Liquefactionism

 

Debord was the most rigorous, consistent Marxist theorist of the 20th century.  Every word in "Society of the Spectacle" is placed with the utmost care and precision.  I would compare "Society of the Spectacle" to the engine of a racecar, in which every component has been delicately placed in position to maximize efficiency and power.  It is nothing like the sloppy meandering prose of a Benjamin or a Gramsci or even of Debord's brilliant and admirable teacher, Lefebvre - and it is directly opposed to Debord's moronic adversary, Althusser.

Debord was working through two difficult questions.  Was Hegel an idealist?  Of course, in a way, we can answer that question briefly and somewhat dismissively, by saying that categories are stipulative - that "words are our servants, not our masters" as Humpty Dumpty says.  That is, we can simply give the glib answer that "It depends on what your definition of idealism is."  We can use the word "idealist" however we like, and some people might use the word "idealist" in such a way that it includes Hegel, and others might use it in such a way that it does not - or to put it differently, we can expand the definition of idealism so that it includes Hegel.  But that just kicks the can down the road.  "What is the meaning of Hegelian idealism?": that might be a way of formulating the first question with which Debord was wrestling.

The second question that Debord considered is just as profound and difficult as the first, if not more so: Why would a materialist, like Marx, make reference to the philosophy of an idealist like Hegel?  What did he find worthwhile about Hegel's system, and why?  Why would idealist philosophy be vital and even necessary to a materialist project?

Different theorists have attempted to answer the first and second questions in various ways, while other theorists who call themselves Marxists have instead tried to avoid these questions altogether, brushing them off the table as it were, by attempting to invent a de-Hegelianized Marx.  This has happened several times - perhaps most obviously in the work of Eduard Bernstein, the "revisionist" Marxist who knew both Marx and Engels personally and seemed the heir apparent of the Marxist cause, until he steered that movement in a wildly different direction, changing the meaning and goal of Marxism or indeed eliminating the goal altogether: as he famously put it in the conclusion of his famous essay, "Evolutionary Socialism," "The ultimate aim of socialism is nothing; but the movement is everything."  For this, Bernstein was roundly attacked and rejected by the "orthodox" Marxists, led by Kautsky, and later by Luxemburg and Lenin, the Bolshevik movement and its descendants in China and elsewhere.  Then again, by the time Debord was writing, the Stalinist states too could be seen as regimes of ersatz de-Hegelianized Marxism - a kind of mechanical, non-dialectical advocacy for progress and industrial development, in which the growth of productive forces is pursued uncritically as a summum bonum.  In many ways, the Stalinist states resembled Bernstein's movement - Bernstein eschewed revolution, in favor of gradual reforms; likewise, the Stalinist states insisted that they were Really Existing Socialism, that they were mere "semi-states," existing for a mere transitional period and that every day they were gradually moving in the direction of building Full Communism.  But progress was dubious, and regress was frequent.  In effect, they were reformists with extra steps.  More importantly, the workers, far from being the drivers of developmental change in their society, were reduced to the role of passive spectators.  And again, yet another attempt at a de-Hegelianized Marxism was attempted by the "Analytic Marxists," chiefly in Britain, such as G.A. Cohen and Jon Elster.  And then there's the notorious structuralist Marxism, represented by Althusser, which again attempted to surgically remove the Hegelianism from Marx.  And we could go on, with yet other, more banal examples.

Debord rejected all of the above.  As he put it, (Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 79) "The inseparability of Marx’s theory from the Hegelian method is itself inseparable from the revolutionary character of this theory, namely from its truth. This first relationship has been generally ignored, misunderstood, and even denounced as the weakness of what fallaciously became a marxist doctrine."

In contrast to all of the above tendencies, Debord developed a distinctive and brilliant way of looking at these questions.  Debord thought Hegel's idealism pointed at a kind of truth, and a necessary truth, which only a real revolutionary movement could materialize.  But for Debord, the truth of Hegelian idealism was not something that was handed down from on high, from God, nor was it something that sprang forth fully formed from idyllic Nature.  No, as Debord saw it, Hegel's idealist world was indeed inverted, a kind of anti-life, but a real anti-life that had been imposed upon us by force from below, from the economic base of society.  Indeed, this imposition of ideal anti-life unto reality, which Debord called "the spectacle," is nothing other than the full development of the commodity form - the point at which the commodity form becomes comprehensive and totalizing - when the commodity becomes a world - when the commodity becomes the world.

As he put it (Society of the Spectacle, Theses 35-37), "In the spectacle’s basic practice of [...] inverting living values into purely abstract values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity, which seems at first glance so trivial and obvious, yet which is actually so complex and full of metaphysical subtleties.  The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by 'imperceptible as well as perceptible things' — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a selection of images which is projected above it, yet which at the same time succeeds in making itself regarded as the perceptible par excellence.  The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is."

That having been said, it would be a mistake to read Debord's theory as simply "anti-consumerism".  We are inundated daily with "anti-consumerist" ideologies that moralistically enjoin us either not to consume so much or to feel appropriately guilty every time we do - either because we are consuming the exploited labor of others, or for ecological reasons, or what have you.  These kinds of pious sermons can easily be assimilated into the spectacle itself - no surprise, because this is how the spectacle operates - it accumulates, assimilates, absorbs everything into itself, including movements that purport to rebel against it, and which seem to run contrary to each other.  The spectacle has no problem selling your rebellion back to you.

Debord notices, with his characteristic incisiveness, that the spectacle itself takes on the structure of Bernsteinian revisionism (Thesis 14): "In the spectacle — the visual reflection of the ruling economic order — goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself."