Theses on Debord
Richard Gilman-Opalsky
From Spectacular Capitalism:
http://www.minorcompositions.info/spectacularcapitalism.html
The urban environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling
society just as violently as the newspapers… Obstacles were everywhere.
And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty.
Since everything was connected, it was necessary to change everything
through a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with
the masses, but sleep was all around us. -GUY DEBORD, 1959
[T]he effort of the philosopher does not and cannot stay on an isolated
philosophical level, in a separate consciousness, sphere or dimension;
the source of his theories is social practice, and he must direct them
back towards life, be it through his teaching or by other means (poetry?
literature?). -HENRI LEFEBVRE, 1958
I just don’t know how to go about this. I want to find out just how I
should do it. I think it’s going to have to be very subtle; you can’t
ram philosophies down anybody’s throat, and the music is enough! That’s
philosophy. -JOHN COLTRANE, 1966
I.
The chief defect of all situationist theory – that of Debord included –
is that it responds to the realm of appearances, and particularly that
of the urban environment, which always already embodies and reflects a
particular and dominant ideology, and which is organized and managed by
capital; situationist theory thus recommends contestatory interventions
that can only ever aspire to be interruptions or disruptions, rendering
politics an occasional attack, a kind of piracy, “hacking,” or a
temporary counter-media. In short, situationist theory reifies the
“permanence” of its opponent by accepting saturnalias of interference as
a modus operandi. Situationist theory thus admits a desperation and
opportunism that, while reflecting a practical consideration of its own
position, ultimately mirrors and affirms the “permanence” of the society
of the spectacle, which it wants to destroy. Debord’s theory is a
necessary advance over the materialism of Marx, the idealism of Hegel,
and the various combinations of the two (i.e. Gramsci, Lukács, etc.) –
none of which captured the singularity of the image-object. Yet Debord’s
understandable cynicism regarding revolutionary aspirations leads him to
a politics of exceptional activity that leaves the rules intact.
Debord’s earliest efforts reflect his trajectory from the art world, and
his personal investment in staging gallery events carrying the
principles of an outline for a new political philosophy into the world.
Hence, Debord arrives at political philosophy out of various
non-political or amorphously political commitments, and never manages to
breach those commitments sufficiently for an understanding of the
“permanent situation” of capitalism. To be clear, the trajectory from
art is a major source of the strength of Debord’s work (i.e.
contestation utilizing hoaxes, humor, and other provocations, seizing
attention with creative and visual savvy), but in this case art is a
double-bind; for it also leads to a practice conceived and fixed mainly
in gallery or sketchbook format, such that the discrete acts of a
situationist politics often feel like incendiary novelty items. Hence,
like Feuerbach, Debord “does not grasp the significance of
‘revolutionary,’ of practical-critical, activity.”
II.
Truth is a matter of both theory and practice. Despite Baudrillard’s
obfuscations on the subject, truth can be discerned, although never very
easily, and never as a purely theoretical or as a purely practical
matter. Truth is not a priori or a posteriori, for it is both – it is
only ever discerned in the corroboration of the conceptual with human
experience, or the corroboration of human experience with the
conceptual. While philosophy can help us to identify what ought to be,
only the world as it is can help us to identify which way to go. One
without the other is never enough of the truth: one without the other is
always a moral and practical risk. Theory without practice is indeed
merely scholastic, but it is no more merely scholastic than the
empirical facts of the world are merely “data” without the conceptual
assessment of human beings and the organization of such “data” in
critical discourses. In other words, the empirical facts of the world
alone, without the struggle to understand them from a theoretical point
of view, forces a break between the facts of the world and the world
itself. If we could manage to extricate the facts of the world from
their complex historical, economic, and social contingencies, then the
facts of the world would be a purely non-political field of data
available for the scientific assessment of objective study. But, as C.
Wright Mills has said, “No man stands alone directly confronting a world
of solid fact. No such world exists.”
The empirical facts of the world always already reflect a politics, and
if there was nothing else besides the world as it already is, that would
mean the end of politics itself. In order for politics to exist there
must be some analysis of what is and a contention that something other
than what already is could possibly be. To be apolitical is nothing more
than to accept the facts of the world as they are without any
contention. Without theory and a sense of the possibility for something
other than what already is, the world would be (and often is) mistaken
for an immutable obstacle course, and human understanding is reduced to
a means for finding one’s way through to the end of life. Therefore,
contrary to a common derision of philosophy as otherworldly and useless
(i.e. the common lesson of Thales who was so involved in observing the
stars that he fell into a well), both the world and politics depend on it.
III.
The antagonisms underlying spectacular society have been complicated and
obscured to the point of oblivion and society cannot be cleanly divided
“into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing
each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.” These two camps, in
particular, still exist, but many different constitutive parts comprise
each one, some parts ideological, some formed by group identities – many
of the constitutive parts bind individual members across class lines.
More and more, we discover the failure of class analysis to account for
the heterogeneous complexity of class composition. But this does not
mean that we should abandon class analysis. To the contrary, the actual
and ongoing existence of class society requires class analysis. However,
the analysis of society must be more complex and less inexorable –
refuting all dichotomous thinking that would make things easier to talk
about, but farther from the truth of the world. The complexity of the
world we live in does undermine and ultimately destroys Marx’s efforts
to identify a revolutionary subject position through class analysis. And
we cannot rescue the inexorable antagonism of Marx’s “revolutionary
class” by introducing a far more amorphous category like Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri have done with the “multitude.”
A further complication is that the new complexities of social
stratification in so-called multicultural societies cannot be reasonably
understood as reflecting revolutionary developments in a historical
materialist dialectic. Changes in the composition of society are due to
multifarious causes, none of which can simply be celebrated as a
harbinger of anything radical or even liberal (i.e. migrations and group
diversification often lead just as much – or more – to ethno-nationalist
reaction, chauvinistic patriotism, and the reification of racial
identities as they do to cosmopolitanism and social solidarity).
But there is some good news. By retaining (i.e. rethinking and reviving)
a moral and normative political position against capitalism and its
culture, we can identify a common ground shared by people across
different fields of human life. Indigenous Mayans in Mexico were quite
surprised in the 1990s to discover their robust common ground and the
profound resonance of their claims with environmentalists and feminists
and gays and precarious and rebellious people everywhere – theirs was a
commonality of being on the losing side of power, where power is defined
by and for capital. However, capital does not by its own force create a
revolutionary subject as “its special and essential product.” Rather,
the creation of any revolutionary subject today requires the conscious
and creative work of the imagination.
Helpful in this regard are the works of Nancy Fraser and Enrique Dussel
who find “revolutionary” prospects in subsets of populations that
attempt to “transform” instead of “reform” the political-economic and
cultural structures of the world. Commonality (and solidarity) among
such groups is critical because none can bring about structural
transformations alone, or through temporary, sporadic, and opportunist
interventions. Yet, the commonality of the aims of disparate groups does
not produce a “multitude” that, however internally diverse, retains a
cohesive unity over time. If any such “group of groups” did retain
cohesive unity over time, then we could employ an analytical rubric of
the multitude versus its opponents. But this cannot be done because when
we look to the world for something like Hardt and Negri’s multitude we
do not find it there. And this is not because we are not looking in the
right place, but rather, because it is not there to be found.
In addition to Dussel and Fraser, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s
comments on “expanding the chain of equivalents between the different
struggles against oppression” are helpful. But, while these theorists
can help us to imagine a new revolutionary subject position, we must
keep in mind that none of them comprehended the critical role of the
meta-textual terrains that Debord focused on. It is one thing to answer
the question of “who,” yet another to answer the question of “how.” And
the final analysis on these questions is not even an analysis: “who”
will be answered when they show themselves, and “how” will be answered
when they win.
IV.
Debord starts with an extreme form of alienation, which deepens Marx’s
theory of estrangement and recognizes the complete failure of the
predictive side (that is, the promise) of historical materialism. One
could say that, in Debord, this latter recognition is dialectically
related to the new depth of alienation. To state the problem bluntly:
How can we resolve the failure of revolutionary projects and the lost
promise of historical materialism, on the one hand, with the maintenance
of revolutionary aspirations on the other (especially if alienation
manages to extinguish instead of ignite revolutionary aspirations)? This
is still the preeminent question today. The problem was summed up very
well by Raoul Vaneigem in his Basic Banalities (Part 1):
In this social context the function of alienation must be understood as
a condition of survival… The satisfaction of basic needs remains the
best safeguard of alienation; it is best dissimulated by being justified
on the grounds of undeniable necessities. Alienation multiplies needs
because it can satisfy none of them; …the glut of conveniences and
elements of survival reduces life to a single choice: suicide or
revolution.
Here, I read suicide to have a particular signification regarding the
life and the living spirit of the revolutionary. Either we will find
revolutionary alternatives to revolution, or we will choose to end our
lives as revolutionaries. Simply put, without a way through this
impasse, the revolutionary becomes a relic for the archives of history.
Keeping the revolutionary subject position alive in the world is not a
task for the philosopher, but philosophy can work through the impasse if
wielded by others than philosophers. And while radical philosophy has
its professors, it is not a profession. The way forward is never a
matter of intellectuals writing recipes for the people and the people
providing study material (in the form of their lives) to intellectuals.
Philosophy itself must become the ongoing activity of those who can
think and communicate well, and who can do better than my kind at
reaching more than specialized reading publics looking for
“groundbreaking” texts. When I hear or see or learn about an
articulation of some kind that reframes critical questions in a
provocative and compelling manner, that destabilizes ideology, I cannot
but conclude that it is philosophy broke loose.
I must make a qualification at this juncture. There are and have been
versions of “folk philosophy” that could never be called “radical
philosophy.” There is a difference between the two, and it is a
difference that makes all the difference in the world. Let us take a
particularly dangerous example. The School of Practical Philosophy
secularizes philosophy by offering it up (selling it, to be precise) as
a practical means for the “philosophically trained” person to achieve
positional advantages (economic, psychological, spiritual) in complete
felicity with the existing society. Like much of the “practical
psychology” that aims to teach people how to be happy, “folk philosophy”
is oriented towards making “healthy” adjustments to the existing world,
and not in any way towards making transformations of the world into
something other than what it is. Philosophy only retains its
transformative potential for as long as it is not made (and does not
make us) compatible with the smooth functioning of spectacular capitalism.
V.
Debord, not satisfied with the “science” of Marx’s crisis theory, wants
to abandon the whole enterprise. But Debord does not sufficiently
understand the reluctance of human societies to desire and imagine, let
alone to work for radical transformations. Generally, people are not
open to structural transformations in the absence of imminent crises.
John Locke understood this well in 1690, and his observations are no
less true today:
People are not so easily got out of their old forms, as some are apt to
suggest. They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledged
faults in the frame they have been accustomed to. And if there be any
original defects, or adventitious ones introduced by time, or
corruption; it is not an easy thing to get them changed, even when all
the world sees there is an opportunity for it.
Americans in the US are especially uninterested in radical and
revolutionary politics; that position is largely a result of the fact
that the global crises many people worry about are still in the realm of
abstraction for most Americans. Americans, for example, need to find
themselves in greater imminent danger than a well-managed flurry of
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad-cow disease) to prompt them to
become vegetarians who oppose factory farming. Likewise, the “crises” of
peak oil and global warming and fresh water reserves are not imminent
for as long we can continue everyday life relatively uninterrupted,
except by occasional worries about the abstract eventually becoming
concrete. Most of the political work that takes place in between crises
is preparatory, as people must be ready to act when the opportunity
structure changes. We must utilize crisis theory in order to comprehend
the political significance of the abstract becoming concrete.
Crisis theory is necessary, but must be done without the predictive side
of Marx or the indifference of Baudrillard. As much as radical
philosophy can redirect attention, nobody will imagine and fight for
possible futures unlike the present until the present proves its
unsustainability in imminent and concrete ways.
The imminence of unsustainability is the only catalyst that lies in wait
for a revolutionary politics today. The practice of radical philosophy
(and situationist politics, since crisis is the ultimate situation) is
limited for as long as we live in between crises. But if and when crises
are deep and widespread and especially if and when they reflect
transnational system-crises, then the “permanent situation” of
spectacular capitalism becomes all at once evidently impermanent and is
thus more susceptible to the inroads of radical philosophy. Like Debord,
my own view lies in between the optimism of Marx and the oblivion of
Baudrillard. Yet, unlike Debord, I explicitly recognize the catalyzing
prospects of crises. The downside of this view is that the emergence of
such crises is out of our hands. Even though human culpability does
often lie behind the environmental crises that are treated as purely
“natural” events, such events are mostly made by generations of humans
collectively and inadvertently, and such crises cannot be unmade or
averted by the conscientious lifestyles of green anarchists or green
consumers (which often amount to the same thing).
When the financial systems collapsed in 2008-2010, the US was only
prepared to bail out its private sector through gargantuan measures of
corporate welfare. US civil society vacillated between seeing this as a
regrettable necessity, or, suspending all logic, socialism. Meanwhile
many in the civil societies of France, Greece, and Spain, and in the
city of Brussels, were ready to make real socialist transformations.
Those movements, however, appear to have been suffocated by isolation or
diminishing appeal, just as the most revolutionary transnational
aspirations of the Zapatista rebellion were almost evaporated by the end
of the 1990s. Still, the most promising responses are not coming from
the US. I do not propose any vanguard, and certainly not a national
vanguard, but for numerous reasons of culture and economy, the new
revolutionary subject will not hail from the US.
One of the hardest questions I hear from students in the US is, “What
can I do?” I do not buy into the old rhetoric about the “belly of the
beast” or “using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.”
Solidarity may be the only role to play for those in the US. There is
only one other option, and that is if the world’s most marginalized and
rebellious people form “transgressive public spheres” and invite our
participation from abroad. Of course, a crisis may change this reality,
but it is worth keeping in mind that the crisis of empire is often the
vital contestation of everyone else who could not afford to wait until
the bitter end.
VI.
The world needs a kind of humanism. This is a moral claim. The basic
principles of humanism can be derived from multifarious sources, from
Marx’s early manuscripts of 1844, from Raya Dunayevskaya, from Jean-Paul
Sartre, and even from Louis Althusser’s critique of humanism. Humanism
is not very clear in Debord. The humanism that animates the cosmopolitan
philosophy demarcates the broadest (even if the thinnest) sphere of
human solidarity. Cosmopolitanism itself is a very good idea, and is the
logical extension of humanism; but its faults come out in the rejection
of nationalisms, certain forms of which have served liberatory purposes,
as can be seen in the colonial and postcolonial struggles of peoples in
the 20th century, and clearly in the works of Frantz Fanon and Partha
Chatterjee. What is needed, then, is a general humanism combined with
the principle of self-determination. Our human being provides a broader
basis for solidarity than shifting national, religious, or other
identities which are in a slow flux. However, people use such other
identities to highlight their particular struggles against exclusion,
discrimination, poverty, disempowerment, etc. In some cases (i.e. under
occupation or colonial rule), the assertion of national or sub-national
identities is part of a liberatory struggle for self-determination. And
it is necessary to clarify that self-determination is not the business
of states, which have long histories of preserving themselves first and
foremost, and of treating their “constituents” as instrumental to the
goal of self-preservation and the propagation of their own power. We
must, therefore, always distinguish between national identity and the
national state.
The kind of base humanism I am proposing makes it impossible to
“presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.” The meaning of
being human is a meaning that must always be negotiated within a social
context. This is a basic sociological and existential observation, well
expounded by phenomenology, and controversial mainly to essentialists
who want to mystify the human person. But the point has a further
stipulation vis-à-vis Debord: Just as the human person does not exist as
an isolated individual, so too the revolutionary transformation of human
society cannot take place as the culmination of isolated individual
acts. On some level, perhaps this seems obvious. But, after World War
II, radical movements around the globe saw the emergence of a form of
lifestyle politics, often seen in atomistic varieties of anarchism and
consumerist politics.
The total individuation of the human person, which can only occur in
one’s imagination, leads inevitably to the individuation (or
privatization) of political action, which has only an imaginary value.
As Jürgen Habermas pointed out in his earliest works, individuation or
privatization of political action is actually depoliticization. As it
turns out, no matter how deformed our social life becomes, we ultimately
understand ourselves only and always within the context of other human
beings. Other human beings make each of us who we are, whatever
distinguishes us as individual persons is only visible in the light of
other people, and other human beings make one social reality (or
another) possible. Solipsism is a philosophical error that cannot
actually occur in the world of human affairs. The only thing that
everyday people can do that can really be seen and heard, that can, in
other words, intervene in and possibly transform the conditions of
everyday life, is collective action. The movement of collective action
can feel like plate tectonics, and the instinct to step outside of the
collectivity is understandable, but none of that sensibility makes it
any more effective (or, for that matter, possible).
VII.
Debord was right in making the first necessity of the program collective
action. But his effort on this score was hobbled by an opposing force,
that of the cult of personality of his own role in the SI and of the SI
itself. Debord sharply denounced the conversion of his philosophy into
the ideology of “situationism.” He even cites this move from theory and
philosophy to ideology as one of the root causes of the dissolution of
the SI. Already in 1960, Debord wrote “There is no ‘situationism.’ I
myself am only a situationist by the fact of my participation, in this
moment and under certain conditions, in a community that has come
together for practical reasons with a certain task in sight, which it
will know how or not know how to accomplish.” But any honest account of
the SI inevitably reveals Debord’s top-down micro-managerial style, his
own susceptibility to the trappings of political purism and cause
célèbre. I am not the slightest bit interested in this as a biographical
curiosity or a lifestyle criticism, but rather, as a specific historical
context that indubitably impacted Debord’s political thinking. This
point is not psychoanalytic and can be simply stated as follows:
Debord’s narrow and tenuous faith in a coterie of situationists was just
as misplaced as any narrow and tenuous faith in any group with a
particular name and set of organizational texts. The strategy of the
putsch has been far better utilized by the powerful than by their
antagonists, and it is time that the antagonists understood this.
I am therefore not a “pro-situ” writer who wants to see some kind of new
SI. As interesting as the storied history of the SI is, Debord’s writing
was his real legacy. Debord himself said that of the many names he had
been called, “theoretician” was the most fitting, and, he asserted, he
was “one of the best.” We are certainly safeguarded then in shelving all
of the biography and confronting the theoretician as such. With regard
to the SI itself, we need a complete inversion of how the footnotes have
gone thus far. That is, the theory and the analysis of spectacular
capitalism and spectacular socialism must take center-stage, while all
the rest of the SI drama, which has until now been the source of
Debord’s notoriety, should become the new footnote. In order to put
these works to work for the future, we must take them from the trap of
the SI itself.
This project is neither about the recuperation of the SI nor is it about
the fossilization of the SI in time. Recuperation wants to turn a corpse
into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, and fossils are useful for the
reconstructive work of paleontologists. We must continually remind
ourselves that revolutionary politics is neither recuperative nor
backward-looking.
VIII.
All good theory is essentially practical. All of the most pressing
problems of spectacular capitalism will find their solutions in human
practice and theory, and not necessarily in that order. This follows the
basic Kantian principle that what works in theory also works in
practice, a principle which remains true and yet continues to run
contrary to the common saying (no less common today) on theory and
practice that Kant was responding to in 1793. That common saying, which
Marxist orthodoxy (and anarchist anti-intellectualism) has repeated ad
nauseam, has served to separate critique from praxis, which impoverishes
both.
IX.
The highest points reached in Debord’s political philosophy consist of
his formal efforts towards the practical synthesis of creative,
theatrical, and surprising collective action, utilizing humor and savvy,
to cultivate (or provoke) an insurrectionary and/or revolutionary
comportment and critique. Following such practical thinking, even new
political parties (in addition to political science itself) should not
be organized around elections and legislation as much as for the
cultivation or understanding of insurrectionary and/or revolutionary
tendencies.
X.
The standpoint of old socialisms has been to view the state, and
capitalism, as instrumental historically transitional modes; the
standpoint of new socialisms must be more anarchist with regard to the
state and less predictive (less willing to find anything inexorable)
with regard to capitalism. The standpoint of new socialisms must seek to
understand the complex social-psychological position and composition of
civil society and the destabilization (via radical philosophy) of the
ideological impediments on that terrain.
XI.
Philosophy can change the world if it is wielded by others than
philosophers; when the best philosophical works are the emancipatory
struggles of the marginalized among us, interpretation is not their sole
content.
--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info
"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through
its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is
to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through
embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position
for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources,
and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of
skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a
common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the
master’s rule." - subRosa Collective
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