dominant language, because when | | it uses existing concrete concepts it is simultaneously aware | | of their rediscovered fluidity, their necessary destruction. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 206. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | This style which contains its own critique must express the | | domination of the present critique over its entire past. The | | very mode of exposition of dialectical theory displays the | | negative spirit within it. “Truth is not like a product in | | which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that made | | it” (Hegel). This theoretical consciousness of movement, in | | which the movement’s very trace must be evident, manifests | | itself by the inversion of the established relations between | | concepts and by the diversion of all the acquisitions of | | previous critique. The inversion of the genetive is this | | expression of historical revolutions, consigned to the form | | of thought, which was considered Hegel’s epigrammatic style. | | The young Marx, recommending the technique Feuerbach had | | systematically used of replacing the subject with the | | predicate, achieved the most consistent use of this | | insurrectional style, drawing the misery of philosophy out of | | the philosophy of misery. Diversion leads to the subversion | | of past critical conclusions which were frozen into | | respectable truths, namely transformed into lies. Kierkegaard | | already used it deliberately, adding his own denunciation to | | it: “But despite all the tours and detours, just as jam | | always returns to the pantry, you always end up by sliding in | | a little word which isn’t yours and which bothers you by the | | memory it awakens” (Philosophical Fragments). It is the | | obligation of distance toward what was falsified into | | official truth which determines the use of diversion, as was | | acknowledged by Kierkegaard in the same book: “Only one more | | comment on your numerous allusions aiming at all the grief I | | mix into my statements of borrowed sayings. I do not deny it | | here nor will I deny that it was voluntary and that in a new | | continuation to this pamphlet, if I ever write it, I intend | | to name the object by its real name and to clothe the problem | | in historical attire.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 207. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the | | improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It | | embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, | | erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 208. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Diversion is the opposite of quotation, of the theoretical | | authority which is always falsified by the mere fate of | | having become a quotation a fragment torn from its context, | | from its movement, and ultimately from the global framework | | of its epoch and from the precise choice, whether exactly | | recognized or erroneous, which it was in this framework. | | Diversion is the fluid language of anti-ideology. It appears | | in communication which knows it cannot pretend to guarantee | | anything definitively and in itself. At its peak, it is | | language which cannot be confirmed by any former or | | supra-critical reference. On the contrary, its own coherence, | | in itself and with the applicable facts, can confirm the | | former core of truth which it brings out. Diversion has | | grounded its cause on nothing external to its own truth as | | present critique. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 209. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | What openly presents itself as diverted in theoretical form, | | denying the durable autonomy of the sphere of the | | theoretically expressed by introducing there, through this | | violence, the action which upsets and overthrows the entire | | existing order, reminds us that the existence of theory is | | nothing in itself, and that it can know itself only through | | historical action and the historical correction which is its | | real counterpart. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 210. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Only the real negation of culture can preserve its meaning. | | It can no longer be cultural. Thus it is what in some way | | remains at the level of culture, but with a completely | | different meaning. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 211. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture | | presents itself as a unified critique in that it dominates | | the whole of culture, its knowledge as well as its poetry, | | and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique | | of the social totality. This unified theoretical critique | | goes alone to meet unified social practice. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chapter 9 “Ideology Materialized” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, | | and by the fact that it exists for another | | self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being | | acknowledged or “recognized.” - Hegel, The Phenomenology of | | Mind | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 212. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society in | | the conflict-laden course of history. Ideological facts were | | never a simple chimaera, but rather a deformed consciousness | | of realities, and in this form they have been real factors | | which set in motion real deforming acts; all the more so when | | the materialization, in the form of spectacle, of the | | ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized | | economic production in practice confounds social reality with | | an ideology which has tailored all reality in terms of its | | model. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 213. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | When ideology, the abstract will and the illusion of the | | universal, is legitimized by the universal abstraction and | | the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society, it | | is no longer a voluntaristic struggle of the partial, but its | | victory. At this point, ideological pretention acquires a | | sort of flat positivistic exactitude: it is no longer a | | historical choice but a fact. In this type of assertion, the | | particular names of ideologies have disappeared. Even the | | role of specifically ideological labor in the service of the | | system comes to be considered as nothing more than the | | recognition of an “epistemological base” that pretends to be | | beyond all ideological phenomena. Materialized ideology | | itself has no name, just as it has no expressible historical | | program. This is another way of saying that the history of | | ideologies is over. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 214. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ideology, whose whole internal logic led to “total ideology” | | in Mannheim’s sense the despotism of the fragment which | | imposes itself as pseudo-knowledge of a frozen totality, the | | totalitarian vision–is now completed in the immobilized | | spectacle of non-history. Its completion is also its | | disintegration throughout society. With the practical | | disintegration of this society, ideology–the final unreason | | that blocks access to historical life–must disappear. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 215. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes | | and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological | | systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real | | life. The spectacle is materially “the expression of the | | separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the | | “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the | | spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings | | to whom man is subservient... grows coextensively with the | | mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion | | which has turned need against life. “The need for money is | | thus the real need produced by political economy, and the | | only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical | | Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the | | principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) | | conceives as the principle of money: it is “the life of what | | is dead, moving within itself.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 216. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | In opposition to the project summarized in the Theses on | | Feuerbach (the realization of philosophy in praxis which | | supersedes the opposition between idealism and materialism), | | the spectacle simultaneously preserves, and imposes within | | the pseudo-concrete of its universe, the ideological | | characteristics of materialism and idealism. The | | contemplative side of the old materialism which conceives the | | world as representation and not as activity–and which | | ultimately idealizes matter–is fulfilled in the spectacle, | | where concrete things are automatically the masters of social | | life. Reciprocally, the dreamed activity of idealism is | | equally fulfilled in the spectacle, through the technical | | mediation of signs and signals-which ultimately materialize | | an abstract ideal. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 217. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia, established | | by Gabel (La Fausse Conscience) must be placed in this | | economic process of materialization of ideology. Society has | | become what ideology already was. The removal of praxis and | | the anti-dialectical false consciousness which accompanies it | | are imposed during every hour of daily life subjected to the | | spectacle; this must be understood as a systematic | | organization of the “failure of the faculty of encounter” and | | as its replacement by a hallucinatory social fact: the false | | consciousness of encounter, the “illusion of encounter.” In a | | society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, | | every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality. | | Ideology is at home; separation has built its world. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 218. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | “In clinical charts of schizophrenia,” says Gabel, “the decay | | of the dialectic of totality (with dissociation as its | | extreme form) and the decay of the dialectic of becoming | | (with catatonia as its extreme form) seem solidly united.” | | The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened | | universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which | | his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers | | who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the | | politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its | | entirety, is his “mirror image.” Here the stage is set with | | the false exit of generalized autism. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 219. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and | | world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence | | of the world and it obliterates the boundaries between true | | and false by driving all lived truth below the real presence | | of fraud ensured by the organization of appearance. One who | | passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed toward | | a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by | | resorting to magical techniques. The acceptance and | | consumption of commodities are at the heart of this | | pseudo-response to a communication without response. The need | | to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the | | infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his | | fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a | | completely different pathological level, “the abnormal need | | for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of | | being on the margin of existence.” | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 220. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | If the logic of false consciousness cannot know itself truly, | | the search for critical truth about the spectacle must | | simultaneously be a true critique. It must struggle in | | practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle | | and admit that it is absent where they are absent. The | | abstract desire for immediate effectiveness accepts the laws | | of the ruling thought, the exclusive point of view of the | | present, when it throws itself into reformist compromises or | | trashy pseudo-revolutionary common actions. Thus madness | | reappears in the very posture which pretends to fight it. | | Conversely, the critique which goes beyond the spectacle must | | know how to wait. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 221. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth this | | is what the self-emancipation of our epoch consists of. This | | “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot | | be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the | | atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by | | the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all | | classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of | | realized democracy, the Council, in which practical theory | | controls itself and sees its own action. This is possible | | only where individuals are “directly linked to universal | | history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own | | conditions victorious. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Guy Debord Archive | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ < back