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Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere
Do you seriously think we shall live long enough to see a political
revolution? -- we, the contemporaries of these Germans? My friend, you
believe what you want to believe.... Let us judge Germany on the basis of
its present history -- and surely you are not going to object that all its
history is falsified, or that all its present public life does not reflect
the actual state of the people? Read whatever papers you please, and you
cannot fail to be convinced that we never stop (and you must concede that
the censorship prevents no one from stopping) celebrating the freedom and
national happiness that we enjoy....
Ruge to Marx, March 1843
180
Culture is the general sphere of knowledge, and of representations of lived
experience, within a historical society divided into classes; what this
amounts to is that culture is the power to generalize, existing apart, as an
intellectual division of labor and as the intellectual labor of division.
Culture detached itself from the unity of myth-based society, according to
Hegel, "when the power to unify disappeared from the life of man, and
opposites lost their connection and living interaction, and became
autonomous" ("The Difference between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and
Schelling"). In thus gaining its independence, culture was embarked on an
imperialistic career of self-enrichment that was at the same time the
beginning of the decline of its independence. The history that brought
culture's relative autonomy into being, along with ideological illusions
concerning that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And
the whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as the history of
the revelation of culture's insufficiency, as a march toward culture's
self-abolition. Culture is the locus of the search for lost unity. In the
course of this search, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate
itself.
181
The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the basic principle
of the internal development of the culture of historical societies, is
predicated entirely on the permanent victory of innovation. Cultural
innovation is impelled solely, however, by that total historical movement
which, by becoming conscious of its totality, tends toward the transcendence
of its own cultural presuppositions -- and hence toward the suppression of
all separations.
182
The sudden expansion of society s knowledge, including -- as the heart of
culture -- an understanding of history, brought about the irreversible
self-knowledge that found expression in the abolition of God. This
"prerequisite of every critique," however, was also the first task of a
critique without end. In a situation where there are no longer any tenable
rules of action, culture's every result propels it toward its own
dissolution. Just like philosophy the moment it achieved its full
independence, every discipline, once it becomes autonomous, is bound to
collapse -- in the first place as an attempt to offer a coherent account of
the social totality, and eventually even as a partial methodology viable
within its own domain. The lack of rationality in a separated culture is what
dooms it to disappear, for that culture itself embodies a call for the
victory of the rational.
183
Culture issued from a history that had dissolved the way of life of the old
world, yet culture as a separate sphere is as yet no more than an
intelligence and a sensory communication which, in a partially historical
society, must themselves remain partial. Culture is the meaning of an
insufficiently meaningful world.
184
The end of the history of culture manifests itself under two antagonistic
aspects: the project of culture's self-transcendence as part of total
history, and its management as a dead thing to be contemplated in the
spectacle. The first tendency has cast its lot with the critique of society,
the second with the defense of class power.
185
Each of the two aspects of the end of culture has a unitary existence, as
much in all spheres of knowledge as in all spheres of sensory representation
-- that is, in all spheres of what was formerly understood as art in the most
general sense. The first aspect enshrines an opposition between, on the one
hand, 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, and, on the other hand, the theory of
practice, which alone has access, not only to the truth of all the knowledge
in question, but also to the secret of its use. The second aspect enshrines
an opposition between the critical self-destruction of society's old common
language and its artificial reconstruction, within the commodity spectacle,
as the illusory representation of non-life.
186
Once society has lost the community that myth was formerly able to ensure, 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 soon as art
-- which constituted that former common language of social inaction --
establishes itself as independent in the modern sense, emerging from its
first, religious universe to become the individual production of separate
works, it becomes subject, as one instance among others, to the movement
governing the history of the whole of culture as a separated realm. Art's
declaration of independence is thus the beginning of the end of art.
187
The fact that the language of real communication has been lost is what the
modern movement of art's decay, and ultimately of its formal annihilation,
expresses positively. What it expresses negatively is that a new common
language has yet to be found -- not, this time, in the form of unilaterally
arrived-at conclusions like those which, from the viewpoint of historical
art, always came on the scene too late, speaking to others of what had been
experienced without any real dialogue, 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, and the playful relationship to
time, which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely
represented.
188
When a newly independent art paints its world in brilliant colors, then a
moment of life has grown old. By art's brilliant colors it cannot be
rejuvenated but only recalled to mind. The greatness of art makes its
appearance only as dusk begins to fall over life.
189
The historical time that invaded art in fact found its first expression in
the artistic sphere, beginning with the baroque. 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 order founded, both cosmically and from the
point of view of earthly government, on the unity between Christianity and
the ghost of an Empire. An art of change was obliged to embody the principle
of the ephemeral that it recognized in the world. In the words of Eugenio
d'Ors, it chose "life as opposed to eternity." Theater and festival, or
theatrical festival -- these were the essential moments of the baroque,
moments wherein all specific artistic expression derived its meaning from its
reference to the decor of a constructed space, to a construction that had to
constitute its own unifying center; and that center was passage, inscribed as
a vulnerable equilibrium on an overall dynamic disorder. 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 normative
classicism or neoclassicism have never been more than brief, 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. What eventually followed the baroque, once it had run
its course, was an ever more individualistic art of negation which, from
romanticism to cubism, renewed its assault time after time until the
fragmentation and destruction of the artistic sphere were complete. The
disappearance of a historical art, which was tied to the internal
communications of an elite whose semi-independent social basis lay in the
relatively playful conditions still directly experienced by the last
aristocracies, also testified to the fact that capitalism had thrown up the
first class power self-admittedly bereft of any ontological quality; a power
whose foundation in the mere running of the economy bespoke the loss of all
human mastery. The baroque ensemble, a unity itself long lost to the world of
artistic creation, recurs in a certain sense in today's consumption of the
entirety of the art of the past. The historical knowledge and recognition of
all past art, along with its retrospective promotion to the rank of world
art, serve to relativize it within the context of a global disorder which in
turn constitutes a baroque edifice at a higher level, an edifice into which
even the production of a baroque art, and all its possible revivals, is bound
to be melded. The very fact that such "recollections" of the history of art
should have become possible amounts to the end of the world of art. Only in
this era of museums, when no artistic communication remains possible, can
each and every earlier moment of art be accepted -- and accepted as equal in
value -- for none, in view of the disappearance of the prerequisites of
communication in general, suffers any longer from the disappearance of its
own particular ability to communicate.
190
Art in the period of its dissolution, as a movement of negation in pursuit of
its own transcendence in a historical society where history is not yet
directly lived, is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the
impossibility of change. The more grandiose its demands, the further from its
grasp is true self-realization. This is an art that is necessarily
avant-garde; and it is an art that is not. Its vanguard is its own
disappearance.
191
The two currents that marked the end of modern art were dadaism and
surrealism. Though they were only partially conscious of it, they paralleled
the proletarian revolutionary movement's last great offensive; and the
halting of that movement, which left them trapped within the very artistic
sphere that they had declared dead and buried, was the fundamental cause of
their own immobilization. Historically, dadaism and surrealism are at once
bound up with one another and at odds with one another. This antagonism,
involvement in which constituted for each of these movements the most
consistent and radical aspect of its contribution, also attested to the
internal deficiency in each's critique -- namely, in both cases, a fatal
one-sidedness. For dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it, and
surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. 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.
192
Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form, going so
far as to recuperate and rediffuse even its negative manifestations; in this
way, the spectacle's cultural sector gives overt expression to what the
spectacle is implicitly in its totality -- the communication of the
incommunicable. Thoroughgoing attacks on language are liable to emerge in
this context coolly invested with positive value by the official world, for
the aim is to promote reconciliation with a dominant state of things from
which all communication has been triumphantly declared absent. Naturally, the
critical truth of such attacks, as utterances of the real life of modern
poetry and art, is concealed. The spectacle, whose function it is to bury
history in culture, presses the pseudo-novelty of its modernist means into
the service of a strategy that defines it in the profoundest sense. Thus a
school of neo-literature baldly admitting that it merely contemplates the
written word for its own sake can pass itself off as something truly new.
Meanwhile, beyond the unadorned claim that the dissolution of the
communicable has a beauty all its own, 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 neo-artistic environment out of
flotsam and jetsam; a good example of this is urbanism's striving to
incorporate old scraps of art or hybrid aesthetico-technological forms. All
of which shows how a general project of advanced capitalism is translated
onto the plane of spectacular pseudo-culture -- that project being the
remolding of the fragmented worker into "a personality well integrated into
the group" (cf. recent American sociology -- Riesman, Whyte, et al.).
Wherever one looks, one encounters this same intent: to restructure society
without community.
193
A culture now wholly commodity was bound to become the star commodity of the
society of the spectacle. Clark Kerr, an ideologue at the cutting edge of
this trend, reckons that the whole complex system of production, distribution
and consumption of knowledge is already equivalent to 29 percent of the
annual gross national product of the United States, and he predicts that in
the second half of this century culture will become the driving force of the
American economy, so assuming the role of the automobile industry in the
first half, or that of the railroads in the late nineteenth century.
194
The task of the complex of claims still evolving as spectacular thought is to
justify a society with no justification, and ultimately to establish itself
as a general science of false consciousness. 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.
195
The official thought of the social organization of appearances is itself
obscured by the generalized subcommunication that it has to defend. It does
not see that conflict is at the root of every feature of its universe.
Spectacular power, which is absolute within the unchallengeable internal
logic of the spectacle's language, corrupts its specialists absolutely. They
are corrupted by their experience of contempt, and by the success of that
contempt, for the contempt they feel is confirmed by their acquaintanceship
with that genuinely contemptible individual -- the spectator.
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, studying separation with
the sole aid of separation's own conceptual and material tools; meanwhile,
from within the various disciplines in which structuralism has taken root, an
apologetics of the spectacle is disseminated as the thought of non-thought,
as an authorized amnesia with respect to historical practice. As forms of
enslaved thought, however, 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.
197
There is a school of sociology, originating in the United States, which has
begun to raise questions about the conditions of existence created by modern
social development. But while this approach has been able to gather much
empirical data, it is quite unable to grasp the true nature of its chosen
object, because it cannot recognize the critique immanent to that object. The
sincerely reformist orientation of this sociology has no criteria aside from
morality, common sense and other such yardsticks -- all utterly inadequate
for dealing with the matter at hand. Because it is unaware of the negativity
at the heart of its world, this mode of criticism is obliged to concentrate
on describing a sort of surplus negativity that it views as a regrettable
irritation, or an irrational parasitic infestation, affecting the surface of
that world. An outraged goodwill of this kind, which even on its own terms
can do nothing except put all the blame on the system's external
consequences, 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. It is
distinctly ungrateful of them to condemn, in the name of economic
rationality, those faithful (albeit irrational) guardians without whom the
power of that same economic rationality would collapse. Daniel Boorstin, for
example, whose book The Image describes the spectacular consumption of
commodities in America, never arrives at a concept of the spectacle because
he mistakenly feels able to treat private life, like something he calls an
"honest product," as quite independent of what he sees as a disastrous
distortion or "exaggeration." 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.
199
Boorstin treats the excesses of a world that has become alien to us as
excesses alien to our world. The "normal" basis of social life to which he
refers implicitly when he describes the superficial reign of images, in terms
of psychological and moral judgments, as the product of "our ever more
extravagant expectations," has no reality at all, however, either in his book
or in the historical period in which he lives. 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. The truth of that society is nothing less
than its negation.
200
A sociology that believes it possible to isolate an industrial rationality,
functioning on its own, from social life as a whole, is liable likewise to
view the technology of reproduction and communication as independent of
overall industrial development. Thus Boorstin accounts for the situation he
portrays in terms of an unfortunate and quasi-serendipitous coming together
of too vast a technology of image-diffusion on the one hand, and, on the
other, too great an appetite for sensationalism on the part of today's
public. The spectacle, in this view, would have to be attributed to man's
"spectatorial" inclinations. Boorstin cannot see that the proliferation of
prefabricated "pseudo-events" -- which he deplores -- flows from the simple
fact that, in face of the massive realities of present-day social existence,
individuals do not actually experience events. Because history itself is the
specter haunting modern society, pseudo-history has to be fabricated at every
level of the consumption of life; otherwise, the equilibrium of the frozen
time that presently holds sway could not be preserved.
201
The claim that a brief freeze in historical time is in fact a definitive
stability -- such is, both consciously and unconsciously expressed, the
undoubted basis of the current tendency toward "structuralist" system
building. The perspective adopted by the anti-historical thought of
structuralism is that of the eternal presence of a system that was never
created and that will never disappear. 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; and the only reason why this has occurred is that an
academic approach fit for complacent middle-range managers, a mode of thought
completely anchored in an awestruck celebration of the existing system,
crudely reduces all reality to the existence of that system.
202
In seeking to understand structuralist categories, it should always be borne
in mind, as in the case of any historical social science, that categories
express not only the forms but also the conditions of existence. Just as one
does not judge a man's value according to the conception he has of himself,
one cannot judge -- or admire -- this specific society by taking the
discourse it addresses to itself as necessarily true. "One cannot judge such
a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life."
Structures are the progeny of the power that is in place. Structuralism is a
thought underwritten by the State, a thought that conceives of the present
conditions of spectacular "communication" as an absolute. Its fashion of
studying the code of messages in itself is merely the product, and the
acknowledgment, of a society where communication has the form of a cascade of
hierarchical signals. Thus it is not structuralism that serves to prove the
transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle; but, on the
contrary, it is the society of the spectacle, imposing itself in its massive
reality, that validates the chill dream of structuralism.
203
Without a doubt, the critical concept of the spectacle is susceptible of
being turned into just another empty formula of sociologico-political
rhetoric designed to explain and denounce everything in the abstract -- so
serving to buttress the spectacular system itself. For obviously no idea
could transcend the spectacle that exists -- it could only transcend ideas
that exist about the spectacle. For the society of the spectacle to be
effectively destroyed, what is needed are people setting a practical force in
motion. A critical theory of the spectacle cannot be true unless it joins
forces with the practical movement of negation within society; and this
negation, which constitutes the resumption of revolutionary class struggle,
cannot for its part achieve self-consciousness unless it develops the
critique of the spectacle, a critique that embodies the theory of negation's
real conditions -- the practical conditions of present-day oppression -- and
that also, inversely, reveals the secret of negation's potential. Such a
theory expects no miracles from the working class. It views the reformulation
and satisfaction of proletarian demands as a long-term undertaking. To make
an artificial distinction between theoretical and practical struggle -- for,
on the basis here defined, the 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.
204
Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language -- the language of
contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: the language of the
critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Not some "writing
degree zero" -- just the opposite. Not a negation of style, but the style of
negation.
205
Even the style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an
abomination to the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities
molded by those canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing
concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their
inevitable destruction.
206
This style, which embodies its own critique, must express the mastery of the
critique in hand over all its predecessors. The mode of exposition of
dialectical theory will thus itself exemplify the negative spirit it
contains. The truth, says Hegel, is not "detached... like a finished article
from the instrument that shapes it." Such a theoretical consciousness of
dialectical movement, which must itself bear the stamp of that movement, 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. Thus the reversed genitive, as an expression of historical
revolutions distilled into a form of thought, came to be considered the
hallmark of Hegel's epigrammatic style. As a proponent of the replacement of
subject by predicate, following Feuerbach's systematic practice of it, the
young Marx achieved the most cogent use of this insurrectional style: thus
the philosophy of poverty became the poverty of philosophy. The device of
d?tournement restores all their subversive qualities to past critical
judgments that have congealed into respectable truths -- or, in other words,
that have been transformed into lies. Kierkegaard too made use of
d?tournement, and offered his own pronouncement on the subject: "But how you
twist and turn, so that, just as Saft always ended up in the pantry, you
inevitably always manage to introduce some little word or phrase that is not
your own, and which awakens disturbing recollections" (Philosophical
Fragments). 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. As Kierkegaard acknowledges in the same work, "One
further remark I wish to make, however, with respect to your many
animadversions, all pointing to my having introduced borrowed expressions in
the course of my exposition. That such is the case I do not deny, nor will I
now conceal from you that it was done purposely, and that in the next section
of this piece, if I ever write such a section, it is my intention to call the
whole by its right name, and to clothe the problem in its historical
costume."
207
Ideas improve. The meaning of words has a part in the improvement. Plagiarism
is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing,
plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with
correct ideas.
208
D?tournement is the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority
invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now
a fragment torn away from its context, from its own movement, and ultimately
from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option
that it constituted within that framework. D?tournement, by contrast, is the
fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication
aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty.
This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any
earlier or supra-critical reference point. On the contrary, its internal
coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what
validate the ancient kernel of truth that it restores. D?tournement founds
its cause on nothing but its own truth as critique at work in the present.
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. 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, that it can only come to self-knowledge in conjunction with
historical action, and that it can only be truly faithful by virtue of
history's corrective judgment upon it.
210
Only the real negation of culture can inherit culture's meaning. Such
negation can no longer remain cultural. It is what remains, in some manner,
at the level of culture -- but it has a quite different sense.
211
In the language of contradiction, 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; unified, too, in that it is no longer
separable from the critique of the social totality. It is this unified
theoretical critique that goes alone to its rendezvous with a unified social
practice.
From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord