text:
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
by Guy Debord
Table of Contents: Preface to the Third French Edition 1. Separation Perfected 2. The Commodity as Spectacle 3. Unity and Division Within Appearances 4. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation 5. Time and History 6. Spectacular Time 7. Environmental Planning 8. Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere 9. Ideology in Material Form
Bibliographic Information By Guy Debord. Originally published in France as La soci''t'' du spectacle in 1967 by BuchetChastel. Translation by Donald NicholsonSmith. This edition designed by Bruce Mau with Greg Van Alstyne. Published by Zone Books, 1994. ZONE BOOKS 611 Broadway, Suite 608 New York, NY 10012 Scanned and converted to HTML by Peter Jaques, September and October 1994. I have not altered the text in any way. Since this text was scanned, there may be errors. If you find any, please send me e mail. Peter Jaques
Preface to the Third French Edition
La Societe du spectacle was first published in November 1967 by the Paris publishers Buchet Chastel. The disturbances of 1968 made the book known. A second edition, strictly unaltered, was issued in 1971 by Editions Champ Libre, a publishing house whose name was changed to Editions Gerard Lebovici in 1984 in the wake of the murder of the publisher. That edition was reprinted regularly until 1991. The text of this third edition is also identical to that of 1967. (Naturally, the same principle will be applied to my other books, all of which are to be republished by Gallimard; I am not someone who revises his work.) A critical theory of the kind presented here needed no changing not as long, at any rate, as the general conditions of the long historical period that it was the first to describe accurately were still intact. The continued unfolding of our epoch has merely confirmed and further illustrated the theory of the spectacle. The reiteration of this theory may also be considered historical in a less elevated sense, for it testifies to what was the most extreme position taken up during the confrontations of 1968, and hence to what it was possible to know by then. The biggest dupes of that time have since received a clear object lesson in the form of their own shattered existences as to what exactly was meant by the "negation of life become visible," by the "loss of quality" associated with the commodityform or by the "proletarianization of the world." I have since as called for added postscripts on the more striking novelties thrown up by the fundamental movement of the times. In 1979, in the preface to a new Italian translation, I dealt with the effective changes in the nature of industrial production, as in the techniques of government, that began with the deployment of the power of the spectacle. And in 1988 my Comments on the Society of the Spectacle offered irrefutable evidence that the former "worldwide division of spectacular tasks" between the rival realms of the "concentrated" and "diffuse" forms of the spectacle had now given way to a combined form to an "integrated" spectacle. This amalgamation might be summed up by slightly revising Thesis 105 of The Society of the Spectacle, which drew a distinction, on the basis of the situation prior to 1967, between two different forms of practice: the Great Schism of class power having been reconciled, we ought now to say that the unified practice of the integrated spectacle has "transformed the world economically" as well as "using police methods to transform perception." (The police in question, incidentally, are of a completely new variety. ) It was only because this fusion had already occurred worldwide on the economic and political planes that the world could be declared officially unified. It was, furthermore, only because of the grave predicament in which separated power universally finds itself that this world needed unifying post haste, so that it might function as one bloc in a single consensual organization of the world market, at once travestied and buttressed by the spectacle. And yet, in the end, it will not be unified. The totalitarian bureaucracy that "substitute ruling class for the market economy" never had much faith in its own destiny. It knew itself to be nothing but an "undeveloped type of ruling class" even as it yearned to be something more. Long ago, Thesis 58 had established as axiomatic that
The phenomenon was duly noted. as tempered by the recognition of the rights of Homo Spectator. and as one man. 1992 Separation Perfected But certainly for the present age. about what it had to say. a very simple sign. to the dictatorial freedom of the Market. There was never anything outrageous. Feuerbach. In 1991 the first effects of this spectacular modernization were felt in the complete disintegration of Russia. of the progress made by the techniques of the spectacle. "the fall of the Berlin Wall. were proof called for." repeated over and over again. immediately attained the incontestability of all the other signs of democracy. however. illusion only is sacred. The disorder presently reigning in the East is no more than a consequence. Thus more clearly even than in the West were the disastrous results of the general development of the economy made manifest. so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Guy Debord June 30... representation to reality. dated and deemed sufficiently well understood. No one in the West felt the need to spend more than a single day considering the import and impact of this extraordinary media event proof enough. sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases. to convert to the current ideology of democracy in other words. and once force has been defeated? Thesis 111. discerning the first symptoms of that Russian decline whose final explosion we have just witnessed and envisioning the early disappearance of a world society which (as we may now put it) will one day be erased from the memory of the computer. the copy to the original. and it is the produce of this field which must in the end come to dominate the spectacular market. Nay. together with all the other tendencies toward the simplification of society. Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity . the appearance to the essence. offered a strategic assessment whose accuracy will very soon be obvious: The "crumbling of the worldwide alliance founded on bureaucratic mystification is in the last analysis the most unfavorable portent for the future development of capitalist society." This striving of the spectacle toward modernization and unification. truth profane. was what in 1989 led the Russian bureaucracy suddenly." This book should be read bearing in mind that it was written with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society."The spectacle has its roots in the fertile field of the economy. which prefers the sign to the thing signified. All that needed recording was the fact that a sort of geological tremor had apparently taken place. The same formidable question that has been haunting the world for two centuries is about to be posed again everywhere: How can the poor be made to work once their illusions have been shattered.
so to speak. Apprehended in a partial way. as such. solely as an object of contemplation. it is the very heart of society's real unreality. It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production. 4 The spectacle is not a collection of images.1 The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself. and the consummate result of that choice. 2 Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream. advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized. converges. it is that sector where all attention. the autonomous movement of nonlife. the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. As a part of society. it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. as a part of society and as a means of unification. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life. Being isolated and precisely for that reason this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness. In all its specific manifestations news or propaganda. the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation. 6 Understood in its totality. On the contrary. The tendency toward the specialization of imagesofthe world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image. 7 The phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world. all consciousness. and the former unity of life is lost forever. 5 The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. 3 The spectacle appears at once as society itself. reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudoworld apart. It is not something added to the real world not a decorative element. rather. of a global social praxis . It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification. and. where deceit deceives itself. translated into the material realm a world view transformed into an objective force.
is also the real totality to which the spectacle is subordinate. 11 In order to describe the spectacle. however. 9 In a world that really has been turned on its head. The language of the spectacle is composed of signs of the dominant organization of production signs which are at the same time the ultimate endproducts of that organization. and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances. out of reach and beyond dispute. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity." The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility.that has split up into reality on the one hand and image on the other. . lived reality suffers the material assaults of the spectacle's mechanisms of contemplation. that formation's agenda. truth is a moment of falsehood. Diversities and contrasts among such phenomena are the appearances of the spectacle the appearances of a social organization of appearances that needs to be grasped in its general truth. as it takes its place on one side or the other. 10 The concept of the spectacle brings together and explains a wide range of apparently disparate phenomena. and the spectacle is real. which the spectacle's autonomy challenges. a few artificial distinctions are called for. its functions and whatever forces may hasten its demise. But any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle's essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself. in fact. Likewise. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and underpinning of society as it exists. which is to say all social life. Each side therefore has its share of objective reality. whatever is good will appear. To analyze the spectacle means talking its language to some degree to the degree. It covers the entire globe. though it turns reality on its head. It is also the historical moment by which we happen to be governed. Thus the spectacle. Social practice. is mere appearance. it is. that the spectacle is able to emerge as its apparent goal. 8 The spectacle cannot be set in abstract opposition to concrete social activity. 13 The spectacle is essentially tautological. So deep is the rift in this totality. that we are obliged to engage the methodology of the society to which the spectacle gives expression. For what the spectacle expresses is the total practice of one particular economic and social formation. its formation. Understood on its own terms. incorporating the spectacular order and lending that order positive support. has no foundation apart from its transformation into its opposite: reality erupts within the spectacle. the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life. is itself a product of real activity. for the simple reason that its means and its ends are identical. And every concept. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good. so to speak. for the dichotomy between reality and image will survive on either side of any such distinction. 12 The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity.
14 The spectacular character of modern industrial society has nothing fortuitous or superficial about it. 15 As the indlspensable packaging for things produced as they are now produced. in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy. It is the opposite of dialogue. Since the spectacle's job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations. which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. 17 An earlier stage in the economy's domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all human endeavor.basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory. For the spectacle is simply the economic realm developing for itself at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers. the spectacle is the chief product of present day society. and the most easily deceived. entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all effective "having" must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d'etre from appearances. as the perfect image of the ruling economic order. the most abstract of the senses. has assumed a social character. ends are nothing and development is all although the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself. mere images are transformed into real beings tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior. So far from realizing philosophy. being directly dependent on social power and completely shaped by that power. however. this society is based on the spectacle in the most fundamental way. that the spectacle itself is perceptible to the naked eye even if that eye is assisted by the ear. inaccessible to any projected review or correction. it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear. The present stage. it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch. and turns the material life . the spectacle philosophizes reality. This is not to say. For the spectacle. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tradition gave rise. The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity. sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to presentday society's generalized abstraction. 19 The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy. At the same time all individual reality. as a general gloss on the rationality of the system. on the contrary. the spectacle reestablishes its rule. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence. and as the advanced economic sector directly responsible for the manufacture of an evergrowing mass of imageobjects. Indeed. 16 The spectacle subjects living human beings to its will to the extent that the economy has brought them under its sway. 18 For one to whom the real world becomes real images.
of everyone into a universe of speculation. 20 Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power, and as such it has never been able to emancipate itself from theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Not that its techniques have dispelled those religious mists in which human beings once located their own powers, the very powers that had been wrenched from them but those cloudenshrouded entities have now been brought down to earth. It is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that have become the most impenetrable and rarefied. The absolute denial of life, in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected onto the heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself. The spectacle is hence a technological version of the exiling of human powers in a "world beyond" and the perfection of separation within human beings. 21 So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modem society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep. 22 The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself from itself and established itself in the spectacle as an independent realm can only be explained by the selfcleavage and self contradictoriness already present in that powerful practice. 23 At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of labor, the specialization of power. The specialized role played by the spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear. Thus the most modern aspect of the spectacle is also at bottom the most archaic. 24 By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of selfpraise. The spectacle is the selfportrait of power in the age of power's totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes; a second Nature thus seems to impose inescapable laws upon our environment. But the spectacle is by no means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural; on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle understood in the limited sense of those "mass media" that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's internal dynamics. If the social requirements of the age which develops such techniques can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of society and all contact between people now depends on the intervention of such "instant"
communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially oneway; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration. The social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labor and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division. 25 Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. Religious contemplation in its earliest form was the outcome of the establishment of the social division of labor and the formation of classes. Power draped itself in the outward garb of a mythical order from the beginning. In former times the category of the sacred justified the cosmic and ontological ordering of things that best served the interests of the masters, expounding upon and embellishing what society could not deliver. Thus power as a separate realm has always had a spectacular aspect, but mass allegiance to frozen religious imagery was originally a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for a poverty of real social activity that was still widely felt to be a universal fact of life. The modern spectacle, by contrast, depicts what society can deliver, but within this depiction what is permitted is rigidly distinguished from what is possible. The spectacle preserves unconsciousness as practical changes in the conditions of existence proceed. The spectacle is selfgenerated, and it makes up its own rules: it is a specious form of the sacred. And it makes no secret of what it is, namely, hierarchical power evolving on its own, in its separateness, thanks to an increasing productivity based on an ever more refined division of labor, an ever greater comminution of machinegoverned gestures, and an everwidening market. In the course of this development all community and critical awareness have ceased to be; nor have those forces, which were able by separating to grow enormously in strength, yet found a way to reunite. 26 The generalized separation of worker and product has spelled the end of any comprehensive view of the job done, as well as the end of direct personal communication between producers. As the accumulation of alienated products proceeds, and as the productive process gets more concentrated, consistency and communication become the exclusive assets of the system's managers. The triumph of an economic system founded on separation leads to the proletarianization of the world. 27 Owing to the very success of this separated system of production, whose product is separation itself, that fundamental area of experience which was associated in earlier societies with an individual's principal work is being transformed at least at the leading edge of the system's evolution into a realm of nonwork, of inactivity. Such inactivity, however, is by no means emancipated from productive activity: it remains in thrall to that activity, in an uneasy and worshipful subjection to production's needs and results; indeed it is itself a product of the rationality of production. There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. So what is referred to as "liberation from work," that is, increased leisure time, is a liberation neither within labor itself nor from the world labor has brought into being. 28 The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process
designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions and each time in a more concrete manner. 29 The origin of the spectacle lies in the world's loss of unity, and its massive expansion in the modern period demonstrates how total this loss has been: the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in general, finds perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of being concrete is, precisely, abstraction. The spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a selfrepresentation to the world, and is superior to the world. The spectacle is simply the common language that bridges this division. Spectators are linked only by a oneway relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness. 30 The spectator's alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere. 31 Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulate. The spectacle is a map of this new world¥a map drawn to the scale of the territory itself. In this way the very powers that have been snatched from us reveal themselves to us in their full force. 32 The spectacle's function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic growth corresponds almost entirely to the growth of this particular sector of industrial production. If something grows along with the selfmovement of the economy, it can only be the alienation that has inhabited the core of the economic sphere from its inception. 33 Though separated from his product, man is more and more, and ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically is he cut off from that life. 34 The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.
As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized man's lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.." This principle is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle. 37 The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere. In these signs we recognize our old enemy the commodity.The Commodity as Spectacle The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. 38 .. which appears at first sight a very trivial thing. being the negative expression of living value. yet which is in reality a very queer thing. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men's consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression. and easily understood. the domination of society by things whose qualities are "at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible. it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. Lukacs. abounding in metaphysical subtleties. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it.. History and Class Consciousness 35 The selfmovement of the spectacle consists in this: it arrogates to itself everything that in human activity exists in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed form as things that. 36 Here we have the principle of commodity fetishism. have become exclusively abstract value. for its logic is one with men's estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is.
but it transforms it into a world of the economy. invested with full authority by an unknown power. from the objects it lauds to the behavior it regulates. can be no more than an augmented survival. It was at this moment too that political economy established itself as at once the dominant science and the science of domination. but they still must be liberated from their liberators. and eventually given rise to an abundance thanks to which the basic problem of survival. except here and there. and it can only develop within the quantitative . 39 Despite the fact that it excludes quality. which implies the exchange of a variety of products among independent producers. was long able to retain an artisanal aspect embodied in a marginal economic activity where its quantitative essence was masked. The unceasing deployment of economic power in the shape of commodities has transfigured human labor into laborascommodity. Thus the spectacle betrays the fact that it must eventually break the bounds of its own abundance. The economy itself. but is rather forever cropping up again at a higher level. Wherever it encountered the social conditions of large scale trade and capital accumulation. though solved. it is already true at the universal level which was the commodity's original standard a standard that it has been able to live up to by turning the whole planet into a single world market. throughout this campaign of conquest. however. was neither perceived nor understood not properly known precisely because of its "familiarity. is solved in such a way that it is not disposed of. the division of labor specific to that revolution's manufacturing system. into wagelabor. The entire economy then became what the commodity. of a surplus survival. 40 The development of the forces of production is the real unconscious history that has built and modified the conditions of existence of human groups (understood as the conditions of survival and their extension): this development has been the basis of all human enterprise. such production successfully established total hegemony over the economy. which is to say an abundance of commodity relations. The pseudonature in which labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain in its service indefinitely. it was the dominance of money that seemed to play the role of emissary. qua development. a process of quantitative development. The economy transforms the world.The loss of quality so obvious at every level of the language of the spectacle. In these circumstances an abundance of commodities. merely echoes the basic traits of a real production process that shuns reality. Economic growth liberates societies from the natural pressures occasioned by their struggle for survival. to the qualitative. had shown itself to be namely. and mass production for a world market. this development is still subject. ." In a society where concrete commodities were few and far between. 41 The commodity's dominion over the economy was at first exercised in a covert manner. Though this is not true locally. the commodity emerged in its fullfledged form as a force aspiring to the complete colonization of social life. The realm of commodities has meant the constitution. The commodity form is characterized exclusively by selfequivalence it is exclusively quantitative in nature: the quantitative is what it develops. With the coming of the industrial revolution. the material basis of social life. The production of commodities. within a natural economy. The independence of the commodity has spread to the entire economy over which the commodity now reigns. and inasmuch as this estranged activity is answerable only to itself it is able in turn to enroll all socially permissible efforts and projects under its banner.
in their new role as consumers. A cycle is thus set in train that must be maintained at all costs: the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a fragmentary individual completely cut off from the concerted action of the forces of production. with a great show of solicitude and politeness. To this end the already specialized science of domination is further broken down into specialties such as sociology. In the least industrialized regions its presence is already felt in the form of imperialist domination by those areas that lead the world in productivity. social space is continually being blanketed by stratum after stratum of commodities. even less radical ones. semiology and so on. is that survival itself belongs to the realm of dispossession: it may gild poverty. new forms of employment have to be created. or true satisfaction from a survival that increases according to its own logic. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see commodities are now all that there is to see. The growth of the dictatorship of modern economic production is both extensive and intensive in character. If automation. 45 Automation. in fact. confronts the world of the commodity with a contradiction that it must somehow resolve: the same technical infrastructure that is capable of abolishing labor must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity and indeed as the sole generator of commodities. because it continues to enshrine deprivation. 43 Whereas at the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation "political economy treats the proletarian as a mere worker" who must receive only the minimum necessary to guarantee his laborpower. In these advanced sectors themselves. in his humanity. Consumable survival must increase. and no end to its growth. once work is over. the world we see is the world of the commodity. Thus it is that the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the "perfected denial of man. The reason there is nothing beyond augmented survival." 44 The spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities. that can increase productivity. and never considers him "in his leisure. cybernetics. The entirety of labor sold is transformed overall into the total commodity. instead they find that every day. they are treated like grownups. but it cannot transcend it." these ideas of the ruling class are revised just as soon as so great an abundance of commodities begins to be produced that a surplus "collaboration" is required of the workers. With the advent of the socalled second industrial revolution. which oversee the selfregulation of every phase of the process. or for that matter any mechanisms. which is at once the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice. alienated consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses. applied psychology.42 The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. All of a sudden the workers in question discover that they are no longer invariably subject to the total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production. are to be prevented from reducing socially necessary labortime to an unacceptably low level. The humanity of the commodity finally attends to the workers' "leisure and humanity" for the simple reason that political economy as such now can and must bring these spheres under its sway. A happy solution presents itself in the growth of the tertiary or service sector in response to the immense strain on the supply lines of the army responsible for distributing and .
the very factitiousness of the needs associated with the commodities on offer calls out a whole battery of reserve forces. use value has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival that is the real basis for the general acceptance of illusion in the consumption of modern commodities. for here the totality of use has already been bartered for the totality of abstract representation. as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do. thereby placing use value at its mercy. The process of exchange became indistinguishable from any conceivable utility. the pseudouse of life. 48 Use value was formerly implicit in exchange value. of the exchangeability of diverse goods whose uses are not otherwise compatible. Starting out as the condottiere of use value. The spectacle is not just the servant of pseudouse it is already. The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion. however. on the other. exchange value eventually gained the upper hand.hyping the commodities of the moment. in itself. gives rise to a new form of privation within the realm of augmented survival. but the victory it eventually won with its own weapons created the preconditions for its establishment as an autonomous power. this is not to say that this realm is emancipated from the old poverty: on the contrary. The spectacle is money for contemplation only. it has to be explicit for the very reason that its own effective existence has been eroded by the overdevelopment of the commodity economy. 49 The spectacle is another facet of money. in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece. In terms of the spectacle's topsyturvy logic. that is. and the spectacle is its most general form. the spectacle in its full development is money's modern aspect. 47 The falling rate of use value. 50 . The commodity is this illusion. the system is faced with the necessity of reintegrating newly redundant labor. 46 Exchange value could only have arisen as the proxy of use value. But whereas money in its familiar form has dominated society as the representation of universal equivalence. one must either submit or die. shelter). it requires the vast majority to take part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of its ends a requirement to which. even in its most impoverished form (food. which is the abstract general equivalent of all commodities. which is in fact real. By activating all human use value and monopolizing that value's fulfillment. which is a constant of the capitalist economy. It is the reality of this situation the fact that. and that a counterfeit life calls for a pseudojustification. The coincidence is neat: on the one hand. exchange value ended up waging a war that was entirely its own. as everyone knows.
a struggle between two conceptions of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception. the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible. 51 The economy's triumph as an independent power inevitably also spells its doom. Those who maintain that "one divides into two" is the fundamental law of things are on the side of the materialist dialectic. subjecting all reality to an appearance that is in effect that labor's product. there ego shall be. out of the struggle that society embodies. the economy proceeds to lose its power.With the achievement of a purely economic abundance. capital spreads out to the periphery. Once freed. Unity and Division Within Appearances A lively new polemic about the concepts "one divides into two" and "two fuse into one" is unfolding on the philosophical front in this country. Where economic id was. all of which come down in the end to just one namely. where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making. The subject can only arise out of society that is. those who maintain that the fundamental law of things is that "two fuse into one" are against the materialist . This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are against the materialist dialectic. now met in the most summary manner. the economy has in point of fact become contingent on society. by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudoneeds. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable. surely this too must fall into ruins?" (Freud). Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs. The possibility of a subject's existing depends on the outcome of the class struggle which turns out to be the product and the producer of history's economic foundation. "Whatever is conscious wears out. Having grown as a subterranean force until it could emerge sovereign. however. where it assumes the form of tangible objects. 53 Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Society in its length and breadth becomes capital's faithful portrait. As it accumulates. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle. Capital is no longer the invisible center determining the mode of production. Such an economy irrevocably breaks all ties with authentic needs to the precise degree that it emerges from a social unconscious that was dependent on it without knowing it. the pseudoneed for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue. 52 By the time society discovers that it is contingent on the economy.
Just as the development of the most advanced economies involves clashes between different agendas. when viewed from the standpoint of the system's global functioning these are seen to be merely different aspects of a worldwide division of spectacular tasks. So even if in its local manifestations the spectacle may embody totalitarian varieties of social communication and control. are thus officially passed off as real antagonisms. and their arguments are diametrically opposed. That tendency is capitalism. (Peking). 21 September 1964 54 Like modern society itself. much as it proposes pseudogoods to be coveted. and this on the world stage as well as within each nation. As for the bureaucratic power that rules in a number of industrialized countries. they do express the system's uneven and conflictridden development. but this plays an integral part in the overarching spectacle as general pseudonegation and hence as vital support. 57 The society that brings the spectacle into being does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely through the exercise of economic hegemony. In both. And. the spectacle is able to portray them as markers of radically distinct social systems. Modern society has thus already invested the social surface of every continent even where the material basis of economic exploitation is still lacking by spectacular means. As it emerges in the spectacle. so totalitarian economic management by a state bureaucracy and the condition of those countries living under colonialism or semicolonialism are likewise highly differentiated with respect to modes of production and power. But from the standpoint of their actual reality as mere sectors. however. it is clear that the specificity of each is subsumed under a universal system as functions of a single tendency that has taken the planet for its field of operations. It can frame the agenda of a ruling class and preside over that class's constitution. 55 Struggles between forces. of the acute and complex class struggle taking place in China and in the world. it may also offer false models of revolution to local revolutionaries. In actuality these struggles partake of a real unity. The two sides have drawn a clear line of demarcation between them. on the ideological level. 56 This is not to say that the spectacle's sham battles between competing versions of alienated power are not also real. the spectacle is at once united and divided. This polemic is a reflection. unity is grounded in a split. It also dominates them in its capacity as the society of the spectacle. while appealing to criteria of quite a different order. and unity as division.dialectic. Red Flag. all of which have been established for the purpose of running the same socioeconomic system. it certainly has its own peculiar spectacle. . this contradiction is itself contradicted by virtue of a reversal of its meaning: division is presented as unity. By pointing up these great differences. as well as the relatively contradictory interests of those classes or fractions of classes that recognize the system and strive in this way to carve out a role for themselves in it.
A smug acceptance of what exists is likewise quite compatible with a purely spectacular rebelliousness. And Kennedy the orator survived . in the second. In the former case. and as clearly the enemy of the individual in himself as of the individual in others. The byproducts in question are power and leisure the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and the omega of a process that is never questioned. Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor. must possess the full range of accepted human qualities. Stars of consumption. actually show each of these types enjoying an equal access to the whole realm of consumption and deriving exactly the same satisfaction therefrom. 59 Behind the glitter of the spectacle's distractions. The life in question is after all produced solely as a form of pseudogratification which still embodies repression. The vestiges of religion and of the family (still the chief mechanism for the passing on of class power). neither do they offer any real choices. for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economics of affluence finds a way of applying its production methods to this particular raw material. all official differences between them are thus canceled out by the official similarity which is an inescapable implication of their supposed excellence in every sphere. Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. Khrushchev had to become a general in order to have been responsible for the outcome of the battle of Kursk not on the battlefield but twenty years later. stars of consumption canvas for votes as pseudopower over life lived. just as none of these celestial activities are truly global. meanwhile. modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of a banalizing trend that also dominates it at each point where the most advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadened the panoply of roles and objects available to choose from. government power assumes the personified form of the pseudostar. whatever ideological or policestate barriers of a protectionist kind may be set up by local spectacles with dreams of autarky. and thus too the vestiges of the moral repression that these institutions ensure. But. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversifications of productive activity. 61 The individual who in the service of the spectacle is placed in stardom's spotlight is in fact the opposite of an individual. The spectacle has its roots in the fertile field of the economy. 60 Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings. as master of the State.58 Though designed to maintain the existing order as a whole. the division of spectacular tasks is chiefly oriented toward the actively developing pole of that order. though outwardly representing different personality types. Stars of decision. and it is the produce of that field which must in the end come to dominate the spectacular market. they mimic by products of that labor. In entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with. distilling the essence of the spectacle's banality into images of possible roles. can now be seamlessly combined with the rhetorical advocacy of pleasure in this life. he renounces all autonomy in order himself to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things. and project these above labor so that they appear as its goal.
The admirable people who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be. And commodity production. and this is usually concentrated in a single individual. on the other hand. at the still center of misfortune. the dynamism of capitalism: it is things that rule. there is one spectacular antagonism which is always at the forefront of the range of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adulthood. Thus false conflicts of ancient vintage tend to be resuscitated regionalisms or racisms whose job it now is to invest vulgar rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority. This dictatorship must therefore be attended by permanent violence. and because any choice made independently of it. and what it sells back to society en bloc is society's survival. that are young things themselves that vie with each other and usurp one another's places. say. Bureaucratic property is itself concentrated. And youth implying change in what exists is by no means proper to people who are young. or music amounts to a declaration of war to the death on the bureaucracy. by his membership in that community. Rather. Differing forms of a single alienation contend in the masquerade of total freedom of choice by virtue of the fact that they are all founded on real repressed contradictions. on the one hand. even the most trivial concerning food. is also concentrated in form: the commodity the bureaucracy appropriates is the totality of social labor. less well developed in bureaucratic systems. Everyone must identify magically with this absolute celebrity or disappear. in the sense that Theodore Sorenson still wrote speeches for Kennedy's successor in the very style that had done so much to create the dead man's persona. it characterizes only the economic system. and even the most advanced capitalism may call on it in moments of crisis.himself. In either case. of roles for the most part signified by and embodied in objects that are at once exclusive and interconnected. of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and. in that the individual bureaucrat's relation to the ownership of the economy as a whole is invariably mediated by the community of bureaucrats. the guarantor of the system's totalitarian cohesiveness. Depending on the needs of the particular stage of poverty that it is supposed at once to deny and sustain. and even delivered his own funeral oration. and the heroic image appropriate to the absolute exploitation constituted by primitive . the spectacle may be concentrated or diffuse in form. 63 What spectacular antagonisms conceal is the unity of poverty. based on the juxtaposition. Its spectacle imposes an image of the good which is a resume of everything that exists officially. it is no more than an image of harmony set amidst desolation and dread. evolves into a contest among phantom qualities meant to elicit devotion to quantitative triviality. 62 The false choice offered by spectacular abundance. Hence too the neverending succession of paltry contests from competitive sports to elections that are utterly incapable of arousing any truly playful feelings. For here an adult in the sense of someone who is master of his own life is nowhere to be found. For this figure is the master of notbeing consumed. 64 The concentrated form of the spectacle normally characterizes bureaucratic capitalism. Wherever the consumption of abundance has established itself. they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life and everyone knows it. though it may on occasion be borrowed as a technique for buttressing state power over more backward mixed economies. so to speak. The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice because it has had to make all the choices itself.
are propagated with lightning speed. or are then traded back and forth in a sphere far removed from that of their original use. So it is that. different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting approaches to the organization of society. Of arms and the man the spectacle does not sing. is the basic use of submission. In this way reified man proclaims his intimacy with the commodity. of the police. 65 The diffuse form of the spectacle is associated with the abundance of commodities. as the mass of commodities become more and more absurd. If every Chinese has to study Mao. Similarly. but rather of passions and the commodity. whereas all particular commodities wear themselves out in the fight. absurdity becomes a commodity in its own right. Here each commodity considered in isolation is justified by an appeal to the grandeur of commodity production in general a production for which the spectacle is an apologetic catalog. unconsciously actualizes something of a higher order than itself: the commodity's becoming worldly coincides with the world's being transformed into commodities. The dominion of the spectacle in its concentrated form means the dominion. Following in the footsteps of the old religious fetishism. thus the spectacular logic of the automobile argues for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of the old city centers. the commodity as abstract form continues on its way to absolute selfrealization. Keychains that are not paid for but come as free gifts with the purchase of some luxury product. whereas the spectacle of the city itself calls for these same ancient sections to be turned into museums. The sheer fad item perfectly expresses the fact that. So the already questionable satisfaction allegedly derived from the consumption of the whole is adulterated from the outset because the real consumer can only get his hands on a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven fragments each of which naturally lacks any of the quality ascribed to the whole. too. fueled and boosted by the communications media. 66 Each individual commodity fights for itself. The claims jostling for position on the stage of the affluent economy's integrated spectacle are not always compatible. Within this blind struggle each commodity. with its transported convulsionaries and miraculous cures. this is because there is nothing else to be. thanks to the cunning of the commodity. A film sparks a fashion craze. and in effect be Mao. with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Waves of enthusiasm for particular products.accumulation accelerated by terror. what this means for the consumer is an outpouring of religious zeal in honor of the commodity's sovereign freedom. meanwhile. following where passion leads. or a magazine launches a chain of clubs that in turn spins off a line of products. The only use still in evidence here. 67 The satisfaction that the commodity in its abundance can no longer supply by virtue of its use value is now sought in an acknowledgment of its value qua commodity. The spectacle is the epic poem of this strife a strife that no fall of Ilium can bring to an end. Someone who collects keychains that have recently been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected might be said to be accumulating the commodity's indulgences the glorious tokens of the commodity's immanent presence among the faithful. the fetishism of the commodity also achieves its moment of acute fervor. bear eloquent witness to a mystical selfabandonment to the transcendent spirit of the commodity. . however. A use of the commodity arises that is sufficient unto itself. cannot acknowledge the others and aspires to impose its presence everywhere as though it were alone.
But even this spectacular prestige evaporates into vulgarity as soon as the object is taken home by a consumer and hence by all other consumers too. as with the fashionable adoption of seemingly rare aristocratic first names which turn out in the end to be borne by a whole generation. This is as true of the concentrated as of the diffuse version of the spectacle. 71 Whatever lays claim to permanence in the spectacle is founded on change. But. For by this time another product will have been assigned to supply the system with its justification. the illusion of community that has guaranteed that figure unanimous support is exposed as a mere sum of solitudes without illusions. though quintessentially dogmatic. stands revealed too late.68 It is doubtless impossible to contrast the pseudoneed imposed by the reign of modern consumerism with any authentic need or desire that is not itself equally determined by society and its history. 69 The image of the blissful unification of society through consumption suspends disbelief with regard to the reality of division only until the next disillusionment occurs in the sphere of actual consumption. The cumulative power of this autonomous realm of artifice necessarily everywhere entails a falsification of life. Likewise every time a personification of totalitarian power is eclipsed. But the commodity in the stage of its abundance attests to an absolute break in the organic development of social needs. As such it is ceremoniously presented as the unique and ultimate product. Each and every new product is supposed to offer a dramatic shortcut to the long awaited promised land of total consumption. however briefly. and must change as that foundation changes. What pushes for greater rationality is also what . The commodity's mechanical accumulation unleashes a limitless artificiality in face of which all living desire is disarmed. What brings together men liberated from local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. and will in turn be demanding its moment of acclaim. Nothing is stable for it: this is its natural state. just like any obsolete product. At this point its essential poverty. and as changes occur in the general conditions of production. the natural outcome of the poverty of its production. albeit the state most at odds with its natural inclination. 72 The unreal unity the spectacle proclaims masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production is based. Something that can assert its own unchanging excellence with uncontested arrogance changes nonetheless. and only the system endures: Stalin. The sole real status attaching to a mediocre object of this kind is to have been placed. The spectacle. can be cast aside by the very forces that promoted his rise. so the wouldbe singularity of an object can be offered to the eager hordes only if it has been massproduced. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what separates them from it. Each new lie of the advertising industry implicitly acknowledges the one before. 70 This continual process of replacement means that fake gratification cannot help but be exposed as products change. can yet produce no solid dogma. at the very center of social life and hailed as the revelation of the goal of the production process.
and into participation in the labor and the struggles which constitute history. but rather of interpreting the world's transformation. are the raison d'ˆtre of the March 18th insurrection and the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished it with an army." with the dialectic with a truly historical thinking that is not content simply to seek the meaning of what is but aspires to understand the dissolution of everything that is and in the process to dissolve all separation. As for the subject of history. 74 It is because human beings have thus been thrust into history. that they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a cleareyed manner. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation The equal right of all to the goods and enjoyment of this world. it can only be the selfproduction of the living: the living becoming master and possessor of its world that is. every static order had crumbled to nothing. Hegel was . the destruction of all authority. and it did so visibly once that victory was translated onto the political plane. at bottom.nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What creates society's abstract power also creates its concrete unfreedom. The development of the forces of production had shattered the old relations of production. 75 The class struggles of the long revolutionary period ushered in by the rise of the bourgeoisie have evolved in tandem with the "thought of history. 76 For Hegel it was no longer a matter of interpreting the world. the negation of all moral restraints these. however. And everything that had formerly been absolute became historical. The history in question has no goal aside from whatever effects it works upon itself. Enquˆte parlementaire sur l'insurrection du 18 mars 73 The real movement that abolishes reigning conditions governed society from the moment the bourgeoisie triumphed in the economic sphere. Inasmuch as he did no more than interpret that transformation. even though the last unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era may view the productive progression through which history has unfolded as itself the object of that history. of history and coming to exist as consciousness of its own activity.
78 Historical thought can be saved only if it becomes practical thought. Such historical thought was still part of that consciousness which comes on the scene too late and supplies a justification after the fact. Hegel's paradoxical posture. arises from the simple fact that the great thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strove in his philosophy merely for reconciliation with the results of those revolutions. and that the only court capable of ruling on truth or falsehood has been adjourned. It is under this aspect that the relationship between Marx and Hegel has generally been ignored. even for him. Bernstein perfectly described this connection between the dialectical method and a historical taking of sides: "Such historical autosuggestion. so grievously mistaken that the commonest of political visionaries would be hard pressed to top it. 79 The inseparability of Marx's theory from the Hegelian method is itself inseparable from that theory's revolutionary character. what existed could only be the totality of the movement of history. had never completely emancipated himself. as it expires in the arms of truly historical thinking. It thus transcended separation but it did so in thought only. that force whose achievement is the present. In view of the general turbulence of the times. which subordinates the meaning of all reality to its historical culmination. it does not reflect the entire process of that revolution. 77 When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that historical thought has not after all forgotten and lost itself. and this goes for Marx as for Stirner and Bakunin. "Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution. Deploring the lessthan scientific predictions of the Manifesto of 1848 concerning the imminence of proletarian revolution in Germany. All the theoretical strands of the revolutionary workers' movement stem from critical confrontation with Hegelian thought. for even in order to express itself it must assume that the total history in which it has vested everything has come to an end. ill understood or even denounced as the weak point of what has been fallaciously transformed into a Marxist dogma.merely the philosophical culmination of philosophy. Hegel performed the task of the philosopher "the glorification of what exists" for the last time. this could be masked only by identifying that thought with a preexisting project of the Spirit of that absolute heroic force which has done what it willed and willed what it has done." 80 . this was all the more fatal to him. Since the external position of thought was nevertheless maintained. "Theses on Hegel and Revolution"). but only its concluding phase. but. So philosophy. It is thus a philosophy. from which Marx. that thought's conclusions are negated. but at the same time the validity of its method is confirmed. and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class cannot be less than historical consciousness applied to the totality of its world. not of the revolution. no more than Engels. would be incomprehensible in a Marx who by that period had already become a serious student of the economy were it not possible to recognize here the traces of a lingering loyalty to Hegel's antithetical dialectics. while at the same time revealing this meaning by proclaiming itself to be that culmination. He sought to understand a world that made itself. can no longer glorify its world without denying it. from its truth. but of the restoration" (Karl Korsch. that is to say.
"We know only a single science. this thought is an approbatory one which no longer has the dimension of the concept. history is fundamentally dependent on economic knowledge only so long as it remains merely economic history. Not. neglects the fact that the science available to it must certainly have been itself founded along with the economy on history. which no longer has any need of Hegelianism to justify it. are properly so called inasmuch as they deny history inasmuch. however. For Marx it is the struggle and by no means the law that has to be understood. 83 The utopian strands in socialism. and its historical wounds leaving no scars. in the form in which this had imposed itself in the preceding centuries. The critique of political economy is the first act of this end of prehistory: "Of all the instruments of production. "the science of history. Marx's theory lies beyond science. On the other hand. Marx's project is the project of a conscious history whereby the quantitative realm that arises from the blind development of purely economic productive forces would be transformed into a qualitative appropriation of history. that is. the project of transcending the economy and taking possession of history cannot itself be scientific in character. has failed to rid itself of all its bourgeois traits. What Marx did was to demolish Hegel's detached stance with respect to what occurs. so long as it persists in espousing the notion that history in the present period can be mastered by means of scientific knowledge. along with any movement of the times beyond the immutable perfection of their image of a happy society. though they do have their historical roots in the critique of the existing social organization. Now that continual tinkering by the State has succeeded in compensating for the tendency for crises to occur. the contemplation of the movement of the economy in the dominant thought of present day society is indeed a noninverted legacy of the undialectical aspect of the Hegelian attempt to create a circular system.The inversion that Marx effected in order to salvage the thought of the bourgeois revolutions by "transplanting" it was no trivial substitution of the material development of the forces of production for the unfolding of the Hegelian Spirit on its way to its rendezvous with itself in time. Theory thenceforward had nothing to know beyond what it itself did. If it is to master the science of society and bring it under its governance. the same type of reasoning takes this delicate balance for a permanent economic harmony. though eager to give history a scientific foundation." 81 The close affinity of Marx's thinking with scientific thinking lies in its rational grasp of the forces actually at work in society. its objectification being indistinguishable from its alienation. The revolutionary point of view. For history. By contrast." 82 The bourgeois era. the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. though. no longer has an end. because they deny science. History's intervention in the economy (a global process that is after all capable of changing its own basic scientific preconditions) has in fact been overlooked by scientific observers to a degree well illustrated by the vain calculations of those socialists who believed that they could ascertain the exact periodicity of crises. On the contrary. Fundamentally. along with the contemplation of a supreme external agent of whatever kind. as they deny the struggle that exists. which is only preserved within it inasmuch as it is transcended by it. the utopians were completely in thrall to scientific thinking. because the movement that it is designed to laud is a sector of the world where thought no longer has any place a sector whose mechanical development in effect dominates the world's development overall. once it becomes real. Their goal was the perfection of this rational ." says The German Ideology.
. in the case of SaintSimonism." 85 The weakness of Marx's theory is naturally part and parcel of the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. logically enough. "that what needed to be proved might be won by fighting?" All the same. The working class failed to inaugurate permanent revolution in 1848. and all who thought like us. for they believed firmly in the social power of scientific proof and even." consciousness now always came on the scene too soon." All of a sudden it was discovered that. It became important patiently to study economic development. ripe. They certainly did not look upon themselves as prophets disarmed.system. and the Commune went down in isolation... in that he undertook critiques of particular disciplines. and they viewed this truth in accordance with its pure abstract image the form in which it had established itself at a much earlier moment in social development. that Marx's theory became "Marxism. according to the "science of revolutions. by a long way. "However did they imagine. in the seizure of power by science. and notably that of the fundamental science of bourgeois society. which determined not only what was considered scientifically acceptable but also just what might become an object of scientific research. of an attempted application to society of the science least dependent on history. as economics. and once more to accept. the utopians' scientific orientation did not extend to knowledge of the fact that social groups are liable to have vested interests in a status quo. What is certain is that the scientific conclusions that Marx drew about the future development of the working class along with the organizational practice founded on them would later become obstacles to proletarian consciousness. the suffering it imposed that suffering whose outcome was still a "graveyard of good intentions. "History has proved us. and greatly widened in his theoretical legacy to the workers' movement. was depended on more and more as guarantor of the necessity of its own future negation. In this way revolutionary practice the only true agent of this negation tended to be thrust out of theory's field of vision altogether. Revolutionary theory was thus still unable to come into full possession of its own existence. was the product. The advent of the subject of history was consequently set back even further. the breach was opened in Marx's own lifetime. and the smiling future continually evoked by the utopians played "a role in their social science analogous to that played by inertia in rational mechanics" (Mat 'riaux pour une th'orie du prol'tariat). As Sorel noted. "It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not. the historical science par excellence. forces at their disposal equipped to maintain it and indeed forms of false consciousness designed to buttress their positions. the utopians took astronomy as their model for the discovery and demonstration of the laws of society: their conception of harmony. 84 The scientificdeterminist side of Marx's thought was indeed what made it vulnerable to "ideologization". which was by this time largely governed by the social demand arising from factors. wrong. The utopian socialists remained prisoners to the scientific manner of expounding the truth. political economy. and needed to be taught.." Engels would write in 1895." Sombart wonders. It was in this mutilated form. That Marx should have been reduced to defending and honing that theory in the detachment of scholarly work in the British Museum can only have had a debilitating effect on the theory itself. Their idea of things thus lagged far behind the historical reality of the development of science itself. such as those mentioned above. so hostile to history. yet in the exposition of that theory he was drawn onto the ground of the dominant forms of thought. This conception was introduced and promoted with an experimental ingenuousness worthy of Newtonism. with Hegelian tranquility. later taken as definitive." Throughout his life Marx upheld his theory's unitary standpoint.
These are also the only two revolutionary classes in history but they are revolutionary under different conditions.86 All the theoretical shortcomings of a scientific defense of proletarian revolution. the bourgeoisie thus renounced any historical existence beyond its own reduction to the economic history of things. and permitted itself to be "condemned along with the other classes to a like political nullity. The proletarian revolution is a project. Nor can any Jacobinstyle seizure of the State be a means to that end. when feudalism was breaking up a stable equilibrium between powers. . or in the common ruin of the contending classes. also. The proletariat cannot make use of any ideology designed to pass partial goals off as general ones. in the time of "laisser faire. The bourgeois revolution is a fait accompli. however. are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. at each stage. and then went on." Already discernible in outline here are the sociopolitical bases of the modern spectacle. via the increase in dispossession that this growth entails. 87 As early as the Manifesto. The first thing the linear model loses sight of is the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever been victorious." to become the bourgeoisie's own State. which in a negative way defines the proletariat as the only pretender to historical existence. The growth of the forces of production cannot in itself guarantee this accession to power not even indirectly. formulated on the basis of the earlier revolution but differing qualitatively from it. on the other hand. so too no jacquerie of serfs ever overthrew the barons and no slave revolt in the ancient world ever ended the rule of freemen. accurately to depict a foreshadowing of modern State bureaucracy in that fusion of capital and State which established "capital's national power over labor and a public authority designed to maintain social servitude". the urge to demonstrate the scientific legitimacy of proletarian power by citing a sequence of precedents only served to muddy Marx's historical thinking. this is true only to the extent that the State was formerly the instrument of class oppression in a static economy. was eventually to emerge as wielder of a power central to the planned management of the economic process. the only class. 88 The only two classes that really correspond to Marx's theory. The modern State. The same simplified view led Marx to neglect the economic role of the State in the management of a class society. just as the "Asiatic mode of production" (as Marx himself observed in another connection) preserved its stasis in spite of class conflict. class struggles would end "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large. This approach led him to defend a linear model of the development of modes of production according to which. be they in the content or in the form of the exposition. Marx was already able. under the rubric of Bonapartism. If the rising bourgeoisie appears to have liberated the economy from the State. laisser passer. The proletariat will never come to embody power unless it becomes the class of consciousness." The plain facts of history." The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the class of the developing economy. To neglect the originality of the bourgeoisie's historical role serves only to conceal the concrete originality of the proletarian project. the two pure classes that the whole thrust of Capital's analysis tends to bring to the fore. for which the development of the economy was the cause and consequence of its capture of society. are that. come down in the end to the identification of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power. which can get nowhere unless it advances under its own banner and comes to grips with the "prodigiousness of its own aims. which first supported the developing bourgeoisie thanks to the mercantile system. The bourgeoisie developed its autonomous economic power during the medieval period when the State had been weakened.
and. on the contrary. The forms of organization developed subsequently by the workers' movement on the basis of this dereliction of theory have tended in turn to bar the construction of a unitary theory. and portrays for others. the way in which he himself pictures. In a wellknown letter of 7 December 1867. to break theory up instead into a variety of specialized and fragmentary types of knowledge. are the very practical medium that theory needs in order to be true. all it can do is help to repress it and destroy all memory of it." By thus censuring the "tendentious conclusions" of his own objective analysis. perhaps. received but the scantest attention from revolutionary theory during the founding period of the workers' movement the very period when that theory still possessed the unitary character which it had inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice). But the defeat and repression that it soon confronted brought to the surface a conflict between two conceptions of the proletarian revolution. by his political position and his past) that is to say. theory cannot even recognize the practical verification of the unitary historical thought that it has betrayed whenever that verification emerges in spontaneous workers' struggles. allowing the tenets of that theory to be imposed by statist and hierarchical methods borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. for example. the ultimate outcome of the present movement. each of which had an authoritarian dimension spelling the abandonment of the conscious selfemancipation of the working class. however. 91 Early successes in the First International's struggle enabled it to free itself from the confused influences that the dominant ideology continued for a time to exercise upon it from within. As it turned out. What constitutes the proletarian class as a subject is its organizing of revolutionary struggles and its organizing of society at the moment of revolution: this is the point at which the practical conditions of consciousness must be assembled and the theory of praxis verified by virtue of its transformation into theoryin practice. were not a theoretical discovery. Thus ideologically alienated. which eventually became an irreconcilable one. The soviets. to go back even farther. however. the present social process has nothing whatsoever to do with his real analysis. and which Engels was supposed to publish as if it were that of an opponent. They are in fact a requirement of theory.because it cannot maintain any partial reality that is truly its own. Marx in effect reveals the methodological key to tackling the two aspects of the matter. he clearly never fell prey himself to such illusions. the highest theoretical truth attained by the International Workingmen's Association was its own existence in practice. accompanying an article criticizing Capital which he himself had written. The rift between Marxists and Bakuninists. 90 The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within the historical struggle itself. thrown up by the struggle. This pivotal issue of organization. and by interpolating an ironic "perhaps" apropos of the unscientific choices supposedly "imposed" on him. 89 It is true that during a certain period of his participation in the struggle of the proletariat Marx overrated the value of scientific prediction indeed he went so far in this direction that he provided the illusions of economism with an intellectual justification. Yet such historical forms. organization became the locus of revolutionary theory's inconsistency. Marx clearly indicated the limits of his scientific stance: "The author's subjective tendency (imposed on him. but one that has not been given theoretical expression. in such a way that each of these poles depends for its validation on the other. had a dual aspect in that it bore .
for deeds. This position." No doubt this attitude preserves the commitment of the truly historical thought of the proletariat to the notion that ideas must become practical. in every case the result produced was greatly different from the one sought. without official titles. found it easy to write that "During the last nine years more than enough ideas for the salvation of the world have been developed in the International (if the world can be saved by ideas) and I defy anyone to come up with a new one. each embodied a partially correct critique. but each. This is the time not for ideas but for action. we must be the invisible pilots guiding the Revolution. and in advance of any actualization. has given anarchism the great merit of representing the refusal of existing conditions from the standpoint of the whole of life. while its commitment to the economic struggle is framed only in terms of the mirage of a definitive solution to be achieved at one stroke. of economic contradictions on the one hand. who held that the combined maturation. and of the democratic education of the workers on the other hand. which fuses all partial demands into a single demand. On the other hand. Collectivist anarchism retains only the terminal point of the historical thought of modern class struggles. aspired to set itself up as an ideological authority. the fact that this fusion of demands is envisaged in the absolute. of the same simple and all encompassing idea the same endpoint that anarchism has identified from the first as the movement's sole and entire goal. as it does not carry the trappings of power. charged Bakunin and his supporters with the authoritarianism of a conspiratorial elite that had deliberately placed itself above the International with the harebrained intention of imposing on society an irresponsible dictatorship of the most revolutionary (or of those selfdesignated as such)." This was clearly a clash between two ideologies of workers' revolution. Marx. 92 The fact that the anarchists regard the goal of the proletarian revolution as immediately present is at once the great strength and the great weakness of the real anarchist struggle (I refer to the struggle of collectivist anarchism. Powerful organizations. without any official status. Thus Bakunin. but it leaves the ground of history by assuming that the adequate forms of this transition to practice have already been discovered and are no longer subject to . warning that this course would lead to the reconstruction of a bureaucratic ruling class and to the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable (or of those reputed to be the most knowledgeable). It is an ideology of pure freedom which makes everything equal and eschews any suggestion of historical evil. would reduce the proletarian State's role to the short phase needed to give the stamp of legality to new social relations brought into being by objective factors. on the day of the general strike or insurrection. at the whim of the individual. not merely from the standpoint of some particular critical specialization.both upon the question of power in a future revolutionary society and upon the current organization of the movement. Bakunin unquestionably recruited followers on just such a basis: "in the midst of the popular tempest. and therefore all the more powerful. would subsequently faithfully serve one or the other of these ideologies. among them the German Social Democracy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation. on quitting the Jura Federation in 1873. having lost the unity of historical thought. Anarchism is the still ideological negation of the State and of classes. the claims of anarchism in its individualist variants are laughable). not by any kind of overt power but by the collective dictatorship of all our allies. and its unconditional demand that this point be attained instantly is echoed in its systematic contempt for method. has doomed anarchism to an incoherence that is only too easy to discern: the doctrine requires no more than the reiteration. of the very social preconditions of any separated ideology. Bakunin denounced as an illusion the idea that classes could be abolished by means of an authoritarian use of State power. Its critique of the political struggle consequently remains an abstract one. The anarchist agenda is the fulfillment of an ideal. that is to say. and both the opposing factions reversed their own position in moving from one of these issues to the other. a dictatorship without badges. on the economic battleground itself. and the reintroduction into each particular struggle.
informed Hilferding's insipid observation in Das Finanzkapital that recognizing the necessity of socialism "gives no clue as to what practical attitude should be adopted. so offering a hospitable field of action. whose ideological fervor clearly distinguished them from the rest of the workers' movement. For it is one thing to recognize a necessity. held power in half the country. and the mediocrity of these specialists was only reinforced by the fact that their intellectual activity was generally confined to the repetition of a clutch of unchanging truths. and revolutionary anarchism expects a comparable unanimity. A scientific orientation of this variety. inasmuch as the revolution was not completed in its earliest days Franco. setting up the most advanced model of proletarian power ever realized. Furthermore. is bound to validate both anarchist ideology and the form of practical organization that flows from it." Those who chose not to understand that for Marx. So out of touch was this attitude with the Hegelian dimension of a total history.variation. an ideology which asserted that its whole truth resided in objective economic processes. 94 The illusion more or less explicitly upheld in all genuine anarchism is that of the permanent imminence of a revolution which. it is pertinent to recall. a unitary historical thought was itself nothing more and nothing less than the practical attitude to be adopted could only fall victim to the practice which that choice immediately entailed. eking this out with a contemplative evocation of the course of history. An ideological respect for unanimity in the taking of decisions tended to favor the uncontrolled exercise of power. the refusal to distinguish between the opposed situations of a minority grouped in the ongoing struggle and a new society of free individuals has led time and again to the permanent isolation of anarchists when the time for common decisions arrives one need only think of the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that have been contained and crushed at a local level. by "specialists of freedom". within any anarchist organization. and in the gradual recognition of their necessity by a working class educated by the organization. Even here. from the people once they are liberated. however. obtained by comparable means. . or even of safeguarding them. for one thing. enjoying strong foreign backing at a time when the rest of the international proletarian movement had already been defeated. This ideology exhumed utopian socialism's faith in pedagogics. and quite another to place oneself in the service of that necessity. that the general insurrection was dictated by an army pronunciamento. 93 The anarchists. that it lost even the static image of the totality present in the utopians' (and signally in Fourier's) critique. hardly capable of doing anything more than rehash symmetrical ethical alternatives. Furthermore. because it will be made instantaneously. In 1936 anarchism really did lead a social revolution. 95 The "orthodox Marxism" of the Second International was the scientific ideology of the socialist revolution. while bourgeois forces and other workers' parties of statist bent still existed in the Republican camp the organized anarchist movement proved incapable of broadening the revolution's semivictories. to the propagandists and defenders of anarchist ideology. and for the revolutionary proletariat. The movement's leaders became government ministers hostages to a bourgeois state that was dismantling the revolution even as it proceeded to lose the civil war. extended this specialization of tasks into their own ranks. within the organization itself. though.
the second time was when. gave the lie to it at every turn. to turn them into theoreticians: the first time was when the overwhelming majority of the party lent its support to the imperialist war. The "science" of the social democrats vouched for the inevitability of such a paradoxical occurrence. but only historical development itself could demonstrate it beyond all possibility of doubt. For the activity of all these people to have retained any revolutionary aspect whatsoever. and the organizational form adopted corresponded perfectly to the sort of passive learning that this implied. and of workingclass background. in the shape of the social democrats' legalistic agitation. It was inevitable that this ideology of revolution should founder on the very success of those who proclaimed it. In consequence the speciality of the profession in question became that of total social . who declined to assume any revolutionary mantle in the absence of such a legitimating event. was honest enough to draw attention to. Though prey to all kinds of illusions in other areas. that it had failed. The task of directing the proletariat from without. 97 This was a contradiction that Bernstein. "means working hard. The setting apart of parliamentary representatives and journalists within the movement encouraged people who had in any case been recruited from the bourgeois intelligentsia to pursue a bourgeois style of life. though it raised consciousness on a wide scale. being the social democrat farthest removed from political ideology. into mere brokers of labor traders in laborpower as a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. proved twice over that the socialdemocratic hierarchy had failed to educate the German workers in a revolutionary way. Bernstein had rejected the notion that a crisis of capitalism must miraculously occur. thus forcing the hand of the socialists." said Ebert. by means of a disciplined clandestine party under the control of intellectuals who had become "professional revolutionaries. and the one who most unabashedly embraced the methodology of bourgeois science." 98 As a Marxist thinker. but it was profoundly uncritical. Theirs was a manifestly reformist practice carried on in the name of an illusory revolution. The participation of the socialists of the Second International in the political and economic struggles was concrete enough. by precisely articulating the agenda of this new form of alienation: "Socialism. while the tradeunion bureaucracy turned even those drawn in through industrial struggle. however. the party crushed the Spartacist revolutionaries. The sometime worker Ebert still believed in sin declaring that he hated revolution "like sin. history. capitalism would have had to find itself conveniently unable to put up with a reformism on the economic plane that it was perfectly able to tolerate on the political. conditions that did not permit of the sort of reformist practice pursued in parallel fashion by the Second International. in short. The profound social upheaval set in train by the First World War. also attested to it." gave rise to a genuine profession and one disinclined to make compacts with any professional strata of capitalist society (even had such an overture presupposing the attainment of an advanced stage of bourgeois development been within the power of the czarist political regime to make). which did without revolutionary ideology altogether. Lenin was simply a faithful and consistent Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary ideology of "orthodox Marxism" to the conditions existing in Russia. the reformism of the English workers' movement.96 The ideology of the socialdemocratic organization placed that organization in the hands of teachers who were supposed to educate the working class." He also proved himself to be a fine herald of that image of socialism which was soon to emerge as the mortal enemy of the proletariat of Russia and elsewhere. in defeat.
when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world." Thus. which essentially dislodged all earlier forms of ownership. 101 "In all earlier revolutions. 102 The organization of the proletariat according to the Bolshevik model stemmed from the backwardness of Russia and from the abdication from the revolutionary struggle of the workers' movement in the advanced countries. The Bolshevik party justified itself in terms of the necessity of a State monopoly over the representation and defense of the power of the workers. program against program. and Bolshevism. the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks was able to cast its net across the globe. By this time the revolutionary image of the proletariat had become both the main element in. namely the party of the owners of the proletariat. and the chief result of. and a social reign of appearances under which no "central question" could any longer be "openly and honestly" posed. and the repeated balking of the mass of the European workers' movement at the Hic Rhodus.' If the central question of the revolution were posed openly and honestly in the form 'Capitalism or socialism?' then no doubt or hesitation would be possible today among the broad proletarian masses. hic salta of the 19181920 period a balking that included the violent annihilation of its own radical minority further facilitated the complete unfolding of a process whose end result could fraudulently present itself to the world as the only possible proletarian solution. 100 This same historical moment. the troops that protect the old order. In the present revolution. a general falsification of society. 103 . "the opponents confronted one another face to face: class against class." wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne for 21 December 1918. and its success in this quest turned the party into what it truly was. proposed its hierarchical and ideological model to the proletariat of all countries as the way to "talk Russian" to the ruling class. 99 With the advent of the war. and the collapse of international social democracy in face of it. also marks the definitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the modern spectacle's rule: this was the moment when an image of the working class arose in radical opposition to the working class itself. Russian backwardness also embodied all the conditions needed to carry this form of organization in the direction of the counterrevolutionary reversal that it had unconsciously contained from its beginnings. instead of intervening in the name of the ruling classes. the radical current within the German proletariat uncovered the secret of the new conditions brought into being by the whole process which had gone before (and to which the image of the working class had largely contributed): the spectacular organization of the ruling order's defense. intervene under the banner of a 'socialdemocratic party. reigning over the first revolutionary rift opened up by this period of crisis.management. Lenin never reproached the Second International's Marxism for being a revolutionary ideology but only for having ceased to be such an ideology. a few days before its destruction. The bloody end of the workers' movement's democratic illusions made a Russia of the whole world.
however. by means of terror exercised against the peasantry. not least the institution of laborascommodity. and against its own externalized and alienated representation in the shape of a workers' party of absolute masters of the State. the decisive role to be played by a centralized and militant proletariat and so on. "the last propertyowning class in history. The totalitarian bureaucracy was not. At the Tenth Congress." for it was merely a substitute ruling class for the market economy. of the economy. statist framework for this cheap remake of the capitalist ruling class was supplied by . We have had enough of opposition. The hierarchical. it did so thanks to a factor that had figured in none of these hypotheses. A strictly bourgeois revolution was impossible. and even. in the end. and. as for the proletarian power of the soviets. against a national and international White reaction. so long as it endured. namely the revolutionary bureaucracy which placed itself at the head of the proletariat. This underdeveloped type of ruling class was likewise a reflection of economic underdevelopment. in parallel fashion. and it had no agenda beyond correcting this backwardness in particular parts of the world. bureaucratic society then proceeded. and hence also to Communist union leaders." into a temporary alliance with the peasantry. but even here it only applied once the unknown quantity of the bureaucracy's class power had come into play. however. it could even do without a bourgeoisie. A tottering capitalist property system was replaced by an inferior version of itself simplified.). to sabotage revolutionary movements and to support bourgeois governments on whose support in the international sphere it was counting (the Kuomintang in the China of 19251927. in other words.For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social democracy had engaged in an unresolved debate over which conditions were most propitious for the overthrow of czarism: the weakness of the bourgeoisie. to party members in general. The industrialization of the Stalin era reveals the bureaucracy's true nature: the prolonging of the reign of the economy and the salvaging of all essential aspects of market society. to the highest ranks of the party's hierarchy. the weight in the balance of the peasant majority. externally. as the Kronstadt soviet was being put down by force of arms and deluged in slander. that the bourgeoisie had created a power so autonomous that. it could not be maintained at once against the class of small landholding peasants. etc. it defended its power by using the regimented workers of the bureaucratic parties of the Third International to back up Russian diplomacy. In the many clashes within the Bolshevik leadership. less diversified and concentrated as the collective property of the bureaucratic class. and under the "New Economic Policy. after Kronstadt. Trotsky and Parvus's theory of permanent revolution which Lenin in effect espoused in April 1917 was the only theory that held true for countries that were backward from the point of view of the social development of the bourgeoisie. It proved. seized the State and proceeded to impose a new form of class rule on society. in Bruno Rizzi's sense. of the means of expression and (before long) of thought. Lenin passed a judgment on the leftist bureaucrats of the "Workers' Opposition." the logic of which Stalin would later extend into a perfect division of the world: "Here with us or out there with a gun in your hand but not as an opposition." 104 Finding itself the sole owner of a state capitalism. the bureaucracy at first secured its power internally by entering. Popular Fronts in Spain and France. talk of a "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants" had no real meaning. The economy in its independence thus showed itself so thoroughly able to dominate society as to recreate for its own purposes that class domination which is essential to its operation. Lenin was the most consistent defender of the concentration of dictatorial powers in the hands of this supreme ideological representation. When practice finally provided the solution. In pursuit of its selfrealization. He invariably had the advantage over his opponents because he championed solutions that flowed logically from the earlier choices made by the minority that now exercised absolute power: a democracy refused to peasants on the State level should be by the same token refused to workers. to effect history's most brutal primitive accumulation of capital ever.
as capitalism in its affluent stage has done. it succeeded only in using police methods to transform perception. Eventually both reality and the goal sought dissolved in a totalitarian ideology proclaiming that whatever it said was all there was. they are actors faithful to the text of ideological betrayal. and its strength serves first and foremost to assert its nonexistence. thus making the whole of social life unfathomable and insane. Ideology was no longer a weapon. Its real proprietorship was masked. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power. because this class had no legal basis. for its official nonexistence is supposed to coincide with the ne plus ultra of historical development. which acknowledges the collective participation in "socialist power" of all such bureaucrats as it does not liquidate. where all real motives soon vanish. with Stalinism. but the cohesiveness of their class can only be ensured by the concentration of their terroristic power in one person. Stalin thus had the power to decide without appeal exactly who was a bureaucrat. As Anton Ciliga noted from the depths of one of Stalin's prisons. because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have to present himself as the opposite of a bureaucrat. 106 The ideologicaltotalitarian class in power is the power of a world turned on its head: the stronger the class. and hence an owner. no juridical status as a propertyowning class that could be extended to each of its members individually. Thus each bureaucrat is completely dependent on a central guarantee from ideology. 107 Stalinism was a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. In this person reposes the only practical truth of the lie in power: the power to lay down an unchallengeable boundary that is ever subject to revision. while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the official truth of the bureaucracy is that the bureaucracy does not exist. this ideology rediscovered its own incoherent essence. the more forcefully it proclaims that it does not exist. because it had become an owner only by means of false consciousness. The social organization of the absolute lie reposes on this fundamental contradiction. the revolutionary ideology of which Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression governed the management of a reality that was resistant to it. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness. Though everywhere in evidence. The ideology that took on material form in this contextdid not transform the world economically. False consciousness can maintain absolute power only through absolute terror. This is as far as its modesty goes. as participants in a basic lie: they have to play the part of the proletariat governing a socialist society. 105 As the coherence of the separate. which is indeed owed to its infallible leadership. his word alone distinguished "proletarians" in power from "traitors in the pay of the Mikado and Wall Street. organized on the bourgeois model of separation. but an end in itself. the bureaucracy is obliged to be a class imperceptible to consciousness. This was a local primitivism of the spectacle that has nonetheless played an essential part in the spectacle's worldwide development. Members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership over society only collectively. The terror on which the bureaucracy's power was founded was bound to strike the class itself. "Technical questions of organization turned out to be social questions" (Lenin and Revolution).the party of the workers. however." The atomized bureaucrat could find the shared essence of his juridical status only in the person of Stalin that lord and master of the world who takes himself in this way to be the absolute person and for whom . As a group the bureaucrats may be said to make all the decisions. Yet their effective participation in this counterfeit being has to be perceived as real.
" has thus been made concrete in a permanent manipulation of the past. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which everything that has happened earlier exists for it solely as a space accessible to its police. it was normal enough that it should be dislodged by more rational and stronger forms of this order that it should leave the front of the stage to the lead players. has been transformed from a fragmentary knowledge into a totalitarian lie. Such rationalization. We know how much the scientific application of an ideology gone mad has cost Russia one need only think of the Lysenko fiasco." He is at once the power that defines the field of domination and the power that devastates that field. the universal might of actuality by that power of destruction which he exercises against the contrasted selfhood of his subjects. truly historical thinking has for its part been so utterly annihilated that history itself. and this not just in respect of the past's meaning. Even though fascism came to the aid of the chief icons (the family. as well as being. in extremis. however. though. namely the capitalist States. of the Stalinist bureaucracy and. on the other. leader. that of "monarchically directing the energy of memories. The price paid for this emancipation from all historical reality. even at the level of the most empirical knowledge. A project already formulated by Napoleon.there exists no higher type of spirit: "The lord of the world becomes really conscious of what he is viz. of fascist totalitarianism. a way for that society to survive through the administration of an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive State intervention in its management. Fascism presented itself for what it was a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race. 109 Between the two world wars the revolutionary workers movement was destroyed by the action. on the one hand. thanks to its part in the destruction of the old workers' movement. inevitably bore the stamp of the immensely irrational nature of the means whereby it was imposed. and effectively mobilized both the petty bourgeoisie and unemployed workers panicstricken because of the crisis or disillusioned by the impotence of revolutionary socialism. the nation) of a bourgeois order that was by now conservative. from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion. 110 . Fascism was an attempt of the bourgeois economy to defend itself. one of the founding forces of presentday society. the moral order. but even in respect of the facts themselves. 108 By the time ideology. The internal contradictions besetting totalitarian bureaucracy in its administration of an industrialized society its simultaneous need for rationality and refusal of it also constitutes one of its chief shortcomings as compared with normal capitalist development. private property. can no longer exist. Fascism is a cult of the archaic completely fitted out by modern technology. so too it turns out eventually to be inferior to capitalism in industrial production. which it seeks to plan in an authoritarian manner on the twin bases of a complete lack of realism and an adherence to an allembracing lie. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the question of agriculture as capitalism does. it was a state of siege in capitalist society. But inasmuch as fascism happens also to be the costliest method of maintaining the capitalist order. It is thus one factor in the formation of the modern spectacle. it was not itself fundamentally ideological in character. the latter having borrowed its organizational form from the totalitarian party as first tried out in Russia. is the loss of the rational orientation indispensable to capitalism as a historical social system. Its degenerate ersatz of myth has been revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. become absolute because it possesses absolute power.. blood.
and its crudely maintained ignorance in contradiction with its scientific pretensions. Just as its actual history is at odds with its judicial status. but even this derision would disappear were it not for the fact that the terror it mocks still lurks in the wings. Considered in conjunction with the expressions of internal negation which first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a "government of metalworkers. A rift in the pseudorevolutionary component of the established division of spectacular labor can only herald the end of that system itself. to remain Stalinist. yes.When the Russian bureaucracy at last successfully disencumbered itself of relics of bourgeois property standing in the way of its hegemony over the economy. What inspired terror now inspires derision. 112 The mirage of Leninism today has no basis today outside the various Trotskyist tendencies. and is generally accompanied by the freedom to choose from an unlimited range of spectacular false alternatives a pseudofreedom. The gap between Trotskyism . so its wish to vie with the bourgeoisie in the production of an abundance of commodities is stymied by the fact that an abundance of this kind contains its own implicit ideology. this crumbling of the worldwide alliance founded on bureaucratic mystification is in the last analysis the most unfavorable portent for the future development of capitalist society." and which have since even extended to the setting up of workers' councils in Hungary. for all that. it sought to enjoy its own world in tranquility. however. and likewise each of those totalitarian parties aspiring to a power that has outlived the Stalinist period within one national working class or another. and once it had achieved recognition from without as a great power among others. its ideological title to ownership is already collapsing internationally: a power set up on the national level as a basically internationalist model must now renounce any claim to maintaining its false cohesion irrespective of national frontiers. Admittedly this ideology has lost the passion that informed its original selfaffirmation. for all its cumbersomeness. it is exposed as capitalism's poor cousin. This spectacular aspect of the dissolution of the workers' movement is thus itself headed for dissolution. and to remove the arbitrariness to which it was still itself subjected. once it had developed this economy in accordance with its own purposes. Henceforward each bureaucracy in power. is its sole title to ownership. for the simple reason that the ideological falsehood that had attended the bureaucracy's birth could never be exposed. will have to find its own way. The bureaucracy cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically because its existence as a class depends on its monopoly of an ideology which. arbitrary. So it is that at the very moment when the bureaucracy attempts to demonstrate its superiority on capitalism's own ground. unexplained and subject to continual adjustment. For the bourgeoisie is now in danger of losing an adversary that has objectively supported it by investing all opposition to its order with a purely illusory unity. 111 At the present stage in the bureaucracy's development. it therefore proceeded to denounce the Stalinism of its beginnings. The bureaucracy is thus helplessly tied to an ideology no longer believed by anyone. where the conflation of the proletarian project with a hierarchical organization grounded in ideology has stolidly survived all the evidence of that conflation's real consequences. The unequal economic development experienced by those competing bureaucracies that have succeeded in owning "socialism" in more than one country has led only to a public and allout confrontation between the Russian lie and the Chinese lie. is incompatible with the bureaucracy's ideology. yet even the pithless triviality which is all that is left retains the oppressive role of prohibiting the least suggestion of competition and holding the entirety of thought captive. but one which. Such a denunciation was bound.
the seizure of State power. where a variety of fraudulent versions of state and bureaucratic socialism are consciously passed off by local ruling classes as.) Trotsky was doomed by his basic perspective. though he sought to gain control of this bureaucracy and cause it to resume a properly Bolshevik foreign policy. as happened for instance in Egypt. A bureaucracy capable of industrializing a nation may also arise out of the petty bourgeoisie. among them Algeria following its war of independence. In other places. Trotsky's subsequent struggle to set up a Fourth International enshrined the same inconsistency. and the opposite of everything for which he had argued in History and Class Consciousness. It is therefore not surprising that it gets its best reception in the formally independent "underdeveloped" countries. Trotsky simply refused. what he was describing as actual virtues of the Bolshevik party were in fact everything that the Party was not. to see that the bureaucracy's power was the power of a separate class. (It is well known that at this time he went so far. in 1923. Lukacs was an ideologist speaking for a power that was in the crudest way external to the proletarian movement. who had made it public. on the basis of the results of its action. The hybrid nature of such classes is more or less directly associated with their position on the bourgeois bureaucratic spectrum. as in China. during the second Russian revolution. with his endless selfrepudiations. together serve to strip these last retreads of ideological socialism of all credibility except for that of their police. No one better than Lukacs illustrates the validity of a fundamental rule for assessing all the intellectuals of this century: what they respect is a precise gauge of their own contemptible reality. the fact was that as soon as the bureaucratic class knew itself." The real subject of Lukacs's purely imaginary and inopportune portrait was a party that was indeed coherent with respect to one precise and partial task only to wit. Until 1927 Trotsky remained fundamentally loyal to the high bureaucracy. for it was Lenin who acknowledged that "a political party cannot examine its members to see whether contradictions exist between their philosophy and the party program. While subsequent events were to demonstrate exactly how the power in question repudiated and eliminated its servants. Their international maneuvering between these two poles of existing capitalist power. The depth of his theoretical work notwithstanding. it was bound to opt for a counterrevolutionary role on the world stage. in such cases. the opposite of himself. One type of bureaucracy has established itself by providing a common framework for nationalist struggle and peasant agrarian revolt. consciously choose and experience those events. Lukacs. partook of this power as though it were truly his own. become an unconditional partisan of the Bolshevik form of organization. along with ideological compromises (notably with Islam) corresponding to their heterogeneous social bases. When Lukacs. whether of the bourgeois or the bureaucratic type. the ideology of economic development. quite simply.and a revolutionary critique of presentday society is in effect coextensive with the respectful distance that the Trotskyists maintain toward positions that were already mistaken when they played themselves out in a real struggle. 113 The neoLeninist mirage entertained by presentday Trotskyism is contradicted at every moment by the reality of modern capitalist society. believing and giving his audience to believe that he himself. Having once. revealed with caricatural clarity precisely what he had identified with. to be a counterrevolutionary class on the domestic front. in order to help conceal Lenin's famous "Testament. with power being seized by army officers. a bureaucracy that has . the Stalinist model of industrialization tends to be applied in societies even less advanced than the Russia of 1917. It certainly cannot be said that Lenin encouraged illusions of this kind concerning his activities. pointed to this same organizational form as the longsought mediation between theory and practice thanks to which proletarians. albeit one assumed in the name of revolution in short. his entire personal being. instead of being mere "spectators" of events that occur in their own organization." as to disavow slanderously his supporter Max Eastman. for the rest of his life. to act abroad just as it did at home. namely.
though. can supply a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction. The spectacular system reacts to these signs with incomprehension or attempts to misrepresent them. The manifest incapacity of such a bourgeoisie to fulfill normal bourgeois economic functions leads to its soon being confronted by a subversive opposition. It has also. once they realize this. lost its illusions. Lastly. The proletariat has not been eliminated.established itself as a paraState authority in the course of a struggle seeks stability through compromise. that is eager to usurp what the bourgeoisie has inherited. a stage is reached at which the compradors' compensation for the sale of local products is ownership of a local State that is independent of the masses though not of the imperialist power. 114 In the course of the complex and terrible evolution that has brought the era of class struggle under a new set of conditions. no longer merely thanks to the alienation of its labor. under the intensified alienation of modern capitalism. but they are sufficient proof that a new period has begun. a local bourgeoisie is constituted generally reposing on the power of traditional tribal chiefs through possession of the State: in such countries. whether European or American. this is a proletariat still very far removed from any practical class consciousness. But the successful realization by any bureaucracy of its fundamental project of industrialization itself necessarily embodies the prospect of its historical failure. But it has not lost its being. then it must also discover through concrete historical experience that it is indeed that class which is totally opposed to all reified externalizations and all specializations of power. in the last reckoning. as also by the extension of the logic of the factory system to a broad sector of labor in the "services" and the intellectual professions. the action of the proletariat must assume a form adequate to these tasks. so creating its own negation in countries where that negation did not yet exist. where foreign imperialism is still the true master of the economy. and this goes not only for whitecollar workers but also for wage workers who as yet know nothing but the impotence and mystifications of the old politics. This class is objectively reinforced by the peasantry's gradual disappearance. and indeed it remains irreducibly present. in the righting of any particular wrong nor even in the righting of many such wrongs. the proletariat of the industrialized countries has lost the ability to assert its own independence. no illusory hierarchical incorporation. but only in the righting of the unqualified wrong that has been perpetrated upon it the universal wrong of its exclusion from life. in the shape of the vast mass of workers who have lost all power over the use of their own lives and who. After the failure of . structured on the bureaucratic model and more or less well adapted to local conditions. therefore. No quantitative relief of its poverty. in those former colonies of black Africa that have maintained overt ties to Western bourgeoisies. and fuses with a weak national bourgeoisie. The proletariat is the bearer of a revolution that can leave no other sphere of society untransformed. for the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered. 115 Signs of a new and growing tendency toward negation proliferate in the more economically advanced countries. Subjectively. But when the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power conspires in the continual reinforcement of capitalist society. The result is an artificial bourgeoisie that is incapable of accumulating capital and merely squanders its revenue as much the portion of surplus value it extracts from local labor as the foreign subsidies it receives from protector States or monopolies. but also thanks to the form taken on by unions. that enforces the permanent domination of the past by the present and demands a universal critique of separation. for as it accumulates capital it also accumulates the proletariat. nor. parties and institutions of State power that it had established in pursuit of its own self emancipation. must necessarily redefine themselves as the proletariat as negation at work in the bosom of today's society.
the councils may be seen in their true light as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated movement: historical consciousness. and thanks to which existing conditions are transformed "into the conditions of unity. From the standpoint of the renewal of the proletariat's critical enterprise.the working class's first subversive assault on capitalism. it must be said. at the same time rebellious tendencies among the young generate a protest that is still tentative and amorphous. the presence of false consciousness within the councils themselves. their appearance has invariably occasioned attack and defeat by one or another of class society's means of defence often including. now perceives the councils as situated historically not at the periphery of an ebbing tide but rather at the center of a rising one. which has changed yet stayed the same. It is here that the objective preconditions of historical consciousness are assembled. for consciousness is now equal to the practical organization that it has chosen for itself. As yet such councils have enjoyed only a brief and experimental existence. aware that this is the only environment in which it can thrive. 118 The appearance of workers councils during the first quarter of this century was the high point of the proletarian movement. in the shape of revolutionary workers' councils vesting all decisionmaking and executive powers in themselves and federating with one another through the exchange of delegates answerable to the base and recallable at any time." Yet the power of workers' councils is the one context in which the problems of the revolution of the proletariat can be truly solved. or else been presented in travestied form. we see antiunion struggles of Western workers that have to be repressed (and repressed primarily by the unions themselves). opening the door to the realization of that active direct communication which marks the end of all specialization. 117 Once embodied in the power of workers councils a power destined to supplant all other powers worldwide the proletarian movement becomes its own product. the decision to set up workers' councils does not in itself provide solutions so much as it "proposes problems. we are now witness to the failure of capitalist abundance. When the lost children of this asyet immobile horde enter once again upon the battlefield. because it inevitably vanished along with the remainder of a movement that the whole historical experience of the time tended to deny and destroy. yet already clearly embodies a rejection of the specialized sphere of the old politics. These are two sides of the same coin. but this reality has gone unnoticed. Only in this context can the spectacle's negation of life be negated in its turn. as well as of art and everyday life. all hierarchy. a new General Ludd will be at their head leading them this time in an onslaught on the machinery of permitted consumption. however. and in his own eyes the producer has himself as his goal. and it has become inseparable from a coherent intervention in history. 116 That longsought political form whereby the economic emancipation of labor might finally be achieved" has taken on a clear outline in this century. On the one hand. As Pannekoek rightly stressed. both portents of a second proletarian onslaught on class society. this product is the producer himself. 119 . both signaling a new spontaneous struggle emerging under the sign of criminality." And it is here too that the proletarian subject can emerge from the struggle against a purely contemplative role. and all separation.
and inscribe their thought upon practice. The only restriction on individual participation in the revolutionary organization's total democracy is that imposed by the effective recognition and appropriation by each member of the coherence of the organization's critique. the revolutionary organization must learn that it can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle. It is thus the very evolution of class society into the spectacular organization of nonlife that obliges the revolutionary project to become visibly what it always was in essence. . 121 The revolutionary organization must necessarily constitute an integral critique of society a critique. 120 The revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of the theory of praxis entering into two way communication with practical struggles.A revolutionary organization that exists before the establishment of the power of workers' councils which must discover its own appropriate form through struggle will know that. namely the economy. that is to say. and eventually puts them in the position of having either to reject it in its totality or do nothing at all. It must simply recognize itself as radically separated from the world of separation. which refuses to compromise with any form of separated power and which is directed globally against every aspect of alienated social life. the weapons are nothing less than the essence of the antagonists themselves: the revolutionary organization cannot allow the conditions of division and hierarchy that obtain in the dominant society to be reproduced within itself. 122 As capitalism's everintensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment. it thus asks much more of its men without qualities than the bourgeois revolution asked of those men with qualifications that it enlisted to run things (the partial ideological consciousness constructed by a segment of the bourgeois class had as its basis only a key portion of social life. it cannot represent the revolutionary class. This revolution demands that workers become dialecticians. 123 The proletarian revolution is predicated entirely on the requirement that. for all these historical reasons. where this class was already in power). 124 Revolutionary theory is now the sworn enemy of all revolutionary ideology and it knows it. for the first time. a coherence that must be borne out both in critical theory proper and in the relationship between that theory and practical activity. In the revolutionary organization's struggle with class society. theory as the understanding of human practice be recognized and directly lived by the masses. it is thus part of the process of the coming into being of practical theory. It must also fight constantly against its own distortion by and within the reigning spectacle.
Time and History O. The agrarian mode of production in general. but not always in its historical form. was the basis . for it viewed time not as something passing. governed by the rhythm of the seasons. All knowledge. it found itself enclosed thereby within the location in question. Time was motionless a sort of enclosed space. When a more complex society did finally attain a consciousness of time. the "natural history" in question exists effectively only through the process of a human history. The shift from pastoralism to settled agriculture marked the end of an idle and contentless freedom. was always borne by the living. 126 The movement of history properly so called (though still hidden) begins with the slow and imperceptible emergence of "the true nature of man. Henry IV. but society. the repetition of a set of gestures. we live to tread on kings. even when it had mastered a technology and a language. gentlemen. A timebound return to similar places thus gave way to the pure return of time in a single place. through the development of the only agency capable of discovering this historical whole. History has always existed. as effected through the mediation of a society. "the wandering of nomads is a merely formal one. remained conscious only of a perpetual present. whose range enables it to track the retreat of nebulae in time toward the edge of the universe." Once a society became fixed in a locality. and the beginning of labor. "is a real part of natural history. one is reminded of a modern telescope. giving space content through the individualized development of specific areas. who confronted the same conditions at each moment of their roaming. true to its immediate experience of nature. An if we live. and even though by then it was already the product of its own history. and of nature's becoming man. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true in historical consciousness. as Hegel notes. its reaction was to deny rather than embrace it. the time of life is short!. Neither death nor reproduction were understood as governed by time." says Marx. This was a static type of society that organized time." of that "nature which was born of human history of the procreative act that gave rise to human society". is equivalent to a humanization of time. on a cyclical model. "History itself. Part I 125 Man that "negative being who is solely to the extent that he abolishes being" is one with time. The temporalization of man.. but as something returning. because it is limited to uniform spaces. 127 Cyclical time was already dominant in the experience of nomadic peoples. Shakespeare. Man's appropriation of his own nature is at the same time the apprehension of the unfolding of the universe. which was in any case limited by the memory of society's oldest members.." Conversely.
conflict was present: at first. had no external limits except for the fear of falling into a formless animal condition. So. such as iron smelting.of cyclical time in its fullest development. The owners of this historical surplus value were the masters of the knowledge and enjoyment of directly experienced events. Yet this turning point also made possible the return of that negative human restlessness. also appropriated the temporal surplus value that resulted from its organization of social time. the time in which the lords of cyclical society pursued their personal histories. The power that built itself up on the basis of the penury of the society of cyclical time the power. static. This was the time of adventure. therefore. The absolute conformity of their social practices. which had been at the origin of the whole (temporarily arrested) development. as well as their internal conflicts. cyclical time was a time without conflict. in constant equilibrium. community. its movement constituted the very time that it used up within the inexhaustible time of cyclical society. Eternity. history sprang forth as an alien factor. also coincided with the first signs of the . the time too that emerged in clashes between communities foreign to one another perturbations in society's unchanging order. Separated off from the collective organization of time that predominated as a function of the repetitive form of production which was the basis of social life. 129 In its essence. seemingly associated with the last great technical revolutions. For ordinary men. Although the vast diversity of institutions set up for this purpose bears eloquent testimony to the plasticity of human nature's selfcreation. In each of these societies a definitive organizational structure ruled out change. was also expended in the form of the squandering of a historical time at society's surface. Yet even in this infancy of time. there to be expended on extravagance and festivity. history struggled to become history through the practical activity of the masters. 128 The social appropriation of time and the production of man by means of human labor were developments that awaited the advent of a society divided into classes. as the return of the same here below. 130 Socalled cold societies are societies that successfully slowed their participation in history down to the minimum. was internal to this time. The only wealth that could exist in concentrated form in the sphere of power. with which all human possibilities were exclusively and permanently identified. this testimony is of course only accessible to an outside observer. Myth was the unified mental construct whose job it was to make sure that the whole cosmic order confirmed the order that this society had in fact already set up within its own frontiers. historical time flowed independently above its own. in other words. here. of the class which organized social labor therein and appropriated the limited surplus value to be extracted. to an anthropologist looking back from within historical time. which occurred at the threshold of a period that was to experience no further major upheavals until the rise of modern industry. men had to remain the same. this class thus had sole possession of the irreversible time of the living. At a superficial level this history created irreversibility. and maintained their conflicts with the natural and human environments. as something they had not sought and against whose occurrence they had thought themselves secure. in order to remain human. of war. 131 The emergence of political power.
enjoyed the private ownership of history. Those who possessed history gave it an orientation a direction. sizeable groups of people had first to experience real participation in history. likewise. "Writings are the thoughts of the State. In China and Egypt. they long held a monopoly on the immortality of the soul. who had experienced the qualitative richness of events as their own activity. Greece was that moment when . a time known to the peasant masses who no matter that empires may crumble along with their chronologies never change. the succession of the generations left the natural realm of the purely cyclical and became a purposeful succession of events. their own epoch from such communication arose the general language of historical communication. was destined to be transcended and to become conscious history. This independence. along with the particular power to which it corresponds." said Novalis. The masters who. as a sphere leaving the underlying society unaffected precisely because it was a sphere separate from common reality. their earliest officially recognized dynasties were an imaginary reconstruction of the past. for example." because such an orientation is bound to collapse. as in the seasonal rites of the Chinese emperors. Irreversible time was the prerogative of whoever ruled. From this moment on. With writing came a consciousness no longer conveyed and transmitted solely within the immediate relationships of the living an impersonal memory that was the memory of the administration of society. chronicles were a means of maintaining the voluntaristic forward progression of this time on the basis of the recording of its past. their own dwellingplace in short. from our point of view. Those for whom irreversible time truly exists discover in it both the memorable and the danger of forgetting: "Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his researches. inextricably.dissolution of the bonds of kinship. unexplained chronology which a deified authority offered to its subjects. was at the same time the only ownership then possible both of the common history and of their own history. that they themselves were relatively emancipated therefrom. All of these consequences flowed from the simple fact that it was only to the degree that the masters made it their task to furnish cyclical time with mythic underpinnings." 132 As the expression of power's irreversible time. a mechanism for the transmission of power. the history of Oriental societies may be reduced to a history of religions: all we can reconstruct from their ruins is the seemingly independent history of the illusions that once enveloped them. which now attained its full autonomous reality as mediation between consciousnesses. "voluntaristic. however. and sink once more into the indifferent oblivion of a solely cyclical time. and also a meaning. Such illusory ownership by the masters. to reflect upon power. and the prime yardstick of rulership lay in dynastic succession. This is why. and which was intended to be understood solely as the earthly execution of the commandments of myth. But their history unfolded and perished apart. 133 The dry. protected by myth. for this to happen. The expansion of their effective historical power went hand in hand with a vulgarization of this illusory mythical ownership." 134 To reflect upon history is also. however. But. The ruler's chief weapon was the written word. From such practical communication between those who had recognized one another as possessors of a unique present. that the great deeds of men may not be forgotten. themselves did so at first in the realm of illusion. "and archives are its memory. was indistinguishable from the general independence of a separate power as the mediation whereby society was constituted.
and the struggle to exploit foreign cities. Eternity emerged from cyclical time. As Bossuet could still say: "So. The shared power of Greek communities inhered solely. which does not pass. Thus the pilgrim was the man who emerged from cyclical time to become in actuality the traveler that each individual was qua sign. Semihistorical religion established qualitative starting points in time the birth of Christ. between the cyclical time which still dominated the sphere of production and the irreversible time which was the theater of conflicts and realignments between peoples. as time ran out. Greece. even here. Historical time became conscious in Greece but it was not yet conscious of itself." 137 The Middle Ages. whether success or failure. introducing an effective accumulation which would take the form of conquest in Islam and that of an increase in capital in the Christianity of the Reformation. in the impenetrable obscurity of its densest point. The only people who lived were those who did not work. for the moment of accession to the other. a oneway passage through a world whose meaning was elsewhere. the flight of Muhammad yet its irreversible time. in the form of the successive stages of life. Clashes between Mediterranean peoples and the constitution and collapse of the Roman State gave rise instead to semihistorical religions that were to become basic components of the new consciousness of time. was thus unable to unite in the face of invasion from without. however. was in fact inverted in religious thought. A measure of irreversible time now became available to everyone individually. for the Last Judgment. which still governed the major part of production. yet still confined to the realm of illusion. 135 The regression of Western thought that occurred once the local conditions favoring the Greek communities had disappeared was not accompanied by any reconstruction of the old mythic structures. by way of the passing of time. yet power's irreversible time was now . as a pure point which cyclical time would enter only to be abolished. and the new armature of separated power. The divisions between Greek communities. Personal historical life invariably found its fulfillment within power's orbit either in struggles waged by power or in struggles in which power was disputed. a system diametrically opposed to that of the despotic State. 136 Monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history. so as to become a sort of countdown: the wait. it was that time's beyond." These religions had germinated and taken root in the soil of history. however. invariably placed the event itself beyond discussion. which dreamed of a universal history. open to all. where power settled accounts only with itself. we enter eternity. Eternity was also what humbled time in its mere irreversible flow suppressing history as history continued by positioning itself beyond irreversible time. true world. suffered history's first real gnawing inroads. was the period when cyclical time. This occurred under a democracy of society's masters.power and changes in power were first debated and understood. by means of palace revolutions whose outcome. an unfinished mythical world whose perfection lay outside itself. it could not even manage to standardize the calendars of its constituent cities. in the expending of a social life whose production remained the separate and static domain of the slave class. in the form of life apprehended as a voyage. they maintained a radical opposition to history. Time remained entirely oriented toward a single final event: "The Kingdom of God is at hand. were the externalized expression of the principle of separation on which each of them was based internally. The religions that evolved out of Judaism were the abstract universal recognition of an irreversible time now democratized.
the time directly experienced by the bourgeoisie in the production of commodities. The great European peasant revolts were likewise a response to history a history that was wresting the peasantry from the patriarchal slumber thitherto guaranteed by the feudal order. The exact opposite is true: millenarianism. when the early Christian communities. The millenarians were doomed to defeat because they could not recognize revolution as their own handiwork. like the Judaic messianism from which they sprang. the latter being further broken down in accordance with the complex relations of suzerainty and vassalage characteristic. and had long been. and it was because it lacked these prerequisites of unity in its action and consciousness that the peasantry formulated its project and waged its wars according to the imagery of an earthly paradise. the irreversible time that had invaded society was experienced by a consciousness still attached to the old order as an obsession with death. contrary to what Norman Cohn believes he has demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium. was already a modern revolutionary tendency. in a historical world not in the realm of myth. The fact that they made their action conditional upon an external sign of God's will was a translation onto the level of thought of the tendency of insurgent peasants to follow outside leaders. Millenarianism unfolded. Seeking its heritage and its . following the collapse of the great official enterprise of this world. This was the melancholy of a world passing away the last world where the security of myth could still balance history. respectively. This diversification of possible historical life reflected the gradual emergence. the founding and expansion of the towns. Under the feudal regime born of the coming together of "the martial organization of the army during the actual conquest" and "the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries" (The German Ideology) and among the factors responsible for organizing those productive forces must be included their religious language under this regime social domination was divided up between the Church on the one hand and State power on the other. modern revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of millenarianism. the practical experimentation that obliterated any mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all. The peasant class could achieve a clear consciousness neither of the workings of society nor of the way to conduct its own struggle. The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry naturally defined itself as an attempt to overthrow the Church.shared to an unlimited degree within the context of the general unity that the oriented time of the Christian era ensured. The Christianity that later shared in imperial power denounced whatever remained of this hope as mere superstition: this is the meaning of the Augustinian pronouncement the archetype of all the satisfecits of modern ideology according to which the established Church was itself. This was the moment when a millenarian utopianism aspiring to build heaven on earth brought back to the forefront an idea that had been at the origin of semihistorical religion. responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their time by announcing the imminent realization of God's Kingdom. of the period's unseen contribution: a society carried along in its unconscious depths by irreversible time. 138 As the Middle Ages came to an end. the commercial discovery of the planet in a word. however. the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time. This was a world of armed faith in which the activity of the masters revolved around fealty and around challenges to fealty owed. that selfsame hopedfor kingdom. of rural landed property and urban communes. lacking only the consciousness of being historical and nothing more. namely the Crusades. So. and for this melancholy all earthly things were inevitably embarked on the path of corruption. and so added an element of disquiet and subversion to ancient society. 139 The Renaissance embodied the new form of possession of historical life.
was now. however. All social life was by this time concentrated in the ornamented poverty of the Court in the chintzy trappings of a bleak State administration whose apex was the "profession of king". life came to recognize itself as the enjoyment of the passing of time. the bourgeoisie effectively conflated its own value qua ruling class with labor. The main product that economic development transformed from a luxurious rarity to a . it was the bearer of a joyous break with eternity. precisely. and made the progress of labor the only measure of its own progress. The world had a new foundation. is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economic revolution eliminated all such vestiges throughout the world. work became that work which transforms historical conditions. By discovering its basis in political economy. The free play of the feudal lords' irreversible time had exhausted itself in their last. and had thus been conceived of as a chronology of events. able to resume its reflection upon secular power. This blind prehistory. So long as agriculture was the chief type of labor. a transitional form along the way to complete domination by the bourgeois class. or in the Scots' uprising in support of Charles Edward.juridical basis in Antiquity. and all individual historical freedom had had to consent to this sacrifice." is the eulogy delivered upon itself by this fragile historical feast: "Quant' Š bella giovinezza / Che si fugge tuttavia. in the arts of festival. as of the effects of those forces that had brought on their ruin. and from top to bottom. The bourgeoisie was the first ruling class for which labor was a value. lost battles: in the Fronde. and by recognizing no value unrelated to the exploitation of labor. With the rise of the bourgeoisie. which Burckhardt considered "the very spirit of the Renaissance. the mass production of objects in accordance with the laws of the commodity. clearly illuminates the highest expression of the bourgeoisie's new irreversible time. which transformed society permanently. history tended to be invisible at its surface. now at last emancipated from the cyclical realm." 140 The tireless pursuit of a monopoly of historical life by the absolutemonarchist State. was now perceived in its general movement an inexorable movement that crushed individuals before it. This unconscious. which had hitherto appeared to express nothing more than the activity of individual members of the ruling class. The triumph of irreversible time was also its metamorphosis into the time of things. By abolishing all social privilege. The song of Lorenzo de' Medici. 142 Though everpresent in society's depths. In the exuberant life of the Italian cities. cyclical time retained its deepdown hold over society and tended to nourish those combined forces of tradition which slowed down the movement of history. because the weapon that had ensured its victory was. history became aware of the existence of what had been its unconscious. a new fatality that no one controls. 141 The victory of the bourgeoisie was the victory of a profoundly historical time the time corresponding to the economic form of production. The time with which the bourgeoisie was inextricably bound up was labortime. But this enjoyment of transience would turn out to be transient itself. The irreversible time of the Renaissance was that of an infinite accumulation of knowledge. and say the unsayable about the State. History. with Machiavelli. The class that accumulated commodities and capital continually modified nature by modifying labor itself by unleashing labor's productivity. while the historical consciousness generated by the experience of democratic communities. continued to exist as such and history still could not draw it out into the full light of day.
is obliged to tie its fate to the maintenance of a reified history and to the permanent preservation of a new historical immobility. unforgettable core of its revolutionary project. by extension. who cannot break with economic history. Universal history became a reality because the entire globe was brought under the sway of this time's progression. So the bourgeoisie concluded a pact with this religion. . The ruling class. now found that. soon discovering that it must reinstate the passivity which it had to shake to its foundations in order to inaugurate its own unchallenged rule. and assigned an absolute origin: Year One of the Republic. to the world spectacle. along with all traditional forms of social organization. "Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract was the most fitting form of religion" (Capital). By demanding to live the historical time that it creates. 146 The irreversible time of production is first and foremost the measure of commodities. irreversible time's reign over production would tend socially to eliminate all such lived time. But the revolutionary ideology of generalized freedom that had served to overthrow the last relics of a mythbased ordering of values. 143 So the bourgeoisie unveiled irreversible historical time and imposed it on society only to deprive society of its use. an arrangement reflected in its presentation of time: the Revolutionary calendar was abandoned and irreversible time was returned to the straitjacket of a duly extended Christian Era. was already unable completely to conceal the real goal that it had thus draped in Roman costume namely. But a history that is thus the same everywhere at once has as yet amounted to nothing more than an intrahistorical refusal of history. and every attempt to carry this project through though all up to now have gone down to defeat signals a possible point of departure for a new historical life. Whereas the cyclical time of an earlier era had supported an everincreasing measure of historical time lived by individuals and groups. since it signifies nothing beyond those special interests which constitute it. at the base of society. is therefore not general in character. but "there is no longer any history" because the class of owners of the economy. 144 The irreversible time of a bourgeoisie that had just seized power was called by its own name. but particular. the proletariat discovers the simple. for now the irreversible is generated from below. The society of the commodity. The time officially promoted all around the world as the general time of society. made up of specialists in the ownership of things who for that very reason are themselves owned by things. is for the first time not materially estranged from history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production time cut up into equal abstract fragments. generalized freedom of trade. Once there was history. Meanwhile the worker. 145 The development of capitalism meant the unification of irreversible time on a world scale. for its purposes.commonly consumed item was thus history itself but only in the form of the history of that abstract movement which dominated any qualitative use of life. must repress any other use of irreversible time as representing an immediate threat to itself. Unified irreversible time still belongs to the world market and.
and the suppression of any qualitative dimension." 148 The general time of human nondevelopment also has a complementary aspect. while also using these as models on which to base new but homologous variants: day and night. It is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other segments. It is therefore quite "natural" that pseudocyclical time should echo the old cyclical rhythms that governed survival in preindustrial societies. This time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its exchangeability. It builds. Or culo manual y Arte de prudencia 147 The time of production. 151 . and it exhibits the essential traits of that time: homogeneous and exchangeable units. which even those without a roof can enjoy. man is nothing. weekly work and weekly rest. on the basis of a determinate form of production.Spectacular Time We have nothing that is ours except time. It is under the rule of timeascommodity that "time is everything. no longer to the natural order. on the natural vestiges of cyclical time. he is at the most time's carcass" (The Poverty of Philosophy). that of a consumable time which. in fact. presents itself in the everyday life of society as a pseudocyclical time. But as a byproduct of timeascommodity intended to promote and maintain the backwardness of everyday life it necessarily finds itself laden with false attributions of value. the cycle of vacations and so on. Baltasar Graci n. 150 Pseudocyclical time typifies the consumption of modern economic survival of that augmented survival in which daily lived experience embodies no free choices and is subject. timeascommodity. and it must manifest itself as a succession of artificially distinct moments. This is time devalued the complete inversion of time as "the sphere of human development. 149 Pseudocyclical time is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the timeascommodity of the production system. is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. but to a pseudonature constructed by means of alienated labor.
but they produce only a disillusion which is invariably in turn offset by further false promises. is the spectacle albeit at a higherthanusual level of intensity. of the "allinclusive" purchase of spectacular forms of housing. though ready for immediate consumption. has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television. they are also paradigmatic of modern sales techniques in that they may be bought on credit. by reduction in its use value. with their travesty of dialogue and their parody of the gift. 155 . as the image of the consumption of time. political life. and as desirable by definition. Those moments when. Mass pseudofestivals. are strictly unavailable to a society where neither community nor luxury exists. "A product. in the spectacle.Pseudocyclical time is a time transformed by industry. and. recombining everything which. a highly concentrated capitalism has begun selling "fully equipped" blocks of time. The social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations moments portrayed. as we know. Spectacular commodities of this type could obviously not exist were it not for the increasing impoverishment of the realities they parody. had become distinct: private life. economic life. during the period of the old unitary society's disintegration. 153 Consumable pseudocyclical time is the time of the spectacle: in the narrow sense. the community would participate in a luxurious expenditure of life. ostensibly moments of life. modern society's obsession with saving time. like all spectacular commodities. And what has been passed off as authentic life turns out to be merely a life more authentically spectacular. the only thing being generated. the medium of all commodities. under the reign of cyclical time. 152 In its most advanced sectors. Yet even in such special moments. The selfapprobation of the time of modern survival can only be reinforced." "meetings with celebrities" and suchlike. of participation in cultural consumption and even of sociability itself. The entirety of the consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as raw material for the production of a diversity of new products to be put on the market as socially controlled uses of time. is actually an epoch without festival. may nevertheless serve as raw material for a further product" ( Capital). not surprisingly. in the form of "exciting conversations. within an expanding economy of "services" and leisure activities. as the time appropriate to the consumption of images. This is the logic behind the appearance. which presents its time to itself as essentially made up of many frequently recurring festivities. This particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. each of which is a complete commodity combining a variety of other commodities. at a distance. The time appropriate to the consumption of images. the only thing to be seen and reproduced. is at once the chosen field of operations of the mechanisms of the spectacle and the goal that these mechanisms hold up overall as the locus and central representation of every individual act of consumption. 154 Our epoch. whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup. The reality of time has been replaced by its publicity. of collective pseudotravel. The time founded on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity. in the broadest sense. And. may incite people to excessive spending.
in spectacular time the past continues to dominate the present. of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time. The spectacular restoration of time was only possible on the basis of this initial dispossession of the producers. Immobilized at the distorted center of the movement of its world. the consciousness of the spectator can have no sense of an individual life moving toward self realization. of a paralyzed memory. By contrast. Such individual lived experience of a cutoff everyday life remains bereft of language or concept. 156 Innovation is ever present in the process of the production of things. which is never anything but more of the same. 160 The irreducibly biological element that labor retains evident as much in our dependence on the natural cycle of sleeping and waking as in the marks of a lifetime's wear and tear.In ancient societies the consumption of cyclical time was consistent with the actual labor of those societies. Someone who has given up the idea of living life will surely never be able to embrace death. everything really lived has no relation to society's official version of irreversible time. is in effect a false consciousness of time. thanks to the precipitation with which the spectacle's pulsing machinery replaces one by the next. or toward death. which attest to the irreversible time of the individual is treated by the modern production system as a strictly secondary consideration. the consumption of pseudocyclical time in developed economies is at odds with the abstract irreversible time implicit in their system of production. Such factors are consequently ignored in the official discourse of this system as it advances. 157 Another aspect of the lack of historical life in general is that the individual life is still not historical. 158 The spectacle. The pseudoevents that vie for attention in the spectacle's dramatizations have not been lived by those who are thus informed about them. and as it generates the consumable trophies that translate its triumphant forward march into accessible terms. At the same time. In any case they are quickly forgotten. and the promoters of the "American way of death" dwell solely on how much of the appearance of life . 159 A prerequisite to the enrollment of the workers as "free" producers and consumers of timeas commodity was the violent expropriation of their time. And it is misunderstood and forgotten to the benefit of the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable. Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible to die without first arranging for the system's adjustment to the economic loss one's death will incur. Cyclical time was the time of a motionless illusion authentically experienced. and it lacks any critical access to its own antecedents. spectacular time is the time of a real transformation experienced as illusion. being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history. Because dead labor continues to dominate living labor. It cannot be communicated. which are nowhere recorded. This is not true of consumption. and is directly opposed to the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time's consumable byproducts.
The opposite obtains in the case of the alienation that now holds sway the alienation suffered by the producers of an estranged present. This is a spatial alienation. and the various stages of labor these are what until now have humanized (and also dehumanized) time. whereby a society which radically severs the subject from the activity that it steals from him separates him in the first place from his own time. The revolutionary project of a classless society. Anybody and everybody is urged to economize on an alleged "capital of youth" which. it has yet to come into possession of the consciousness that will allow it to experience its reality. has scant prospect of ever attaining the durable and cumulative properties of capital tout court. The limitations of human practice. within the medium of time.can be maintained in the individual's encounter with death. 162 In contrast to the passing fashions that clash and fuse on the frivolous surface of a contemplated pseudocyclical time. though in principle surmountable." 164 The world already has the dream of a such a time. of that communism which "abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals. Elsewhere under advertising's bombardments it is simply forbidden to get old. becomes human and social inasmuch as it exists for human beings. of a generalized historical life. being the medium in which the subject realizes himself while losing himself. in short. Environmental Planning 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 . This social absence of death is one with the social absence of life. is also the project of a withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of an individual and collective irreversible time which is playful in character and which encompasses. the grand style of our era can ever be recognized in whatever is governed by the obvious yet carefully concealed necessity for revolution. 163 Time's natural basis. is nevertheless the alienation that has forbidden and petrified the possibilities and risks of a living alienation within time. Social alienation. a variety of autonomous yet effectively federated times the complete realization. though it is unlikely to have suffered much in the way of dilapidation. both cyclical time and the separated irreversible time of the economic system of production. simultaneously present within it. time is a necessary alienation. 161 As Hegel showed. becomes other in order to become truly himself. the sensory data of its passage.
. and in spite of anything that can be done or foreseen. 166 If henceforward the free space of commodities is subject at every moment to modification and reconstruction. of trivialization. Just as the accumulation of commodities massproduced for the abstract space of the market inevitably shattered all regional and legal barriers. in Hegelian terms. breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next.customs. 167 This society eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular separation.. this is so that it may become ever more identical to itself. basically. and achieve as nearly as possible a perfectly static monotony. Machiavelli. at once extensive and intensive. tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite. This unification is also a process." . true to its logical development toward absolute domination. as an absolute predominance of "tranquil sidebysideness" in space over "restless becoming in the progression of time. 168 Human circulation considered as something to be consumed tourism is a byproduct of the circulation of commodities. 169 A society that molds its entire surroundings has necessarily evolved its own techniques for working on the material basis of this set of tasks.. as well as all those corporative restrictions that served in the Middle Ages to preserve the quality of craft production. The same modernization that has deprived travel of its temporal aspect has likewise deprived it of the reality of space. which never through either length of time or benefits are forgotten. That material basis is the society's actual territory. The Prince 165 The capitalist production system has unified space. 170 The requirement of capitalism that is met by urbanism in the form of a freezing of life might be described. so too it was bound to dissipate the independence and quality of places. can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor. The economic management of travel to different places suffices in itself to ensure those places' interchangeability. Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism. which. they do not forget that name and those institutions. The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls. unless citizens are disunited or dispersed.
the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance. Factories and cultural centers. since the experience of the French Revolution. points out that with the advent of longdistance mass communications. At the core of these conditions we naturally find an authoritarian decisionmaking process that abstractly develops any environment into an environment of abstraction." Lewis Mumford. . has left its mark on the landscape in the dominance of freeways that bypass the old urban centers and promote an ever greater dispersal. The dictatorship of the automobile. where the generalized use of receivers of the spectacle's message ensures that his isolation is filled with the dominant images images that indeed attain their full force only by virtue of this isolation. 172 Urbanism is the modern way of tackling the ongoing need to safeguard class power by ensuring the atomization of workers dangerously massed together by the conditions of urban production. But the general trend toward isolation. the isolation of the population has become a much more effective means of control. and the corresponding lag in the conscious appropriation of this power. with the readying of the ground in preparation for their deployment in a word. but in the case of urbanism we are dealing with the fitting out of the general basis of those forces. moving along a oneway road. The threshold crossed in the growth of society's material power. is presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirements of consumption. Meanwhile. Both formal poverty and the immense extension of this new experience in housing are the result of its mass character.171 It is true that all the capitalist economy's technical forces should be understood as effecting separations. 173 In all previous periods. These imperatives pursue the isolated individual right into the family cell. now for the first time there is such a thing as a new architecture specifically for the poor. say. to augment their means of keeping order in the street has eventually culminated in the suppression of the street itself. architectural innovation served the ruling class exclusively. covering it with what Mumford calls "formless masses" of urban debris. Such an integration into the system must recapture isolated individuals as individuals isolated together. in the spheres of nuclear weapons or of the management of births (where the possibility of manipulated heredity is already on the horizon). must also embody a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. Evoking a "civilization . for even these are considered a fertile terrain for the implantation of the new type of social existence. even in the countries that are the furthest behind in this regard. are just as clearly manifested in urbanism as they are. The explosion of cities into the countryside. The same architecture appears everywhere just as soon as industrialization begins. holiday camps and housing developments all are expressly oriented to the goals of a pseudocommunity of this kind. with the technology of separation itself. . in The City in History. The effort of all established powers. which is the essential reality of urbanism. The unremitting struggle that has had to be waged against the possibility of workers coming together in whatever manner has found a perfect field of action in urbanism. dictated at once by its ultimate ends and by the modern conditions of construction. 174 We already live in the era of the selfdestruction of the urban environment. instants of incomplete reorganization of the urban fabric briefly crystallize around the "distribution factories" giant shopping centers created ex nihilo and .
for whom the movement of a world of their own making is every bit as inaccessible as were the natural rhythms of work for an earlier agrarian society. 176 Universal history was born in cities. The technical organization of consumption is thus merely the herald of that general process of dissolution which brings the city to the point where it consumes itself. of State administration controlling not only the country but also the city itself. and attained its majority with the town's decisive victory over the country. The traditional peasantry was the unshakeable basis of "Oriental despotism. of the break with historical time on which they are founded. But while the history of cities is certainly a history of freedom. and a consciousness of the past. The towns may have supplied the historical battleground for the struggle for freedom. The geographic dispersal and narrowmindedness that always prevented the peasantry from undertaking independent action and becoming a creative historical force are equally characteristic of these modern producers." Quite obviously. urbanism institutes a pseudocountryside devoid not only of the natural relationships of the country of former times but also of the direct (and directly contested) relationships of the historical cities. The city is the locus of history because it embodies at once a concentration of social power. the tardiness of a unification that will enable society to recapture its alienated powers. which must take . their motto might well be: "On this spot nothing will ever happen and nothing ever has. which is what makes the historical enterprise possible. 177 The country demonstrates just the opposite fact¥ isolation and separation" ( The German Ideology). The present paralysis of overall historical development. 175 The history of the economy. they in turn become overtaxed secondary centers. The "new towns" of the technological pseudo peasantry are the clearest of indications. marks instead their simultaneous collapse. they are likewise cast aside. artificial peasantry. As it destroys the cities. The reciprocal erosion of town and country that has resulted from the faltering of the historical movement by whose means existing urban reality should have been superseded is clearly reflected in the bits and pieces of both that are strewn across the most advanced portions of the industrialized world. due to the exclusive pursuit of the economy's independent goals. inscribed on the land. has progressed so far that it has now succeeded in abolishing both of these poles. but even these temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the irresistible centrifugal trend. The forms of habitation and the spectacular control of today's "planned environment" have created a new." and its very scatteredness called forth bureaucratic centralization. the new peasantry that has emerged as the product of the growth of modern state bureaucracy differs from the old in that its apathy has had to be historically manufactured and maintained: natural ignorance has given way to the organized spectacle of error. whose development has turned entirely on the opposition between town and country. and when. but up to now they have not taken possession of that freedom. as partial reconstructions of the city.surrounded by acres of parking space. Marx considered that one of the bourgeoisie's great merits as a revolutionary class was the fact that it "subjected the country to the rule of the towns" whose very air made one free. it is precisely because the liberation of history. The present urge to destroy cities is thus merely another index of the belatedness of the economy's subordination to historical consciousness. means that the moment when town and country begin to disappear. it is also a history of tyranny. so far from marking the transcendence of the split between them.
in other words. The proletarian revolution is that critique of human geography whereby individuals and communities must construct places and events commensurate with the appropriation.. 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. you believe what you want to believe. and of representations of lived experience. the needs of dialogue invested with executive power. and by virtue of freely chosen variations in the rules of the game.. Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere Do you seriously think we shall live long enough to see a political revolution? we. nor from technology. that the forces of historical absence have set about designing their own exclusive landscape there. I refer to the decision to reconstruct the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of established workers' councils the needs.place in the cities. March 1843 180 Culture is the general sphere of knowledge.. within a historical society divided into classes. or that all its present public life does not reflect the actual state of the people? Read whatever papers you please. 178 The same history that threatens this twilight world is capable of subjecting space to a directly experienced time. no longer just of their labor. what this amounts to is that culture is the power to generalize. has not yet occurred. 179 The most revolutionary idea concerning city planning derives neither from urbanism. of the antiState dictatorship of the proletariat. along with authentic life understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself. and it cannot assign itself any lesser a task if it aspires to be recognized and to recognize itself in a world of its own design. . Ruge to Marx.. existing apart. By virtue of the resulting mobile space of play. the independence of places will be rediscovered without any new exclusive tie to the soil. nor from aesthetics. The power of workers' councils can be effective only if it transforms the totality of existing conditions. 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. the contemporaries of these Germans? My friend. and thus too the authentic journey will be restored to us.. but of their total history.. as an intellectual division of labor and as the intellectual labor of division.
185 Each of the two aspects of the end of culture has a unitary existence. as a march toward culture's selfabolition. brought about the irreversible selfknowledge that found expression in the abolition of God. including as the heart of culture an understanding of history. culture's every result propels it toward its own dissolution. is predicated entirely on the permanent victory of innovation. tends toward the transcendence of its own cultural presuppositions and hence toward the suppression of all separations. on . is bound to collapse in the first place as an attempt to offer a coherent account of the social totality.Culture detached itself from the unity of mythbased society. culture was embarked on an imperialistic career of selfenrichment that was at the same time the beginning of the decline of its independence. yet culture as a separate sphere is as yet no more than an intelligence and a sensory communication which. 182 The sudden expansion of society s knowledge. 181 The struggle between tradition and innovation. by that total historical movement which. and its management as a dead thing to be contemplated in the spectacle. must themselves remain partial. In the course of this search. The lack of rationality in a separated culture is what dooms it to disappear. the second with the defense of class power. was also the first task of a critique without end. and eventually even as a partial methodology viable within its own domain. and became autonomous" ("The Difference between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and Schelling"). In thus gaining its independence. according to Hegel. 184 The end of the history of culture manifests itself under two antagonistic aspects: the project of culture's selftranscendence as part of total history. as much in all spheres of knowledge as in all spheres of sensory representation that is." however. The history that brought culture's relative autonomy into being. once it becomes autonomous. is also expressed as the history of culture. Cultural innovation is impelled solely. "when the power to unify disappeared from the life of man. along with ideological illusions concerning that autonomy. 183 Culture issued from a history that had dissolved the way of life of the old world. and opposites lost their connection and living interaction. in a partially historical society. This "prerequisite of every critique. Culture is the locus of the search for lost unity. however. in all spheres of what was formerly understood as art in the most general sense. And the whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as the history of the revelation of culture's insufficiency. for that culture itself embodies a call for the victory of the rational. by becoming conscious of its totality. which is the basic principle of the internal development of the culture of historical societies. In a situation where there are no longer any tenable rules of action. every discipline. The first tendency has cast its lot with the critique of society. culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself. Culture is the meaning of an insufficiently meaningful world. Just like philosophy the moment it achieved its full independence. The first aspect enshrines an opposition between.
" Theater and festival. to the movement governing the history of the whole of culture as a separated realm. 189 The historical time that invaded art in fact found its first expression in the artistic sphere. speaking to others of what had been experienced without any real dialogue. the theory of practice. and that center was passage. and. but also to the secret of its use. or theatrical festival these were the essential moments of the baroque. in the form of unilaterally arrivedat conclusions like those which. it becomes subject. and accepting this shortfall of life as inevitable but rather in a praxis embodying both an unmediated activity and a language commensurate with it. The point is to take effective possession of the community of dialogue. religious universe to become the individual production of separate works. expresses positively.the one hand. and ultimately of its formal annihilation. By art's brilliant colors it cannot be rejuvenated but only recalled to mind. which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely represented. always came on the scene too late. then a moment of life has grown old. which alone has access. not only to the truth of all the knowledge in question. moments wherein all specific artistic expression derived its meaning from its reference to the decor of a constructed space. inscribed as a vulnerable equilibrium on an overall dynamic disorder. 188 When a newly independent art paints its world in brilliant colors. both cosmically and from the point of view of earthly government. In the words of Eugenio d'Ors. the accumulation of a fragmentary knowledge which becomes useless in that any endorsement of existing conditions must eventually entail a rejection of that knowledge itself. emerging from its first. it chose "life as opposed to eternity. on the other hand. on the unity between Christianity and the ghost of an Empire. Baroque was the art of a world that had lost its center with the demise of the last mythic order recognized by the Middle Ages. An art of change was obliged to embody the principle of the ephemeral that it recognized in the world. to a construction that had to constitute its own unifying center. The sometimes excessive importance taken on in modern discussions of aesthetics by the concept of the baroque reflects a growing awareness of the impossibility of classicism in art: for three centuries all efforts to create a . within the commodity spectacle. What it expresses negatively is that a new common language has yet to be found not. 187 The fact that the language of real communication has been lost is what the modern movement of art's decay. As soon as art which constituted that former common language of social inaction establishes itself as independent in the modern sense. 186 Once society has lost the community that myth was formerly able to ensure. and the playful relationship to time. it must inevitably lose all the reference points of a truly common language until such time as the divided character of an inactive community is superseded by the inauguration of a real historical community. as one instance among others. an order founded. beginning with the baroque. The second aspect enshrines an opposition between the critical selfdestruction of society's old common language and its artificial reconstruction. this time. Art's declaration of independence is thus the beginning of the end of art. The greatness of art makes its appearance only as dusk begins to fall over life. as the illusory representation of nonlife. from the viewpoint of historical art.
also attested to the internal deficiency in each's critique namely. which was tied to the internal communications of an elite whose semiindependent social basis lay in the relatively playful conditions still directly experienced by the last aristocracies. is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change. the spectacle's cultural sector gives overt expression to what the spectacle is implicitly in its totality the communication of the incommunicable. dadaism and surrealism are at once bound up with one another and at odds with one another. Only in this era of museums. The baroque ensemble. in this way. 192 Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form. This antagonism. also testified to the fact that capitalism had thrown up the first class power selfadmittedly bereft of any ontological quality. This is an art that is necessarily avantgarde. and surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. was the fundamental cause of their own immobilization. and all its possible revivals. The critical position since worked out by the situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.normative classicism or neoclassicism have never been more than brief. they paralleled the proletarian revolutionary movement's last great offensive. was an ever more individualistic art of negation which. and it is an art that is not. in view of the disappearance of the prerequisites of communication in general. a fatal onesidedness. serve to relativize it within the context of a global disorder which in turn constitutes a baroque edifice at a higher level. as a movement of negation in pursuit of its own transcendence in a historical society where history is not yet directly lived. The very fact that such "recollections" of the history of art should have become possible amounts to the end of the world of art. artificial projects giving voice to the official discourse of the State whether the State of the absolute monarchy or that of the revolutionary bourgeoisie draped in Roman togas. a power whose foundation in the mere running of the economy bespoke the loss of all human mastery. The historical knowledge and recognition of all past art. Though they were only partially conscious of it. which left them trapped within the very artistic sphere that they had declared dead and buried. Historically. the further from its grasp is true selfrealization. along with its retrospective promotion to the rank of world art. in both cases. an edifice into which even the production of a baroque art. going so far as to recuperate and rediffuse even its negative manifestations. is bound to be melded. What eventually followed the baroque. 190 Art in the period of its dissolution. Thoroughgoing attacks on language are liable to emerge in this context coolly . The disappearance of a historical art. can each and every earlier moment of art be accepted and accepted as equal in value for none. when no artistic communication remains possible. suffers any longer from the disappearance of its own particular ability to communicate. Its vanguard is its own disappearance. and the halting of that movement. renewed its assault time after time until the fragmentation and destruction of the artistic sphere were complete. recurs in a certain sense in today's consumption of the entirety of the art of the past. a unity itself long lost to the world of artistic creation. 191 The two currents that marked the end of modern art were dadaism and surrealism. once it had run its course. from romanticism to cubism. involvement in which constituted for each of these movements the most consistent and radical aspect of its contribution. The more grandiose its demands. For dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it.
Thus a school of neoliterature baldly admitting that it merely contemplates the written word for its own sake can pass itself off as something truly new. This thought is entirely determined by the fact that it cannot and does not wish to apprehend its own material foundation in the spectacular system. and by the success of that contempt. one encounters the most modern tendency of spectacular culture and the one most closely bound up with the repressive practice of the general social organization seeking by means of a "global approach" to reconstruct a complex neoartistic environment out of flotsam and jetsam.). reckons that the whole complex system of production. presses the pseudonovelty of its modernist means into the service of a strategy that defines it in the profoundest sense. Whyte. Spectacular power. The spectacle. Meanwhile. so assuming the role of the automobile industry in the first half. beyond the unadorned claim that the dissolution of the communicable has a beauty all its own. meanwhile. an ideologue at the cutting edge of this trend. for the contempt they feel is confirmed by their acquaintanceship with that genuinely contemptible individual the spectator. a good example of this is urbanism's striving to incorporate old scraps of art or hybrid aestheticotechnological forms. 196 A new division of tasks occurs within the specialized thought of the spectacular system in response to the new problems presented by the perfecting of this system itself: in the first place modern sociology undertakes a spectacular critique of the spectacle. the critical truth of such attacks. as utterances of the real life of modern poetry and art. 193 A culture now wholly commodity was bound to become the star commodity of the society of the spectacle. Clark Kerr. recent American sociology Riesman. It does not see that conflict is at the root of every feature of its universe. an apologetics of the spectacle is disseminated as the thought of . and he predicts that in the second half of this century culture will become the driving force of the American economy. 195 The official thought of the social organization of appearances is itself obscured by the generalized subcommunication that it has to defend. 194 The task of the complex of claims still evolving as spectacular thought is to justify a society with no justification. one encounters this same intent: to restructure society without community. from within the various disciplines in which structuralism has taken root. studying separation with the sole aid of separation's own conceptual and material tools. which is absolute within the unchallengeable internal logic of the spectacle's language. corrupts its specialists absolutely. whose function it is to bury history in culture. and ultimately to establish itself as a general science of false consciousness. is concealed. et al. distribution and consumption of knowledge is already equivalent to 29 percent of the annual gross national product of the United States. Naturally. for the aim is to promote reconciliation with a dominant state of things from which all communication has been triumphantly declared absent. or that of the railroads in the late nineteenth century. They are corrupted by their experience of contempt.invested with positive value by the official world. Wherever one looks. All of which shows how a general project of advanced capitalism is translated onto the plane of spectacular pseudoculture that project being the remolding of the fragmented worker into "a personality well integrated into the group" (cf.
like something he calls an "honest product. whose book The Image describes the spectacular consumption of commodities in America. this mode of criticism is obliged to concentrate on describing a sort of surplus negativity that it views as a regrettable irritation. Because the real human life that Boorstin evokes is located for him in the past even in a past of religious passivity he has no way of comprehending the true depth of society's dependence on images. however. from social life as a whole. in the name of economic rationality. or an irrational parasitic infestation. As forms of enslaved thought. on the other. The sincerely reformist orientation of this sociology has no criteria aside from morality. But while this approach has been able to gather much empirical data. It is distinctly ungrateful of them to condemn." has no reality at all. originating in the United States. is liable likewise to view the technology of reproduction and communication as independent of overall industrial development. functioning on its own. those faithful (albeit irrational) guardians without whom the power of that same economic rationality would collapse. because it cannot recognize the critique immanent to that object. Because it is unaware of the negativity at the heart of its world. would have to be attributed to man's "spectatorial" inclinations. in terms of psychological and moral judgments. however. An outraged goodwill of this kind. as the product of "our ever more extravagant expectations. it is quite unable to grasp the true nature of its chosen object. affecting the surface of that world. 197 There is a school of sociology. The truth of that society is nothing less than its negation." as quite independent of what he sees as a disastrous distortion or "exaggeration. as an authorized amnesia with respect to historical practice." What he fails to grasp is that the commodity form itself lays down laws whose "honest" application gives rise not only to private life as a distinct reality but also to that reality's subsequent conquest by the social consumption of images. Thus Boorstin accounts for the situation he portrays in terms of an unfortunate and quasiserendipitous coming together of too vast a technology of imagediffusion on the one hand. The "normal" basis of social life to which he refers implicitly when he describes the superficial reign of images. there is nothing to choose between the fake despair of a nondialectical critique on the one hand and the fake optimism of a plain and simple boosting of the system on the other. either in his book or in the historical period in which he lives. too great an appetite for sensationalism on the part of today's public. never arrives at a concept of the spectacle because he mistakenly feels able to treat private life. and. can see itself as critical only by ignoring the essentially apologetic character of its assumptions and method. 198 People who denounce incitements to wastefulness as absurd or dangerous in a society of economic abundance do not understand the purpose of waste. common sense and other such yardsticks all utterly inadequate for dealing with the matter at hand. for example. in this view. 200 A sociology that believes it possible to isolate an industrial rationality. Boorstin cannot see that the proliferation of prefabricated . which even on its own terms can do nothing except put all the blame on the system's external consequences. Daniel Boorstin. The spectacle.nonthought. 199 Boorstin treats the excesses of a world that has become alien to us as excesses alien to our world. which has begun to raise questions about the conditions of existence created by modern social development.
that validates the chill dream of structuralism. but." Structures are the progeny of the power that is in place. individuals do not actually experience events. it should always be borne in mind. that categories express not only the forms but also the conditions of existence. in face of the massive realities of presentday social existence. on the contrary. For the society of the spectacle to be effectively destroyed. This fantasy of a preexisting unconscious structure's hegemony over all social practice is illegitimately derived from linguistic and anthropological structural models even from models of the functioning of capitalism that are misapplied even in their original contexts. cannot for its part achieve selfconsciousness unless it develops the critique of the spectacle. Just as one does not judge a man's value according to the conception he has of himself. pseudohistory has to be fabricated at every level of the consumption of life. the . both consciously and unconsciously expressed. reveals the secret of negation's potential. For obviously no idea could transcend the spectacle that exists it could only transcend ideas that exist about the spectacle. one cannot judge or admire this specific society by taking the discourse it addresses to itself as necessarily true. Such a theory expects no miracles from the working class. of a society where communication has the form of a cascade of hierarchical signals. what is needed are people setting a practical force in motion. this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life. it is the society of the spectacle. 203 Without a doubt. a thought that conceives of the present conditions of spectacular "communication" as an absolute. Thus it is not structuralism that serves to prove the transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle. Because history itself is the specter haunting modern society. as in the case of any historical social science. and the only reason why this has occurred is that an academic approach fit for complacent middlerange managers. on the basis here defined. the equilibrium of the frozen time that presently holds sway could not be preserved. which constitutes the resumption of revolutionary class struggle. and the acknowledgment. 201 The claim that a brief freeze in historical time is in fact a definitive stability such is. 202 In seeking to understand structuralist categories. crudely reduces all reality to the existence of that system. A critical theory of the spectacle cannot be true unless it joins forces with the practical movement of negation within society. "One cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness. a critique that embodies the theory of negation's real conditions the practical conditions of presentday oppression and that also. the undoubted basis of the current tendency toward "structuralist" system building. imposing itself in its massive reality. but. Structuralism is a thought underwritten by the State. inversely. It views the reformulation and satisfaction of proletarian demands as a longterm undertaking."pseudoevents" which he deplores flows from the simple fact that. and this negation. otherwise. The perspective adopted by the antihistorical thought of structuralism is that of the eternal presence of a system that was never created and that will never disappear. a mode of thought completely anchored in an awestruck celebration of the existing system. on the contrary. To make an artificial distinction between theoretical and practical struggle for. the critical concept of the spectacle is susceptible of being turned into just another empty formula of sociologicopolitical rhetoric designed to explain and denounce everything in the abstract so serving to buttress the spectacular system itself. Its fashion of studying the code of messages in itself is merely the product.
but the style of negation. and offered his own pronouncement on the subject: "But how you twist and turn. and to sensibilities molded by those canons. of the critique of history. plagiarism exploits his expressions. The device of d'tournement restores all their subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths or." 207 Ideas improve. Not some "writing degree zero" just the opposite.. 205 Even the style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination to the canons of the prevailing language. of their inevitable destruction." Such a theoretical consciousness of dialectical movement. that have been transformed into lies. just as Saft always ended up in the pantry. Progress demands it. if I ever write such a section. so that. came to be considered the hallmark of Hegel's epigrammatic style. 204 Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language the language of contradiction. Thus the reversed genitive. Staying close to an author's phrasing. erases false ideas. the young Marx achieved the most cogent use of this insurrectional style: thus the philosophy of poverty became the poverty of philosophy.. As Kierkegaard acknowledges in the same work. and to clothe the problem in its historical costume. you inevitably always manage to introduce some little word or phrase that is not your own. Plagiarism is necessary.very constitution and communication of a theory of this kind cannot be conceived independently of a rigorous practice we may say with certainty that the obscure and difficult path of critical theory must also be the path of the practical movement that occurs at the level of society as a whole. because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity. The meaning of words has a part in the improvement. says Hegel. as an expression of historical revolutions distilled into a form of thought. which must itself bear the stamp of that movement. all pointing to my having introduced borrowed expressions in the course of my exposition. is manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts and by the diversion (or d'tournement) of all the attainments of earlier critical efforts. however. The truth. . and that in the next section of this piece. The mode of exposition of dialectical theory will thus itself exemplify the negative spirit it contains. Kierkegaard too made use of d'tournement. like a finished article from the instrument that shapes it. dialectical in form as well as in content: the language of the critique of the totality. must express the mastery of the critique in hand over all its predecessors. nor will I now conceal from you that it was done purposely. in other words. which embodies its own critique. it is my intention to call the whole by its right name. is not "detached. 206 This style. As a proponent of the replacement of subject by predicate. Not a negation of style. That such is the case I do not deny. with respect to your many animadversions. following Feuerbach's systematic practice of it. The defining characteristic of this use of d'tournement is the necessity for distance to be maintained toward whatever has been turned into an official verity. and which awakens disturbing recollections" (Philosophical Fragments). replaces them with correct ideas. "One further remark I wish to make.
that it can only come to selfknowledge in conjunction with historical action. that is to say. and that it can only be truly faithful by virtue of history's corrective judgment upon it. and by the fact that it exists for another self consciousness. the critique of culture manifests itself as unified: unified in that it dominates the whole of culture culture as knowledge as well as culture as poetry.208 D'tournement is the antithesis of quotation. in some manner. because it is now a fragment torn away from its context. unified. Such negation can no longer remain cultural. D'tournement founds its cause on nothing but its own truth as critique at work in the present. by contrast. too. it is only by being acknowledged or "recognized. in that it is no longer separable from the critique of the social totality. It is what remains. is the fluid language of antiideology. in that. This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any earlier or supracritical reference point. The Phenomenology of Mind . at the level of culture but it has a quite different sense. 211 In the language of contradiction. The fact that the violence of d'tournement itself mobilizes an action capable of disturbing or overthrowing any existing order is a reminder that the existence of the theoretical domain is nothing in itself. 209 Whatever is explicitly presented as d'tournement within formulated theory serves to deny any durable autonomous existence to the sphere of theory merely formulated. its internal coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what validate the ancient kernel of truth that it restores. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. D'tournement. It is this unified theoretical critique that goes alone to its rendezvous with a unified social practice. and ultimately from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option that it constituted within that framework. On the contrary." Hegel. of a theoretical authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable. 210 Only the real negation of culture can inherit culture's meaning. Ideology in Material Form Selfconsciousness exists in itself and for itself. from its own movement.
Names of particular ideologies have vanished. for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment. is over. as a totalitarian worldview has now fulfilled itself in the immobilized spectacle of nonhistory. moving of itself. and the only need it creates" ( Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The claims of ideology now take on a sort of flat. 214 Ideology. whose whole internal logic led toward what Mannheim calls "total ideology" the despotism of a fragment imposing itself as the pseudoknowledge of a frozen whole. ideology the last unreason standing in the way of historical life must likewise disappear. Its fulfillment is also its dissolution into society as a whole. real factors retroactively producing real distorting effects. which conceives of the world as . The principle which Hegel enunciated in the Jenenser Realphilosophie as that of money "the life." This is the supreme stage of an expansion that has turned need against life. of alienation between man and man.212 Ideology is the foundation of the thought of a class society within the conflictual course of history. "The need for money is for that reason the real need created by the modern economic system. The contemplative aspect of the old materialism. but simply an assertion of the obvious. Which is another way of saying that the history of ideologies. 216 In contrast to the project outlined in the Theses on Feuerbach the realization of philosophy in a praxis transcending the opposition between idealism and materialism the spectacle preserves the ideological features of both materialism and idealism. The portion of properly ideological labor serving the system may no longer be conceived of other than in terms of an "epistemological base" supposedly transcending all specific ideological phenomena. just as it is without a formulable historical agenda. imposing them in the pseudoconcreteness of its universe. in the form of the spectacle. finds itself legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion. then it is no longer the voluntaristic struggle of the fragmentary. Materially." The "new potentiality of fraud" concentrated within it has its basis in that form of production whereby "with the mass of objects grows the mass of alien powers to which man is subjected. enslavement and negation of real life. Come the practical dissolution of that society itself. Ideological entities have never been mere fictions rather. positivistic exactness: ideology is no longer a historical choice. which is all the more reason why that materialization of ideology. but rather its triumph. they are a distorted consciousness of reality. 213 Once ideology. the spectacle is "the expression of estrangement. and. of that which is dead" has now been extended by the spectacle to the entirety of social life. as such. plural. results in the virtual identification with social reality itself of an ideology that manages to remold the whole of the real to its own specifications. 215 The spectacle is the acme of ideology. which is precipitated by the concrete success of an autonomous economic system of production. which is the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof. Ideology in material form is itself without a name.
" 220 Whereas the logic of false consciousness cannot accede to any genuine selfknowledge. an antidialectical false consciousness. The need to imitate that the consumer experiences is indeed a truly infantile need. The recognition and consumption of commodities are at the core of this pseudoresponse to a communication to which no response is possible. Correlatively. this through the technical mediation of signs and signals which in the last reckoning endow an abstract ideal with material form. repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances. is thus driven into a form of madness in which. under siege by the presence/absence of the world. "the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a torturing feeling of being at the margin of existence. in that the self. it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false. not as activity and which in the last reckoning idealizes matter has found fulfillment in the spectacle. where what is staged is a false way out of a generalized autism. as well as a readiness to withhold commitment where those enemies are not active. The sole mirror of this consciousness is the spectacle in all its breadth. each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality. 218 In clinical pictures of schizophrenia. are imposed at every moment on an everyday life in thrall to the spectacle an everyday life that should be understood as the systematic organization of a breakdown in the faculty of encounter." Imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle's screen. idealism's imaginary activity likewise finds its fulfillment in the spectacle. By eagerly embracing the machinations of reformism or making common cause with pseudorevolutionary dregs. 219 The spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world. 217 The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia drawn by Joseph Gabel in his False Consciousness should be seen in the context of this economic process of materialization of ideology. is eventually overwhelmed. the consciousness of the spectactor has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a oneway discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities. according to Gabel. What ideology already was. This quest calls for commitment to a practical struggle alongside the spectacle's irreconcilable enemies. A blocked practice and its corollary. Here ideology is at home. The individual. where concrete things are automatically masters of social life. he entertains the illusion that he is reacting to this fate. by resorting to magical devices." In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else. and the replacement of that faculty by a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter. one determined by every aspect of his fundamental dispossession. those driven by the abstract wish for immediate efficacity obey only the laws of the dominant forms of thought. In terms used by Gabel to describe quite another level of pathology. and adopt the . society has now become.representation. the quest for the critical truth of the spectacle must also be a true critique. "a degradation of the dialectic of the totality (of which dissociation is the extreme form) and a degradation in the dialectic of becoming (of which catatonia is the extreme form) seem to be intimately interwoven. though condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality. or an "illusion of encounter. here separation has built its world.
until individuals are "directly bound to universal history". subjecting all power to the disalienating form of a realized democracy to councils in which practical theory exercises control over itself and surveys its own action. End . It cannot be carried out. In this way delusion is able to reemerge within the camp of its erstwhile opponents. but only and always by that class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes.exclusive viewpoint of actuality. The fact is that a critique capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide its time. in other words. This "historic mission to establish truth in the world" can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses. 221 Self emancipation in our time is emancipation from the material bases of an inverted truth. until dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own conditions upon the world.
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
We've moved you to where you read on your other device.
Get the full title to continue listening from where you left off, or restart the preview.