The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it (Debord, ibid., thesis 72).
The theory of the spectacle is able to conceptualise the reciprocal implication, but it conceptualises it as spectacle. As spectacle, this implication is an ‘exterior’ to the relation between classes, an ‘exterior’ to the contradiction which opposes them. Having posed the unity of the capitalist mode of production as having as its content the very division between classes, Debord can dismiss the struggles between the powers which constituted themselves for the management of the same socio-economical system as struggles which can not escape the capitalist mode of production. But Debord can not conceive of this unity without its mask, without the spectacle. This allows him to criticise the forms of representation of this reciprocal implication, while maintaining a reality of the proletariat which, on the one hand, is implicated with capital and exists only in this implication and, on the other hand, irreducibly, remains in itself essentially revolutionary. Here lies the content and the essential function of the concept of spectacle.
Thus we have here the entire history of the struggles of the ‘classical workers’ movement’ which become, as far as they now take place in ‘modern capitalism’ mere ‘sham spectacular struggles between rival forms of separate power…’ (Ibid., thesis 56). The concept of spectacle becomes, for us, (that is to say: now) a concept critical of programmatism because, on the one hand, it posits the unity of the division of the capitalist mode of production into classes, and, on the other hand, it implies that, for as long as the proletariat does not put its own existence into question in its struggle against capital, it can only remain in the framework of this unity, only demanding a different management of the same system. The unity is simultaneously the expression of a real basis and something that only exists in its spectacular concealment; in itself, the concept of spectacle implies a duality of level between the real and its concealment. If the concept of spectacle is for us a concept critical of programmatism (the proposition ‘of’ must here be understood in both ways, that is: criticizing it while at the same time remaining part of it), it represents in the SI the attempt, momentarily successful (thanks to their critique of the economy), at a synthesis between a non-programmatic project and the production of this project from a problematic that remains programmatic. The spectacle formulates the contradiction between classes as being their reciprocal implication while maintaining the essentially revolutionary reality of the proletariat. The reciprocal implication and the revolutionary nature become fixed in their opposition: the reciprocal implication is spectacular, exists only as mystification, and what the spectacle conceals (the lived, the authentic), is the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. Momentarily, this coexistence appears legitimate.
It is for this last reason that we will only untangle the threads of the theory of the spectacle after having made a detour, that is to say after having looked at it as a theory which showed its legitimacy in the crisis of the previous cycle of struggles, essentially as an analysis of May ‘68. To criticize the theory of the spectacle as a pure theoretical object, without showing its nature, at a precise historical moment (as we have always tried to do until now) as an attempt at solving the dead-ends of programmatism, therefore at theoretically formulating a moment in class struggles and activity within it, is a rather vain enterprise.
Nonetheless, in the space of a week millions of people had cast off the weight of alienating conditions, the routine of survival, ideological falsifications, and the inverted world of the spectacle. For the first time since the Commune of 1871, and with a far more promising future, the real individual was absorbing the abstract citizen into his life, his work, and his individual relationships, becoming a ‘species-being’ and thereby recognizing his own powers as social powers. (Viénet, ibid., p. 135).
From this general analysis of May ‘68 Vienet could draw from the movement the following main lesson:
It was these subjective obstacles that prevented the working class from speaking for itself (Ibid., p. 155)
The question that necessarily had to arise from May ‘68 – how can a class which acts as a class abolish itself? – could only, in the crisis of this first phase of real subsumption of labour under capital, remain unresolved, could only show the movement’s most advanced expression and its limits. Programmatism, as the general form and content of the struggle of the proletariat, showed its limits and the necessity of its overcoming. The greatest merit of the situationist theory is to have identified the problem; its great limit, however, is to have tried to solve it without escaping programmatism. The SI developed at that point in time an explicit theory of the duality of the proletariat: indeed, its affirmation as a class revealed a revolutionary nature which was coming into contradiction with, and was determined to be the abolition of, its existence within capital. A hasty analysis would only see in this the continuation of the problematic of the historic ultra-left. In fact, the SI goes further with its theory of the proletariat as subject and as representation. In affirming itself as subject (that is to say, as the class of consciousness, see above), the proletariat not only enters in contradiction with its own existence as representation and as such abolishes itself, but also produces its existence as a class as being only this representation. Therefore, its affirmation as a subject is an overcoming of its existence as a class. Then, its affirmation as subject makes its existence as representation the totality of its existence as a class. In this way, its affirmation becomes its abolition, it affirms what it is, a subject (self-consciousness), but this affirmation, at the very moment it is made, transforms its representation, does not leave the other term unaltered, it bestows upon it the totality of its existence as a class. Out of such a problematic, it becomes possible to express the self-negation of the proletariat in a variety of programmatic forms.
The ‘wildcat general strike’, ‘beginnings of direct democracy’ ‘critique of all alienations’, ‘recognized desire for genuine dialogue’, ‘despise for all former conditions of existence’ (IS no. 12, pp. 3–4), all of them understood as the ’spontaneously councilist tendency of the movement’ were the manifestations of the return of the proletariat as subject. ‘We were only an hour away from the formation of the first Workers Council.’ (Ibid, p. 12) However, ‘the majority of the workers had not recognized the total significance of their own movement; and nobody else could do so in their place.’ (Ibid), the strike remained a ‘sum of isolations’ and ‘got stuck in a defensive position’ (Ibid., p. 25). As long as the alternative sees itself as situated between ‘the autonomous self-affirmation of the proletariat and the complete defeat of the movement’ (Ibid., p. 12), only a complete defeat of the movement is possible. It is this very situation that the IS tried to overcome theoretically. This attempt could only refer to a ‘Eucharistic’ understanding of the revolution:
By launching the wildcat strike the workers gave the lie to the liars who spoke in their name. In most of the factories they proved incapable of really speaking on their own behalf and of saying what they wanted. But in order to say what they want it is first necessary for the workers to create, through their own autonomous action, the concrete conditions that enable them to speak and act, conditions that now exist nowhere. The absence, almost everywhere, of such dialogue and of such linking up, as well as the lack of theoretical knowledge of the autonomous goals of proletarian class struggle (these two factors being able to develop only together), prevented the workers from expropriating the expropriators of their real life. (Ibid., p. 8)
The programmatic overcoming of programmatism functions on the reality-falsehood binary. In the situationist theory, this binary makes it possible to pose the negation of the proletariat as the appropriation of its real life, this insofar as the existence of the proletariat as a class in its implication with capital is dismissed as being part of ‘falsehood’. The SI maintains the proletariat as the revolutionary class (‘we are very 19th century’), it does not replace it by humanity, because the very division of its existence into reality and falsehood confers a revolutionary virtue to this reality (to be a revolutionary worker) when it affirms itself against its falsehood (reciprocal implication as representation of the proletariat): the proletariat abolishes itself as soon as it starts existing for itself. The SI has never conceived of communism as the management by the workers of the production ‘the pseudo-control of workers of their alienation’, communism is always posited as the construction of the human community through the abolition of exchange, of the commodity, of the division of society into classes, it is posited in its content rather than as a form of management. However, in order to reach this point, the SI remains a prisoner of the theoretical necessity of positing a moment in which the proletariat becomes its own object, a moment in its liberation, which explains the great importance of the form of the Council as being this existence for itself of the proletariat, this existence as subject-object, the proletariat class of consciousness as a form.
It is obvious that the SI no longer conceives the abolition of the proletariat as a stage following its affirmation, but as a content within its affirmation. This recalls Vienet’s affirmations quoted above in which he tries to synthesise the ‘occupation movement’ as an attempt, by man, the real individual, to absorb his social forces in his empirical life. We can only subscribe to such a definition of communism, provided it is made clear that the real life of the worker in the capitalist mode of production is not to be considered as a lie and, as corollary to this, that the fact that the real individual absorbs its own social forces is not to be considered as the revelation of the truth of the worker, that is to say providing we don’t consider that this real individual of communism pre-exists in the worker and that is one and the same as the latter as soon as it occurs to him to exist for himself rather than for capital. As we will now see, this is the very limit of the concept of spectacle, insofar as it presupposes against itself a reality that is already here, whose affirmation is the movement of the revolution itself.
The theory of the spectacle sets out to solve the following enigma: the capitalist society is divided into antagonistic classes but at the same time this society is a totality, which means that these antagonistic classes, and their antagonism itself, exist in this totality and constitute it as such. This is the question that is central to all revolutionary theories. This is from this standpoint rather than !!as a ‘social critique’ type of subtle analysis!! that we take into consideration the theory of the spectacle. The starting point of this theory is simple: the lived, the real, the relations that individuals define between themselves, become estranged from them as the representation and mystification of their real relations, in such a way that these individuals end up living in the forms and categories of this representation which become the reality and impose itself as the dominant form of life; it is an ideology that has become real. However, from this ‘simple’ starting point immediately arise complicated questions. The main ones being the question of the relation between the ‘real’ and its “representation’, and the one of the status of the ‘observer’ of this process. Can we speak of a reality that remains despite and against the spectacle? Is the relation between the ‘spectacle’ and ‘reality’ only one of mystification, of concealment? What is the relation between the observer and the object that is observed (the repressed question of all theories of fetishism)?
Most of the time, the SI contents itself with a trivial conception of the spectacle, one which opposes a reality, irreducible, to its representation, one about reality and its occultation. This is the conception developed by Vaneigem in Basic Banalities (SI n°7 and 8), in Theo Frey’s text (n°10) and Jean Garnault’s (ibid). After grounding privative appropriation in nature (we will come back to this objectivism of the SI: one of the must obvious aspect of its theory, and one of its best kept secret), Vaneigem defines it as ‘the appropriation of things by means of the appropriation of people’ (op cit). Which would mean that: ‘privative appropriation entails an organization of appearance by which its radical contradictions can be dissimulated: the servants must see themselves as degraded reflections of the master’ Vaneigem ends up trying to solve a problem that only exists for the ideologists: the problem of ‘volontary servitude’ As soon as consciousness and conscious being are equated, the question of ‘voluntary slavery’ disappears and, reciprocally, the obligation to hide the contradictions, however ‘radical’ they may be. Contrary to the ‘myth’ which provided society with an almost infallible coherence, the spectacle, a desacralized form of myth, is vulnerable. Human relations, which used to be dissolved in divine transcendence, revealed their materiality.
Their materiality [of human relations] was revealed and, as the capricious laws of the economy succeed those of Providence, the power of men began to appear behind the power of gods. Today a multitude of roles corresponds to the mythical role everyone once played under the divine spotlight. Though their masks are now human faces, these roles still require both actors and extras to deny their real lives in accordance with the dialectic of real and mythical sacrifice. The spectacle is nothing but desacralized and fragmented myth. It forms the armour of a power (which could also be called essential mediation) that becomes vulnerable to every blow once it no longer succeeds in dissimulating (in the cacophony where all cries drown out each other and form an overall harmony) its nature as privative appropriation (ibid.)
The spectacle is here explicitly defined as an organisation of appearances that constrains to the negation of real life, it is a armour that masks the governing power, whose vulnerability lies in the fragility of its dissimulation of reality. We are here dealing, under the verbosity, with a rather simplistic conception of mystification, of truth and false. Truth have to prevail, just because it is truth.
By defining the spectacle as an accumulation of fragmentary roles, Vaneigem defines everyday life as the locus of the spectacle, but here everyday life has invaded everything. It does not allow to reach the standpoint of the totality to understand the capitalist relations of production and understand exploitation, it is one and the same with the totality. All social life is exposed as being only everyday life. For Vaneigem, the notion of roles is a fundamental one, and to understand the spectacle as a succession of roles, of fragments, is to understand its subversion insofar as it then betrays itself as an artifice. What follows could not be more simple:
But lived experience cannot so easily be reduced to a succession of empty configurations Resistance to the external organization of life, that is to the organization of life as survival, contains more poetry, etc. (ibid)
If the lived is ‘irreducible’ (the adjective is used a bit later), it is because the spectacle is only an appearance, it does not really shape the lived of capitalist society, which means that the classes and all these things are themselves only appearances. The spectacle is such a fragile appearance and the passivity it imposes defines so little the individuals of the capitalist society that even the stars of the spectacle want to escape it, and Vaneigem gives us the example of Brigitte Bardot’s soul-searching (we feel real tenderness for the BB of the 60s, but still…) or the tricks of Fidel Castro (pictured as a ruler ‘criticizing its own power’, both of them “demanding their status as free beings” to be recognised’ (ibid).
In Basic Banalities, everyday life has a double status. On the one hand, it is where the battle between the appearance and the lived takes place, but on the other hand it is also what by nature opposes the spectacle, what escapes the spectacular categories. It is the misery of the spectacle which reveals the existence of an everyday life which, despite its misery, is where is expressed the ‘authentic lived’. Vaneigem can well say that ‘the spectacle that imposes its norms on lived experience itself arises out of ‘lived experience’, he always comes back to a simple and rigid opposition between the spectacle and the ‘authentic lived’, an irreducible category which is simply linked to life, desires, etc… ‘Elements born of lived experience are acknowledged only at the level of the spectacle, where they are expressed in the form of stereotypes, although such expression is constantly contested and refuted in and by lived experience’.(ibid). The capitalist mode of production has become an ectoplasm, we are even left wondering how it can have been lasting for so long. We are here very far from the analysis of fetishism that Marx developed in his Theories on Surplus-Value and that we used as a basis for the definition of the economy (see above). What Vaneigem does not grasp is the very reality of the spectacle, and, therefore, the formalisation of the unity of the capitalist society into the reproduction of one of its pole, capital. (Even if it is ‘as spectacle’, this concept acknowledges the reciprocal implication between the proletariat and capital and the contradiction between them – which for us represents the very importance of this concept). However, the contradiction between appearance and authentic life remains one between exterior elements with no necessary relation between them. What’s more, this exteriority between the elements of the ‘contradiction’ makes it possible to no longer consider it as a contradiction between classes, insofar as the contradiction is no longer a motion internal to the capitalist mode of production but the opposition to it of something that is other; the only problem of capital is then to keep this other !!‘confined/imprisonned’!!. The ‘politics’ or, using a situationist language, the ‘strategy’ that ends this analysis reveals, as usual, all its meaning. Its aim is to accelerate a crisis in the intelligentsia that would provoke a rupture in the appearance and in the ideology, and then, to crown it all: ‘We will form a small, almost alchemical, experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be started.’ (ibid) In the last thesis of Basic Banalities, Vaneigem points to the text that follows his own in Issue 8, and that he considers as a commentary of his own text: A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds. In it Trocchi develops the possibility and the necessity to create experimental bases (“spontaneous universities’) within the intelligentsia. Difficult to be more idealistic! Lastly, the Editorial Notes of the 8th issue present in a few words all the limits of Vaneigem’s analysis ‘In Basic Banalities Vaneigem has elucidated the process of the dissolution of religious thought and has shown how its function as anaesthetic, hypnotic and tranquilizer (underlined by us) has been taken over, at a lower level, by ideology’.
The same dualistic conception of the spectacle is developed in the texts of Théo Frey and Jean Garnault, in issue n° 10. We insist on this analysis, because for us it is the dominant conception of the SI. In any case, it is the only conception of the spectacle that can be used immediately in a programmatic problematic, the only one allowing an understanding of ‘modern capitalism’ that can lead to the necessity of a formal organisation and to understanding theoretical work as having a role of demystification. We will see that the conception, far more complex, that Debord holds in The society of the spectacle results in such a theoretical tension within programmatism that it can only lead to the giving up of the theory of the spectacle itself, as it still wants to conceive of the capitalist mode of production as class struggle; that it condemns any separated organisation (and the SI itself) and any problematic based on the concept of demystification. This simply because Debord ends up conceiving of class struggle as only internal to the spectacle and has more and more difficulties to situate and define a point of view and an ‘object’ that would be exterior to the spectacle. At that point, either one abandons a conception of the capitalist mode of production understood as a contradiction between classes, or one abandons the concept of the spectacle which, taken rigorously, as it is, can not provide, from itself and in a way internal to it, a contradictory conception of society that would produce a revolutionary overcoming because it would be, according to the definition of the spectacle, a contradiction in itself. Unless one expects that the spectacle will produce its own collapse, but by saying that Debord leaves the field of communist theory.
Theo Frey’s text (n°10, p.33) is a caricature of what is exposed, in a more ‘subtle’ way, in Basic Banalities. The ‘conceptual framework’ is revealed from the very first sentence:
An insane society proposes to manage its future by spreading the use of technically improved and collective straight-jackets (houses, cities, real-estate developments), which it imposes on us as a remedy for its ills. We are invited to accept and to recognize this prefabricated ‘non-organic body’ as our own; Power intends to enclose the individual in another, radically different self.(op.cit.)
‘Society’ on one side, ‘we’ on the other, and ‘domination’ as the relation between the two. We will develop the critic of the theme of domination more at the beginning of next chapter, let’s just say for the moment that it rests on the separation between the individual and society, both considered as substances highly determined outside their very relation. This conception presupposes an individual predetermined outside its social existence, that is to say a substance of this individual that society, either dominates and constraint, according to critical theories, or fulfils, according to apologetic ones. We don’t need this to be in contradiction with capital: our own definition as particular individuals of this society is well enough.
This understanding of the spectacle presupposes the existence of a subject that is ‘non-spectacular’ and that corollary defines the spectacle as a certain use of existing technical means (the ‘straightjackets’). These very technical means, used by the authorities to subjugate us, are a means to our liberation.
Everywhere there is a spectacular clash between divergent economic theories and policies, but nowhere are the absurd imperatives of political economy itself challenged and bourgeois economic categories abolished in practice for the benefit of a free (post-economic) construction of situations, and therefore of all life, on the basis of the currently concentrated and squandered powers in ‘advanced’ societies. (op.cit.)
The SI never abandoned this vision of a revolution made possible by another use of existing technical means. What’s more, the revolutionary contradiction between the proletariat and capital is very often explained, and even based on, the very fact that these means exist now. This conception is present all along the theoretical development of the SI, from the critique of art in its first issues to the theme of pollution in the The Veritable Split… The SI could only break from it by putting into question its proclaimed raison d’être, what it said about itself as an ‘experimental practice’ All the theoretical evolution of the SI can be understood as the progressive suppression of its own conditions for existence, as the self-suppression of its theoretical bases, first with the elimination of the ‘artists’ followed by Debord’s problematic on the spectacle.
Theo Frey, like Vaneigem previously, seems to acknowledge the real becoming of the ideology which makes reality appear as inverted and distorted within reality itself (‘the real which appears within reality’, these are Frey’s words.) It would then be ‘an inverted world once and for all’ But Frey can not defend this position without putting into question his whole ‘conceptual framework’. The theory of the spectacle only holds if an ‘exterior’ is maintained, but at the same time its logic implies the reducing and the elimination of this exterior.
This modern process of reducing the gap between life and its representation for the benefit of a representation that turns back on its assumptions is merely an artificial, caricatured, spectacular resolution of real problems posed by the widespread revolutionary crisis of the modern world, a ‘simulacrum’ of resolution that will fall at the same time as the greater number of illusions that continue to foster it.(ibid)
What follows is that this world ‘once and for all inverted’, this real truly inverted within reality, always leaves a way out. This ‘real within reality’ is ‘factitious’ and only maintains itself as an ‘illusion’ that still abuses us a little but will not resist long to the ‘real problems’.
With the theory of the spectacle as an opposition between the real and the false, the authentic and the illusionary (even in the domain of wine and alcohol, see Debord’s Panegyrique), the SI gives us the key to the resolution of the problem we started from, that is the problem of the definition of the proletariat. This definition is not a problem for the SI. This opposition between the authentic and the illusionary is the general form of the contradiction that contains, in the capitalist mode of production, its overcoming as revolution. The proletariat, as for it, is constructed/derived from this contradiction as its social form of representation (the bearer of this general contradiction between true and false) rather than the revolutionary contradiction being derived from the situation of the proletariat in the capitalist mode of production. The mere ‘critique of society’ becomes then immediately the definition of the proletariat:
The ‘ruse of history’ is nevertheless such that the apparent early successes of this policing arrangement, an attenuation of the class struggle (in the former sense) and of the antagonism between city and countryside, disguise less and less the radical and hopeless proletarianization of the huge majority of the population, condemned to ‘live’ in the uniform conditions that constitute the bastardized and spectacular ‘urban’ milieu born of the break-up of the city (ibid).
Jean Garnault (‘The Root Structures of Reification’, SI, n° 10, p.36) brings to its conclusion this view that sees the spectacle as an opposition between reality and illusion.
It brings this view to its conclusion, because for him it no longer leads to a contradiction that would be univocal as for its overcoming, but to an alternative. Indeed, if the terms of an opposition are not linked by a necessary relation, the overcoming of the opposition must logically take the form of an alternative. Firsty, Garnault holds in the crudest possible way a view that sees the spectacle as a mystification, and even as a veil on reality. Because this view situates the terms as being completely separated from one another, it gives way to an alternative. Either the truly lived takes over, or does the ‘anthromorphosis of capital’ (a concept borrowed from the theoretical core of the magazine Invariance). However, Garnault can not bring himself to acknowledge this alternative, he posits the two possibilities simultaneously in modern capitalism, therefore making his text incoherent.
The commodity, like the bureaucracy, is a formalization and a rationalization of praxis: its reduction to some thing that can be dominated and manipulated. In the end, social reality under this domination reduces itself to two contradictory meanings: a bureaucratic-commodity meaning (which on another level corresponds to exchange value) and a real meaning. (ibid)
This defines the following alternative:
The spectacular-commodity form parodies the revolutionary project of the mastery of the environment, natural and social, by a humanity become master of itself and its history. The spectacular-commodity presides over the domination of an isolated and abstract individual in an environment organized by power. If it is true that men are the products of their conditions, it is sufficient to create inhuman conditions to reduce them to the state of things. In the organization of the commodity atmosphere, as in the principles of communicating vessels, ‘Man’ is reduced to the state of things, and things in return assume human qualities. (Garnault, ibid)
Garnault gives to what is a fundamental limit in the SI the dimension of an alternative. This limit being the fact of considering revolution as a competition, a race, between the lived and the spectacle, on the use of existing technical means for the production or conditioning of human life. Marelli, in The Bitter Victory of Situationism (Sulliver) has well noticed this aspect, even if he does not expressly relate it to the objectivism and programmatism of the SI.
Therefore, according to Garnault, either social reality, praxis and the lived prevail, or does the spectacle, both of them fighting over an object that is in itself ‘neutral’: the means of social conditioning. Social reality remains under this formal domination of the spectacle, but the spectacle is already becoming a ‘real domination’ and the commodity-capital is already becoming man. The commodity ‘has acquired an autonomous existence and created man and world in its image. A form that gave birth to the anthropology of an isolated individual who remained deprived of the riches of his social relationships; […] it has acquired the totality of social reality to the quantifiable and installed the totalitarian domination of the quantitative… […] ‘the “cybernated state” has summoned a fetishism at its own level: the commodity spectacle which is a projection of all life into a hypostasized and crystallized essence, ghost and scaled-down model of life itself. (ibid). Where then lies the lived? Garnault posits an alternative before going back to a totalitarian conception of the spectacle that suppress the very possibility of an alternative. We see here all the hazards that are inherent to the incapacity of the SI to pose a contradiction from its concept of spectacle. This incapacity being summarized in Garnault’s maxime “When the system can dispense with reality, it is because reality can do without the system.” (ibid.) The truth of the spectacle is to overcome its existence as a mediation between men and their activity and between men themselves; it needs to overcome the stage in which it is only a ‘deprivation for men of their reality’, it tends to become the ‘positive fabrication of the reality of individual existence’ (Communication colonized in SI, n°10). But simultaneously the SI could not accept the idea that ‘true life’ would produce the spectacle and that the spectacle would be ‘life’ full stop –, ‘life’ in which, as Marx says on the subject of fetishism, !!we feel ourselves ‘at home’!!, nor that the revolutionary contradiction would be a contradiction inherent to the spectacle, as it would destroy it as concept of the spectacle. The ultimate moment for the SI is the recognition by the spectacle of the use of ‘true life’.
The SI remains in a programmatic problematic because, in order to posit a contradiction able to produce the overcoming of capital it needs something that would already be outside, would already be an exterior, to what is abolished. The contradiction is only an opposition and can only lead to an alternative, that is,the immediate political form of an objectivism grounded on the neutrality of the development of productive forces reaching completion, or of the material means of the construction of life:
The systematic expropriation of intersubjective communication, the colonization of everyday life by authoritarian mediation, does not necessarily have to be the product of technological development’ (ibid.)
Conversely, when the necessary relation between the terms is !!constructed!! (the lived – the spectacle), it is the very possibility of their opposition that disappears. It is with this dilemma that Debord !!struggles!! in the 221 thesis of The society of the Spectacle.
For Debord, what the spectacle masks is nothing else than itself, and, if we can say that ‘there is spectacle’ and that it ‘masks’ something, it is because he contradicts himself, he contradicts what makes the spectacle necessary: the humanisation of man through its appropriation of time as history. But this requires a human essence, and this is the ‘point of view’ that Debord builds for himself.
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. (Thesis 125)
This human essence is the one that Marx, ‘dialecticising’ Feuerbach, defines in the EPMs (We will see that Debord, more surprisingly, adds to it an existentialist colouration, a Heideggerian one to be more precise).
Marx, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, conceives of such an essence in terms of man’s belonging to his natural species, his Gattungswesen. He sees human history as part of natural history, and the natural history of man is, precisely, the production of human nature, which has occurred within history. […] This humanization of nature, whereby man produces himself and becomes human himself, is understood by Marx as an organic exchange with nature and as a development of productive capabilities in the broadest sense. In Debord, likewise, we find the conception of a human essence that is not fixed, not given, but rather identical with the historical process, understood as man’s self-creation in time. (Jappe, Guy Debord, Via Valeriano, p. 56)
Even if it is possible that, as Jappe says, Debords does not attempt to build an ontology, it is undeniable that we find a definition of the human essence. As for Marx in the EPMs, it is not an abstract ontology (Feuerbach) but a phylogenesis. Nonetheless, as any philogenesis, it relates back to an ontology and can not escape from it.
However, this theory of the essence which, as a phylogenesis, wants to escape the ontology contradicts itself and falls back into an ontology in a twofold way. First, because of the presuppositions it has to pose as its principle, second, in its conception of the historical development itself. The mere fact of conceiving the historical development as the essence of man (this proposition is usually presented the other way round, in which it appears less philosophical) presupposes that some a priori categories of this essence have been defined (if we say that these categories are taken from history then we are going around in circles) categories which realise themselves, even if the subtlety goes as far as saying that they only exist through realizing themselves, only as history. We are obviously dealing here with the definition of man as species being and with the attributes of this being: universality, consciousness, freedom. The human essence is no longer abstract in a sense in which it would be completed and defined outside of its being and existence, nonetheless it can only function in its identity with history if we suppose in it a core of categories which constitute, like it or not, an ontology. This essence identical to history functions on the couple: substance (the core), tendency. The tendency is only the retrospective abstraction of the result to which the core can only lead us, thus this essence identical to history necessarily produces a teleology, that is to say the disappearance of history.
The teleological development is contained in the premises themselves. The starting point, given in the notion of species being and in its attributes, is the problematic of the subject and the object, which is at the core of all philosophy. Whatever the answer chosen among all the potentially conceivable ones, the mystification lies in the question itself. If primacy is given to the subject, one is ‘idealist’, if it is given to the object (nature in a philosophical sense), one is ‘materialist’ Feuerbach, and Marx after him in the EPMs, try to overcome this alternative in the name of ‘concrete humanism’ or ‘naturalism’. The definition given by Marx in the EPMs shows this, for this ‘concrete humanism’ is the real basis of the whole of the situationist theory, not only in its most ‘theoricist’ developments, but also in its strategical aspect (construction of situations, race against capital in the use of existing technological means, the realisation-negation of art as the content of the abolition of work).
Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects […] A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective. A non-objective being is a non-being. (Op. cit., pp. 282–283)
However, Marx doesn’t consider this union of subject and object to a point of fusion – of consubstantiality – as a given, but as something historical. This is what the famous passage of the EPMs on the ‘human eye’ indicates. It is a rewriting of a passage of Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the future, who himself only declared: ‘Similarly, the object of the eye is light and not sound or smell, it is through this object that the eye reveals its essence to us’ (in Part 1, History of Modern Philosophy). It is the application of the basic principle: the object of a being is its essence, therefore its being – the conditions of being of the essence – is its essence, proposition that Marx criticizes in The German Ideology as apologetic of the existing order. However (this second ‘however’ brings us back to the subject-object identical in itself of the previous paragraph, albeit in a enriched form), this historical becoming is only a smokescreen (to keep our main language register we will not say a ‘con trick’). Indeed, becoming is adequation.
The identity of the subject and the object which is in itself (the definition itself of the subject) can only become a coincidence for itself (alienation is the middle term).
But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species-being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it immediately is – as it is objectively – human sensibility, human objectivity. Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is directly given in a form adequate [underlined by us] to the human being. And as everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin – history – which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of origin it is a conscious self-transcending act of origin. History is the true natural history of man (I will need to come back to this). (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Prometheus Books, New York 1988, pp. 155–156)1)
Fortunately, he has seen this for what it is and he never came back to it. Therefore we have an identical subject-object, but as natural human being this identical subject-object can immediately only be identical in itself; as human being, this natural being is a species being, that is to say that it takes itself as object. It follows from this that the object which defines it in itself in their identity must become ‘in itself and for itself’. The reader will have recognised… the outline of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The subject, as external object, is first identical to its object (consciousness as knowledge of an exterior object: consciousness); then, the subject as object of itself (consciousness as knowledge of the subject itself: self-consciousness); lastly, the subject is identical to its exterior object and to itself in this object (consciousness as knowledge of thought, something at the same time objective and internal: reason). History is then only a middle term, a moment posited a priori in the definition of the human essence, it is then obvious that this human essence is the becoming to the extent that it is in fact the becoming that is part of it, that is already posited in it. Not only is history posited from the start as a category of the human essence (rather than the other way round as it itself claims) but also it is the nature of this history that is defined beforehand as alienation. We start from an identity and come back to an identity, as the first identity could only be unstable, according to the definition of the human essence itself; between the two can only be the loss of this identity: subject and object foreign to each other. But don’t get it wrong, this loss is itself only a form of the identity in itself in the process of becoming identity for itself, that is what the concept of alienation is, and that is why Marx abandons it. The loss is only a form of the identity, its necessary becoming to find itself back, its negative identity. History stems from the true reality of man, which he will find again when alienation comes to an end.
In the concept of alienation, the separation between labour and property or labour and capital, the separation between men, is brought back to the movement of an unique being (the fantasm of the origin), the separation is never real. If I conceive of capital on the model of ‘the essential forces of man transposed and facing him’, then I get ‘man’ on both sides as labour and as capital. Then the split of society into classes makes no sense, has no reality, it is only a form which has its overcoming and its resolution in itself, because the split is ‘absurd’, that is to say it is something which already contains the fact that it makes no sense in relation to itself because it is only, as split, a moment of existence of the identity. This split becomes ‘irrational’ and must therefore leave the scene of history. To conceive this separation and this transposition as the movement of waged labour and capital is completely different: it is no longer about a unique being splitting, while still containing the totality. Each term is given in its singular reality from which its reciprocal implication is produced. The ‘transposition’ doesn’t bring us back to an unique being, but to a social relation of production, in which capital is the transposition of the social forces of labour, because this labour is waged labour, it is itself ‘transubstantiation’ In the ideology of alienation, its overcoming is the ‘truth’ of man who, even if he is defined as history, is in fact part of its predicates. Communism becomes the realisation of human essence, alienation can only be posited if is first posited its return to the subject. Alienation implies its own suppression in its own conceptual structure rather than as a history, which is for itself only a detail, as there is nothing to say about it anyway. In the same way that the origin of religion is not in man as an abstraction but in society itself, the separation that alienation would want to explain is neither an ‘alienation of man’, neither does it come from the nature of its ‘activity’ (the two are interlinked), but it is a contradiction in particular historical societies bringing into play particular classes.
As Marx shows it and flusters it in The German Ideology, the anthropological and humanistic conception, instead of starting from particular historical social forms, abstract these societies and their succession in a concept of man. What is required is not, in an opposite way, to turn society into an acting entity (the ‘grand être’ of Auguste Comte), but rather to start from society as being the relations that individuals define between them.
This conception shows that history does not end by being resolved into ‘self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,’ but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of man,’ [our emphasis] […] (Marx, The German Ideology, Part 1, B !!p. X!!)
The ideology of alienation, as it structurally functions on the split of an unique being, can not avoid producing this movement of abstraction and of production of an ‘essence of man’. For the same reason, it can not avoid being a teleology, as Marx expressed later on in an ironic manner:
In this way it is infinitely easy to give history ‘unique’ turns, as one has only to describe its very latest result as the ‘task’ which ‘in truth originally it set itself’. Thereby earlier times acquire a bizarre and hitherto unprecedented appearance. It produces a striking impression, and does not require great production costs. As, for instance, if one says that the real ‘task’ which the institution of landed property ‘originally set itself’ was to replace people by sheep — a consequence which has recently, become manifest in Scotland, etc., or that the proclamation of the Capet dynasty ‘originally in truth set itself the task’ of sending Louis XVI to the guillotine and M. Guizot into the Government. The important thing is to do it in a solemn, pious, priestly way, to draw a deep breath, and then suddenly to burst out: ‘Now, at last, one can state it.’ (Ibid., p. !!XX!!)
This is exactly the process of construction of history inherent to the concept of alienation and its corollary, the ‘human essence’.
The essential in human existence lies in the relations that individuals define between themselves. The definition that Marx gives in the Theses on Feuerbach contents itself with saying what the human existence is without answering to the trick question: ‘What is the human essence?’.
Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. (Thesis 6)
We could totally adopt the commentaries that Balibar realised on this famous thesis in The philosophy of Marx (La Découverte, pp. 28–32) as our own. We are here presenting the principal ideas of this commentary (without quotation marks, in order to facilitate the reading of the sequence of ideas. The reader could, to complete it, refer to this small book which is a necessary reading).
Philosophers have formed a false idea of what an essence is (and this error is so… essential to them that one can hardly imagine a philosophy without it). They have thought, firstly, that the essence is an idea or an abstraction (one would say today, in a different terminology, a universal concept), under which may be ranged, in a declining order of generality, specific differences and, finally, individual differences; and, secondly, that this generic abstraction is somehow ‘inherent’ (innewohnend) in individuals of the same genus, either as a quality they possess, by which they may be classified, or even as a form or a force which causes them to exist as so many copies of the same model. We can see, then, the meaning of the strange equation made by Marx. The point is to reject both of the positions (the realist and the nominalist) between which philosophers have generally been divided: the one arguing that the genus or essence precedes the existence of individuals; the other that individuals are the primary reality, from which universals are abstracted. Neither of these two positions is capable of thinking precisely what is essential in human essence: the multiple and active relations which individuals establish with each other (whether of language, labour, love, reproduction, domination, conflict etc.) and the fact that it is these relations which define what they have in common, the ‘genus’. They define this because they constitute it at each moment in multiple forms. They thus provide the only ‘effective’ content of the notion of essence, applied to the human being (i.e. to human beings). The words Marx uses reject both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of an individuality which could be defined in itself, in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behaviour or whatever), and the organicist point of view (which, today, following Anglo-American? usage, is also called the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered as an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely the functional members.) Neither the ‘monad’ of Hobbes and Bentham, nor the ‘grand être’ of Auguste Comte, and we could add to Balibar’s commentary, nor the genus as lists of qualities represented in individuals. It is significant that Marx (who spoke French) should have resorted to the foreign word ‘ensemble’ here, clearly in order to avoid using the German ‘das Ganze’, the ‘whole’ or ‘totality’. When Marx speaks of ‘human nature’ he substitutes for the problems raised by the relations between the individual and the genus, an enquiry into historical social relations. (end of the borrowing from Balibar)
The method of alienation, with its complement the ‘human essence’, has this particular advantage that it can be applied to anything. One of its favourite subject is the State, in which case the separation lies between the generic universal life contemplated in the State and the personal life reduced to immediate practical activities. All of this is not wrong, it is the method which is wrong and which, after being the spiritual complement of all reformisms, has become the lifeline of all theories engulfed in the disappearance of programmatism. The State, as previously said, is indeed the ‘universal separated life’, an abstraction of the individual engaged in class relations, but it is not, as the whole problematic of On the Jewish Question, for example, puts it because man is split in two. It is so because it is society which is divided in two (before that, there is no State), because it is the State of the dominant class and because the latter subsumes the entirety of society under the reproduction of its particular interests. The problem of the concept of alienation is that it can only function when the subject and the predicate have been inverted, and this in all domains. History, as the succession of particular social forms, becomes the predicate of man/the subject or, in a form that claims to be more concrete, these social forms become the predicate of the activity/labour (see above). In fact, all this wisdom has been delivered in its totality as early as 1932 by the ‘discoverers’ of the ‘young Marx’: Landhut and Mayer.
Through his work between 1840 and 1847, Marx gradually widens his understanding to encompass the whole of historical conditions and secures the general human foundation without which any explanation of economical relations would remain the simple intellectual labour of a salacious economist. [This human foundation is of course defined in the mode of alienation.] The liberation of his existence from conditions external to himself which distort all the true manifestations of the being of man, […] all the manifestations of his being will be immediately what they really are [our emphasis]. After Marx arrived to this result through separating himself from Hegel and Feuerbach, and faced this result, the effort of the rest of his life uniquely concentrated on giving names to the forces of the current reality which solve the contradictions between the idea and reality. But these forces are the forces of the alienation proper, of the power of the conditions, of the domination of political economy: capital. (Landshurst and Mayer, ‘foreword’ to the collection of Marx’s Early Writings, published under the title Historical Materialism, in French in a ‘foreword’ to the Œuvres philosophiques, Costes)
In the EPMs, Marx considers private property and all the notions developed by political economy as, within it, ‘facts without necessity’. The critique of political economy consists in looking for its necessity somewhere else, in philosophy. The conceptions of the economists and the realities they refer to are considered as a whole. It is true that Marx is not a ‘salacious economist’ yet, in fact there is not in the EPMs a critique of political economy (as the first third of the book, mostly devoted to ‘loss and profits’, shows) To find the ‘necessity’, political economy is put through the filter of the relation subject/object, of the philosophy of alienation: the product of my work which is a manifestation of myself becomes a commodity, it therefore becomes foreign to me, labour thus ceases to be a human manifestation. The necessity of political economy is then based on human nature: ‘political economy has not recognized alienation in labour’ and the latter as the ‘becoming for itself of man in alienation’. And we come back to the aporias and the teleology of the essence of man. Private property, a human phenomenon, becomes the negation of human activity, therefore a nonsense, and must be abolished.
The ‘salacious economist’, showing himself a better philosopher, later ‘contented’ himself with understanding the fundamental form of capital, the production orientated towards the appropriation of the labour of others, as a historical form. ‘The view outlined here diverges sharply from the one current among bourgeois economists imprisoned within capitalist ways of thought. Such thinkers do indeed realize how production takes place within capitalist relations [if that…, author’s note] But they do not understand how theses relations are themselves produced, together with the material preconditions of their dissolution. They do not see, therefore, that their historical justification as a necessary form of economic development and of the production of social wealth may be undermined. (Marx, Missing Sixth Chapter)
‘Necessity’, ‘historical justification’, ‘production of the overcoming’, the terms are still here, but the ‘facts without necessity’ that have to be transcended by Labour or by Man have been done away with. The problematic is totally different. Capital abolishes its own historical meaning: here lies the difference. And when, in the new cycle of struggles, this movement is the structure and the content itself of the contradiction between proletariat and capital, all the ideologies which could support the understanding of this movement as alienation must collapse, including the objectivism in Marx. The theoretical overcoming of programmatism requires not less than that, and the Situationist International, as for it, has taken all this themes, including the one of objectivism (see below), to their breaking point.
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