Critique of the American alternative press, the Argentinian review Contracultura, the journals Radical America and Telos, with particular attention to their coverage of situationist theory.
The few examples of militant interest in the critical conception of the spectacle have been as confused as they are academic. The rare instances of theoretical discussion which are introduced are as helplessly didactic as they are incoherent. Where refutations are cast toward the global rejection of the spectacle, the utterances are always as meek as they are arbitrary. This trend is expected. Like businessmen taking accounts at their board meetings, various left-wing journals and papers close the doors to open debate, shirk from the prodigiousness of their adversary, yet pass for elusive allies while murmuring furtively under marginal footnotes and anonymous titles, equally plaintive accords and discords. Well, we don’t want to hurt them and we don’t want to scold them, we only want to play with them a little to expose the mechanisms of vulgarization.
The worse cases are not related to antipathy but obscurity. Certain incoherent groups and individuals bearing common brand labels of radicalism fall into this category. They have the merit of conveying the most blind enthusiasm for anything, and toward us nothing but the most contemplative theoretical interest and the most base practical fragmentation. Many American “underground” newspapers, like the Barb in Berkeley and Fusion in Boston, wanted to simplify revolutionary theory in favor of popular prejudice, but for intellectuals and not popularly. The Tribe, also in Berkeley, rallied to the scandalous subversion which was called for in the text, “The Poverty of Student Life,” against the circus of culture, professors and academic guerrilla warfare. Yet they never understood a word about their own ideology or the truth of others. They wanted to import a real sense of scandal in the service of their radical professors as if the poverty was not there and they were not the students. Certain other esthetes have viewed the spectacle as some bizarre impressionist portrait which simply disturbs their thoughts and fashionable dreams. Hegelianism seems to motivate their criticism minus the dialectic.
An attitude of this kind appeared in August, 1970, in the Argentinian review Contracultura. One article in it was entitled “The Dependent Spectacle” whose author went under the pen name of Colador and whose objective was to “freely Argentinianize situationist theories.” The text proved faithful to the language of a handful of intellectuals in Buenos Aires who were interested in using a new vocabulary and fresh metaphors to dress up their old objectives. This example of confusion arrived at the pinnacle of pretension in treating the specific historical conditions in the underdeveloped world with the most vague, picturesque social philosophy, so much so that its conclusion manifests an unapproachable ambiguity. The key misconception involves the relationship between the global spectacle of merchandise and backward economic zones: on the one hand, the spectacular image is seen as an invasion from abroad which cannot be supported by local production already deprived of its autonomous sources; on the other, the vast distance between the imported “contemplation” and the actual “possession” of commodities is said to discharge psychic estrangement in the spectator, “neurotic cargo,” “tension,” “irritation” in place of material alienation. It is this erroneous psychological reduction, accompanied by a narrow geographic conception of alienated mediation, which hobbles to the last paragraph. This paragraph is worth mentioning for the sake alone of anthropological inquiry. Colador writes or scribbles as follows:
In this way all that the proletariat gains from the world centers at the point of having before it the illusion in block of a production that is not exclusively produced by it, in finished alienation and the edification of its partial historical mission (May, 1968), the proletariat gains from the periphery qualitatively transforming its neurotic cargo into unbridled desire to transpose the distance of the contemplated-possessed, to recuperate its alienated product. Copying plainly the model that the spectacle offers it, it begins to knock down the weak local scaffolding. This desire finds immediate manifestation in violence, its wise midwife. The Tupamaros and Che Guevara are the individual and collective realization. the social appropriation, the humanization of James Bond.
On November 8, 1971, we pointed our finger to this “pampa of determinism” in a letter directed to “The Readers of Contracultura.” Evidently, an image of negativism was as foreign to the critique of modern spectacular society as Guevaraism was hostile. This critique could not be mistaken for some ideal formulation which only finds the contemporary peasantry and numeric minorities of workers vanquished in futility. Beyond infantile image-making, one cannot glimpse, for instance, at the Bolivian workers from the side of their struggle to recuperate the alienated product without seeing at the same time the side of their departure from themselves as an alienated product. In the gallery of recuperations, the cultural critic had simply approached politics as the Marxists would approach culture in the framework of a Victorian tragedy motivated not by history but by impulse.
Global illusion haunts the radical intelligensia, illusion which pushes again toward the peasantry under the title of Bolshevism as it enters the horizons of industrial workers as socialist reformism. Other western intellectuals have complemented the fragmentary portrayal of the critique without illusions according to an insipid antiquarianism. This text or that text is reproduced as a “document,” no more or no less. Similarly, the actual objections felt by the antiquarian revolutionary are posed in documentary terms. The American journal, Radical America, epitomized the antiquarian in their publication of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle from which they hoped to design an additional specialization consisting of new “situationist-type” texts within their own shadowy circles1 . As for Radical America, one must say that its “historical research” always formed the least inspiring aspect of Students For a Democratic Society which now is defunct. The beginnings of the organization had shown, to the contrary, far more imagination. The Port Huron Statement, issued in 1960, expressed an initial disdain for all forms of power and every shade of falsehood. Subsequently, the contempt failed to germinate within the limited battleground of the university and even ended up in intellectual surrender. Some young rebels had shown, after all, their exclusive concern with the university, by agitating over and over again there, enjoying a sort of refuge within it. As these “activists” failed to criticize everyday life, their theoretical heirs now seemed to treat the critique of everyday life as a highlight.
These recuperators had simply seen as much opportunity in a “situationist dialectic” as in a few miserable surrealist admirers in Chicago in function of their traditional politics. Their new joy was to reproduce theory other than their own, theory much of which is pregnant with the old world, in order to supplement their empirical studies. Months afterward, Radical America revealed its actual position in publishing a special issue on Hegel and Lenin with a hand from some allies of the Marxist philosophy journal, Telos. Evidently, there were many different cooks, poets, philosophy professors and soft anarchists, who could follow the package recipe faithfully. At one and the same time, the following phenomenology revealed itself there: the recuperators wavered between the contrary poles of Trotskyism and Luxemburgism as they were unable at first to read more than the opening three chapters of Society of the Spectacle. In turn, they tried to redress their error by expressing at the margins a detail of opposition.
“Lenin and Stalinism must be sharply separated. It is interesting to notice that Stalin, stupid fuck that he was, first admitted to the authenticity of Lenin’s Testament in 1928, and subsequently lied about it by presenting it as a Trotskyist fabrication....Since the politburo in Moscow had agreed to keep the document secret, it demanded that Trotsky write an outright denial, which was then reluctantly made by him in the September 1, 1925 issue of Bolshevik...Guy Debord’s account of this, carried away by the force of its rhetoric, blurs very important details....”
Of course, no such “important detail” exists, nor can they produce one in order to redeem some bureaucratic variation to which they are disposed or the transitions of one bureaucratic decision or another. Their projected rhetoric is in itself of secondary importance in comparison with their contemplative historical irrelevance, irrelevance whose lips will be forever closed to the massacre of Kronstadt. This kind of historical apology is merely the dust of a long counter-revolutionary episode from which the twentieth century is only now emerging. Let it equivocate over the 13th Party Congress, let it “sharply separate” bureaucratic lies, let it file away its cardinal sins. These people who indulge in some reformation of the past with a folkloric methodology tied to its heroes, are foreign to historical transcendence except as a spectacle. Laughably, they have set out against the future, against a fresh activity realized in the world, by virtue of adumbrated typography. This brand of recuperation will surely fall away with its monographs while the revolutionary texts it borrowed will remain.
In conclusion, we do not ask for worthier opponents than those we mention. We will be well satisfied with the defeat of the dreary.
Text from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jon-horelick-diversion-number-1
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