Chapter 5. "Time and History"
O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!...
An if we live, we live to tread on
kings.
Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I
125. Man, "the negative being
who is only to the extent that he suppresses
Being," is identical to time. Man's
appropriation of his own nature is at the
same time his grasp of the unfolding of the
universe. "History is itself a real
part of natural history, of the transformation
of nature into man" (Marx). Inversely,
this "natural history" has no actual
existence other than through the process
of human history, the only part which recaptures
this historical totality, like the modern
telescope whose sight captures, in time,
the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of
the universe. History has always existed,
but not always in a historical form. The
temporalization of man as effected through
the mediation of a society is equivalent
to a humanization of time. The unconscious
movement of time manifests itself and becomes
true within historical consciousness.
126 Properly historical movement, although
still hidden, begins in the slow and
intangible
formation of the "real nature
of man,"
this "nature born within human
history--within
the generating action of human society,"
but even though that society developed
a
technology and a language and is already
a product of its own history, it is
conscious
only of a perpetual present. There,
all knowledge,
confined within the memory of the oldest,
is always carried by the living. Neither
death nor procreation is grasped as
a law
of time. Time remains immobile, like
an enclosed
space. A more complex society which
finally
becomes conscious of time devotes itself
to negating it because it sees in time
not
what passes, but only what returns.
A static
society organizes time in terms of
its immediate
experience of nature, on the model
of cyclical
time.
127 Cyclical time already dominates
the experience
of nomadic populations because they
find
the same conditions repeated at every
moment
of their journey: Hegel notes that
"the
wandering of nomads is only formal
because
it is limited to uniform spaces."
The
society which, by fixing itself in
place
locally, gives space a content by arranging
individualized places, thus finds itself
enclosed inside this localization.
The temporal
return to similar places now becomes
the
pure return of time in the same place,
the
repetition of a series of gestures.
The transition
from pastoral nomadism to sedentary
agriculture
is the end of the lazy liberty without
content,
the beg inning of labor. The agrarian
mode
of production in general, dominated
by the
rhythm of the seasons, is the basis
for fully
constituted cyclical time. Eternity
is internal
to it; it is the return of the same
here
on earth. Myth is the unitary construction
of the thought which guarantees the
entire
cosmic order surrounding the order
which
this society has in fact already realized
within its frontiers.
128 The social appropriation of time,
the
production of man by human labor, develops
within a society divided into classes.
The
power which constituted itself above
the
penury of the society of cyclical time,
the
class which organizes the social labor
and
appropriates the limited surplus value,
simultaneously
appropriates the temporal surplus value
of
its organization of social time: it
possesses
for itself alone the irreversible time
of
the living. The wealth that can be
concentrated
in the realm of power and materially
used
up in sumptuous feasts is also used
up as
a squandering of historical time at
the surface
of society. The owners of historical
surplus
value possess the knowledge and the
enjoyment
of lived events. Separated from the
collective
organization of time which predominates
with
the repetitive production at the base
of
social life, this time flows above
its own
static community. This is the time
of adventure
and war, when the masters of the cyclical
society travel through their personal
histories,
and it is also the time which appears
in
confrontations with foreign communities,
in the derangement of the unchangeable
order
of the society. History then passes
before
men as an alien factor, as that which
they
never wanted and against which they
thought
themselves protected. But by way of
this
detour returns the human negative anxiety
which had been at the very origin of
the
entire development that had fallen
asleep.
129 Cyclical time in itself is time
without
conflict. But conflict is installed
within
this infancy of time: history first
struggles
to be history in the practical activity
of
masters. This history superficially
creates
the irreversible; its movement constitutes
precisely the time it uses up within
the
interior of the inexhaustible time
of cyclical
society.
130 "Frozen societies" are
those
which slowed down their historical
activity
to the limit and maintained in constant
equilibrium
their opposition to the natural and
human
environment as well as their internal
oppositions.
If the extreme diversity of institutions
established for this purpose demonstrates
the flexibility of the self-creation
of human
nature, this demonstration becomes
obvious
only for the external observer, for
the anthropologist
who returns from historical time. In
each
of these societies a definitive structuring
excluded change. Absolute conformism
in existing
social practices. with which all human
possibilities
are identified for all time, has no
external
limit other than the fear of falling
back
into formless animality. Here, in order
to
remain human, men must remain the same.
131 The birth of political power which
seems
to be related to the last great technological
revolutions (like iron smelting), at
the
threshold of a period which would not
experience
profound shocks until the appearance
of industry,
also marks the moment when kinship
ties begin
to dissolve. From then on, the succession
of generations leaves the sphere of
pure
cyclical nature in order to become
an event-oriented
succession of powers. Irreversible
time is
now the time of those who rule, and
dynasties
are its first measure. Writing is its
weapon.
In writing, language attains its complete
independent reality as mediation between
consciousnesses. But this independence
is
identical to the general independence
of
separate power as the mediation which
constitutes
society. With writing there appears
a consciousness
which is no longer carried and transmitted
directly among the living: an impersonal
memory, the memory of the administration
of society. "Writings are the
thoughts
of the State; archives are its memory"
(Novalis).
132 The chronicle is the expression
of the
irreversible time of power and also
the instrument
that preserves the voluntaristic progression
of this time from its predecessor,
since
this orientation of time collapses
with the
fall of every specific power and returns
to the indifferent oblivion of cyclical
time,
the only time known to peasant masses
who,
during the collapse of empires and
their
chronologies, never change. The owners
of
history have given time a meaning:
a direction
which is also a significance. But this
history
deploys itself and succumbs separately,
leaving
the underlying society unchanged precisely
because this history remains separated
from
the common reality. This is why we
reduce
the history of Oriental empires to
the history
of religions: the chronologies which
have
fallen to ruins left no more than the
apparently
autonomous history of the illusions
which
enveloped them. The masters who make
history
their private property, under the protection
of myth, possess first of all a private
ownership
of the mode of illusion: in China and
Egypt
they long held a monopoly over the
immortality
of the soul, just as their famous early
dynasties
are imaginary arrangements of the past.
But
the masters' possession of illusion
is at
that moment the only possible possession
of a common history and of their own
history.
The growth of their real historical
power
goes together with a popularization
of the
possession of myth and illusion. All
this
flows from the simple fact that, to
the extent
that the masters took it upon themselves
to guarantee the permanence of cyclical
time
mythically, as in the seasonal rites
of Chinese
emperors, they themselves achieved
a relative
liberation from cyclical time.
133 The dry unexplained chronology
of divine
power speaking to its servants, which
wants
to be understood only as the earthly
execution
of the commandments of myth, can be
surmounted
and become conscious history; this
requires
that real participation in history
be lived
by extended groups. Out of this practical
communication among those who recognized
each other as possessors of a singular
present,
who experienced the qualitative richness
of events as their activity and as
the place
where they lived--their epoch--arises
the
general language of historical communication.
Those for whom irreversible time has
existed
discover within it the memorable as
well
as the menace of forgetting: "Herodotus
of Halicarnassus here presents the
results
of his study, so that time may not
abolish
the works of men ...
134 Reasoning about history is inseparably
reasoning about power. Greece was the
moment
when power and its change were discussed
and understood, the democracy of the
masters
of society. Greek conditions were the
inverse
of the conditions known to the despotic
State,
where power settles its accounts only
with
itself within the inaccessible obscurity
of its densest point: through palace
revolution,
which is placed beyond the pale of
discussion
by success or failure alike. However,
the
power shared among the Greek communities
existed only with the expenditure of
a social
life whose production remained separate
and
static within the servile class. Only
those
who do not work live. In the division
among
the Greek communities, and in the struggle
to exploit foreign cities, the principle
of separation which internally grounded
each
of them was externalized. Greece, which
had
dreamed of universal history, did not
succeed
in unifying itself in the face of invasion--or
even in unifying the calendars of its
independent
cities. In Greece historical time became
conscious, but not yet conscious of
itself.
135 After the disappearance of the
locally
favorable conditions known to the Greek
communities,
the regression of western historical
thought
was not accompanied by a rehabilitation
of
ancient mythic organizations. Out of
the
confrontations of the Mediterranean
populations,
out of the formation and collapse of
the
Roman State, appeared semi-historical
religions
which became fundamental factors in
the new
consciousness of time, and in the new
armor
of separate power.
136 The monotheistic religions were
a compromise
between myth and history, between cyclical
time which still dominated production
and
irreversible time where populations
clash
and regroup. The religions which grew
out
of Judaism are abstract universal acknowledgements
of irreversible time which is democratized,
opened to all, but in the realm of
illusion.
Time is totally oriented toward a single
final event: "The Kingdom of God
is
at hand." These religions arose
on the
soil of history, and established themselves
there. But there they still preserve
themselves
in radical opposition to history. Semi-historical
religion establishes a qualitative
point
of departure in time (the birth of
Christ,
the flight of Mohammed), but its irreversible
time--introducing real accumulation
which
in Islam can take the form of a conquest,
or in Reformation Christianity the
form of
increased capital is actually inverted
in
religious thought and becomes a countdown:
the hope of access to the genuine other
world
before time runs out, the expectation
of
the last Judgment. Eternity came out
of cyclical
time and is beyond it. Eternity is
the element
which holds back the irreversibility
of time,
suppressing history within history
itself
by placing itself on the other side
of irreversible
time as a pure punctual element to
which
cyclical time returned and abolished
itself.
Bossuet will still say: "And by
means
of the time that passes we enter into
the
eternity which does not pass."
137 The Middle Ages, this incomplete
mythical
world whose perfection lay outside
it, is
the moment when cyclical time, which
still
regulates the greater part of production,
is really chewed away by history. A
certain
irreversible temporality is recognized
individually
in everyone, in the succession of stages
of life, in the consideration of life
as
a journey, a passage with no return
through
a world whose meaning lies elsewhere:
the
pilgrim is the man who leaves cyclical
time
and becomes in reality the traveller
that
everyone is symbolically. Personal
historical
life still finds its fulfillment within
the
sphere of power, within participation
in
struggles led by power and in struggles
over
disputed power; but the irreversible
time
of power is shared to infinity under
the
general unification of the oriented
time
of the Christian era, in a world of
armed
faith, where the game of the masters
revolves
around fidelity and disputes over owed
fidelity.
This feudal society, born out of the
encounter
of "the organizational structure
of
the conquering army as it developed
during
the conquest" with "the productive
forces found in the conquered country"
(German Ideology) and in the organization
of these productive forces one must
count
their religious language divided the
domination
of society between the Church and the
state
power, in turn subdivided in the complex
relations of suzerainty and vassalage
of
territorial tenures and urban communes.
In
this diversity of possible historical
life,
the irreversible time which silently
carried
off the underlying society, the time
lived
by the bourgeoisie in the production
of commodities,
in the foundation and expansion of
cities
and in the commercial discovery of
the earth--practical
experimentation which forever destroyed
all
mythical organization of the cosmos--slowly
revealed itself as the unknown work
of this
epoch when the great official historical
undertaking of this world collapsed
with
the Crusades.
138 During the decline of the Middle
Ages,
the irreversible time which invades
society
is experienced by the consciousness
attached
to the ancient order in the form of
an obsession
with death. This is the melancholy
of the
demise of a world, the last world where
the
security of myth still counterpoised
history,
and for this melancholy everything
worldly
moves only toward corruption. The great
revolts
of the European peasants are also their
attempt
to respond to history--which was violently
wrenching the peasants out of the patriarchal
sleep that had guaranteed their feudal
tutelage.
This millenarian utopia of achieving
heaven
on earth revives what was at the origin
of
semi-historical religion, when Christian
communities which grew out of Judaic
messianism
responded to the troubles and unhappiness
of the epoch by looking to the imminent
realization
of the Kingdom of God and brought a
disquieting
and subversive factor into ancient
society.
When Christianity reached the point
of sharing
power within the empire, it exposed
what
still survived of this hope as a simple
superstition:
that is the meaning of the Augustinian
affirmation,
archetype of all the satisfecit of
modern
ideology, according to which the established
Church has already for a long time
been this
kingdom one spoke of. The social revolt
of
the millenarian peasantry defines itself
naturally first of all as a will to
destroy
the Church. But millenarianism spreads
in
the historical world, and not on the
terrain
of myth. Modern revolutionary expectations
are not irrational continuations of
the religious
passion of millenarianism, as Norman
Cohn
thought he had demonstrated in The
Pursuit
of the Millennium. On the contrary,
it is
millenarianism, revolutionary class
struggle
speaking the language of religion for
the
last time, which is already a modern
revolutionary
tendency that as yet lacks the consciousness
that it is only historical. The millenarians
had to lose because they could not
recognize
the revolution as their own operation.
The
fact that they waited to act on the
basis
of an external sign of God's decision
is
the translation into thought of the
practice
of insurgent peasants following chiefs
taken
from outside their ranks. The peasant
class
could not attain an adequate consciousness
of the functioning of society or of
the way
to lead its own struggle: because it
lacked
these conditions of unity in its action
and
consciousness, it expressed its project
and
led its wars with the imagery of an
earthly
paradise.
139 The new possession of historical
life,
the Renaissance, which finds its past
and
its legitimacy in Antiquity, carries
with
it a joyous rupture with eternity.
Its irreversible
time is that of the infinite accumulation
of knowledge, and the historical consciousness
which grows out of the experience of
democratic
communities and of the forces which
ruin
them will take up. with Machiavelli,
the
analysis of desanctified power, saying
the
unspeakable about the State. In the
exuberant
life of the Italian cities, in the
art of
the festival, life is experienced as
enjoyment
of the passage of time. But this enjoyment
of passage is itself a passing enjoyment.
The song of Lorenzo di Medici considered
by Burckhardt to be the expression
of "the
very spirit of the Renaissance"
is the
eulogy which this fragile feast of
history
pronounces on itself: "How beautiful
the spring of life which vanishes so
quickly."
140 The constant movement of monopolization
of historical life by the State of
the absolute
monarchy, transitional form toward
complete
domination by the bourgeois class,
brings
into clear view the new irreversible
time
of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie
is attached
to labor time, which is liberated for
the
first time from the cyclical. With
the bourgeoisie,
work becomes labor which transforms
historical
conditions. The bourgeoisie is the
first
ruling class for which labor is a value.
And the bourgeoisie which suppresses
all
privilege, which recognizes no value
that
does not flow from the exploitation
of labor,
has justly identified with labor its
own
value as a dominant class, and has
made the
progress of labor its own progress.
The class
which accumulates commodities and capital
continually modifies nature by modifying
labor itself, by unleashing its productivity.
All social life has already been concentrated
within the ornamental poverty of the
Court,
the tinsel of the cold state administration
which culminates in "the vocation
of
king"; and all particular historical
liberty has had to consent to its defeat.
The liberty of the irreversible temporal
game of the nobles is consumed in their
last
lost battles, the wars of the Fronde
and
the rising of the Scotch for Charles-Edward.
The world's foundation has changed.
141 The victory of the bourgeoisie
is the
victory of profoundly historical time,
because
this is the time of economic production
which
transforms society, continuously and
from
top to bottom. So long as agrarian
production
remains the central activity, the cyclical
time which remains at the base of society
nourishes the coalesced forces of tradition
which fetter all movement. But the
irreversible
time of the bourgeois economy eradicates
these vestiges on every corner of the
globe.
History, which until then had seemed
to be
only the movement of individuals of
the ruling
class, and thus was written as the
history
of events, is now understood as the
general
movement, and in this relentless movement
individuals are sacrificed. This history
which discovers its foundation in political
economy now knows of the existence
of what
had been its unconscious, but this
still
cannot be brought to light and remains
unconscious.
This blind prehistory, a new fatality
dominated
by no one, is all that the commodity
economy
democratized.
142 The history which is present in
all the
depths of society tends to be lost
at the
surface. The triumph of irreversible
time
is also its metamorphosis into the
time of
things, because the weapon of its victory
was precisely the mass production of
objects
according to the laws of the commodity.
The
main product which economic development
has
transferred from luxurious scarcity
to daily
consumption is therefore history, but
only
in the form of the history of the abstract
movement of things which dominates
all qualitative
use of life. While the earlier cyclical
time
had supported a growing part of historical
time lived by individuals and groups,
the
domination of the irreversible time
of production
tends, socially, to eliminate this
lived
time.
143 Thus the bourgeoisie made known
to society
and imposed on it an irreversible historical
time, but kept its use from society.
"There
was history, but there is no more,"
because the class of owners of the
economy,
which cannot break with economic history,
is directly threatened by all other
irreversible
use of time and must repress it. The
ruling
class, made up of specialists in the
possession
of things who are themselves therefore
a
possession of things, must link its
fate
with the preservation of this reified
history,
with the permanence of a new immobility
within
history. For the first time the worker,
at
the base of society, is not materially
a
stranger to history, because it is
now the
base that irreversibly moves society.
In
the demand to live the historical time
which
it makes, the proletariat finds the
simple
unforgettable center of its revolutionary
project; and every attempt (thwarted
until
now) to realize this project marks
a point
of possible departure for new historical
life.
144 The irreversible time of the bourgeoisie
in power at first presented itself
under
its own name, as an absolute origin,
Year
One of the Republic. But the revolutionary
ideology of general freedom which had
destroyed
the last remnants of the mythical organization
of values and the entire traditional
regulation
of society, already made visible the
real
will which it had clothed in Roman
dress:
the freedom of generalized commerce.
The
commodity society, now discovering
that it
needed to reconstruct the passivity
which
it had profoundly shaken in order to
set
up its own pure reign, finds that "Christianity
with its cultus of abstract man . .
. is
the most fitting form of religion"
(Capital).
Thus the bourgeoisie establishes a
compromise
with this religion, a compromise which
also
expresses itself in the presentation
of time:
its own calendar abandoned, its irreversible
time returns to unwind within the Christian
era whose succession it continues.
145 With the development of capitalism,
irreversible
time is unified on a world scale. Universal
history becomes a reality because the
entire
world is gathered under the development
of
this time. But this history, which
is everywhere
simultaneously the same, is still only
the
refusal within history of history itself.
What appears the world over as the
same day
is the time of economic production
cut up
into equal abstract fragments. Unified
irreversible
time is the time of the world market
and,
as a corollary, of the world spectacle.
146 The irreversible time of production
is
first of all the measure of commodities.
Therefore the time officially affirmed
over
the entire expanse of the globe as
the general
time of society refers only to the
specialized
interests which constitute it and is
no more
than a particular time.
Chapter 6 "Spectacular Time"
We have nothing that is ours except time,
which even those without a roof can enjoy.
Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo manual y Arte de
prudencia
147 The time of production, commodity-time,
is an infinite accumulation of equivalent
intervals. It is the abstraction of irreversible
time, all of whose segments must prove on
the chronometer their merely quantitative
equality. This time is in reality exactly
what it is in its exchangeable character.
In this social domination by commodity-time,
"time is everything, man is nothing;
he is at most the carcass of time" (Poverty
of Philosophy). This is time devalued, the
complete inversion of time as "the field
of human development."
148 The general time of human non-development
also exists in the complementary form of
consumable time which returns as pseudo-cyclical
time to the daily life of the society based
on this determined production.
149 Pseudo-cyclical time is actually no more
than the consumable disguise of the commodity-time
of production. It contains the essential
properties of commodity-time, namely exchangeable
homogeneous units and the suppression of
the qualitative dimension. But being the
by-product of this time which aims to retard
concrete daily life and to keep it retarded,
it must be charged with pseudo-valuations
and appear in a sequence of falsely individualized
moments.
150 Pseudo-cyclical time is the time of consumption
of modern economic survival, of increased
survival, where daily life continues to be
deprived of decision and remains bound, no
longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature
developed in alienated labor; and thus this
time naturally reestablishes the ancient
cyclical rhythm which regulated the survival
of preindustrial societies. Pseudo-cyclical
time leans on the natural remains of cyclical
time and also uses it to compose new homologous
combinations: day and night, work and weekly
rest, the recurrence of vacations.
151 Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed
by industry. The time which has its basis
in the production of commodities is itself
a consumable commodity which includes everything
that previously (during the phase of dissolution
of the old unitary society) was differentiated
into private life, economic life, political
life. All the consumable time of modern society
comes to be treated as a raw material for
varied new products which impose themselves
on the market as uses of socially organized
time. "A product which already exists
in a form which makes it suitable for consumption
can nevertheless in its turn become a raw
material for another product" (Capital).
152 In its most advanced sector, concentrated
capitalism orients itself towards the sale
of "completely equipped" blocks
of time, each one constituting a single unified
commodity which integrates a number of diverse
commodities. In the expanding economy of
"services" and leisure, this gives
rise to the formula of calculated payment
in which "everything's included":
spectacular environment, the collective pseudo-displacement
of vacations, subscriptions to cultural consumption,
and the sale of sociability itself in the
form of "passionate conversations"
and "meetings with personalities."
This sort of spectacular commodity, which
can obviously circulate only because of the
increased poverty of the corresponding realities,
just as obviously fits among the pilot-articles
of modernized sales techniques by being payable
on credit.
153 Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular
time, both as the time of consumption of
images in the narrow sense, and as the image
of consumption of time in the broad sense.
The time of image-consumption, the medium
of all commodities, is inseparably the field
where the instruments of the spectacle exert
themselves fully, and also their goal, the
location and main form of all specific consumption:
it is known that the time-saving constantly
sought by modern society, whether in the
speed of vehicles or in the use of dried
soups, is concretely translated for the population
of the United States in the fact that the
mere contemplation of television occupies
it for an average of three to six hours a
day. The social image of the consumption
of time, in turn, is exclusively dominated
by moments of leisure and vacation, moments
presented at a distance and desirable by
definition, like every spectacular commodity.
Here this commodity is explicitly presented
as the moment of real life, and the point
is to wait for its cyclical return. But even
in those very moments reserved for living,
it is still the spectacle that is to be seen
and reproduced, becoming ever more intense.
What was represented as genuine life reveals
itself simply as more genuinely spectacular
life.
154 The epoch which displays its time to
itself as essentially the sudden return of
multiple festivities is also an epoch without
festivals. What was, in cyclical time, the
moment of a community's participation in
the luxurious expenditure of life is impossible
for the society without community or luxury.
When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies
of the dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus
of economic expenditure, they lead only to
deception always compensated by the promise
of a new deception. In the spectacle, the
lower the use value of modern survival-time,
the more highly it is exalted. The reality
of time has been replaced by the advertisement
of time.
155 While the consumption of cyclical time
in ancient societies was consistent with
the real labor of those societies, the pseudo-cyclical
consumption of the developed economy is in
contradiction with the abstract irreversible
time of its production. While cyclical time
was the time of immobile illusion, really
lived, spectacular time is the time of self-changing
reality, lived in illusion.
156 What is constantly new in the process
of production of things is not found in consumption,
which remains the expanded repetition of
the same. In spectacular time, since dead
labor continues to dominate living labor,
the past dominates the present.
157 Another side of the deficiency of general
historical life is that individual life as
yet has no history. The pseudo-events which
rush by in spectacular dramatizations have
not been lived by those informed of them;
moreover they are lost in the inflation of
their hurried replacement at every throb
of the spectacular machinery. Furthermore,
what is really lived has no relation to the
official irreversible time of society and
is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical
rhythm of the consumable by-product of this
time. This individual experience of separate
daily life remains without language, without
concept, without critical access to its own
past which has been recorded nowhere. It
is not communicated. It is not understood
and is forgotten to the profit of the false
spectacular memory of the unmemorable.
158 The spectacle, as the present social
organization of the paralysis of history
and memory, of the abandonment of history
built on the foundation of historical time,
is the false consciousness of time.
159 The preliminary condition required for
propelling workers to the status of "free"
producers and consumers of commodity time
was the violent expropriation of their own
time. The spectacular return of time became
possible only after this first dispossession
of the producer.
160 The irreducibly biological element which
remains in labor, both in the dependence
on the natural cycle of waking and sleep
and in the existence of irreversible time
in the expenditure of an individual life,
is a mere accessory from the point of view
of modern production; consequently, these
elements are ignored in the official proclamations
of the movement of production and in the
consumable trophies which are the accessible
translation of this incessant victory. The
spectator's consciousness, immobilized in
the falsified center of the movement of its
world, no longer experiences its life as
a passage toward self-realization and toward
death. One who has renounced using his life
can no longer admit his death. Life insurance
advertisements suggest merely that he is
guilty of dying without ensuring the regularity
of the system after this economic loss; and
the advertisement of the American way of
death insists on his capacity to maintain
in this encounter the greatest possible number
of appearances of life. On all other fronts
of the advertising onslaught, it is strictly
forbidden to grow old. Even a "youth-capital,"
contrived for each and all and put to the
most mediocre uses, could never acquire the
durable and cumulative reality of financial
capital. This social absence of death is
identical to the social absence of life.
161 Time, as Hegel showed, is the necessary
alienation, the environment where the subject
realizes himself by losing himself, where
he becomes other in order to become truly
himself. Precisely the opposite is true in
the dominant alienation, which is undergone
by the producer of an alien present. In this
spatial alienation, the society that radically
separates the subject from the activity it
takes from him, separates him first of all
from his own time. It is this surmountable
social alienation that has prohibited and
petrified the possibilities and risks of
the living alienation of time.
162 Under the visible fashions which disappear
and reappear on the trivial surface of contemplated
pseudo-cyclical time, the grand style of
the age is always located in what is oriented
by the obvious and secret necessity of revolution.
163 The natural basis of time, the actual
experience of the flow of time, becomes human
and social by existing for man. The restricted
condition of human practice, labor at various
stages, is what has humanized and also dehumanized
time as cyclical and as separate irreversible
time of economic production. The revolutionary
project of realizing a classless society,
a generalized historical life, is the project
of a withering away of the social measure
of time, to the benefit of a playful model
of irreversible time of individuals and groups,
a model in which independent federated times
are simultaneously present. It is the program
of a total realization, within the context
of time, of communism which suppresses "all
that exists independently of individuals."
164 The world already possesses the dream
of a time whose consciousness it must now
possess in order to actually live it.
Chapter 7 "The Organization of Territory"
And he who becomes master of a city used
to being free and does not destroy her can
expect to be destroyed by her, because always
she has as pretext in rebellion the name
of liberty and her old customs, which never
through either length of time or benefits
are forgotten, and in spite of anything that
can be done or foreseen, unless citizens
are disunited or dispersed, they do not forget
that name and those institutions....
Machiavelli, The Prince
165 Capitalist production has unified space,
which is no longer bounded by external societies.
This unification is at the same time an extensive
and intensive process of banalization. The
accumulation of commodities produced in mass
for the abstract space of the market, which
had to break down all regional and legal
barriers and all the corporative restrictions
of the Middle Ages that preserved the quality
of craft production, also had to destroy
the autonomy and quality of places. This
power of homogenization is the heavy artillery
which brought down all Chinese walls.
166 In order to become ever more identical
to itself, to get as close as possible to
motionless monotony, the free space of the
commodity is henceforth constantly modified
and reconstructed.
167 This society which eliminates geographical
distance reproduces distance internally as
spectacular separation.
168 Tourism, human circulation considered
as consumption, a by-product of the circulation
of commodities, is fundamentally nothing
more than the leisure of going to see what
has become banal. The economic organization
of visits to different places is already
in itself the guarantee of their equivalence.
The same modernization that removed time
from the voyage also removed from it the
reality of space.
169 The society that molds all of its surroundings
has developed a special technique for shaping
its very territory, the solid ground of this
collection of tasks. Urbanism is capitalism's
seizure of the natural and human environment;
developing logically into absolute domination,
capitalism can and must now remake the totality
of space into its own setting.
170 The capitalist need which is satisfied
by urbanism in the form of a visible freezing
of life can be expressed in Hegelian terms
as the absolute predominance of "the
peaceful coexistence of space" over
"the restless becoming in the passage
of time."
171 If all the technical forces of capitalism
must be understood as tools for the making
of separations, in the case of urbanism we
are dealing with the equipment at the basis
of these technical forces, with the treatment
of the ground that suits their deployment,
with the very technique of separation.
172 Urbanism is the modern fulfillment of
the uninterrupted task which safeguards class
power: the preservation of the atomization
of workers who had been dangerously brought
together by urban conditions of production.
The constant struggle that had to be waged
against every possible form of their coming
together discovers its favored field in urbanism.
After the experiences of the French Revolution,
the efforts of all established powers to
increase the means of maintaining order in
the streets finally culminates in the suppression
of the street. "With the present means
of long-distance mass communication, sprawling
isolation has proved an even more effective
method of keeping a population under control,"
says Lewis Mumford in The City in History,
describing "henceforth a one-way world."
But the general movement of isolation, which
is the reality of urbanism, must also include
a controlled reintegration of workers depending
on the needs of production and consumption
that can be planned. Integration into the
system requires that isolated individuals
be recaptured and isolated together: factories
and halls of culture, tourist resorts and
housing developments are expressly organized
to serve this pseudo-community that follows
the isolated individual right into the family
cell. The widespread use of receivers of
the spectacular message enables the individual
to fill his isolation with the dominant images--images
which derive their power precisely from this
isolation.
173 For the first time a new architecture,
which in all previous epochs had been reserved
for the satisfaction of the ruling classes,
is directly aimed at the poor. The formal
poverty and the gigantic spread of this new
living experience both come from its mass
character, which is implicit in its purpose
and in modern conditions of construction.
Authoritarian decision, which abstractly
organizes territory into territory of abstraction,
is obviously at the heart of these modern
conditions of construction. The same architecture
appears in all industrializing countries
that are backward in this respect, as a suitable
terrain for the new type of social existence
which is to be implanted there. The threshold
crossed by the growth of society's material
power alongside the lag in the conscious
domination of this power, are displayed as
clearly by urbanism as by problems of thermonuclear
armament or of birth control (where the possibility
of manipulating heredity has already been
reached).
174 The present is already the time of the
self-destruction of the urban milieu. The
explosion of cities which cover the countryside
with "formless masses of urban residues"
(Lewis Mumford) is directly regulated by
the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship
of the automobile, pilot-product of the first
phase of commodity abundance, has been stamped
into the environment with the domination
of the freeway, which dislocates old urban
centers and requires an ever-larger dispersion.
At the same time, stages of incomplete reorganization
of the urban fabric polarize temporarily
around "distribution factories,"
enormous shopping centers built on the bare
ground of parking lots; and these temples
of frenzied consumption, after bringing about
a partial rearrangement of congestion, themselves
flee within the centrifugal movement which
rejects them as soon as they in turn become
overburdened secondary centers. But the technical
organization of consumption is only the first
element of the general dissolution which
has led the city to the point of consuming
itself.
175 Economic history, which developed entirely
around the opposition between town and country,
has reached a level of success which simultaneously
cancels out both terms. The current paralysis
of total historical development for the sake
of the mere continuation of the economy's
independent movement makes the moment when
town and country begin to disappear, not
the supersession of their cleavage, but their
simultaneous collapse. The reciprocal erosion
of town and country, product of the failure
of the historical movement through which
existing urban reality should have been surmounted,
is visible in the eclectic melange of their
decayed elements which cover the most industrially
advanced zones.
176 Universal history was born in cities
and reached maturity at the moment of the
decisive victory of city over country. To
Marx, one of the greatest revolutionary merits
of the bourgeoisie was "the subjection
of the country to the city" whose very
air emancipates. But if the history of the
city is the history of freedom, it is also
the history of tyranny, of state administration
that controls the countryside and the city
itself. The city could as yet only struggle
for historical freedom, but not possess it.
The city is the locus of history because
it is conscious of the past and also concentrates
the social power that makes the historical
undertaking possible. The present tendency
to liquidate the city is thus merely another
expression of the delay in the subordination
of the economy to historical consciousness
and in the unification of society reassuming
the powers that were detached from it.
177 "The countryside shows the exact
opposite: isolation and separation"
(German Ideology). Urbanism destroys cities
and reestablishes a pseudo-countryside which
lacks the natural relations of the old countryside
as well as the direct social relations which
were directly challenged by the historical
city. A new artificial peasantry is recreated
by the conditions of housing and spectacular
control in today's "organized territory":
the geographic dispersal and narrowmindedness
that always kept the peasantry from undertaking
independent action and from affirming itself
as a creative historical force again today
become characteristics of the producers--the
movement of a world which they themselves
produce remaining as completely beyond their
reach as the natural rhythm of tasks was
for the agrarian society. But when this peasantry,
which was the unshakable foundation of "Oriental
despotism" and whose very fragmentation
called for bureaucratic centralization reemerges
as a product of the conditions of growth
of modern state bureaucracy, its apathy must
now be historically manufactured and maintained;
natural ignorance has been replaced by the
organized spectacle of error. The "new
towns" of the technological pseudo-peasantry
clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture
with the historical time on which they are
built; their motto could be: "On this
spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing
ever has." It is obviously because history,
which must be liberated in the cities, has
not yet been liberated, that the forces of
historical absence begin to compose their
own exclusive landscape.
178 History, which threatens this twilight
world, is also the force which could subject
space to lived time. Proletarian revolution
is the critique of human geography through
which individuals and communities have to
create places and events suitable for the
appropriation, no longer just of their labor,
but of their total history. In this game's
changing space, and in the freely chosen
variations in the game's rules, the autonomy
of place can be rediscovered without the
reintroduction of an exclusive attachment
to the land, thus bringing back the reality
of the voyage and of life understood as a
voyage which contains its entire meaning
within itself.
179 The greatest revolutionary idea
concerning
urbanism is not itself urbanistic,
technological
or esthetic. It is the decision to
reconstruct
the entire environment in accordance
with
the needs of the power of the Workers'
Councils,
of the anti-statist dictatorship of
the proletariat,
of enforceable dialogue. And the power
of
the Councils which can be effective
only
if it transforms existing conditions
in their
entirety, cannot assign itself a smaller
task if it wants to be recognized and
to
recognize itself in its world.
Chapter 8 "Negation and Consumption
Within Culture"
Do you seriously think we shall live long
enough to see a political revolution? --
we, the contemporaries of these Germans?
My friend, you believe what you want to believe....
Let us judge Germany on the basis of its
present history -- and surely you are not
going to object that all its history is falsified,
or that all its present public life does
not reflect the actual state of the people?
Read whatever papers you please, and you
cannot fail to be convinced that we never
stop (and you must concede that the censorship
prevents no one from stopping) celebrating
the freedom and national happiness that we
enjoy....
Ruge to Marx, March 1843
180 In the historical society divided into
classes, culture is the general sphere of
knowledge and of representations of the lived;
which is to say that culture is the power
of generalization existing apart, as division
of intellectual labor and as intellectual
labor of division. Culture detaches itself
from the unity of the society of myth "when
the power of unification disappears from
the life of man and when opposites lose their
living relation and interaction and acquire
autonomy... (Hegel's Treatise on the Differences
between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling).
By gaining its independence, culture begins
an imperialist movement of enrichment which
is at the same time the decline of its independence.
The history which creates the relative autonomy
of culture and the ideological illusions
about this autonomy also expresses itself
as history of culture. And the entire victorious
history of culture can be understood as the
history of the revelation of its inadequacy,
as a march toward its self-suppression. Culture
is the locus of the search for lost unity.
In this search for unity, culture as a separate
sphere is obliged to negate itself.
181 The struggle between tradition and innovation,
which is the principle of internal cultural
development in historical societies, can
be carried on only through the permanent
victory of innovation. Yet cultural innovation
is carried by nothing other than the total
historical movement which, by becoming conscious
of its totality, tends to supersede its own
cultural presuppositions and moves toward
the suppression of all separation.
182 The growth of knowledge about society,
which includes the understanding of history
as the heart of culture, derives from itself
an irreversible knowledge, which is expressed
by the destruction of God. But this "first
condition of any critique" is also the
first obligation of a critique without end.
When it is no longer possible to maintain
a single rule of conduct, every result of
culture forces culture to advance toward
its dissolution. Like philosophy at the moment
when it gained its full autonomy, every discipline
which becomes autonomous has to collapse,
first of all as a pretention to explain social
totality coherently, and finally even as
a fragmented tool which can be used within
its own boundaries. The lack of rationality
of separate culture is the element which
condemns it to disappear, because within
it the victory of the rational is already
present as a requirement.
183 Culture grew out of the history which
abolished the way of life of the old world,
but as a separate sphere it is still no more
than perceptible intelligence and communication,
which remain partial in a partially historical
society. It is the sense of a world which
hardly makes sense.
184 The end of cultural history manifests
itself on two opposite sides: the project
of its supersession in total history, and
the organization of its preservation as a
dead object in spectacular contemplation.
One of these movements has linked its fate
to social critique, the other to the defense
of class power.
185 The two sides of the end of culture--in
all the aspects of knowledge as well as in
all the aspects of perceptible representations
exist in a unified manner in what used to
be art in the most general sense. In the
case of knowledge, the accumulation of branches
of fragmentary knowledge, which become unusable
because the approval of existing conditions
must finally renounce knowledge of itself,
confronts the theory of praxis which alone
holds the truth of them all since it alone
holds the secret of their use. In the case
of representations, the critical self-destruction
of society's former common language confronts
its artificial recomposition in the commodity
spectacle, the illusory representation of
the non-lived.
186 When society loses the community of the
society of myth, it must lose all the references
of a really common language until the time
when the rifts within the inactive community
can be surmounted by the inauguration of
the real historical community. When art,
which was the common language of social inaction,
becomes independent art in the modern sense,
emerging from its original religious universe
and becoming individual production of separate
works, it too experiences the movement that
dominates the history of the entirety of
separate culture. The affirmation of its
independence is the beginning of its disintegration.
187 The loss of the language of communication
is positively expressed by the modern movement
of decomposition of all art, its formal annihilation.
This movement expresses negatively the fact
that a common language must be rediscovered
no longer in the unilateral conclusion which,
in the art of the historical society, always
arrived too late, speaking to others about
what was lived without real dialogue, and
admitting this deficiency of life but it
must be rediscovered in praxis, which unifies
direct activity and its language. The problem
is to actually possess the community of dialogue
and the game with time which have been represented
by poetico-artistic works.
188 When art, become independent, depicts
its world in dazzling colors, a moment of
life has grown old and it cannot be rejuvenated
with dazzling colors. It can only be evoked
as a memory. The greatness of art begins
to appear only at the dusk of life.
189 The historical time which invades art
expressed itself first of all in the sphere
of art itself, starting with the baroque.
Baroque is the art of a world which has lost
its center: the last mythical order, in the
cosmos and in terrestrial government, accepted
by the Middle Ages--the unity of Christianity
and the phantom of an Empire has fallen.
The art of the change must carry within itself
the ephemeral principle it discovers in the
world. It chose, said Eugenio d'Ors, "life
against eternity." Theater and the festival,
the theatrical festival, are the outstanding
achievements of the baroque where every specific
artistic expression becomes meaningful only
with reference to the setting of a constructed
place, a construction which is its own center
of unification; this center is the passage,
which is inscribed as a threatened equilibrium
in the dynamic disorder of everything. The
somewhat excessive importance given to the
concept of the baroque in the contemporary
discussion of esthetics is an expression
of the awareness that artistic classicism
is impossible: for three centuries the attempts
to realize a normative classicism or neoclassicism
were no more than brief artificial constructions
speaking the external language of the State,
the absolute monarchy, or the revolutionary
bourgeoisie in Roman clothes. What followed
the general path of the baroque, from romanticism
to cubism, was ultimately an ever more individualized
art of negation perpetually renewing itself
to the point of the fragmentation and complete
negation of the artistic sphere. The disappearance
of historical art, which was linked to the
internal communication of an elite and had
its semi-independent social basis in the
partly playful conditions still lived by
the last aristocracies, also expresses the
fact that capitalism possesses the first
class power which admits itself stripped
of any ontological quality, a power which,
rooted in the simple management of the economy,
is equally the loss of all human mastery.
The baroque, artistic creation's long-lost
unity, is in some way rediscovered in the
current consumption of the totality of past
art. When all past art is recognized and
sought historically and retrospectively constituted
into a world art, it is relativized into
a global disorder which in turn constitutes
a baroque edifice on a higher level, an edifice
in which the very production of baroque art
merges with all its revivals. The arts of
all civilizations and all epochs can be known
and accepted together for the first time.
Once this "collection of souvenirs"
of art history becomes possible, it is also
the end of the world of art. In this age
of museums, when artistic communication can
no longer exist, all the former moments of
art can be admitted equally, because they
no longer suffer from the loss of their specific
conditions of communication in the current
general loss of the conditions of communication.
190 As a negative movement which seeks the
supersession of art in a historical society
where history is not yet lived, art in the
epoch of its dissolution is simultaneously
an art of change and the pure expression
of impossible change. The more grandiose
its reach, the more its true realization
is beyond it. This art is perforce avant-garde,
and it is not. Its avant-garde is its disappearance.
191 Dadaism and surrealism are the two currents
which mark the end of modern art. They are
contemporaries, though only in a relatively
conscious manner, of the last great assault
of the revolutionary proletarian movement;
and the defeat of this movement, which left
them imprisoned in the same artistic field
whose decrepitude they had announced, is
the basic reason for their immobilization.
Dadaism and surrealism are at once historically
related and opposed to each other. This opposition,
which each of them considered to be its most
important and radical contribution, reveals
the internal inadequacy of their critique,
which each developed one-sidedly. Dadaism
wanted to suppress art without realizing
it; surrealism wanted to realize art without
suppressing it. The critical position later
elaborated by the Situationists has shown
that the suppression and the realization
of art are inseparable aspects of a single
supersession of art.
192 Spectacular consumption which preserves
congealed past culture, including the recuperated
repetition of its negative manifestations,
openly becomes in the cultural sector what
it is implicitly in its totality: the communication
of the incommunicable. The flagrant destruction
of language is flatly acknowledged as an
officially positive value because the point
is to advertise reconciliation with the dominant
state of affairs--and here all communication
is joyously proclaimed absent. The critical
truth of this destruction the real life of
modern poetry and art is obviously hidden,
since the spectacle, whose function is to
make history forgotten within culture, applies,
in the pseudo-novelty of its modernist means,
the very strategy which constitutes its core.
Thus a school of neo-literature, which simply
admits that it contemplates the written word
for its own sake, can present itself as something
new. Furthermore, next to the simple proclamation
of the sufficient beauty of the decay of
the communicable, the most modern tendency
of spectacular culture--and the one most
closely linked to the repressive practice
of the general organization of society--seeks
to remake, by means of "team projects,"
a complex neo-artistic environment made up
of decomposed elements: notably in urbanism's
attempts to integrate artistic debris or
esthetico- technical hybrids. This is an
expression, on the level of spectacular pseudo-culture,
of developed capitalism's general project,
which aims to recapture the fragmented worker
as a "personality well integrated in
the group," a tendency described by
American sociologists (Riesman, Whyte, etc.).
It is the same project everywhere: a restructuring
without community.
193 When culture becomes nothing more than
a commodity, it must also become the star
commodity of the spectacular society. Clark
Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of this
tendency, has calculated that the complex
process of production, distribution and consumption
of knowledge already gets 29% of the yearly
national product in the United States; and
he predicts that in the second half of this
century culture will be the driving force
in the development of the economy, a role
played by the automobile in the first half
of this century, and by railroads in the
second half of the previous century.
194 All the branches of knowledge, which
continue to develop as the thought of the
spectacle, have to justify a society without
justification, and constitute a general science
of false consciousness. This thought is completely
conditioned by the fact that it cannot and
will not investigate its own material basis
in the spectacular system.
195 The system's thought, the thought of
the social organization of appearance, is
itself obscured by the generalized sub-communication
which it defends. It does not know that conflict
is at the origin of all things in its world.
Specialists in the power of the spectacle,
an absolute power within its system of language
without response, are absolutely corrupted
by their experience of contempt and of the
success of contempt; and they find their
contempt confirmed by their knowledge of
the contemptible man, who the spectator really
is.
196 Within the specialized thought of the
spectacular system, a new division of tasks
takes place to the extent that the improvement
of this system itself poses new problems:
on one hand, modern sociology which studies
separation by means of the conceptual and
material instruments of separation itself,
undertakes the spectacular critique of the
spectacle; on the other hand, in the various
disciplines where structuralism takes root,
the apology for the spectacle institutes
itself as the thought of non-thought, as
the official amnesia of historical practice.
Nevertheless, the false despair of non-dialectical
critique and the false optimism of pure advertising
of the system are identical in that they
are both submissive thought.
197 The sociology which began, first in the
United States, to focus discussion on the
living conditions brought about by present
development, compiled a great deal of empirical
data, but could not fathom the truth of its
subject because it lacked the critique immanent
in this subject. As a result, the sincerely
reformist tendency of this sociology resorts
to morality, common sense, appeals devoid
of all relevance to practical measures, etc.
Because this type of critique is ignorant
of the negative at the core of its world,
it insists on describing only a sort of negative
surplus which it finds deplorably annoying
on the surface, like an irrational parasitic
proliferation. This indignant good will,
even if genuine, ends up blaming only the
external consequences of the system, yet
thinks itself critical, forgetting the essentially
apologetic character of its assumptions and
method.
198 Those who denounce the absurdity or the
perils of incitement to waste in the society
of economic abundance do not understand the
purpose of waste. They condemn with ingratitude,
in the name of economic rationality, the
good irrational guardians without whom the
power of this economic rationality would
collapse. For example, Boorstin, in L'Image,
describes the commercial consumption of the
American spectacle but never reaches the
concept of spectacle because he thinks he
can exempt private life, or the notion of
"the honest commodity," from this
disastrous exaggeration. He does not understand
that the commodity itself made the laws whose
"honest" application leads to the
distinct reality of private life and to its
subsequent reconquest by the social consumption
of images.
199 Boorstin describes the excesses of a
world which has become foreign to us as if
they were excesses foreign to our world.
But the "normal" basis of social
life, to which he implicitly refers when
he characterizes the superficial reign of
images with psychological and moral judgments
as a product of "our extravagant pretentions,"
has no reality whatever, either in his book
or in his epoch. Boorstin cannot understand
the full profundity of a society of images
because the real human life he speaks of
is for him in the past, including the past
of religious resignation. The truth of this
society is nothing other than the negation
of this society.
200 The sociology which thinks that an industrial
rationality functioning separately can be
isolated from the whole of social life can
go so far as to isolate the techniques of
reproduction and transmission from the general
industrial movement. Thus Boorstin finds
that the results he depicts are caused by
the unfortunate, almost fortuitous encounter
of an oversized technical apparatus for image
diffusion with an excessive attraction to
the pseudo-sensational on the part of the
people of our epoch. Thus the spectacle would
be caused by the fact that modern man is
too much of a spectator. Boorstin fails to
understand that the proliferation of the
prefabricated "pseudo-events" which
he denounces flows from the simple fact that,
in the massive reality of present social
life, men do not themselves live events.
Because history itself haunts modern society
like a spectre, pseudo-histories are constructed
at every level of consumption of life in
order to preserve the threatened equilibrium
of present frozen time.
201 The assertion of the definitive stability
of a short period of frozen historical time
is the undeniable basis, proclaimed consciously
and unconsciously, of the present tendency
toward a structuralist systematization. The
vantage point from which anti-historical
structuralist thought views the world is
that of the eternal presence of a system
which was never created and which will never
end. The dream of the dictatorship of a preexisting
unconscious structure over all social praxis
could be erroneously drawn from models of
structures elaborated by linguistics and
anthropology (and even the analysis of the
functioning of capitalism)--models already
misunderstood in this context--only because
the academic imagination of minor functionaries,
easily overwhelmed and completely entrenched
in the awestruck celebration of the existing
system, flatly reduces all reality to the
existence of the system.
202 In order to understand "structuralist"
categories, one must keep in mind, as with
every historical social science, that the
categories express forms as well as conditions
of existence. Just as one cannot appraise
the value of a man in terms of the conception
he has of himself, one cannot appraise--and
admire--this particular society by taking
as indisputably true the language it speaks
to itself; "... we cannot judge such
epochs of transformation by their own consciousness;
on the contrary, this consciousness must
rather be explained in the light of the contradictions
of material life..." Structure is the
daughter of present power. Structuralism
is the thought guaranteed by the State which
regards the present conditions of spectacular
"communication" as an absolute.
Its method of studying the code of messages
is itself nothing but the product, and the
acknowledgement, of a society where communication
exists in the form of a cascade of hierarchic
signals. Consequently it is not structuralism
which serves to prove the transhistorical
validity of the society of the spectacle;
it is on the contrary the society of the
spectacle imposing itself as massive reality
which serves to prove the cold dream of structuralism.
203 The critical concept of spectacle can
undoubtedly also be vulgarized into a commonplace
hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric
to explain and abstractly denounce everything,
and thus serve as a defense of the spectacular
system. It is obvious that no idea can lead
beyond the existing spectacle, but only beyond
the existing ideas about the spectacle. To
effectively destroy the society of the spectacle,
what is needed is men putting a practical
force into action. The critical theory of
the spectacle can be true only by uniting
with the practical current of negation in
society, and this negation, the resumption
of revolutionary class struggle, will become
conscious of itself by developing the critique
of the spectacle which is the theory of its
real conditions (the practical conditions
of present oppression), and inversely by
unveiling the secret of what this negation
can be. This theory does not expect miracles
from the working class. It envisages the
new formulation and the realization of proletarian
imperatives as a long-range task. To make
an artificial distinction between theoretical
and practical struggle since on the basis
defined here, the very formulation and communication
of such a theory cannot even be conceived
without a rigorous practice it is certain
that the obscure and difficult path of critical
theory must also be the lot of the practical
movement acting on the scale of society.
204 Critical theory must be communicated
in its own language. It is the language of
contradiction, which must be dialectical
in form as it is in content. It is critique
of the totality and historical critique.
It is not "the nadir of writing"
but its inversion. It is not a negation of
style, but the style of negation.
205 In its very style. the exposition of
dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination
in terms of the rules and the corresponding
tastes of the dominant language, because
when it uses existing concrete concepts it
is simultaneously aware of their rediscovered
fluidity, their necessary destruction.
206 This style which contains its own critique
must express the domination of the present
critique over its entire past. The very mode
of exposition of dialectical theory displays
the negative spirit within it. "Truth
is not like a product in which one can no
longer find any trace of the tool that made
it" (Hegel). This theoretical consciousness
of movement, in which the movement's very
trace must be evident, manifests itself by
the inversion of the established relations
between concepts and by the diversion of
all the acquisitions of previous critique.
The inversion of the genetive is this expression
of historical revolutions, consigned to the
form of thought, which was considered Hegel's
epigrammatic style. The young Marx, recommending
the technique Feuerbach had systematically
used of replacing the subject with the predicate,
achieved the most consistent use of this
insurrectional style, drawing the misery
of philosophy out of the philosophy of misery.
Diversion leads to the subversion of past
critical conclusions which were frozen into
respectable truths, namely transformed into
lies. Kierkegaard already used it deliberately,
adding his own denunciation to it: "But
despite all the tours and detours, just as
jam always returns to the pantry, you always
end up by sliding in a little word which
isn't yours and which bothers you by the
memory it awakens" (Philosophical Fragments).
It is the obligation of distance toward what
was falsified into official truth which determines
the use of diversion, as was acknowledged
by Kierkegaard in the same book: "Only
one more comment on your numerous allusions
aiming at all the grief I mix into my statements
of borrowed sayings. I do not deny it here
nor will I deny that it was voluntary and
that in a new continuation to this pamphlet,
if I ever write it, I intend to name the
object by its real name and to clothe the
problem in historical attire."
207 Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates
in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary.
Progress implies it. It embraces an author's
phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases
a false idea, and replaces it with the right
idea.
208 Diversion is the opposite of quotation,
of the theoretical authority which is always
falsified by the mere fate of having become
a quotation a fragment torn from its context,
from its movement, and ultimately from the
global framework of its epoch and from the
precise choice, whether exactly recognized
or erroneous, which it was in this framework.
Diversion is the fluid language of anti-ideology.
It appears in communication which knows it
cannot pretend to guarantee anything definitively
and in itself. At its peak, it is language
which cannot be confirmed by any former or
supra-critical reference. On the contrary,
its own coherence, in itself and with the
applicable facts, can confirm the former
core of truth which it brings out. Diversion
has grounded its cause on nothing external
to its own truth as present critique.
209 What openly presents itself as diverted
in theoretical form, denying the durable
autonomy of the sphere of the theoretically
expressed by introducing there, through this
violence, the action which upsets and overthrows
the entire existing order, reminds us that
the existence of theory is nothing in itself,
and that it can know itself only through
historical action and the historical correction
which is its real counterpart.
210 Only the real negation of culture can
preserve its meaning. It can no longer be
cultural. Thus it is what in some way remains
at the level of culture, but with a completely
different meaning.
211 In the language of contradiction, the
critique of culture presents itself as a
unified critique in that it dominates the
whole of culture, its knowledge as well as
its poetry, and in that it no longer separates
itself from the critique of the social totality.
This unified theoretical critique goes alone
to meet unified social practice.
Chapter 9 "Ideology Materialized"
Self-consciousness exists in itself and for
itself, in that, and by the fact that it
exists for another self-consciousness; that
is to say, it is only by being acknowledged
or "recognized."
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind
212 Ideology is the basis of the thought
of a class society in the conflict-laden
course of history. Ideological facts were
never a simple chimaera, but rather a deformed
consciousness of realities, and in this form
they have been real factors which set in
motion real deforming acts; all the more
so when the materialization, in the form
of spectacle, of the ideology brought about
by the concrete success of autonomized economic
production in practice confounds social reality
with an ideology which has tailored all reality
in terms of its model.
213 When ideology, the abstract will and
the illusion of the universal, is legitimized
by the universal abstraction and the effective
dictatorship of illusion in modern society,
it is no longer a voluntaristic struggle
of the partial, but its victory. At this
point, ideological pretention acquires a
sort of flat positivistic exactitude: it
is no longer a historical choice but a fact.
In this type of assertion, the particular
names of ideologies have disappeared. Even
the role of specifically ideological labor
in the service of the system comes to be
considered as nothing more than the recognition
of an "epistemological base" that
pretends to be beyond all ideological phenomena.
Materialized ideology itself has no name,
just as it has no expressible historical
program. This is another way of saying that
the history of ideologies is over.
214 Ideology, whose whole internal logic
led to "total ideology" in Mannheim's
sense the despotism of the fragment which
imposes itself as pseudo-knowledge of a frozen
totality, the totalitarian vision--is now
completed in the immobilized spectacle of
non-history. Its completion is also its disintegration
throughout society. With the practical disintegration
of this society, ideology--the final unreason
that blocks access to historical life--must
disappear.
215 The spectacle is ideology par excellence,
because it exposes and manifests in its fullness
the essence of all ideological systems: the
impoverishment, servitude and negation of
real life. The spectacle is materially "the
expression of the separation and estrangement
between man and man." Through the "new
power of fraud," concentrated at the
base of the spectacle in this production,
"the new domain of alien beings to whom
man is subservient... grows coextensively
with the mass of objects." It is the
highest stage of an expansion which has turned
need against life. "The need for money
is thus the real need produced by political
economy, and the only need it produces"
(Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).
The spectacle extends to all social life
the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie
of Jena) conceives as the principle of money:
it is "the life of what is dead, moving
within itself."
216 In opposition to the project summarized
in the Theses on Feuerbach (the realization
of philosophy in praxis which supersedes
the opposition between idealism and materialism),
the spectacle simultaneously preserves, and
imposes within the pseudo-concrete of its
universe, the ideological characteristics
of materialism and idealism. The contemplative
side of the old materialism which conceives
the world as representation and not as activity--and
which ultimately idealizes matter--is fulfilled
in the spectacle, where concrete things are
automatically the masters of social life.
Reciprocally, the dreamed activity of idealism
is equally fulfilled in the spectacle, through
the technical mediation of signs and signals-which
ultimately materialize an abstract ideal.
217 The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia,
established by Gabel (La Fausse Conscience)
must be placed in this economic process of
materialization of ideology. Society has
become what ideology already was. The removal
of praxis and the anti-dialectical false
consciousness which accompanies it are imposed
during every hour of daily life subjected
to the spectacle; this must be understood
as a systematic organization of the "failure
of the faculty of encounter" and as
its replacement by a hallucinatory social
fact: the false consciousness of encounter,
the "illusion of encounter." In
a society where no one can any longer be
recognized by others, every individual becomes
unable to recognize his own reality. Ideology
is at home; separation has built its world.
218 "In clinical charts of schizophrenia,"
says Gabel, "the decay of the dialectic
of totality (with dissociation as its extreme
form) and the decay of the dialectic of becoming
(with catatonia as its extreme form) seem
solidly united." The spectator's consciousness,
imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound
by the screen of the spectacle behind which
his life has been deported, knows only the
fictional speakers who unilaterally surround
him with their commodities and the politics
of their commodities. The spectacle, in its
entirety, is his "mirror image."
Here the stage is set with the false exit
of generalized autism.
219 The spectacle obliterates the boundaries
between self and world by crushing the self
besieged by the presence-absence of the world
and it obliterates the boundaries between
true and false by driving all lived truth
below the real presence of fraud ensured
by the organization of appearance. One who
passively accepts his alien daily fate is
thus pushed toward a madness that reacts
in an illusory way to this fate by resorting
to magical techniques. The acceptance and
consumption of commodities are at the heart
of this pseudo-response to a communication
without response. The need to imitate which
is felt by the consumer is precisely the
infantile need conditioned by all the aspects
of his fundamental dispossession. In the
terms applied by Gabel to a completely different
pathological level, "the abnormal need
for representation here compensates for a
tortuous feeling of being on the margin of
existence."
220 If the logic of false consciousness cannot
know itself truly, the search for critical
truth about the spectacle must simultaneously
be a true critique. It must struggle in practice
among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle
and admit that it is absent where they are
absent. The abstract desire for immediate
effectiveness accepts the laws of the ruling
thought, the exclusive point of view of the
present, when it throws itself into reformist
compromises or trashy pseudo-revolutionary
common actions. Thus madness reappears in
the very posture which pretends to fight
it. Conversely, the critique which goes beyond
the spectacle must know how to wait.
221 Emancipation from the material
bases
of inverted truth this is what the
self-emancipation
of our epoch consists of. This "historical
mission of installing truth in the
world"
cannot be accomplished either by the
isolated
individual, or by the atomized crowd
subjected
to manipulation, but now as ever by
the class
which is able to effect the dissolution
of
all classes by bringing all power into
the
dealienating form of realized democracy,
the Council, in which practical theory
controls
itself and sees its own action. This
is possible
only where individuals are "directly
linked to universal history";
only where
dialogue arms itself to make its own
conditions
victorious.
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