Chapter 8: Negation and consumption within culture

“Do you really believe that these Germans will make a political
revolution in our lifetime? My friend, that is just wishful thinking. . . .
Let us judge Germany on the basis of its present history — and surely you
are not going to object that all its history is falsified, or that all its
present public life does not reflect the actual state of the people? Read
whatever newspapers you please and you cannot fail to be convinced that we
never stop (and you must concede that the censorship prevents no one from
stopping) celebrating the freedom and national happiness that we enjoy.”

—Ruge to Marx, March 1843

 

180

Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived
experiences within historical societies divided into classes. As such, it is a
generalizing power which itself exists as a separate entity, as division
of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division. Culture detached
itself from the unity of myth-based society “when human life lost its unifying
power and when opposites lost their living connections and interactions and
became autonomous” (The Difference Between the Systems of
Fichte and Schelling). In thus gaining its independence, culture embarked on
an imperialistic career of self-enrichment that ultimately led to the decline of
that independence. The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of
culture, and to the ideological illusions regarding that autonomy, is also
expressed as the history of culture. And this whole triumphant history of
culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of
culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition. Culture is the terrain of
the quest for lost unity. In the course of this
quest, culture as a separate
sphere is obliged to negate itself.

181

In the struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the basic theme of
internal cultural development in historical societies, innovation always wins.
But cultural innovation is generated by nothing other than the total historical
movement — a movement which, in becoming conscious of itself as a whole, tends
to go beyond its own cultural presuppositions and toward the
suppression of all separations.

182

The rapid expansion of society’s knowledge, including the understanding that
history is the underlying basis of culture, led to the irreversible
self-knowledge reflected by the destruction of God. But this “first condition
of all critique” is also the first task of a critique without end. When there
are no longer any tenable rules of conduct, each result of culture pushes
culture toward its own dissolution. Like philosophy the moment it achieved full
independence, every discipline that becomes autonomous is bound to collapse —
first as a credible pretension to give a coherent account of the social
totality, and ultimately even as a fragmented methodology that might be workable
within its own domain. Separate culture’s lack of rationality is what
dooms it to disappear, because that culture already contains a striving
for the victory of the rational.

183

Culture grew out of a history that dissolved the previous way of life, but as
a separate sphere within a partially historical society its understanding
and sensory communication inevitably remain partial. It is the meaning of an
insufficiently meaningful world.

184

The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the
project of culture’s self-transcendence within total history, and its
preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency
has linked its fate to social critique, the second to the defense of class
power.

185

Each of these two forms of the end of culture has a unitary existence, both
within all the aspects of knowledge and within all the aspects of sensory
representation (that is, within what was formerly understood as art in
the broadest sense of the word). In the case of knowledge, the accumulation of branches of
fragmentary knowledge, which become unusable because approval of existing
conditions ultimately requires renouncing one’s own knowledge, is opposed
by the theory of praxis which alone has access to the truth of all these forms
of knowledge since it alone knows the secret of their use. In the case of
sensory representations, the critical self-destruction of society’s former
common language is opposed by its artificial reconstruction within the
commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of nonlife.

186

Once society has lost its myth-based community, it loses all the reference
points of truly common language until such time as the divisions within the
inactive community can be overcome by the inauguration of a real historical
community. When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops
into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious
universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes
subject to the movement governing the history of all separate culture. Its
declaration of independence is the beginning of its end.

187

The positive significance of the modern decomposition and formal destruction
of all art is that the language of communication has been lost. The negative
implication of this development is that a common language can no longer take the
form of the unilateral conclusions that characterized the art of historical
societies — belated portrayals of someone else’s dialogueless life
which accepted this lack as inevitable — but must now be found in a praxis that
unifies direct activity with its own appropriate language. The point is to
actually participate in the community of dialogue and the game with time that up
till now have merely been represented by poetic and artistic works.

188

When art becomes independent and paints its world in dazzling colors, a
moment of life has grown old. Such a moment cannot be rejuvenated by dazzling
colors, it can only be evoked in memory. The greatness of art only emerges at
the dusk of life.

189

The historical time that invaded art was manifested first of all in the
sphere of art itself, beginning with the Baroque. Baroque was the art of
a world that had lost its center with the collapse of the last mythical order:
the Medieval synthesis of a unified Christianity with the ghost of an Empire
which had harmonized heavenly and earthly government. The art of change
inevitably embodied the same ephemerality that it discovered in the world. As
Eugenio d’Ors put it, it chose “life as opposed to eternity.” The outstanding
achievements of Baroque were in theater and festival, or in theatrical
festivals, where the sole purpose of each particular artistic expression was to
contribute to the composition of a scene, a scene which had to serve as its own
center of unification; and that center was passage, the expression of a
threatened equilibrium within the overall dynamic disorder. The somewhat
excessive emphasis on the concept of Baroque in contemporary aesthetic
discussions reflects the awareness that an artistic classicism is no longer
possible. The attempts to establish a normative classicism or neoclassicism
during the last three centuries have been nothing but short-lived artificial
constructs speaking the official language of the state, whether of the absolute
monarchy or of the revolutionary bourgeoisie draped in Roman togas. What
eventually followed Baroque, once it had run its course, was an ever more
individualistic art of negation which, from Romanticism to Cubism, continually
renewed its assaults until it had fragmented and destroyed the entire artistic
sphere. The disappearance of historical art, which was linked to the internal
communication of an elite and which had its semi-independent social basis in the
partially playful conditions still experienced by the last aristocracies, also
reflects the fact that capitalism produced the first form of class power that
acknowledges its own total lack of ontological quality — a power whose basis in
the mere management of the economy reflects the loss of all human
mastery. The comprehensive unity of the Baroque ensemble, which has long
been lacking in the world of artistic creation, has in a sense been
revived in today’s wholesale consumption of the totality of past art. As
all the art of the past comes to be recognized and appreciated historically, and
is retrospectively reclassified as phases of a single “world art,” it is
incorporated into a global disorder that can itself be seen as a sort of baroque
structure at a higher level, a structure that absorbs Baroque art itself along
with all its possible revivals. For the first time in history the arts of all
ages and civilizations can be known and accepted together, and the fact that it
has become possible to collect and recollect all these art-historical memories
marks the end of the world of art. In this age of museums in which
artistic communication is no longer possible, all the previous expressions of
art can be accepted equally, because whatever particular communication problems
they may have had are eclipsed by all the present-day obstacles to communication
in general.

190

Art in its period of dissolution — a movement of negation striving for its
own transcendence within a historical society where history is not yet directly
lived — is at once an art of change and the purest expression of the
impossibility of change. The more grandiose its pretensions, the further from
its grasp is its true fulfillment. This art is necessarily avant-garde,
and at the same time it does not actually exist. Its vanguard is its own
disappearance.

191

Dadaism and Surrealism were the two currents that marked the end of modern
art. Though they were only partially conscious of it, they were contemporaries
of the last great offensive of the revolutionary proletarian movement, and the
defeat of that movement, which left them trapped within the
very artistic sphere
whose decrepitude they had denounced, was the fundamental reason for their
immobilization. Dadaism and Surrealism were historically linked yet also opposed
to each other. This opposition involved the most important and radical
contributions of the two movements, but it also revealed the internal inadequacy
of their one-sided critiques. Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing
it; Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. The
critical position since developed by the Situationists has shown that the
abolition and realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single
transcendence of art.

192

The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form,
including co-opted rehashes of its negative manifestations, gives overt
expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the
communication of the incommunicable. The most extreme destruction of
language can be officially welcomed as a positive development because it amounts
to yet one more way of flaunting one’s acceptance of a status quo where all
communication has been smugly declared absent. The critical truth of this
destruction — the real life of modern poetry and art — is obviously concealed,
since the spectacle, whose function is to use culture to
bury all historical memory,
applies its own essential strategy in its promotion of modernistic
pseudo-innovations. Thus, a school of neoliterature that baldly admits that it does
nothing but contemplate the written word for its own sake can pass itself off as
something new. Meanwhile, alongside the simple claim that the death of
communication has a sufficient beauty of its own, the most modern tendency of
spectacular culture — which is also the one most closely linked to the
repressive practice of the general organization of society — seeks by means of
“collective projects” to construct complex neoartistic environments out of
decomposed elements, as can be seen in urbanism’s attempts to incorporate scraps of
art or hybrid aesthetico-technical forms. This is an expression, in the
domain of spectacular pseudo-culture, of advanced capitalism’s general project of
remolding the fragmented worker into a “socially integrated personality,” a
tendency that has been described by recent American sociologists (Riesman,
Whyte, etc.). In all these areas the goal remains the same: to restructure
society without community.

193

As culture becomes completely commodified it tends to become the star
commodity of spectacular society. Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of
this tendency, has calculated that the complex process of the production,
distribution and consumption of knowledge already accounts for 29% of the
gross national product of the United States; and he predicts that in the second
half of this century culture will become the driving force of the American
economy, as was the automobile in the first half of this century and the
railroad in the last half of the previous century.

194

The task of the various branches of knowledge that are in the process of
developing spectacular thought is to justify an unjustifiable society and
to establish a general science of false consciousness. This thought is totally
conditioned by the fact that it cannot recognize, and does not want to
recognize, its own material dependence on the spectacular system.

195

The official thought of the social organization of appearances is itself
obscured by the generalized subcommunication that it has to defend.
It cannot understand that conflict is at the origin of everything in its world.
The specialists of spectacular power — a power that is absolute within
its realm
of one-way communication — are absolutely corrupted by their experience of
contempt and by the success of that contempt, because they find their contempt
confirmed by their awareness of how truly contemptible spectators really
are.

196

As the very triumphs of the spectacular system pose new problems, a new
division of tasks appears within the specialized thought of that system. On one
hand, a spectacular critique of the spectacle is undertaken by modern
sociology, which studies separation exclusively by means of the conceptual and material
instruments of separation. On the other, the various disciplines where
structuralism has become entrenched are developing an apologetics of the
spectacle — a mindless thought that imposes an official amnesia
regarding historical practice. But the fake despair of nondialectical
critique and the fake optimism of overt promotion of the system are equally
submissive.

197

The sociologists who (first of all in the United States) have begun to raise questions about the living
conditions brought about by modern social developments have gathered a great deal of empirical data, but they have failed to
grasp the true nature of their object of study because they fail to recognize
the critique that is inherent in that object. As a result, those among them who
sincerely wish to reform these
conditions can only appeal to ethical standards, common sense, moderation,
and other measures that are equally inadequate for dealing with the problems
in question. Because this method of criticism is unaware of the negativity at
the heart of its world, it focuses on describing and deploring an excessive sort
of negativity that seems to blight the surface of that world like some
irrational parasitic infestation. This outraged good will, which even within its
own moralizing framework ends up blaming only the external consequences of the
system, can see itself as critical only by ignoring the essentially
apologetic character of its assumptions and methods.

198

Those who denounce the affluent society’s incitement to wastefulness as
absurd or dangerous do not understand the purpose of this wastefulness. In the
name of economic rationality, they ungratefully condemn the faithful irrational
guardians that keep the power of this economic rationality from collapsing.
And Boorstin, for example, whose book The Image describes
spectacle-commodity consumption in the United States, never arrives at the concept of the
spectacle because he thinks he can treat private life and “honest commodities”
as separate from the “excesses” he deplores. He fails to understand that the
commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads both to the
distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social
consumption of images.

199

Boorstin describes the excesses of a world that has become foreign to us as
if they were excesses foreign to our world. When, like a moral or psychological
prophet, he denounces the superficial reign of images as a product of “our
extravagant expectations,” he is implicitly contrasting these excesses to a
“normal” life that has no reality in either his book or his era. Because the
real human life that Boorstin evokes is located for him in the past, including
the past that was dominated by religious resignation, he has no way of
comprehending the true extent of the present society’s domination by images.
We can truly understand this
society only by negating it.

200

A sociology that believes that a separately functioning industrial
rationality can be isolated from social life as a whole may go on to view
the techniques of reproduction and communication as independent of general
industrial development. Thus Boorstin concludes that the situation he describes
is caused by an unfortunate but almost fortuitous encounter of an excessive
technology of image-diffusion with an excessive appetite for sensationalism on
the part of today’s public. This amounts to blaming the spectacle on modern
man’s excessive inclination to be a spectator. Boorstin fails to see that the
proliferation of the prefabricated “pseudo-events” he denounces flows from the
simple fact that the overwhelming realities of present-day social existence
prevent people from actually living events for themselves. Because history
itself haunts modern society like a specter, pseudo-histories have to be
concocted at every level of life-consumption in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the
present frozen time.

201

The current tendency toward structuralist systematization is based on
the explicit or unconscious assumption that this brief freezing of historical time
will last forever. The antihistorical thought of structuralism believes in the
eternal presence of a system that was never created and that will never come to
an end. Its illusion that all social practice is unconsciously determined by
preexisting structures is based on illegitimate analogies with structural models
developed by linguistics and anthropology (or even on models used for analyzing
the functioning of capitalism) — models that were already inaccurate even in
their original contexts. This fallacious reasoning stems from the limited
intellectual capacity of the academic functionaries
hired to expound this thought, who are so thoroughly
caught up in their awestruck celebration of the existing system that
they can do nothing but reduce all reality to the existence of that
system.

202

In order to understand “structuralist” categories, one must bear in mind
that such categories, like those of any other historical social science, reflect
forms and conditions of existence. Just as one does not judge an individual by
what he thinks about himself, one cannot judge or admire this particular society
by assuming that the language it speaks to itself is necessarily true. “We
cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the
contrary, that consciousness must be explained in the light of the
contradictions of material life . . .” Structure is the
daughter of present
power. Structuralism is thought underwritten by the state, a form of
thought that regards the present conditions of spectacular “communication” as
an absolute. Its method of studying code in isolation from
content is merely a
reflection of a taken-for-granted society where communication takes the form of
a cascade of hierarchical signals. Structuralism does not prove the
transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle; on the contrary, it is
the society of the spectacle, imposing itself in its overwhelming reality, that
validates the frigid dream of structuralism.

203

The critical concept of “the
spectacle” can also undoubtedly be turned
into one more hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric
used to
explain and denounce everything in the abstract, thus serving to
reinforce the spectacular system. It is obvious that ideas alone cannot lead
beyond the existing spectacle; at most, they can only lead beyond existing ideas
about the spectacle. To actually destroy the society of the spectacle, people
must set a practical force into motion. A critical theory of the spectacle
cannot be true unless it unites with the practical current of negation in
society; and that negation, the resumption of revolutionary class struggle, can
for its part only become conscious of itself by developing the critique of the
spectacle, which is the theory of its real conditions — the concrete conditions
of present-day oppression — and which also reveals that negation’s hidden potential. This
theory does not expect miracles from the working class. It envisages the
reformulation and fulfillment of proletarian demands as a long-term task. To
make an artificial distinction between theoretical and practical struggle
(for
the formulation and communication of the type of theory envisaged here is
already inconceivable without a rigorous practice), it is certain that the
obscure and difficult path of critical theory must also be the
fate of the
practical movement acting on the scale of society.

204

Critical theory must communicate itself in its own language — the language of
contradiction, which must be dialectical in both form
and content.
It must be an all-inclusive
critique and it must be grounded in history. It is not a “zero degree of
writing,” but its reversal. It is not a negation of style, but the style of
negation.

205

The very style of dialectical theory is a scandal and abomination to the
prevailing standards of language and to the sensibilities molded by those
standards, because while it makes concrete use of existing concepts it
simultaneously recognizes their rediscovered fluidity and their inevitable destruction.

206

This style, which includes a critique of itself, must express the domination of
the present critique over its entire past. Dialectical theory’s mode of
exposition reveals the negative spirit within it. “Truth is not like
some finished product in which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that
made it” (Hegel). This theoretical consciousness of a movement whose traces
must remain visible within it is manifested by the reversal of
established relationships between concepts and by the détournement of all the achievements of earlier critical efforts. Hegel’s
characteristic practice
of reversing the genitive was an expression of historical revolutions, though
that expression was confined to the form of thought. The young Marx, inspired by
Feuerbach’s systematic reversal of subject and predicate, achieved the most
effective use of this insurrectional style, which answers “the
philosophy of poverty” with “the poverty of philosophy.” Détournement
reradicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been
petrified into
respectable truths and thus transformed into lies. Kierkegaard already used it
deliberately, though he also denounced it: “But despite all your twists and
turns, just as jam always returns to the pantry, you always end up introducing
some little phrase which is not your own, and which awakens disturbing
recollections” (Philosophical Fragments). As he acknowledged
elsewhere in the same
book, this use of détournement requires maintaining one’s distance from
whatever has been perverted into an official truth: “One further remark regarding
your many complaints that I introduced borrowed expressions into my exposition.
I do not deny that I did so. It was in fact done deliberately. In the next section
of this work, if I ever write such a section, I intend to call this topic by its
true name and to clothe the problem in its historical attire.”

207

Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a part in that improvement.
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s
phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the
right one.

208

Détournement is the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical
authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a
quotation — a fragment torn from its own context and development, and
ultimately from the general framework of its period and from the
particular option
(appropriate or erroneous) that it represented within that framework.
Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. It appears in
communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty. It
is language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or
supracritical reference. On the contrary, its own internal coherence and
practical effectiveness are what validate the previous kernels of truth it has
brought back into play. Détournement has grounded its cause on nothing but its
own truth as present critique.

209

The element of overt détournement in formulated theory refutes any notion
that such theory is durably autonomous. By introducing into the theoretical
domain the same type of violent subversion that disrupts and overthrows
every existing order, détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing
in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through
the historical correction that is its true allegiance.

210

The real values of culture can be maintained only by actually negating culture.
But this
negation can no longer be a cultural negation. It may in a
sense take place within culture, but it points
beyond it.

211

In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture is a unified
critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture — its knowledge as well as
its poetry — and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the
social totality. This unified theoretical critique is on its way to meet
a
unified social practice.