Situationists

I think SatanIsMy CoPilot is characterising Hegel's idea of history rather than his own there.

Obviously its abstract idealism, but, in context, its not absolutely nuts.
Marx (and Debord) basically had it that history was the act of realising human nature.
Realising it in the sense of making it, as well as expressing it.

but that falls into the same problem that Hegel has. history is just what humans do, it has no teleological end. The society of the spectacle is as much an expression of human self actualisation as anyother, Hegel thought it was the Prussian state and Fukuyami saw it as the end of the cold war.

I dont think this sentence makes sense. Maybe you want to say it again. And maybe expand on it.

Yeah I totally agree that in context its not absolutely nuts. When you look at what marx did and where he was coming from, i.e. hegelianism, what he did loses a lot of its 'OMG how the fuck did he think about so much at the same time' punch. That said I think Marx did do more than what you are accrediting him with. I'd take a pretty anti-humanist reading of late Marx and I don't think he 'basically had it that history was the act of realising human nature'. To be honest any talk of 'human nature' sounds idealist to me.

what's not to understand, you asked if i agreed with Satanismycopilot and I said 'not all' and then went onto deal with Cardinal Tourettes take on my assesment of the spectacle leading to post modernism ala Baudrillards hyper reality if you jettison Debords essentialism.

ah honestly didn't understand. I thought you could have meant 'not at all' or 'not all of it' and didn't want to jump to a conclusion. What part of it do you agree with? Do you think that debord's essentialism is problematic?

I broadly agree with you on this:

I think its important in this discussion to realise that human self actualisation is not the actualisation of any human nature, but rather develops in a determinate manner.

Yeah but humans do pursue goals. (Sometimes even their own.)
History in the broad sense has a complex of teleological ends, some of which are radically in conflict.
Leaving it at that you could say that what I'm saying about history/human nature is just trivially true - they're contradictory etc. But the nature of history (as opposed to just the general sense of everything that has happened, or been done) is that human beings transform their world, and in doing so transform their own nature. (This is really what is distinctive about human beings as opposed to other animals. They make their own nature.) But at the same time this making of their nature is not arbitrary, it comes out of the nature they already have, its a development of it as well as a change.
Hegel, Marx and Debord are essentialists not in the sense that theres some ahistorical, transcendent human nature or purpose, but that there are essential ( ie necessary) tendencies in human history and human beings, tendencies that are part of the nature of these things at a given time.

Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons Marx veered away from talking about "species-being" and all that in his later stuff - that he didn't want to start from some general idea of human nature and then deduce the consequences from that, in the philosphical style. He wanted to look at the specific details and draw out the essentials from within, empirically. Paradoxically, I think that approach actually follows from his general theory of human nature/ history etc - I don't think its inconsistent.
I think it relates to the old question of the universal and the particular. Marx recognised the need to subordinate the former to the latter.
That doesn't mean the former is reduced to nothing though. More like its kept in its place.

We're talking about this in quite philosphical terms (I am anyway), but its an interesting and tricky area. Theres quite a lot hidden away in it I think. Eg I think this is one way in which the situationists are inferior to Marx, their tendency to crush complex particulars under an overbearing generalisation. (It is only a tendency though - when Debord choses to really go into the specifics of something he is very good. Its also something that he wrestles with a lot in his style, he's aware of it as a problem, or he finds it a problem.)

What is this saying beyond the obvious?

The problem with the situationists is that they hold that the spectacle is a freezing of 'self actualisation', yet this is completely arbitrary, why does the spectacle only stand as a block on history, surely the spectacle is as real and as dynamic a form of self actualisation as anyother? or will we resort to idealism and in typical hegelian fashion hold that everything in history was not really actual but this one coming up will be? You know where this search for real 'actualisation' leads to, yep primmoville.

there is absolutely no contradiction between rejecting essentialism and talking about 'species being'.

Well I felt like like I'd addressed that in the rest of my post, but maybe I wasn't clear enough.

Do you feel that capitalist society isn't hindering your self actualisation ( to use your terminology, which basically does describe the situationists view, so long as by self actualisation you mean the fulfillment of your needs and desires as an individual)?
Or do you feel that, in attempting to critically describe the nature of modern capitalism, it is undesirable to try and capture this characteristic of it in ones ideas?

Do you think thats what I was saying?

Only if you have an ahistorical concept of human beings.
Or, more practically, if you think in terms of what you should want, instead of what you actually do want.

I didn't quite say there was, but I get the impression your talking about a different kind of essentialism than the one I described in my last post anyway.

i can see patterns in history, but not ends. can you give examples of what you mean?

Yeah.
Eg Profit is an end for capital.
A conflicting end would be higher wages for workers.
An end is basically a tendency. Its what a tendency is a tendency towards.

I think the concept of the spectacle must be understood historically and it should be remembered when discussing it that the situationists were countering two objectivising tendencies within the left, firstly the idea that working class struggle had produced real historical gains relating to a future socialist society, that human needs were objectively and progressively expressed in structure (unions, health care, social housing, political representation), and secondly that the working class no longer existed anyway but its historical role had been taken on by those structures.

The concept of the spectacle took into account and refused both of these tendencies – the SI reasserted that class struggle continued outside and against the left institutions, and also pointed out that the needs which had been instituted within the social agreements of the time not only favoured the interest of the ruling class more than the working class but actually set the terms for a new form of mystification of need and thus of exploitation.

The spectacle defined an objectively existing terrain of governance of capitalist society within which revolutionaries literally could not recognise their own subjectivity – in other words, the spectacle could not be seized and used for revolutionary ends but must be entirely abolished if a communist society was to be established.

The SI, via the theory of the spectacle, indicated that the struggles for gains identified as achieved up to that point by the left did not alter the balance in the relation between capital and proletariat – they did not constitute an objective historical advance. Neither the production of tractors in the USSR nor the purchase of washing machines and cars in the West changed anything at the level of lived experience – therefore, the claims that they did constitute progress indicated an incorrect or malicious formulation of the problem of capitalist society.

Through reintroducing the concept of alienation the SI reasserted the existing basic antagonism which states that material gains are less an issue than is the relation to those gains (this is where, I think, the Hegelian dialectic is reintroduced).

The practical and theoretical implications of this insight helped to refute the left’s progressivist claims for history as the objective and teleological realisation of human society, and instead indicated that further development of the forces of production within the capitalist social relation only advanced the material interest of a (vaguely) defined governmental apparatus and thus of the ruling class.

The allegation regarding 'primmoville' tho is interesting and this concentration on the human community has often led its adherants in that direction (from Camatte and Perlman to Wildcat as mentioned elsewhere and apparently to tendencies within riff-raff currently).

pilpil

Revol: ""The problem with the situationists is that they hold that the spectacle is a freezing of 'self actualisation', yet this is completely arbitrary, why does the spectacle only stand as a block on history, surely the spectacle is as real and as dynamic a form of self actualisation as anyother? "

For Hegel actuality (which should be distinguished from reality, as explained above) is the actualisation of the rational Concept. Freedom, for Hegel, is akin to reason because pure reason is self determining and knows no authority other than itself. For Debord actuality - or in his own terms, real, active history, the 'self production of the living' - is the actualisation of self-determining human beings, not self-determining thought. Thus, the spectacle is most certainly human activity, but it does not constitute actuality in this sense as all consciousness and activity is determined by capital.

Pilpil: "Through reintroducing the concept of alienation the SI reasserted the existing basic antagonism which states that material gains are less an issue than is the relation to those gains (this is where, I think, the Hegelian dialectic is reintroduced)."

Could you expand on that?

Lordship and bondage – a relation of antagonism confined to and determined by the general social relation but not actually expressive of objective historical movement (eg a heated dispute concerning towels on deckchairs whilst the ship's on course for collision with an iceberg [of course the iceberg is not predictable from the passenger deck {so the dispute is real but is dissolved on impact, dissolved by a different 'logical typing' of dispute, ie steel and ice}]).
p.

Fuck not riff raff as well.

double post

If only they talked about communism in the rocky horror picture show, it might have actually made it entertaining. Christ that's a boring film.

Yes but this doesn't deal with the fundamental issue that he then has to locate this 'pure' self production of the living, that is seperate from the frozen activity of the spectacle. It's still the same old false consciousness bullshit.

Who says its 'pure'? You.
Debord reckoned that in a world that really is upside down, the true is a moment of the false.
So not pure, but rather the opposite, as far as he was concerned.

yes but you do realise that saying the world is upside down means there is a right way up? Pure or opposite, whatever, the point is that there needs to exist some magical place that isn't actually within the spectacle.

Ok after this post I stop banging my head against a brick wall.
To be unable, or to pretend to be unable, to tell a tendency from a place is taking a lack of dialectics to truly bumpkin-like levels, if you don't mind me saying.

If you really happy with what you're saying there, then I'll leave it at that.

on the contrary it is debords notion of the spectacle that lacks dialectics, whether we call it a place or a tendency makes little difference. the fact is that debord makes the spectacle a static place, a place where self development is frozen. I on the otherhand see the spectacle (though I wouldn't use that phrase because it implies a seperation between it and 'reality' that i'm not comfortable with) as being necessarily dynamic, riven with tendencies and that any 'self development to freedom' will happen within it and indeed drives it.

"Debord's notion of the spectacle lacks dialectics"? Jesus.

This is the basis of your problem

The spectacle is a frozen moment of human history and development. It is, however, the 'autonomous movement of the non-living', the self actualisation of separated power which has achieved complete realisation in the world of the spectacle. Separated power, human power alienated from human beings themselves, develops via the mediation of the economy in the same way as Hegel's Spirit until it achieves complete realisation. This becomes a kind of literal 'end of History' (although to give Hegel due credit, he doesn't actually talk about an end of history - the belief that he does is a popular misconception, for which Kojeve is largely responsible).

You don't like the 'essentialism' of Debord. Fine; but how can you have a political oppinion and a desire to chage th world according to what you think would be fundamentally better if you don't have some kind of 'essential' position? Now, you can say 'I don't believe in essences, because that's all very old fashioned and not very trendy and postmodern - I much prefer Dolce and Gabanna [woops, sorry, Deleuze and Guattari] style endless becoming with no limits beyond context and subjective desire. ...however, that's precisely what Debord describes. I think you have a fundamental problem when you think about 'the real' (a term which Debord almost never uses) as a solid, stable, identifiable essence. its not; rather, it's potential, possibility...in other words, history.

I agree with many Situationist concepts (the spectacle, detournement, reification) but the highly complex language they used makes it so damned hard to comprehend.

or in situ-speak:

understanding cannot be meant when meaning cannot be understood

have discovered this site:

http://www.endangeredphoenix.com/

haven't read the texts yet though ... seems pro-situ / post -stiu

I just re-read 1984 and got thinking, is the Party, Newspeak, hour of hate etc just a characterisation of the Spectacle at it worst?

Its a pretty good speculation on where the spectacle was going, leaning a bit towards what Debord called the "concentrated spectacle" elements ( ie the Russian type "totalitarian" elements basically).
I dont think Orwell was too far wrong myself.
Debord liked him a lot. His assassinated best pal/publisher Lebovici published Orwell's complete works .