{"id":566,"date":"2008-06-14T00:00:24","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T05:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=566"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:59:11","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:59:11","slug":"against-debords-nihilism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=566","title":{"rendered":"Against Debord’s nihilism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rejoinder to Principia Dialectica<\/em> (U.K.)<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

PRINCIPIA DIALECTICA<\/em><\/a> HAS RESPONDED<\/a> to our critique<\/a> of their d\u00e9tournement<\/em><\/a> of our “death of the Left” rhetoric with a noisy disclaimer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But to hold up Guy Debord’s “Situationism” circa 1968 against two centuries of the critical theory and politics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Korsch, Benjamin, Adorno, et al. \u2014 to say nothing of the contributions to enlightenment of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, et al. \u2014 requires either a great deal of gall, or is meant only in jest.<\/p>\n

We suspect the latter, and so seek, at the very least, to prevent the misappropriation \u2014 really, abuse \u2014 of Moishe Postone’s work by such bad faith efforts as Principia Dialectica<\/em>. \u2014 Otherwise:<\/em><\/p>\n

The title of the Principia Dialectica<\/em> rejoinder to Platypus cites Amy Winehouse’s 2006 song “Rehab,” which sounds like a 1960s-era pop song, another piquant, if immediately dated and musty British appropriation and slick commodification of American culture. But, although Winehouse sang that she wouldn’t “go to rehab, no, no, no,” as it turned out, later she did!<\/p>\n

This story does in fact speak to the principal intention of Platypus, to learn from the past and prevent its pathological repetition: The understandable desire to escape the past in a manic fit of ecstatic optimism is tragic to the extent that it is unrealistic and lands one precisely where one has sworn never to return; it is farcical to the degree that this is repeated \u2014 over and over again.<\/p>\n

Note to advocates of today’s already obsolete early 1990s-era rehabilitation of Situationism and other post-1960s politics of anarchism, autonomia<\/em>, “post-work,” etc.: If you find yourself disagreeing with all or several of the most outstanding historical Marxist critical theorists and political actors listed above and\/or the enlightened thought about modern humanity from the 17th\u201319th centuries from which the best Marxists drew and developed their insights, you can be sure that you are in denial and not on any road to recovery.<\/p>\n

Whether you like it or not, and one way or another, you will find yourself “back to rehab” \u2014 in some form of political social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or worse, or by being simply depoliticized and folded back into the rhythm of mainstream existence \u2014 or, in a dead-end of self-destruction, whether intoxicated or not. Debord’s suicide \u2014 motivated very differently from Benjamin’s, Debord being more pathetic than tragic \u2014 should stand as a warning to any and all of his wannabe followers.<\/p>\n

For, going down this highway, you will sooner or later either render yourself entirely useless politically, or you’ll end up dropping the attempt at emancipatory politics altogether \u2014 as indeed Debord’s Situationism had done already from the very beginning.<\/p>\n

Platypus, by contrast, seeks to foster recognition by a new generation of thinkers and actors that there might be a point to developing and instrumentalizing ourselves for the possibility of human enlightenment and emancipation, and not complacently wasting ourselves away in a narcissistic narcosis of self-dosing on the gaiety of futility.<\/p>\n

Note to young contrarian “rebels:” The “system” is going to consume you one way or another, no matter what you do, so it might as well be in ways that push the envelope of possibility and move oneself and others as far in the directions of human betterment and development of further potential as possible.<\/p>\n

What Principia Dialectica<\/em> says about class struggle, “proletarian” empowerment and capital is of course true: this is all immanent to and perpetuating of the “system.” Where Principia Dialectica<\/em>, as all anarchism, goes wrong (but perhaps instructively) is in their Romantic nihilism. But the system is our reality \u2014 in and through it is the only direction in which our hope might lie.<\/p>\n

The world doesn’t need any more H\u00f6lderlins; as Hegel said, the “unhappy consciousness” is regressive, falls below the threshold with which it is tasked, and so cannot fulfill itself, but must overcome itself.<\/p>\n

Debord’s notes on cocktail napkins can’t help us do that.\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coda<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n

Anselm Jappe of the Krisis-Gruppe<\/a>, in his 1993 book Guy Debord<\/em><\/a> cites Debord’s affinity with Luk\u00e1cs with the following quotation, “The only possible basis for understanding this world is to oppose it; and such opposition will be neither genuine nor realistic unless it contests the totality” [also in Jappe’s pamphlet on Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle<\/em><\/a>, Chapter 1 of his book]. Principia Dialectica<\/em> also turns to Jappe for the concept of capital as the “automaton” or “automatic subject”<\/a> (in Jappe’s book Adventures of the Commodity: for a new critique of value<\/em>, 2003\/05). The question, however, is not one of affirming vs. opposing the social “totality” and the proletariat as being already the “subject-object of history,” but rather transforming<\/em> the alienated totality of domination in an emancipatory manner, and the possibility of the working class becoming<\/em> an actual subject of social emancipation in the process of overcoming capital: Luk\u00e1cs was not positing<\/em> something but politically advocating<\/em> it, and we need to understand why<\/em>. According to Hegel, one becomes a subject only in the process of self-overcoming and transformation. This side of such an emancipatory process, the proletariat remains an “object” of the “automatic subject” of capital, which is an expression of the industrial working class’s alienated social agency in value<\/em> production. What is missing from Principia Dialectica<\/em> is precisely the sense of history<\/em> \u2014 for instance, why Luk\u00e1cs’s book was titled History and Class Consciousness<\/em>. The question is not what kind of subject the proletariat is<\/em>, but what it could be<\/em> \u2014 in the activity of its self-abolition<\/em>, in, through and beyond capital, on the basis of labor as a socially mediating<\/em> activity that becomes a form of self-domination<\/em> under capital, its alienated product. But Luk\u00e1cs recognized such revolutionary socialist politics as the “completion” of “reification,” and so that this is not the end goal of emancipation but rather a necessary stage<\/em> for the possible overcoming of capital. That, in the USSR, etc. and in Stalinist and social democratic and other nationalist-reformist working class politics in the 20th century, the proletariat participated in the reconstitution of capital and not in its revolutionary overcoming, was the result<\/em> of the failure of the 1917\u201319 anticapitalist revolution, not its cause<\/em> \u2014 or the original animus<\/em> of the Marxism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. Debord’s Situationism is just as much an adaptation to this failure as any other form of the “politics” of post-Marxism in the 20th century. Debord and his followers went along with the lie that Lenin led to Stalin, with all the confusion this entailed. The goal is indeed the overcoming of proletarian labor \u2014 the society of work \u2014 as mediating and thus dominating modern human history. The question is, how?<\/em> |\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rejoinder to Principia Dialectica (U.K.) Chris Cutrone PRINCIPIA DIALECTICA HAS RESPONDED to our critique of their d\u00e9tournement of our “death of the Left” rhetoric with a noisy disclaimer. But to hold up Guy Debord’s “Situationism” circa 1968 against two centuries of the critical theory and politics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Korsch, Benjamin, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,17,19,16],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-12","tag-contra-anarchism","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3245,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions\/3245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}