
Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere

  Do you seriously think we shall live long enough to see a political
  revolution? -- we, the contemporaries of these Germans? My friend, you
  believe what you want to believe.... 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 papers 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
   experience, within a historical society divided into classes; what this
   amounts to is that culture is the power to generalize, existing apart, as an
   intellectual division of labor and as the intellectual labor of division.
   Culture detached itself from the unity of myth-based society, according to
   Hegel, "when the power to unify disappeared from the life of man, and
   opposites lost their connection and living interaction, and became
   autonomous" ("The Difference between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and
   Schelling"). In thus gaining its independence, culture was embarked on an
   imperialistic career of self-enrichment that was at the same time the
   beginning of the decline of its independence. The history that brought
   culture's relative autonomy into being, along with ideological illusions
   concerning that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And
   the whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as the history of
   the revelation of culture's insufficiency, as a march toward culture's
   self-abolition. Culture is the locus of the search for lost unity. In the
   course of this search, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate
   itself. 

181 
   The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the basic principle
   of the internal development of the culture of historical societies, is
   predicated entirely on the permanent victory of innovation. Cultural
   innovation is impelled solely, however, by that total historical movement
   which, by becoming conscious of its totality, tends toward the transcendence
   of its own cultural presuppositions -- and hence toward the suppression of
   all separations. 

182 
   The sudden expansion of society s knowledge, including -- as the heart of
   culture -- an understanding of history, brought about the irreversible
   self-knowledge that found expression in the abolition of God. This
   "prerequisite of every critique," however, was also the first task of a
   critique without end. In a situation where there are no longer any tenable
   rules of action, culture's every result propels it toward its own
   dissolution. Just like philosophy the moment it achieved its full
   independence, every discipline, once it becomes autonomous, is bound to
   collapse -- in the first place as an attempt to offer a coherent account of
   the social totality, and eventually even as a partial methodology viable
   within its own domain. The lack of rationality in a separated culture is what
   dooms it to disappear, for that culture itself embodies a call for the
   victory of the rational. 

183 
   Culture issued from a history that had dissolved the way of life of the old
   world, yet culture as a separate sphere is as yet no more than an
   intelligence and a sensory communication which, in a partially historical
   society, must themselves remain partial. Culture is the meaning of an
   insufficiently meaningful world. 

184 
   The end of the history of culture manifests itself under two antagonistic
   aspects: the project of culture's self-transcendence as part of total
   history, and its management as a dead thing to be contemplated in the
   spectacle. The first tendency has cast its lot with the critique of society,
   the second with the defense of class power. 

185 
   Each of the two aspects of the end of culture has a unitary existence, as
   much in all spheres of knowledge as in all spheres of sensory representation
   -- that is, in all spheres of what was formerly understood as art in the most
   general sense. The first aspect enshrines an opposition between, on the one
   hand, the accumulation of a fragmentary knowledge which becomes useless in
   that any endorsement of existing conditions must eventually entail a
   rejection of that knowledge itself, and, on the other hand, the theory of
   practice, which alone has access, not only to the truth of all the knowledge
   in question, but also to the secret of its use. The second aspect enshrines
   an opposition between the critical self-destruction of society's old common
   language and its artificial reconstruction, within the commodity spectacle,
   as the illusory representation of non-life. 

186 
   Once society has lost the community that myth was formerly able to ensure, it
   must inevitably lose all the reference points of a truly common language
   until such time as the divided character of an inactive community is
   superseded by the inauguration of a real historical community. As soon as art
   -- which constituted that former common language of social inaction --
   establishes itself as independent in the modern sense, emerging from its
   first, religious universe to become the individual production of separate
   works, it becomes subject, as one instance among others, to the movement
   governing the history of the whole of culture as a separated realm. Art's
   declaration of independence is thus the beginning of the end of art. 

187 
   The fact that the language of real communication has been lost is what the
   modern movement of art's decay, and ultimately of its formal annihilation,
   expresses positively. What it expresses negatively is that a new common
   language has yet to be found -- not, this time, in the form of unilaterally
   arrived-at conclusions like those which, from the viewpoint of historical
   art, always came on the scene too late, speaking to others of what had been
   experienced without any real dialogue, and accepting this shortfall of life
   as inevitable -- but rather in a praxis embodying both an unmediated activity
   and a language commensurate with it. The point is to take effective
   possession of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to
   time, which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely 
   represented. 

188 
   When a newly independent art paints its world in brilliant colors, then a
   moment of life has grown old. By art's brilliant colors it cannot be
   rejuvenated but only recalled to mind. The greatness of art makes its
   appearance only as dusk begins to fall over life. 

189 
   The historical time that invaded art in fact found its first expression in
   the artistic sphere, beginning with the baroque. Baroque was the art of a
   world that had lost its center with the demise of the last mythic order
   recognized by the Middle Ages, an order founded, both cosmically and from the
   point of view of earthly government, on the unity between Christianity and
   the ghost of an Empire. An art of change was obliged to embody the principle
   of the ephemeral that it recognized in the world. In the words of Eugenio
   d'Ors, it chose "life as opposed to eternity." Theater and festival, or
   theatrical festival -- these were the essential moments of the baroque,
   moments wherein all specific artistic expression derived its meaning from its
   reference to the decor of a constructed space, to a construction that had to
   constitute its own unifying center; and that center was passage, inscribed as
   a vulnerable equilibrium on an overall dynamic disorder. The sometimes
   excessive importance taken on in modern discussions of aesthetics by the
   concept of the baroque reflects a growing awareness of the impossibility of
   classicism in art: for three centuries all efforts to create a normative
   classicism or neoclassicism have never been more than brief, artificial
   projects giving voice to the official discourse of the State -- whether the
   State of the absolute monarchy or that of the revolutionary bourgeoisie
   draped in Roman togas. What eventually followed the baroque, once it had run
   its course, was an ever more individualistic art of negation which, from
   romanticism to cubism, renewed its assault time after time until the
   fragmentation and destruction of the artistic sphere were complete. The
   disappearance of a historical art, which was tied to the internal
   communications of an elite whose semi-independent social basis lay in the
   relatively playful conditions still directly experienced by the last
   aristocracies, also testified to the fact that capitalism had thrown up the
   first class power self-admittedly bereft of any ontological quality; a power
   whose foundation in the mere running of the economy bespoke the loss of all
   human mastery. The baroque ensemble, a unity itself long lost to the world of
   artistic creation, recurs in a certain sense in today's consumption of the
   entirety of the art of the past. The historical knowledge and recognition of
   all past art, along with its retrospective promotion to the rank of world
   art, serve to relativize it within the context of a global disorder which in
   turn constitutes a baroque edifice at a higher level, an edifice into which
   even the production of a baroque art, and all its possible revivals, is bound
   to be melded. The very fact that such "recollections" of the history of art
   should have become possible amounts to the end of the world of art. Only in
   this era of museums, when no artistic communication remains possible, can
   each and every earlier moment of art be accepted -- and accepted as equal in
   value -- for none, in view of the disappearance of the prerequisites of
   communication in general, suffers any longer from the disappearance of its 
   own particular ability to communicate. 

190 
   Art in the period of its dissolution, as a movement of negation in pursuit of
   its own transcendence in a historical society where history is not yet
   directly lived, is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the
   impossibility of change. The more grandiose its demands, the further from its
   grasp is true self-realization. This is an art that is necessarily 
   avant-garde; and it is an art that is not. Its vanguard is its own
   disappearance. 

191 
   The two currents that marked the end of modern art were dadaism and
   surrealism. Though they were only partially conscious of it, they paralleled
   the proletarian revolutionary movement's last great offensive; and the
   halting of that movement, which left them trapped within the very artistic
   sphere that they had declared dead and buried, was the fundamental cause of
   their own immobilization. Historically, dadaism and surrealism are at once
   bound up with one another and at odds with one another. This antagonism,
   involvement in which constituted for each of these movements the most
   consistent and radical aspect of its contribution, also attested to the
   internal deficiency in each's critique -- namely, in both cases, a fatal
   one-sidedness. For dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it, and
   surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. The critical position
   since worked out by the situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the
   realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art. 

192 
   Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form, going so
   far as to recuperate and rediffuse even its negative manifestations; in this
   way, the spectacle's cultural sector gives overt expression to what the
   spectacle is implicitly in its totality -- the communication of the
   incommunicable. Thoroughgoing attacks on language are liable to emerge in
   this context coolly invested with positive value by the official world, for
   the aim is to promote reconciliation with a dominant state of things from
   which all communication has been triumphantly declared absent. Naturally, the
   critical truth of such attacks, as utterances of the real life of modern
   poetry and art, is concealed. The spectacle, whose function it is to bury
   history in culture, presses the pseudo-novelty of its modernist means into
   the service of a strategy that defines it in the profoundest sense. Thus a
   school of neo-literature baldly admitting that it merely contemplates the
   written word for its own sake can pass itself off as something truly new.
   Meanwhile, beyond the unadorned claim that the dissolution of the
   communicable has a beauty all its own, one encounters the most modern
   tendency of spectacular culture -- and the one most closely bound up with the
   repressive practice of the general social organization -- seeking by means of
   a "global approach" to reconstruct a complex neo-artistic environment out of
   flotsam and jetsam; a good example of this is urbanism's striving to
   incorporate old scraps of art or hybrid aesthetico-technological forms. All
   of which shows how a general project of advanced capitalism is translated
   onto the plane of spectacular pseudo-culture -- that project being the
   remolding of the fragmented worker into "a personality well integrated into
   the group" (cf. recent American sociology -- Riesman, Whyte, et al.).
   Wherever one looks, one encounters this same intent: to restructure society
   without community. 

193 
   A culture now wholly commodity was bound to become the star commodity of the
   society of the spectacle. Clark Kerr, an ideologue at the cutting edge of
   this trend, reckons that the whole complex system of production, distribution
   and consumption of knowledge is already equivalent to 29 percent of the
   annual 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, so assuming the role of the automobile industry in the
   first half, or that of the railroads in the late nineteenth century. 

194 
   The task of the complex of claims still evolving as spectacular thought is to
   justify a society with no justification, and ultimately to establish itself
   as a general science of false consciousness. This thought is entirely
   determined by the fact that it cannot and does not wish to apprehend its own
   material foundation in 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 does
   not see that conflict is at the root of every feature of its universe.
   Spectacular power, which is absolute within the unchallengeable internal
   logic of the spectacle's language, corrupts its specialists absolutely. They
   are corrupted by their experience of contempt, and by the success of that
   contempt, for the contempt they feel is confirmed by their acquaintanceship
   with that genuinely contemptible individual -- the spectator. 

196 
   A new division of tasks occurs within the specialized thought of the
   spectacular system in response to the new problems presented by the
   perfecting of this system itself: in the first place modern sociology
   undertakes a spectacular critique of the spectacle, studying separation with
   the sole aid of separation's own conceptual and material tools; meanwhile,
   from within the various disciplines in which structuralism has taken root, an
   apologetics of the spectacle is disseminated as the thought of non-thought,
   as an authorized amnesia with respect to historical practice. As forms of
   enslaved thought, however, there is nothing to choose between the fake
   despair of a nondialectical critique on the one hand and the fake optimism of
   a plain and simple boosting of the system on the other. 

197 
   There is a school of sociology, originating in the United States, which has
   begun to raise questions about the conditions of existence created by modern
   social development. But while this approach has been able to gather much
   empirical data, it is quite unable to grasp the true nature of its chosen
   object, because it cannot recognize the critique immanent to that object. The
   sincerely reformist orientation of this sociology has no criteria aside from
   morality, common sense and other such yardsticks -- all utterly inadequate
   for dealing with the matter at hand. Because it is unaware of the negativity
   at the heart of its world, this mode of criticism is obliged to concentrate
   on describing a sort of surplus negativity that it views as a regrettable
   irritation, or an irrational parasitic infestation, affecting the surface of
   that world. An outraged goodwill of this kind, which even on its own terms
   can do nothing except put all the blame on the system's external
   consequences, can see itself as critical only by ignoring the essentially 
   apologetic character of its assumptions and method. 

198 
   People who denounce incitements to wastefulness as absurd or dangerous in a
   society of economic abundance do not understand the purpose of waste. It is
   distinctly ungrateful of them to condemn, in the name of economic
   rationality, those faithful (albeit irrational) guardians without whom the
   power of that same economic rationality would collapse. Daniel Boorstin, for
   example, whose book The Image describes the spectacular consumption of
   commodities in America, never arrives at a concept of the spectacle because
   he mistakenly feels able to treat private life, like something he calls an
   "honest product," as quite independent of what he sees as a disastrous
   distortion or "exaggeration." What he fails to grasp is that the commodity
   form itself lays down laws whose "honest" application gives rise not only to
   private life as a distinct reality but also to that reality's subsequent
   conquest by the social consumption of images. 

199 
   Boorstin treats the excesses of a world that has become alien to us as
   excesses alien to our world. The "normal" basis of social life to which he
   refers implicitly when he describes the superficial reign of images, in terms
   of psychological and moral judgments, as the product of "our ever more
   extravagant expectations," has no reality at all, however, either in his book
   or in the historical period in which he lives. Because the real human life
   that Boorstin evokes is located for him in the past -- even in a past of
   religious passivity -- he has no way of comprehending the true depth of
   society's dependence on images. The truth of that society is nothing less
   than its negation. 

200 
   A sociology that believes it possible to isolate an industrial rationality,
   functioning on its own, from social life as a whole, is liable likewise to
   view the technology of reproduction and communication as independent of
   overall industrial development. Thus Boorstin accounts for the situation he
   portrays in terms of an unfortunate and quasi-serendipitous coming together
   of too vast a technology of image-diffusion on the one hand, and, on the
   other, too great an appetite for sensationalism on the part of today's
   public. The spectacle, in this view, would have to be attributed to man's
   "spectatorial" inclinations. Boorstin cannot see that the proliferation of
   prefabricated "pseudo-events" -- which he deplores -- flows from the simple
   fact that, in face of the massive realities of present-day social existence,
   individuals do not actually experience events. Because history itself is the
   specter haunting modern society, pseudo-history has to be fabricated at every
   level of the consumption of life; otherwise, the equilibrium of the frozen
   time that presently holds sway could not be preserved. 

201 
   The claim that a brief freeze in historical time is in fact a definitive
   stability -- such is, both consciously and unconsciously expressed, the
   undoubted basis of the current tendency toward "structuralist" system
   building. The perspective adopted by the anti-historical thought of
   structuralism is that of the eternal presence of a system that was never
   created and that will never disappear. This fantasy of a preexisting
   unconscious structure's hegemony over all social practice is illegitimately
   derived from linguistic and anthropological structural models -- even from
   models of the functioning of capitalism -- that are misapplied even in their
   original contexts; and the only reason why this has occurred is that an
   academic approach fit for complacent middle-range managers, a mode of thought
   completely anchored in an awestruck celebration of the existing system,
   crudely reduces all reality to the existence of that system. 

202 
   In seeking to understand structuralist categories, it should always be borne
   in mind, as in the case of any historical social science, that categories
   express not only the forms but also the conditions of existence. Just as one
   does not judge a man's value according to the conception he has of himself,
   one cannot judge -- or admire -- this specific society by taking the
   discourse it addresses to itself as necessarily true. "One cannot judge such
   a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
   consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life."
   Structures are the progeny of the power that is in place. Structuralism is a
   thought underwritten by the State, a thought that conceives of the present
   conditions of spectacular "communication" as an absolute. Its fashion of
   studying the code of messages in itself is merely the product, and the
   acknowledgment, of a society where communication has the form of a cascade of
   hierarchical signals. Thus it is not structuralism that serves to prove the
   transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle; but, on the
   contrary, it is the society of the spectacle, imposing itself in its massive
   reality, that validates the chill dream of structuralism. 

203 
   Without a doubt, the critical concept of the spectacle is susceptible of
   being turned into just another empty formula of sociologico-political
   rhetoric designed to explain and denounce everything in the abstract -- so
   serving to buttress the spectacular system itself. For obviously no idea
   could transcend the spectacle that exists -- it could only transcend ideas
   that exist about the spectacle. For the society of the spectacle to be
   effectively destroyed, what is needed are people setting a practical force in
   motion. A critical theory of the spectacle cannot be true unless it joins
   forces with the practical movement of negation within society; and this
   negation, which constitutes the resumption of revolutionary class struggle,
   cannot for its part achieve self-consciousness unless it develops the
   critique of the spectacle, a critique that embodies the theory of negation's
   real conditions -- the practical conditions of present-day oppression -- and
   that also, inversely, reveals the secret of negation's potential. Such a
   theory expects no miracles from the working class. It views the reformulation
   and satisfaction of proletarian demands as a long-term undertaking. To make
   an artificial distinction between theoretical and practical struggle -- for,
   on the basis here defined, the very constitution and communication of a
   theory of this kind cannot be conceived independently of a rigorous practice
   -- we may say with certainty that the obscure and difficult path of critical
   theory must also be the path of the practical movement that occurs at the
   level of society as a whole. 

204 
   Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language -- the language of
   contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: the language of the
   critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Not some "writing
   degree zero" -- just the opposite. Not a negation of style, but the style of
   negation. 

205 
   Even the style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an
   abomination to the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities
   molded by those canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing
   concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their
   inevitable destruction. 

206 
   This style, which embodies its own critique, must express the mastery of the
   critique in hand over all its predecessors. The mode of exposition of
   dialectical theory will thus itself exemplify the negative spirit it
   contains. The truth, says Hegel, is not "detached... like a finished article
   from the instrument that shapes it." Such a theoretical consciousness of
   dialectical movement, which must itself bear the stamp of that movement, is
   manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts and
   by the diversion (or détournement) of all the attainments of earlier critical
   efforts. Thus the reversed genitive, as an expression of historical
   revolutions distilled into a form of thought, came to be considered the
   hallmark of Hegel's epigrammatic style. As a proponent of the replacement of
   subject by predicate, following Feuerbach's systematic practice of it, the
   young Marx achieved the most cogent use of this insurrectional style: thus
   the philosophy of poverty became the poverty of philosophy. The device of 
   détournement restores all their subversive qualities to past critical
   judgments that have congealed into respectable truths -- or, in other words,
   that have been transformed into lies. Kierkegaard too made use of 
   détournement, and offered his own pronouncement on the subject: "But how you
   twist and turn, so that, just as Saft always ended up in the pantry, you
   inevitably always manage to introduce some little word or phrase that is not
   your own, and which awakens disturbing recollections" (Philosophical
   Fragments). The defining characteristic of this use of détournement is the
   necessity for distance to be maintained toward whatever has been turned into
   an official verity. As Kierkegaard acknowledges in the same work, "One
   further remark I wish to make, however, with respect to your many
   animadversions, all pointing to my having introduced borrowed expressions in
   the course of my exposition. That such is the case I do not deny, nor will I
   now conceal from you that it was done purposely, and that in the next section
   of this piece, if I ever write such a section, it is my intention to call the
   whole by its right name, and to clothe the problem in its historical
   costume." 

207 
   Ideas improve. The meaning of words has a part in the improvement. Plagiarism
   is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing,
   plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with
   correct ideas. 

208 
   Détournement is the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority
   invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now
   a fragment torn away from its context, from its own movement, and ultimately
   from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option
   that it constituted within that framework. Détournement, by contrast, is the
   fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication
   aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty.
   This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any
   earlier or supra-critical reference point. On the contrary, its internal
   coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what
   validate the ancient kernel of truth that it restores. Détournement founds
   its cause on nothing but its own truth as critique at work in the present. 

209 
   Whatever is explicitly presented as détournement within formulated theory
   serves to deny any durable autonomous existence to the sphere of theory
   merely formulated. The fact that the violence of détournement itself
   mobilizes an action capable of disturbing or overthrowing any existing order
   is a reminder that the existence of the theoretical domain is nothing in
   itself, that it can only come to self-knowledge in conjunction with
   historical action, and that it can only be truly faithful by virtue of
   history's corrective judgment upon it. 

210 
   Only the real negation of culture can inherit culture's meaning. Such
   negation can no longer remain cultural. It is what remains, in some manner,
   at the level of culture -- but it has a quite different sense. 

211 
   In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture manifests itself as
   unified: unified in that it dominates the whole of culture -- culture as
   knowledge as well as culture as poetry; unified, too, in that it is no longer
   separable from the critique of the social totality. It is this unified
   theoretical critique that goes alone to its rendezvous with a unified social
   practice. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord
