Art, Reification and Class Consciousness in the Situationist International
By David Black
1 - Pre-history: Surrealism
According to Walter Benjamin, it was Balzac, in his fictional 'realism', who first spoke of the ruin of the bourgeoisie; but "it was surrealism which first allowed its gaze to roam freely over it". Benjamin, writing in the late-1930s, argued that technology had "liberated" the "forms of creation" from Art. In the visual field, for example, nature could now be reproduced with photography and modern industry could churn out masterpieces en masse as mechanically-reproduced images. In the modern world, the work of art had suddenly lost its "aura".
The Surrealists, like their forerunners in the Dadaist movement, allied themselves with radical politics, but their philosophy of revolutionary self-transformation was deeply influenced by Freud's ideas on the interrelation of the conscious and the sub-conscious. In Benjamin's assessment, Surrealism had recognized that the "residues of the dream-world" lay scattered amongst the products of bourgeois consumer culture; and that these objects and images could be "utilized" in the "waking" process of liberation. As the surrealist poet Paul Eluard argued, true poetic invention involved a concrete unity of subjective and objective experience; it was an act of "deviating" the objects of the world from their accepted roles and properties.
Surrealism, Benjamin claimed, was an expression of: "...dialectical thought [as] the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness. It bears its end with itself, and reveals it - as Hegel had already recognised - by a ruse. With the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled." The idea of the "ruse" of philosophic comprehension had a great appeal for Surrealism. In France, in the early-1930s, Andre Breton published a translation of Lenin's previously unknown 'Notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic' in the journal Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution. Breton himself turned to Hegel's analysis in the 'Aesthetics' of a dialectical movement in Art. In that work, Hegel begins with Symbolic art, in which the object is presented not as what it is but as re-presenting something else: in Egypt the labyrinth of the temple symbolizes the movement of the heavens; the sphinx symbolises the riddle of life itself (and its own self - which is a human construct). In the classical, Hegel sees the highest unity of form and content: the statues of the Greek gods show them as liberated from abstraction into beautiful, individual (and human) form. Finally arriving at Romanticism, Hegel sees the sensuous, material character of art losing its ability to express the ideal content it depends on in order to exist as art. For the romantic, the ideal becomes the object which is revealed to the "inner" self. But since "the spiritual has now retired from the outer mode into itself", the "sensous externality of form" it assumes becomes impoverished, with "an insignificant and transient character": "Feeling is now everything. It finds its artistic reflection, not in the world of external things and their forms, but in its own expression."
Breton sees in Hegel a brilliant insight into the "objective humour" of the poetic personality's overcoming of romanticism's "servile imitation of nature in its accidental forms" in which the all-consuming "flame of subjectivity" extinguishes itself, having taken its own reflection for the real thing. Given the repeated efforts of modern art to escape from "servile imitation" (in the movements of Naturalism, through to Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Dadaism), Hegel's assertions had, in Breton's opinion, a "tremendous prophetic value." Hegel's speculative idealism, in refusing to recognise any force outside of concrete mental and material reality, had envisioned a revolutionary and objective reconcilation of human becoming and its universe - a true challenge to what Breton called "the crisis of the object."
The more uncompromising and radical aspects of Surrealist thought brought it into conflict with the Communist left at the time when the art-police of the Soviet Union were resuscitating romanticism as "socialist-realism". Since most of Surrealism's founders in France were, in the 1930s, either in or moving towards the PCF, the tendency led by Breton (who was allied with Trotsky) lacked the support to continue Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution. After 1945, Surrealism, weakened by splits, defections and the disruptions of the War, found its avant-guard hegemony challenged by new "rivals".
In Paris, the young Rumanian exile, Isadore Isou, led a group called the "Lettrists", who were experimenting in sound-poems and paintings made up of written words. Isou argued that since the "amplification" of poetic language in the romantic period, it had gone through a "chiselling" process under Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme; until Dada finally destroyed it. Isou launched the resurrection in 1947 with a manifesto put out by a major Paris publishing house.
In 1950, a group of Lettrists, dressed as Dominican monks, disrupted Easter Mass at Notre Dame and read out an anti-religious poem. Almost just as controversially, old Dadaists and Surrealists found their poetry readings disrupted by Lettrists shouting "Surrealism is dead!" When Lettrists also began making avant-guard films, they attracted the efforts of Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, both then in their early-20s. In 1952, Debord and Wolman participated in an "intervention" at the Paris premiere of Charlie Chaplin's 'Limelight', where they handed out a statement attacking him. Isou publically disapproved - since Chaplin had been barred from the US for suspected "communist" sympathies the Left were deeply offended by the action - and this led the Debord/Wolman group to split and form a rival "Lettrist International", which included the writer, Michele Bernstein.
In 1957, after years of discussions between the "left lettrists" and avant-guard artists in various countries, the founding of a "Situationist International" drew in participants from the Lettrist International; the Movement for Imaginist Bauhaus; and the former-surrealists of COBRA (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam), led by the Danish painter, Asger Jorn. Within a few months other groups from Italy and West Germany affiliated to the SI, thus inaugurating a stormy 15-year process of fusions and schisms in equal measure. In a 1957 summary of avant-guardism in the 20th century, Debord credited the Surrealists for having asserted the "sovereignty of desire and surprise" in their projection of a "new way of life". But, there had been an "error at the root" in the surrealist "idea of the infinite richness of the unconscious imagination". The "techniques" born of this idea, he argued, such as automatic writing, had tended towards occultism. Furthermore, Surrealism had mistakenly put itself "in the service" of a revolution (in Russia) that had already been lost. In the 'Society of the Spectacle', in 1967, Debord said that the defeat of the social revolutions following the First World War had left the Surrealists and the Dadaists "imprisoned in the same artistic field whose decripitude they had announced". Whereas "Dadaism had tried to repress art without realising it; Surrealism wanted to realise art without suppressing it". What was necessary, in Debord's view, was to project suppression and realisation as "inseparable aspects of a single supercession of art."
2 - Beyond Avant-guardism
Debord and Wolman argued that art could no longer be justified as a "superior activity" or as an honourable "activity of compensation". In the new conditions of the culture industry only "extremist innovation" was "historically justified". The "literary and artistic heritage of humanity" could however, still be used for "partisan propaganda" because its artefacts could be deflected, or "detourned" (a term coined within Lettrism), from their "intended" purposes. In the history of the cinema, for example, Debord and Wolman argued that DW Griffith's Hollywood blockbuster of 1915, 'Birth of Nation', represented a "wealth of new contribution", but was so despicibly racist that it did not deserve to be shown in its original form. They suggested however, that it might be possible to: "detourne it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now." In Birth of a Nation there is a powerful "moonlight-ride" sequence which portrays the Klan as heroes riding to the rescue of the whites. Thirty years after Debord and Wolman's article, Spike Lee actually did "detourne" the scene of the KKK in 'Malcolm X'. Lee borrowed the images of the scene, but in effect turned its "intent" around, by showing the Klan from the point of view of the real Black victims of their racist violence.
The concept of detournement was to give rise to numerous innovations, such as the subversive use of comic books and pirate radio, and the defacing of advertisements with additional images and words. But detournement was further developed by the Situationists into a more general concept of spontaneous rebellion against the technology of consumption. In 1962, an editorial in Internationale Situationiste #7 spoke of "new resistances everywhere", especially in workers wildcat strikes and the "youth rebellion". Even "vandalism" represented a resistance against "machines of consumption" as much as the Luddites' "primitive" resistance against mechanised production in the early 19th century:
"It is evident that now, as then, the value does not lie in the destruction itself, but in the insubordination which can eventually transform itself into a positive project, to the point of reconverting the machines in a way that increases people's real power."
From the late-1950s onwards, the Situationists, in France especially, were heavily influenced by the ideas of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. SouB's leading intellectual, Cornelius Castoriadis, had analysed the implications for radical politics of developments in post-War capitalism, such as the elimination of unemployment and the creation of an "affluent" workforce. Since the "immiseration" that traditional "marxists" had predicted now appeared to have been forestalled, the remaining central contradiction of the system was the alienation of the worker. In the opinion of the Situationists, Castoriadis had correctly highlighted "the continually more thorough reification of human labour and its modern corollary, the passive consumption of leisure activity manipulated by the ruling class".
In 1966, a statement entitled 'The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy' (IS#10) hailed the Watts/Los Angeles Rebellion as a rebellion by young Black proletarians against "the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity-values".
3 - Urbanism
The Situationists also developed the concept of "unitary urbanism" - also first formulated within Lettrism, by Ivan Chtcheglev. This envisioned a city planning based on aesthetic and technological innovations in architecture, but freed from subordination to the needs of corporate capitalism and the endless expansion of private car ownership. It is evident, more than forty years on, that the present-day anti-capitalist 'urbanism' has been influenced by this perspective. In Naomi Klein's book, 'No Logo', Debord is the only Marxist spoken about as relevant to the new forces of protest. As is well known, in the 1970s, the spin merchants of British Punk - and some of the musicians - claimed Situationist inspiration; and a quarter of a century later, at Mayday 2000 in London, the celebrated detournement of Churchill's statue was just one of many situ-inspired elements of play and carnival in the "events" - whether the participants knew it or not. For the SI, "authentic situations" involved revolutionaries constituting themselves as a dialectical moment in the totality.
But, as Debord said in 1961 at Henri Lefebvre's Group for Research on Everyday Life: "The critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday life, before being carried out naturally by all people, must be undertaken in the present conditions of oppression in order to destroy these conditions. An avant-garde cultural movement, even one with revolutionary sympathies, cannot accomplish this. Neither can a revolutionary party on the traditional model, even if it accords a large place to criticism of culture... The revolutionary transformation... will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities, and at the same time the end of all specialized politics."
4 - Council Communism
Debord argued in 1961 that because the academic specialists had abandoned the "critical truth" of their disciplines to preserve their function, "all real researches" were "converging toward a totality, just as real people are going to come together in order to try once again to escape from their prehistory". In reference to the "real researches", International Situationniste #7 1962 pointed to "militant publications like Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris and Correspondence in Detroit". The Correspondence group, led by CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace-Lee Boggs, had, like SouB, broken from Trotskyist vanguardism in the 1940s. According to Debord, both Correspondence and SouB, had published "well-documented articles on workers' continued resistance at work (against the whole organization of work) and on their depoliticization and disaffection from unions, which have become a mechanism for integrating workers into the society as a supplementary weapon in the economic arsenal of bureaucratized capitalism."
There were also a re-evaluation of the old "council communism". The Situationists were of a generation of anti-stalinist revolutionaries who saw the appearance of workers councils in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as the renewal of the "anti-bolshevik", council communism that flowered briefly in Europe after the First World War. One of its thinkers much admired by the Situationists was Anton Pannekoek(1873-1960), who attempted to challenge vulgar-marxism's subsumption of 'subjective' - human - factors into objective historical 'laws'. As an alternative, he adopted as a philosophic base the ideas of the 19th century 'proletarian philosopher', Joseph Dietzgen. Pannekoek wrote: "The first problem in the science of human knowledge, the origin of ideas, was answered by Marx in the demonstration that they are produced by the surrounding world. The second adjoining problem, of how the impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas, was answered by Dietzgen... Marx pointed out what the world does to the mind, Dietzgen pointed out what the mind does itself." Dietzgen, a "self-proclaimed materialist" had recognised that thinking as well as objects could be the object of thought. But in a somewhat neo-Kantian manner, he argued that whilst "our brains do not grasp the things themselves but only the concepts", the concepts for were quite adequate for "practical living" in a rational human society run by the producers.
From the Situationist point of view, Pannekoek had made a brilliant critique of the scientific pretentions of Russian "dialectical materialism" (in 'Lenin as Philsopher'). But his avoidance of the hegelian dialectic meant that those who engaged with it (such as Korsch and Lukacs) had more philosophic impact on the Situationists.
5 - Socialisme ou Barbarie
In 1953, Pannekoek was in correspondence with Castoriadis of SouB and Correspondence on the issue of workers councils and 'revolutionary party'. Pannekoek wrote: "While you limit the activity of these councils to the organization of work in the factories after the seizure of power by the workers, we consider them equally as being the means by which the workers will conquer this power." Pannekoek argued that for councilists to retain even the concept of a non-vanguardist party was a "knotty contradiction". And for SouB so it turned out. The issue blew up within a few years later when another of SouB's intellectuals, Claude Lefort, decided that the SouB position concealed a "radical fiction" posing as a "conception" of non-bureaucratic socialism, which in turn concealed both a "communitarian" desire for homogeneity and the inevitability of articulation by a small circle of intellectuals. Although efforts had been made to involve workers in SouB journals, Lefort saw "a permanent contradiction between the theoretical character of the journal and its propagandistic claims". One of several splits in SouB in the early '60s, produced a group called Workers Information and Correspondence (ICO), who took Lefort's side in rejecting the "party spirit" of SouB.
In May 1968, the ICO was attacked by the Situationists on the Sorbonne/Nanterre student occupations committee for refusing to "intervene" in the universities to build co-ordinating bodies for students and workers independently of the vanguard parties. The ICO militants responded that they did not wish to build a "parallel organization" which, like a vanguard party, might "end up substituting itself for the workers". Workers councils would only come about through "the transformation of strike committees... within the dialectic of struggle", not through "ideology". For the Situationists, to whom all "ideology" was anathema, Rene Reisel hit back, accusing the ICO of disguising an "informal leadership" that "pretends not to exist", whilst condemning "in amalgam any other possible organisation and to automatically anathematize any theoretical expression".
During the 1960s, the Situationists become increasing critical of Castoriadis and SouB, who were accused of lapsing into "sociological" analysis and of "unconsciously harboring a sort of nostalgia for work in its ancient form". Worse still, this fitted in well "with the system's efforts to obtain a higher yield from existing production by doing away with both the waste and the inhumanity that characterize modern industry." This SI analysis showed some foresight into the later recuperation of the ideas of workplace radicalism in modern management's notions of "human resources" and "empowerment". For the SI, the revolutionary project meant "nothing less than than the suppression of work in the ordinary sense (as well as the suppression of the proletariat) and of all the justifications of previous forms of work."
Castoriadis, for his part, was coming to the conclusion that Marxism was a "pseudo-scientific" "obfuscation" of 19th century class struggles, which had themselves "allowed the system to function and survive". In the 1970s, Castoriadis abandoned class politics completely.
6 - The Situationists and Philosophy - Lukacs
The ultimate failure of Socialisme ou Barbarie - and of Correspondence as well - was not just "organisational": that is, it wasn't just a problem of formulating a working relationship between the three different 'layers' of theoreticians, "conscious" militants and workers spontaneously engaging in class struggle.
Within the Correspondence group, Dunayevskaya wanted to continue the investigation of Hegel's dialectic that James had undertaken in 1948 (in 'Notes on Dialectics') but no longer wanted to pursue. Dunayeskaya, who saw workers' spontaneous practice as itself a form of theory, argued that there was a theoretical void on the Left. To begin the task of regeneration, she published the first English translations of Marx's 1844 Philosopic Manuscripts and Lenin's 1914 Hegel Notebooks. In 1955, Dunayevskaya formed the a group of Committees centred in Detroit, where their monthly journal, News and Letters, was edited by Black autoworker Charles Denby. In 1958 she published 'Marxism and Freedom', a seminal projection of the continuity and totality of Marx's "revolutionary humanism".
In 1987, Dunayevskaya, shortly before she died, was working on a book about philosophy and organisation when she came across Pannekoek's 1953 letter again and wrote of it: "It is extremely important to consider it the ground of all other tendencies, be it various anti-Leninist groups like Mattick's or even within Marxist-Humanism", who "act as if the absolute opposites are party/spontaneity rather than party/dialectics of thought". The problem with councilist organisation theory was that "both party and mass are forms of organization sans philosophy, and we want organization inseparable from philosophy". (RD Collection 10901-3)
Situationists in the 'sixties were also looking at the questions of organisation and spontaneity in relation to philosophy. But they took rather a different approach to Dunayevskaya's. For a start, like Castoriadis, they refused to take Lenin's Hegel studies seriously. Debord and Reisel did however, engage with George Lukacs' 1923 work, 'History and Class Consciousness'. Initially, during Lukacs's period as a revolutionary philosopher (from 1918-23), he held a sort of mid-way position between left/council communism and bolshevism, arguing that workers councils were a sign of real class consciousness: a preliminary stage in workers' consciousness of the class "in itself" and "for itself". In reviving the Hegelian dialectic for "orthodox" (i.e. authentic) Marxism, Lukacs restated the philosophic problematic of subject and object. Against the totality of fetishized commodity production - capital - Lukacs juxtaposed the particular commodity that production is based on: the labour-power of the labourer. Since labour-power cannot be separated from the labourer, then any real "self-consciousness" on the labourer's part of that relationship can be "ascribed" as revolutionary. Lukacs thus postulated a "subject-object identity" constituted by the human class who "wake up" from their position as "commodities" to mass revolutionary consciousness. Lukacs, who had been in the leadership of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, was nevertheless well aware of the gap between the "ascribed" revolutionary conciousness and the actually existing reformist/false consciousness. Whereas Marx analysed reification as the process by which labour is transformed into an appendage of the machine, for Lukacs reification is the "..necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society. It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by relating the concretely manifested contradictions to the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development". In 1966 the Situationist pamphlet, 'On the Poverty of Student Life' took this formulation:
"Since the struggle between the system and the new proletariat can only be in terms of the totality, the future revolutionary movement must abolish anything within itself that tends to reproduce the alienation produced by the commodity system - the system dominated by the commodity labor. It must be the living critique of that system, the negation embodying all the elements necessary for its supersession. As Lukacs correctly showed, revolutionary organization is this necessary mediation between theory and practice, between man and history, between the mass of workers and the proletariat constituted as a class."
As 'Society of the Spectacle' points out, Lukacs claimed that the Bolshevik form of organization "was the long sought mediation between theory and practice, in which proletarians are no longer 'spectators' of the events which happen in their organization, but consciously choose and live these events". The trouble was, "he was actually describing as merits of the Bolshevik party everything that the Bolshevik party was not".
On the other hand, Debord quotes Lukacs uncritically in explaining how with the universalisation of commodity relations, reification assumes decisive importance for social progress and social consciousness. With this universalised reification, Lukacs argues, the commodity becomes "crucial for the subordination of mens' consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression... As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized, his (the workers) lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative."
In Marx's Capital however, the reification of the labourer's labour-power is not seen in terms of the labourer's mind getting reified as well. For Lukacs, not only is the thinking of the workers rendered "contemplative" by the organisation of the work process, but the commodification of every area of life reifies the minds of everyone.
With Lukacs, Dunayevskaya argues, the conception of reification is transformed "into a universal, affecting all of society equally. And 'becoming conscious' is endowed with a 'neutrality'". And for all that Lukacs writes on the proletariat as the sole revolutionary force, "it does not flow either logically or objectively, either historically or dialectically from his original theory." Lukacs' attempted to resolve the problem of "becoming conscious" with his concept of the vanguard party acting as historical "mediator":
"... Lukacs so overstressed 'consciousness' of the proletariat that it overshadowed its praxis which was both material force and reason, so that it left room, at one and the same time, for a slip back into the Hegelian idealism of the 'identical subject-object,' and into substituting the Party that 'knows' for the proletariat."
'On the Poverty of Student Life' argued that "Everything ultimately depends on how the revolutionary movement resolves the organizational question, of... the organizational forms..." In concrete terms, this meant projecting the "absolute power of workers councils as prefigured in the proletarian revolutions of this century". For the Situationists then, the solution to the Lukacsian problematic of subject-object identity was to absolutize Council Communism in a new form unrestricted by the factory gates - a concept lacking in the old council communism.
7 - The Situationists and Hegel
Debord argued that because Hegel, as the last great philosopher, had never managed to supercede theology, the limitations of philosophy had been inherited by the Spectacle. The Spectacle "does not realise philosophy, it philosophizes reality" and becomes itself the material reconstruction of the "religious illusion" and "fallacious paradise": "the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond". 'Official' marxism had promoted a "contemplative" view of the economy as the "supreme external agent", and this had become the untranscended, undialectical part of Hegel's "search for a circular system" - one "which no longer needs Hegelianism to justify itself".
Debord in 1967 quoted Karl Korsch's judgement that as a "philosophy of the bourgeois revolution", Hegel's dialectic "does not express the entire process... In this sense, it is not a philosophy of the revolution but of the restoration". Korsch, writing at the same time as Lukacs (in 1923) recognised that Hegel had regarded "'revolution in the form of thought' as an objective component of the total social process of a real revolution." However, in his quest for a reconciliation with the results of the French Revolution, Hegel preserved the position of thought as external to economic reality. In Debord's view, this "could be masked only by the identification of thought with an earlier project of Spirit, the absolute hero who did what he wanted and wanted what he did, and whose accomplishment coincides with the present".
This view of the Hegelian absolute as a Cromwellian or Napoleonic embodiment of the Idea in the birthtime of bourgeois society echoes Korsch's later position. By 1938 Korsch was stressing the "bourgeois character" of Hegel's philosophy. Having broken with Leninism, Korsch dismissed the significance of Lenin's 'Hegel Notebooks' when they appeared in the 1930s and simply said that was not surprising that Lenin was drawn to Hegel because "Leninism was merely an ideological form assumed by the bourgeois revolution in an underdeveloped country".
Though Debord seems not to have been unware of it, in 1950 Korsch pronounced the same verdict on Marxism as a whole: the full development of capitalism, he argued, had negated the working class as agency of socialist transformation.
To trace ideology back to "undeveloped" revolutions is one thing. To resolve all thinkers in these revolutions into ideology/false consciousness is however, something else; and the Situationist's 1967 'Contribution to Rectifying Public Opinion Concerning Revolution in the Underdeveloped Countries' does precisely that. Frantz Fanon's philosophic thinking on the Algerian and Third World Revolutions is lumped together with "Castro-Guevaraism" and casually dismissed as: "...the false consciousness through which the peasantry carries out the immense task of ridding pre-capitalist society of its semi-feudal and colonialist leftovers and acceding to a national dignity previously trampled on by the colonists and retrograde classes." In fact, Fanon was dedicated to a "national consciousness that is not nationalist". The struggle for new human relations, he pointed out, "does not give back to the national culture its former values and shapes" and "cannot leave intact either the form or content of the people's culture". Consideration of Fanon's 'negation of negations' might suggest an appropriation of Hegel's "absolute negativity" that envisions something more than the birth-time of bourgeois society. At the point in the Science of Logic where Hegel presents the Absolute as the identity of the Practical and Theoretical Idea, interpretors accuse him of resolving the self-movement of the subject into a "closed ontology". Some see the "transcendence" as a theological resolution of the class struggle; for others, the movement of the Idea is a reflection of the self-movement of capital as it subsumes all of humanity and nature into mechanised abstract labour. But Hegel says that the Absolute also contains "the highest degree of opposition within itself". Having differentiated his concept of "absolute negativity" from Spinoza's "abstract negativity", Hegel sees the transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality as a "negative self-relation"; in which subjectivity is "the innermost and most objective moment by virtue of which a subject is personal and free".
The Situationists argued that it was necessary to "abolish anything within itself that tends to reproduce the alienation produced by the commodity system". But to refuse to be limited by the struggle against the object-to-be-negated could only mean turning the negativity of the revolution-in-permanence back onto the internal obstacles as well. This would have involved a new openness to new subjectivities. But at the beginning the 1970s, when the SI was still in existence, the new forces such as Women's Liberation movement barely featured in Situationist activity or literature.
8 - The Changed World
Debord, in 1988, concluded that thought had been overwhelmed by spectacular reality. His 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' declares class politics to have become meaningless and laments the passing of all struggles capable of threatening the rule of capital. There is no philosophical analysis, except a brief lamentation for the spectacle's destruction of "logic" in science. The "self-proclaimed democratic society", whose subjects generally accept it as the "realisation of fragile perfection", is a society that "can no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and indeed is no longer open to attack, being perfect... The commodity is beyond criticism..." And so, in late-Debord thought, early-Lukacs' formulation of a structure of reified consciousness became the "integrated spectacle."
In Society of the Spectacle in 1966, Debord quoted Hegel on the "detachment" of "culture" from everyday life that occurs "when the the power of unification disappears from the life of man and when opposites lose their living relation and interaction and acquire autonomy..." Debord however, failed to tell his readers what comes next in that passage: that "the need for philosophy arises". The source of this need lies in the dichotomy between real freedom and an existing capitalist system Hegel could see no alternative to. Philosophy however, remains essential to the concrete totality of capital in which, in Marx's terms, the contradiction between the "absolute becoming" of "human power" measured as "an end in itself" and the "absolute general law" of capital accumulation is the law of its disintegration.
References
Andre Breton, What is Surrealism? (Ed Franklin Rosemount)
Anna Balakian, Surrealism The Road to the Absolute
Walter Benjamin, Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Anton Pannekoek, Lenin and Philosophy (includes Karl Korsch essay wrongly credited to Paul Mattick)
George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness
Situationist Anthology, Ed. Ken Knabb Interview with
Claude Lefort, reprinted in Telos #30 1976. (Note- Lefort in fact confuses Dunayevskaya with Grace Lee Boggs, who sided with CLR James after the Correspondence split. In 'Socialisme ou Barbarie'' in Left History 5.1 97, Marcel van der Linden deepens the confusion by interpreting Lefort account as indicating a "close co-operation which had grown between Castoriadis and Dunayevskaya in the 1950s" - which was not the case at all.)
C Costoriadis, On the History of the Workers Movement, Telos #30 1976.
Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism.
Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, and The Power of Negativity.
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces,
David Black, Fanon and Marxist-Humanism, Hobgoblin #3
Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, and Ten Theses on Marxism, Telos #26 1975/76
Hobgoblin No.4 2001