Critique of the Situationist International (3)
| The Theoretical Deadend of the Notion of the "Spectacle" |
| The notion of the spectacle unites a large number of given basic facts by showing society- and thus its revolutionary transformation - as activity. Capitalism does not "mystify" the workers. The activity of revolutionaries does not demystify; it is the expression of a real social movement. The revolution creates a different activity whose establishment is a condition of what classical revolutionary theory called "political" tasks (destruction of the State). |
| But the S.I. was not able to conceive in this way of the notion which it had brought to light. It invested so much in this notion that it reconstructed the whole of revolutionary theory around the spectacle. |
| In its theory of "bureaucratic capitalism", Socialisme ou Barbarie (S ou B) had capital rest on the bureaucracy. In its theory of "spectacular commodity society", the S.I. explained everything from the spectacle. One does not construct a revolutionary theory except as a whole, and by basing it on what is fundamental to social life. No, the question of "social appearances" is not the key to any new revolutionary endeavor (I.S. #10, p. 79). |
| The traditional revolutionary groups had only seen new means of conditioning. But for the S.I., the mode of expression of the "media" corresponds to a way of life which did not exist a hundred years ago. Television does not indoctrinate, but inscribes itself into a mode of being. The S.I. showed the relationship between the form and foundation, where traditional marxism saw nothing but new instruments in the service of the same cause. |
| Meanwhile, the notion of the spectacle elaborated by the S.I. falls behind what Marx and Engels understood by the term "ideology". Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle presents itself as an attempt to explain capitalist society and revolution, when in fact it only considers their forms, important but not determinant phenomena. It robes the description of them in a theorization which gives the impression of a fundamental analysis, when in fact the method, and the subject being studied, remain always at the level of social appearances. At this level, the book is outstanding. The trouble is that it is written (and read) as if one were going to find something in it that isn't there. While S ou B analyzed the revolutionary problem by means of industrial sociology, the S.I. analyzes it starting out from a reflection on the surface of society. This is not to say that The Society of the Spectacle is superficial. Its contradiction and, ultimately, its theoretical and practical dead-end, is to have made a study of the profound, through and by means of the superficial appearance. The S.I. had no analysis of capital : it understood it, but through its effects. It criticized the commodity, not capital - or rather, it criticized capital as commodity, and not as a system of valuation which includes production as well as exchange. |
| Throughout the book, Debord remains at the stage of circulation, lacking the necessary moment of production, of productive labor. What nourishes capital is not consumption, as he leads one to understand, but the formation of value by labor. Debord is right to see more in the relation between appearance and reality than in that between illusion and the reality, as if appearances did not exist. But one never understands the real on the basis of the apparent. Thus Debord does not complete his project. He does not show how capitalism makes what is only the result into the cause or even into the movement. The critique of political economy (which Debord does not make, content to ignore it as were the utopians before him) shows how the proletarian sees standing over and against him not only his product, but his activity. In the fetishism of commodities, the commodity appears as its own movement. By the fetishism of capital, capital takes on an autonomy which it does not possess, presenting itself as a living being (Invariance is a victim of this illusion) : one does not know where it comes from, who produces it, by what process the proletarian engenders it, by what contradiction it lives and may die. Debord makes the spectacle into the subject of capitalism, instead of showing how it is produced by capitalism. He reduces capitalism to its spectacular dimension alone. The movement of capital becomes the movement of the spectacle. . In the same way Banalites de base [5] makes a history of the spectacle through religion, myth, politics, philosophy, etc. This theory remains limited to a part of the real relations, and goes so far as to make them rest entirely on this part. |
| The spectacle is activity become passive. The S.I. rediscovered what Marx said in the Grundisse about the rising-up of Man's being (his self-transformation, his labor) as an alien power which crushes him : facing it, he no longer lives, he only looks. The S.I. brought a new vigor to this theme. But capital is more than pacification. It needs the intervention of the proletarian, as S ou B [6] said. The S.I.'s overestimation of the spectacle is the sign that it theorizes on the basis of a social vision born at the periphery of society, and which it believed to be central. |
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[5] Translator's footnote : Appeared in English as The
Totality for Kids.
[John Gray note : On line in two parts at www.nothingness.org Part One. Part Two ] |
| [6] Translator's footnote : In a series of articles in Socialisme ou Barbarie, it was shown how capitalist industry needs the active and creative cooperation of workers in order to function. The most telling example of this is the British rank-and-file workers' tactic of the "work to rule" in which all jobs are carried out precisely according to union contract and employer specification. This usually results in a decline in output by anywhere up to 50 percent. (Tr.) |