Critique of the Situationist International (10)
| Recuperation |
| At the same moment, Jaime Semprun, the author of La Guerre sociale au Portugal, published a Precis de recuperation. Here is what the S.I. once said about "recuperation" : |
| "It is quite normal that our enemies should come to use us partially... just like the proletariat, we do not pretend to be unexploitable under present conditions." (I.S. #9. p. 4). |
| "The vital concepts undergo at one and the same time the truest and most lying uses ... because the struggle of critical reality against apologetic spectacle leads us to a struggle over words, a struggle the more bitter as the words are more central. It is not an authoritarian purge, but the coherence of a concept's use in theory and in practical life which reveals its truth." (I.S. #10, p. 82). |
| The counterrevolution does not take up revolutionary ideas because it is malign or manipulative, let alone short of ideas, but because revolutionary ideas deal with real problems with which the counterrevolution is confronted. It is absurd to launch into a denunciation of the enemy's use of revolutionary themes or notions. Today, all terms, all concepts are perverted. The subversive movement will only reappropriate them by its own practical and theoretical development. |
| Since the end of the 19th century, capitalism and the workers' movement have engendered a fringe of thinkers who take up revolutionary ideas only so as to empty them of their subversive content and adapt them to capital. The bourgeoisie has, by nature, a limited vision of the world. It must call on the vision of the class, the proletariat, which is the bearer of another project. This phenomenon has been amplified since marxism has been officially recognized as having public usefulness. During the first period, capital drew from it a sense of the unity of all relations and of the importance of the economy (in the sense in which Lukacs rightly said that capitalism produces a fragmented vision of reality). But to the extent that capitalism comes to dominate the whole of life, this vision -- broadly speaking, that of old-fashioned economistic vulgar marxism -- is inadequate to its complexity and to the extension of conflicts to all its levels. During the second period, the one we are living in today, determinist orthodox marxism has been rejected by the bourgeoisie itself. At the universities, it was good fun to shrug one's shoulders at Capital fifty years ago : around 1960, it became permissible to find "interesting ideas" in it, the more so as they were being "applied" in the U.S.S.R.... To be in fashion today, it is enough to say that Capital is in the rationalist and reductionist tradition of Western philosophy since Descartes, or even since Aristotle. The new official marxism is not an axis; instead one puts a little bit of it everywhere. It serves to remind one of the "social" character of all practice : the "recuperation" of the S.I. is only a particular case. |
| One of the natural channels of this evolution is the university, since the apparatus of which it is a part backs a considerable part of the research on the modernization of capitaL Official "revolutionary" thought is the scouting party of capital. Thousands of appointed functionaries criticize capitalism from every direction. |
| Modernism expresses the social crisis of which the crisis of the proletariat is only an aspect. Out of the limits which the subversive movement encounters at every step, modernism makes its objectives. It serves in particular to justify immediate reformism at the social level. In fact, traditional working class reformism no longer needs justification inasmuch as it has become the rule. The reformism of customs and daily life still needs to be theorized, both against the revolutionary movement from which issues the bias toward it, and against backward capitalist fractions which reject liberties that are nonetheless inoffensive to capital. Modernism thus gets developed because it helps capital to free itself from the fetters on capitalist liberty (sic). The reformism of the everyday is still in its ascendant phase, as economic and working class reformism was seventy years ago. |
| The common trait of all modernism is the taking up of revolutionary theory by halves; basically its approach is that of "marxism" as against Marx. Its axiom is to call, not for revolution, but for liberation from a certain number of constraints. It wants the maximum of freedom within the existing society. Its critique will always be that of the commodity and not of capital, of politics and not of the state. of totalitarianism and not of democracy. Is it by accident that its historical representative, Marcuse, came from a Germany forced to turn away from the radical aspirations revealed in 1917-21 ? |
| It is conceivable to denounce deformations in revolutionary theory in order to make things absolutely precise - on the condition, however, that there is more than just a denunciation. In Semprun's book, there is not an ounce of theory to be found. Let us take two examples. In his critique of G. Guegan, [20] Semprun shows what he considers important. Why demolish this personage ? To demarcate oneself, even with violent language, has no meaning unless one Puts oneself at a higher level. Semprun spreads Guegan's life over several pages. But if it is really necessary to talk about Guegan, there is something that must be got straight concerning Cahiers du futur (Future Notebooks), the journal he edited. If the first issue was uselessly pretentious, the second, devoted to the counter-revolution, is particularly detestable. It presents the fact that the counter-revolution feeds on the revolution as a paradox, takes pleasure in pointing out the mix-up without explaining anything, as something to revel in amid complacently morbid drawings, and sends everybody into a tailspin. This (intentional ?) derision for all revolutionary activity mixes in a little more and fosters a feeling of superiority among those who have understood because they have been there : "That's where revolution leads. . . " (read : "That's what I was when I was a militant . . . " One can only dream of what the S.I. in its prime might have written about this. |
| Semprun also shows how Castoriadis [21] has innovated in taking it upon himself to "recuperate" his own past revolutionary texts, striving to make them unreadable by heaping them with prefaces and footnotes. This is amusing at first sight, but becomes less so when one knows what the S.I. owes to S ou B. Semprun even shows condescension toward Chaulieu's "marxist" period. The ultra-left was indeed dry as dust, but not enough to stop Debord from joining it. Whether one likes it or not, this is falsification : one amuses the reader while making him forget what the S.I.'s bankruptcy owes to Chaulieu before he went bankrupt himself. |
| In these two cases as in others, individuals are judged by their attitude, not by their theoretical evolution, from which one might profit. Semprun presents us with a gallery of moral portraits. He does not analyze, he judges. He pillories a number of assholes who stole from the S.I.. Criticizing these attitudes, he is himself nothing but an attitude. |
| Like every moralistic practice, this one leads to some monstrosities. The most striking is the aggravation of the practice of organization already mentioned in relation to The Real Split... As Debord's new bodyguard, Semprun settles accounts with former members of the S.I.. Reading these works, the uninitiated wouldn't think that the S.I. was ever much of anything. Busy with his self-destruction, Debord now unleashes a sectarianism which reveals his fear of the world. Semprun's style can thus only insult everything that comes within its scope and which is not Debord. He is nothing but a demarcation. He does not know either how to approve or to scorn. Of radical criticism, he has retained only the contempt. |
| [20] Translator's footnote : Geugan was the manager and the real founder of Champ Libre Publications until he was fired in 1975. He is now a fashionable figure in literary and avant-garde circles. |
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[21] Translator's footnote : Cardan - Chaulieus real
name. (tr)
[John Gray note : Chaulieu and Cardan were both pseudonyms used by Cornelius Castoriadis.] |