Twilight of Idle - Jonathan Horelick

“We are against the conventional form of culture, even in the most modern state; but evidently not preferring ignorance to it, the petit-bourgeois common sense of the butcher, neo-primitivism. There is an anti-cultural attitude which favors an impossible return to old myths. We are for culture, of course, against such a trend. We line up on the other side of culture. Not before it, but after. We say that it’s necessary to realize it, by surpassing it as a separated sphere; not only as a domain reserved to specialists, but especially as a domain of specialized production which does not directly affect the construction of life--even the life of its own specialists.”

-- Number 8, Internationale Situationniste

1

So far we see only the poor aspect of modernization, the brutal infiltration of fresh sources of life by ideology. What has become a systematic--as opposed to unconscious--lie in power has fallen into conflict with its unofficial past and therefore consciousness itself. Official thought no longer bears the faintest residue of quality but instead has become an absolute quantity of lies. It fills every second with the omniscience of authority which knows everything because it appears in everything. After having suffered under their pressure day by day, the awareness of existing facts in their totality calls at the same time for the practical resistance to these facts according to a general reversal of perspective: revolutionary criticism.

2

The whole truth remains the one outstanding innovation beyond the reach of alienated history and the totalitarian domination of the fragmentary; an epoch whose partial achievements only fulfill the particular interests of ruling classes. With the collapse of unitary myth, when the separate categories of thought and action have shattered into others and the entire space-time of individuals is dominated by the economy, the consciousness of man is reduced to the consciousness of things. As Webster’s Third edition tells us, consciousness as a thing is reification. Today, reification monopolizes the planet as well as each lived moment without geographic or socio-political limits. Men are now as foreign from the modern world as they are familiar with its contemplation. For us, the one arena of thought which withstands reification is negative. Once mistaken for “Spirit,” the truth of thought is nothing unless it is revolutionary and partakes directly in its practical verification; as ruthless criticism which, while not predominant, is an indispensable poetry of the future. The modern experiment still has to be realized in regard to man: that is to say, the free construction of everyday life. At one and the same time, the free construction of everyday life constitutes the destruction and the realization of known culture.

3

Presently, the mass production of culture on a universal scale corresponds to the totalitarian reduction of subjective space, the waning presence of men in places and time. Under the heavy artillery of commodities, the personal and collective autonomy of individuals runs the risk of disappearing from history in its first signs and symptoms without ever synthesizing as history. Through the rapid degeneration of impassioned, sensible experience, the spectacular image of merchandise scatters the geometric rhythm of history and banalizes the will to live. History is submerged in the surroundings of its opposite. Even the faintest historical murmurings, contained at first in the new intellectual discoveries of our time, turn with their amplification by prehistory against themselves. But the disappointment encountered in everyday life tends to expose everyday life itself as a disputable reality.

4

How nicely are thoughts dehydrated and packaged for the production and consumption of a space which always remains closed and a time which simply passes. Market culture is at once the most vulgar and the most rudimentary phase in the accumulation of false consciousness and accordingly hierarchical power. Coca Cola is certainly less exotic than the Madonna. Yet for that, so much more subtle must its enunciations become.

5

There is no quarter given by the logic of merchandise in its quest for an interchangeable world of subjects and objects enveloped by a monologue without limits. To the principle of suffering known of the ecclesiastical order have been added the material and contemplative rights to a marginal social situation. To be cultured means entering some critical operation within the hierarchy. The miserable laws of commodities are at the source of enrichment. Yesterday’s so-called lofty conceptions have been transplanted to commercial propaganda, recycled, and are now translated to the majority of alienated as thought disinfected of perspective and substance, fragments of information, innocuous commentaries. Society, culture and life have been modernized to fit stillborn values, an infancy of reason, whose prestigious image is gargling in the happy mouth of the status quo.

6

In their isolation, the more people observe, the less they know. The more culture absorbs their days, the less they are. On the graft of the cultural spectacle, mass observation simply induces geometric variations on the passive properties of men. The modern spectator consumes the dead center of appearances which attract him everywhere, as a viewer who loyally acknowledges each positive feature of alienated power. He is the common denominator of banalization, relative master over his own inaction. He receives a fabulous array of views which appraise everything he initiates, after he obeys. At the same time, the alienated comforts imposed by spectacular ideology amass in the end the kind of disenchantment which can no longer be fathomed in series nor amended in dollars and cents. The irritations imposed by a leisure time consumed in passivity inspire fresh opposition, in search of its total history. By nature, the commodity form works consistently against itself as much as for itself in spite of the weathered framework of its contradictory development. Thus the delirious plunges of the intellect into the hypnotic persuasions of exchange-value have simultaneously nurtured the radical distillation of an unmerciful critique, an enlightened contempt. This contempt is rising against false needs and their modes of justification as carrier of a new conception of comfort: the comfort of being oneself in a world organized according to desire, a world commanded by subjectivity.

7

The global automation of the modern division of labor intensifies the pulse of contradictory production. The technology of estrangement installs at one and the same time the mechanical clash within the relations of production, class against class, in the name of the overall system of class power, and the social forces which can effectively recognize that clash, manhandle contradiction, in order to destroy and finally transcend alienated relations. The central antagonism between the contemplative stature of work which eats away at the present and the unitary setting of playful construction which can invade the future, this is fast accelerating. Today there are the appearances of technology, appearances which work for indignity against the technology in the making, the technology of concrete man.

8

At present, technical innovations are harnessed merely to invent new clusters of repression. The present technology continues to be monopolized around the refinement of division and the mental degradation of labor in the pay of mathematically disfigured priorities. Just as profoundly, however, the advanced moment of alienation is by nature a furnace in which extreme dissatisfaction burns the fuel of insurrectionary wisdom. The spreading intellectual tasks of modern labor, which composes a normal feature of highly evolved industrialization, tends to invest in revolutionary criticism itself an immediate, direct impact previously unknown to modern history; as format for the sabotage of modern capitalism by the new proletariat.

9

The renewal of practical theory ranks without doubt among the most powerful forces in social space and time, touching upon everyone and everything, with the force of radical denunciation capable of ruining all the designs of the specialists of power and with a whole application which can permanently disarm the modern State.

10

Within the flattened universe of merchandise, everyday life is built and consumed without ever being controlled. As all productive operations, ruling culture is now visibly what it has always been in essence: a rich power holding poor reference points whose products bear their beauty and value in evading an extravagant use among many. The glory of the arts has always risen with the fall of social action. An earlier age, whose permitted commerce only released artistic impulses to production, an age so much more eloquent and inaccessible, is forefather of present conditions where interpretations all at once have become chores, monopolized around an all inclusive display of things. From the art of mythical pieces to the art of commonplace images, from the art which sprang out of the market embryo to the art which immaculately conceives the new miracles of merchandise, separation reigns.

11

For the modern organization of poverty, the trifles of integral culture play an important part in prolonging its regime of archaic laws according to their fantastic rituals and listless celebrations. In the weary surplus of products--the dazzling affairs of pacified consumption--every trace of the historical event at the source of creation has disappeared. The slightest genuine glance at the historical past, the revolutionary seizure which founded the existing order, evokes a living contrast which is inadmissible within the absolute immediacy required by the prevailing order whose apparent trans-historical presence alone preserves its fragile decay. This contrast, the radical stage of the young bourgeoisie, had already shaken the world at its roots in breaking the fixed order of the land, in penetrating history with the irrevocable model of political economy and the shattering of the Church and natural isolation. Faltering, however, the free individual associations announced by Capital penetrated the concrete only half way. The eternal was routed by the partial invasion of irreversible time, but time which soon became a new eternity of partial changes. The release of social, that is to say, creative time slowly became a museum piece. The flow of fresh machinery and knowledge which could initiate the foundations of a new society blossomed on the topography of abstraction. In the transformation of the starting-point, the domination of nature, into the last objective available to history, ideology was born.

12

Modern class society has included everyone in the vast multiplication of productive forces which never acquire their social consequence. Only the space identifiable with merchandise has enlarged--the vanishing space of urban survival--in which thoughts are poor compensation. No matter how strangely, the process of dead time goes on through the river banks of the spectacle. Rather than having dissolved, the myth of a beyond has descended to the terrestrial paradise of merchandise: the spectacle. The spectacle is to merchandise what the Church was to god, and always the twain shall meet. The irrational has collided with reason to blend altogether the hybrid principle of the quantitative. Men are free finally to engage in their own prehistory. Here, culture means everything and nothing for time which thrives on its own carcass, a time frozen in eternal transition and the image of space. The combat of anxious subjectivity grows from the same time against the fragmentary suspension of contradiction, Its own time is gradually exposing the spectre of culture and the concrete prospects of transforming everyday life. What can sway more power than the mystery of transcendence shrouded in the quantifiable metaphysic of mere, insensible things? Only the negation of the producer...

13

Throughout the twentieth century, the apparent radical alternative to the private conditions of reification merely consists of its political substitution. Rising in economically backward areas, it replaces the total transcendence of existing conditions with their undifferentiated, totalitarian concentration. The bureaucratic counterrevolution ultimately permitted the global formation of the spectacular society. It founded a patent formula of opposition derived mechanically from the repressive discipline of existing culture and political economy. Leninism is a borrowed dogma, the infantile revolutionary theory of the primitive proletariat and the highest critical variation on the reformism of traditional capitalism. It merely realized the “bourgeois State minus a bourgeoisie.” What was going to be done, ever since 1905, in synthesizing all the repressive laws known to modern civilization, gave itself away even in theory, in underestimating the part played by cultural and political superstructures in the making of history. According to the radical intelligentsia which failed to seek its own dissolution in the revolutionary victory of the masses, a conscious society never arrived. As a consequence, contemporary society can now synthesize its own plastic models of revolt, parcels of rebellion or parcellized rebellion--no matter, as the youngest, most zealous merchandise, the spectacle of youth.

14

At the stage where false needs govern every incident, culture materializes--beyond recognition--in a world of objects. Productive history, which first reduced man to a thing in order to conquer the rest of nature, at this point devotes all its intellectual energies to his limitless elevation in images. Under the direction of hierarchy, the prestigious expansion of technological innovations crumbles into calculated ridicule with a rainfall of absurd gadgets, prospective instruments of dialogue and social consciousness pursue the refinement of commodities which no longer transmit any use beyond their own, their exchange-value. Always, ever more affluent means are being supplied in order to multiply the limitations of experience, always, with the ebb of pleasant discovery amidst the foam of a functional boredom without end. Everyone and everything is subject to ideological technique inasmuch as ideology itself balances the scales of exchange-value best of all through the direct collusion of the modern masses in their own misery. The mass possession of cultural knowledge takes place with the collapse of use-value, after there is nothing left to be enjoyed apart from acquisition itself. Merchandise, meager heir to aristocratic events, locates its philosophy in the living room.

15

Ideological technique advances the neutralization of the lie with a new civility which allows it to become no more or less innocuous than any of the marginal phenomena mirrored on the screen. Every banality is founded on the lie. What else is the lie of progress but the great big lie succeeded by many little ones? Rival lies. from opposing political systems to star commodity rivalries, are doubling the potency of universal ideology. On one side, state capitalism can never rationalize the whole of existing production. The bureaucratic class has justified and protected its ownership of “the Revolution” according to an absolute dictatorship over social behavior down to the last cultural detail. On the other side, private capitalism swiftly buys up cultural operations in order to exempt consciousness more than to convert it. The bourgeoisie establishes one principle, the freedom to sell and buy, around which the public at large and tattered intellectual elites are incited to choose their individual brands of irrelevance. Although revolutionary criticism simply finds room for expression in the mass media in inverse proportion to their “impact,” the main stream of false consciousness is supported by the dogma carried in abundance itself. As ideology becomes pure information, false consciousness has descended to the level of repressive automatism. Even the surrealist experiment, having idealized its dream, its specialized language, became a technique of commercial advertising which invades our sleep as well as every waking hour. The enemy inherits every technique, every fallen experiment in subversion.

16

Up to now, the richness of ideas has never attained the stature of history to be lived, except, of course, for those notions which were inseparably -insurrectionary, at irrevocable odds with dominant ideology, i.e., the very mystique of thought “for itself.” In addressing the deformed character of the industrial revolution, Marx remarked that both science and art had appeared to require the existing realm of private life (an area of time dominated by the exclusive consciousness of a privileged sector) in which misery functioned as the necessary contrast for their charms. This well characterizes the quandary of established intellect right up to the arduous pluralism of today. As late as the 1930’s, when the gestures and sentiments of the limited cultural arena were well inoculated with triviality and opened upon vanquished masses the famous opponent of the repression lodged within contemporary civilization, Freud himself, still defended the necessity of the old contradiction. Oppressive labor had to continue inevitably. And the human instinct “to play,” creative spontaneity and sexual gratification, would not evolve within the everyday life of -unhappy humanity but within the sublime stacks of a “higher” cultural anthropology. Today the artifacts of everyday life are in full bloom. The arts accompany the extended exclusion of modern workers from their own production as supplementary compensation, after philosophy. The sphere of cultural expression is by no means open to wider participation and greater meaning but simply to a larger audience. There are more spectators. Contemporary art has not aroused everyday life but rather the compulsory domain of consumption, as “the ideal commodity which makes all the others sell.” It became a spectacle. The art for artists, the criticism for critics, the science for scientists shows us a time inflated with spectacle, a time in which everyone has become the spectator.

17

As aristocratic society once concealed its domination and fractured interests, its sacrifice of the community of individuals to the honor of a few, through the unitary veil of christian myth, the spectacular society advertises social alienation in a fragmentary series of positive images. The incense of renunciation passes to the gaseous stench of banalization. Through the communicating vessel of reification, social alienation appears in the automatism of the spectacle as “interesting material” or “profound subject matter” for literature, museum galleries? auto shows, film festivals, television and group therapy--to the ever doubling passivity of everyone. Characters, like those of Godard, are suddenly drawn from the most ordinary contexts in order to arrive at even more ordinary tragedies: endless hallways, Coca Cola, Maoism, instant suicide...The minuscule intoxication of shredded novelties sold by the caretakers of the once avant-garde cultural estate establish nothing for us but irony, ironies of life, irony as opposed to life. Indeed, all the elegant particularities of bourgeois settings have vanished except one. The artistic celebrities endure despite the downhill turn of creative values, and so much The better, Without any. In the arts, the topical “death of culture” enlivens a deadly culture as an ideal mirror of spectacular contemplation. The tragic dilemmas which grapple for the attention of the viewers reflect a time in which misery has become a commodity and the commodity a spectacle. The old world holds on to esthetics--with the esthetics of decay--against the creative power that will be released by global revolutionary change. The museum which is the modern city is glutted with purely nominal artists, pygmy interlocutors between the beauty of cash and the art free of artists. The proletariat alone can realize art.

18

In the calculated imprisonment of urban space, according to which modern architecture moulds its illusions, every scrap of commodity survival receives new importance. Every gesture, every habit, every exchange is dramatized in order to inspire altogether an endless multiplicity of spectacles. Whether fumigating body odors, broadcasting university courses or televising assassinations and counter-murders, the medium and the message of commodities impose one and the same destitution for everyone, item for item, the same shares of dead time, the same portions of cultural debris. Thanks to the mass production of advertisements, news and entertainments, spectacular survival can now offer a fuller, a richer and a more learned day’s insignificance. The insignificant is noticeably over-equipped. Surely this is the time of the studious consumer, the informed slave, the mass curator of images.

19

As Hegel revealed in a decisively revolutionary manner, pure thought is simply knowing alienation which attains the appearance of autonomy at the expense of its actual self-division. Like the solitary omniscience of the Brahman, contemplation constitutes nothing but a particularity in the extreme, miles away from the totality of experience which stands to be made. Thought which remains thought becomes an object of its own fixation whose truth reclines into abstract self-identity. In the trenches of alienated survival, the spectator represents the last Brahman on the face of the earth. The world of believing has shifted to the world of staring across a century of defeated revolutionary attempts. The world of thought and practice have merged in the eyes, the gay lights of abstraction. Certainly, the transformation of history in consciousness led to the consciousness of historical transformation. Heir to philosophy, proletarian revolution could only master the world according to its own truth. According to an ideology, this has never happened. Thought found structure by default of man. Philosophy came into the hands of Madison Avenue, Peking Review and Pravda, including, of course, the “Daily News” type travelogue portrayed by Castro’s Granma with its trotskyist and surrealist admirers. Quantity has still not passed to quality, a century after Marx. The game which situates modern society is none other than competition, operating under diverse hierarchical specifications, everywhere. The rules are never egalitarian, the chances are never real. In one hemisphere, the alienated pursuit of money and goods is dominated by the past: the family and its holy property. In the other, the State’s power is a new certainty, a certainty which regulates the insidious struggle for socio-bureaucratic status. The global dictatorship of false consciousness verges on no consciousness.

20

What are the ad men and cyberneticians designing within your contemplations? Unhappiness in the inevitable encounter with stark reality; instant contentment before the imaginary comforts and mechanical oppositions handed to you on a silver platter by the present world. With every ambiguous rejection of alienation, the consciousness of alienation fatally swells. Insofar as the values, thoughts and patterns of behavior imposed by an alien reality are hardly attractive any more in themselves, their habitual force alone must attend to most of the convincing. Ideology is thoughtless in its own climate. Worn thin and frail by the pains taken to prolong the surroundings of the irrational, surroundings which lack the slightest sense whatsoever, the dosage and application of ideology has stepped up intensively. As the hierarchy materializes more and more calculably in time, and becomes equally surmountable in turn, ideology constitutes the substance of commodities whose grossly fetishized laws can only survive through the oblivion of the producers themselves. The fallen credibility of all dogma has been compensated by the fierce changeover to subliminal techniques. Everyone is subject to the instant colonization of their time by the unilateral message of the spectacle, a message which removes them from each moment in order to fill the void with the image of their absence. Beyond the id, one is certain to stumble across another can of 7-Up. Ideological technique has become blatant: systematic conditioning and still more conditioning at every level. The devices of falsification themselves emerge from the following hypothesis. Either the rhythm of banalization will infect men with an utter disinterest in themselves as living subjects--not to speak of others--or drive them instead toward unconscious reactions; radical acts deprived of perspective; outrage possessed by ideology. Personal and collective escapism, jaded alienations, sinister inertia “for one and all” pave the absolute condition of spectacular existence. “Everyone is allotted their specific role in a general passivity” (The Poverty of Student Life).

21

At the mass gatherings of isolated, fragmented individuals which revere a diversity of spectacular identities, one enters the holy communion of mediocrity. Throughout the pastimes of aimless peer groups, from the factory athletic team to the authoritarian wilderness of the street gang, one must never violate the stereotyped behavior of normal routine in order to externalize his isolation in common. The spectacle of opacity is epitomized by hierarchical groups of militants. There, the presence of each atomized individual, each follower attracted to the nucleus of star leaders, enlarges the nullity of the other. Within the mass of admirative spectators, every person is forever ready to dispute the value of others in furtive conversation while always remaining reconciled with his unqualified and habitual acceptance of everyone. Sacrifice and manipulation are envisaged as the best tools of practical realism. This is the political quintessence of the spectacular milieu, by-product of former ideologies which shattered with the complete integration of state socialism into the world market, after having suppressed on each revolutionary occasion in the past the absolute power of Workers Councils. The revolutionary game with time will remain caught in the terminology of the spectacle so long as an image motivates the decision to act. Unknowingly, Nietzsche has put the cards on the table for us. “I do not love your festivals either. There are too many actors there and the spectators, too, often behaved like actors.”

[missing illustration]
Caption for illustration: THE CYBERNATION OF THE DIALECTIC

This graphic representation appeared in the California Engineer in an article by Bruce Gardner entitled Marxism and Philosophy. The author claims to find some of the sources of his inspiration in the Situationist International as well as Anarchos. Not bizarre enough, he has drawn his mathematical insignia of the dialectical triad in Marx according to the basic “formal” dimension of alienation. A distressing gastronomy, “reality” is digested as “knowledge” and simultaneously “excreted” in polluted technology. In this marxist naturalism I.B.M. has found a friendly nutrient.

22

The most withered ideology has renewed its ludicrous strength in proclaiming the impotence of thought. Because there is nothing more which can be said for its part, nothing more is there to think about or say. Suddenly, the world has become infinitely subtle, incomprehensibly complex, unapproachably modern and permanent. Ideology has died only theoretically. It rules over the kingdom of its abandon concerning events which now escape precise apprehension. The amorphous state of presence-absence oils the greaseless sleight of hand of grown-up mystification, in the fatherland which may not convince you but which will certainly bore you! A formless perspective rolls off the conveyor belt as the last article of dogmatic prehistory, dogmatism without name or title. Clearly, there is no general point of view which emerges any longer from modern ideology except the persistent celebration over the defeat of history in its historical perspective. Nothing occurs any longer within the labyrinth of ideas, once rich with forms and styles, except for the occasional rumination of the labyrinth itself in the contentment of its menopause. Here and there, one can detect the pitter-patter of the “counter-culture.”

23

The inveterate nags who guard over history seen as an idea (minus ideas themselves) are the wrinkled specialists of abstract history which reproduces its means in order to avoid its ends. Prehistory found its spectacles! All that remains of the metaphysics of traditional thought is the faint odor of the original abstraction. For example, take the most modern Airwick of social science, the science of psychology. Since the writings of such imbeciles as Jaspers and Lemaitre, the most lofty, super-egocentric dreams of psychoanalysis imagine the wide incidence of neurosis--which emanates in reality from the excessive alienation of human nature--to be the perfect stimulus for a psychiatric transfiguration of the globe; the totality as a mental hospital. Imagine, the libidinal cathexis of the human race within a psychiatric clinic...

The commodity did not need the Church in order to become the spectacle of the masses. But it needed the conservation of the Church to maintain the masses of the spectacle. Before power was restored, the myth had to be restored that consecrates power. Today, as the Reverend Billy Graham has claimed, even the youthful consumers of the image of rebellion think of “God” or “death” on an average of every ten minutes. In the Mexican parish shown above, however, there are no people present--only these dogs-- as the Reverend Laureiro says his daily Mass.

24

Simultaneously, the central void which is the lot of contemporary thought tends to provoke the multiplication of marginal intellectual critiques. The unrelenting squabbles issued by rival ideologies obscure the real problems and genuine antagonisms that concern the emancipation of reality from all systems. Sartre / Camus, Stalin / Trotsky, Aragon / Dali, Marcuse / Norman O. Brown...They compose the bad renditions of an original flop, already discredited by the practical developments of its own time. Simply scratch the surface of modernism, you find the greyest matter of power. Critical thought renewed for its own sake will never arrive too late to the fast of history, a fast which reserved the setting for its sobriety years ago. Anything which remains interpretive is ideology.

25

Whereas the Hegelian critics of the last century substantiated the total unification of reality in the form of an idea, the structuralist-formalists at the heart of contemporary ideology are content to scatter the separations of the present world under the heels of their unthinkable language. Not a word can be uttered about the practical history of modern reality, and modern reality becomes nothing more than the language which it utters. Evidently, the “mangled forms” have become absolute in the gullet of anemic ideology which through the wear and tear of age old application falsely has lost the very chord of thought, both past and future, in the voice of an eternal present. The menu scheduled for the “international think tank” which convenes among twelve nations sometime this year (“world health,” “urban growth,” “pollution”) says much about the ways and means of ideological verbiage. Every particle of practical inquiry is broadcast in order to elude the center of the social question, the inquiry into liberation and the liberation of inquiry itself. The merchants of state power have deliberated a thousand and one self-critical sessions in the language of survival, in words that carry the actual reality of alienation in depicting the mere sediment of social distress. In the barren surroundings of spectacular existence, the significations have taken on all significance. The mediations of desire are robbed of their immediacy and ossify. The language of action, whose first shimmerings dwelled in the vital repudiation of art by dadaism and surrealism, finally tumbled into the reconditioned mortar of historical separation. The linear words of abstraction monitor the dead weight of the past over the minds of the living. They mutter their powers of suggestion austerely, as penitent heirs to the gallant armor of concepts and ideas. Bureaucratic speech, formal colonizer of everyday life, administers the psalm “say anything” against the possible poetry which “says everything.” The spectacle of merchandise plays the parts both of oppressor and oppressed. It speaks so that we cannot be heard. Spectacular commodity relations intend to leave men wordless in their endless volume. In the harmless speech of commodities, one can still smell the bad odor of the gas chamber.

26

“Style flows from a worthy theme,” declared the blind puritan poet of English capitalism. Indeed, the real movement which suppresses all conditions existing independent of individuals, that communism which exists nowhere as yet, can alone sponsor a renaissance of human relations in the time free of exchange-value. The contemplations which arrive at nothing and always return to the circle of alienation stand to be surmounted by revolutionary poetry, by the anti-spectators of the future. These combatants of the old word [sic] are gathering at the pole of active dialogue. At the side exits of the modern theatre, one already finds the disgust of growing minorities, driven from the crowded congregation of anonymous audiences, in flight from the confusion and isolation which haunt them again and again. For us, nothing less than the force of maximum disturbance, in direct antagonism with the settled state of spectators, can effectively publicize the shame of the ruling spectacle of passivity and make it still more shameful. Before the immobile smiles of an ever more absurd world, the ruthless critique cannot make itself known without resorting to the parody form.

27

The renewal of practical criticism of existing conditions cannot hope to free everyday life of oppression without establishing once more the language of historical freedom itself, in annihilating all the conventional chains which have confined a conscious understanding of the modern world. Revolutionary praxis must first criticize the fixations attached to the defeated revolutionary tradition itself. Until today, the critical alternative to what exists appears scattered in separate categories, restrained by fixed systems, compressed by the logic of separation. Revolutionary theory must dominate the whole of its own past through a new use of all former criticism. Plagiarism becomes necessary. Progress requires it. It squeezes the phrase of the author, makes use of its expression. It rubs out a false idea and replaces it with a true one. In diversion, the unshakable stature of truths which have frozen into respectability--as ideology--collapses irrevocably. The radical transfer of thoughts to the thought of totality at once destroys their former limitations and places them in an interdependent whole from which they can draw their only significance. The technique of diversion spells violation of the linguistic contract, an insurrectionary upheaval against the rules of established speech. It assaults that speech founded on the marketplace which has censored and abbreviated all the natural ties of words with historical movement. Expression diverted is criticism already communicated and clarified, in the phase of living speech and inseparably the speech of the living. One day liberated experience will be so rich it will not have to be spoken about. It will be life at its highest moment.

28

The ever widening division between manual and intellectual labor forever poisons everyday life. This is also the time when the experts are lost in the narrowness of their own expertise. The missionaries of a pure, instrumentalist rationality possess the finest instruments of calculation with which they comb a universe of detail less and less assertively. The trite, enervated contradictions which they embody really correspond to the actual decay which sets in over all aspects of life. The social praxis of our age is plagued with troubled sleep, in long need of negation and transcendence. The movements and schools which rise and fall without bearing the slightest consequence are signs of a great social loss and equally the need for new life. Everything which is missing on the plains of modern culture, that stockbroker which speculates with shares of everyday life, has become possible at the frontiers of qualitative change. The rigor of free choice accented by existentialism becomes concrete with the formation of revolutionary society, the liberation of history in which each individual will be free to invent his own. The marginal exploration of the imaginative introduced by art finds the moment of being lived apart from merchandise as well as superstition. The discovery by psychology of the repressive function of the family, the role and taboos within authoritarian society can end in the practical dissolution of the framework of survival--the playful federation of Workers Councils--the simultaneous presence of reason and men. The modern spirit of scientific relativity can acquire full application beyond the restraints of reification, in passing to the science of the totality, revolutionary praxis; the annulment of all sides of the myth of historical determinism according to a plan whose verification is bound up with practice; as truth, neither predestined nor utopian, which “man must prove.”

29

The extension of prehistory has provoked the extension of its negation without limits. The value of revolutionary theory today depends on the consequence of those who put it to use, or who fail to. The radical masses are sole bearer of the anti-hierarchical principle and the famous theory of praxis. They alone can transform theory into an objective force to the extent that they speak themselves for their own emancipation. For them, theory can serve simply as a tool which helps to clarify fresh desires and felt historical objectives. The truth will have an urgency for them, as it has for us, inasmuch as it concerns their own struggle for life, an urgency to think unknown to all “thinkers” and a thought which they will never know. Inversely, the specialists of the revolutionary proletariat have appropriated the revolution to the exclusion of the proletariat itself. The apparent humility of the radical intelligentsia consists forever of speaking down, from the mist of new hierarchies, not in order to raise others higher but fatally to dominate them with the image of their dependence. The bolshevik concentration of power, coordinated around the “democratic centralism” of professional intellectual revolutionaries and leading worker elites, never disappears in the coherent enrichment of the masses but always returns as the permanent feature of the Socialist State dictatorship which refuses to “wither away.” Ideology is the concentrated private property of prehistory, in the possession of bureaucratic power whose eternal proclamation of “historical necessity” represents nothing but its own. The revolutionary intelligentsia constitutes a power pitted against the intelligentsia itself, against the mechanical evolution of “happy society” envisaged by utopian myths and the unhappy transitions forecast by bureaucratic dogmas. Its victory is seen in its dissolution. Its answer to the specialist is the amateur-professional.

30

In the revolutionary game, the individual who towers above the rest or falters under all the others must be eliminated so that its impassioned organization may reawaken as a whole and reawaken at best the search of everyone. It supposes that in the natural order of things there are many possible complementary talents which can spur each other to subversive action. It abominates the rule of minorities and recognizes their danger; it desires, as protection against the enlightened critic, another critic.

31

One knows since Feuerbach the objective power of man as a species. Now is the time to realize the roots of that power, the power of autonomous subjects, power which evolves not against man but for him. Power by division is fast coming to its close. Yet only the accelerated excellence of the next whip of the revolutionary class struggle can effectively liquidate the present world of misery and boredom. One can be more certain of the technical and intellectual capacities which present conditions must give over to the immense tasks of the revolutionary project than the existing intentions of individuals who so often know and don’t know. The will to live will be the central talent which confronts a time of resignation and compromise and leads to the others. Surely, we ourselves will be the ultimate cause of our defeat or our victory.

Text from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jon-horelick-diversion-number-1#toc4