The Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
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
voxfux