
Ideology in Material Form

  Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the
  fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is
  only by being acknowledged or "recognized." 

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind 


212 
   Ideology is the foundation of the thought of a class society within the
   conflictual course of history. Ideological entities have never been mere
   fictions -- rather, they are a distorted consciousness of reality, and, as
   such, real factors retroactively producing real distorting effects; which is
   all the more reason why that materialization of ideology, in the form of the
   spectacle, which is precipitated by the concrete success of an autonomous
   economic system of production, results in the virtual identification with
   social reality itself of an ideology that manages to remold the whole of the
   real to its own specifications. 

213 
   Once ideology, which is the abstract will to universality and the illusion
   thereof, finds itself legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction
   and by the effective dictatorship of illusion, then it is no longer the
   voluntaristic struggle of the fragmentary, but rather its triumph. The claims
   of ideology now take on a sort of flat, positivistic exactness: ideology is
   no longer a historical choice, but simply an assertion of the obvious. Names
   of particular ideologies have vanished. The portion of properly ideological
   labor serving the system may no longer be conceived of other than in terms of
   an "epistemological base" supposedly transcending all specific ideological
   phenomena. Ideology in material form is itself without a name, just as it is
   without a formulable historical agenda. Which is another way of saying that
   the history of ideologies, plural, is over. 

214 
   Ideology, whose whole internal logic led toward what Mannheim calls "total
   ideology" -- the despotism of a fragment imposing itself as the
   pseudo-knowledge of a frozen whole, as a totalitarian worldview -- has now
   fulfilled itself in the immobilized spectacle of non-history. Its fulfillment
   is also its dissolution into society as a whole. Come the practical
   dissolution of that society itself, ideology -- the last unreason standing in
   the way of historical life -- must likewise disappear. 

215 
   The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and
   manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment,
   enslavement and negation of real life. Materially, the spectacle is "the
   expression of estrangement, of alienation between man and man." The "new
   potentiality of fraud" concentrated within it has its basis in that form of
   production whereby "with the mass of objects grows the mass of alien powers
   to which man is subjected." This is the supreme stage of an expansion that
   has turned need against life. "The need for money is for that reason the real
   need created by the modern economic system, and the only need it creates" (
   Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The principle which Hegel enunciated
   in the Jenenser Realphilosophie as that of money -- "the life, moving of
   itself, of that which is dead" -- has now been extended by the spectacle to
   the entirety of social life. 

216 
   In contrast to the project outlined in the Theses on Feuerbach -- the
   realization of philosophy in a praxis transcending the opposition between
   idealism and materialism -- the spectacle preserves the ideological features
   of both materialism and idealism, imposing them in the pseudo-concreteness of
   its universe. The contemplative aspect of the old materialism, which
   conceives of the world as representation, not as activity -- and which in the
   last reckoning idealizes matter -- has found fulfillment in the spectacle,
   where concrete things are automatically masters of social life.
   Correlatively, idealism's imaginary activity likewise finds its fulfillment
   in the spectacle, this through the technical mediation of signs and signals
   -- which in the last reckoning endow an abstract ideal with material form. 

217 
   The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia drawn by Joseph Gabel in his 
   False Consciousness should be seen in the context of this economic process of
   materialization of ideology. What ideology already was, society has now
   become. A blocked practice and its corollary, an antidialectical false
   consciousness, are imposed at every moment on an everyday life in thrall to
   the spectacle -- an everyday life that should be understood as the systematic
   organization of a breakdown in the faculty of encounter, and the replacement
   of that faculty by a social hallucination: a false consciousness of
   encounter, or an "illusion of encounter." In a society where no one is any
   longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to
   recognize his own reality. Here ideology is at home; here separation has
   built its world. 

218 
   In clinical pictures of schizophrenia, according to Gabel, "a degradation of
   the dialectic of the totality (of which dissociation is the extreme form) and
   a degradation in the dialectic of becoming (of which catatonia is the extreme
   form) seem to be intimately interwoven." Imprisoned in a flat universe
   bounded on all sides by the spectacle's screen, the consciousness of the
   spectactor has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way
   discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities. The
   sole mirror of this consciousness is the spectacle in all its breadth, where
   what is staged is a false way out of a generalized autism. 

219 
   The spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world, in that the
   self, under siege by the presence/absence of the world, is eventually
   overwhelmed; it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false,
   repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the
   falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances. The individual,
   though condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality, is
   thus driven into a form of madness in which, by resorting to magical devices,
   he entertains the illusion that he is reacting to this fate. The recognition
   and consumption of commodities are at the core of this pseudo-response to a
   communication to which no response is possible. The need to imitate that the
   consumer experiences is indeed a truly infantile need, one determined by
   every aspect of his fundamental dispossession. In terms used by Gabel to
   describe quite another level of pathology, "the abnormal need for
   representation here compensates for a torturing feeling of being at the
   margin of existence." 

220 
   Whereas the logic of false consciousness cannot accede to any genuine
   self-knowledge, the quest for the critical truth of the spectacle must also
   be a true critique. This quest calls for commitment to a practical struggle
   alongside the spectacle's irreconcilable enemies, as well as a readiness to
   withhold commitment where those enemies are not active. By eagerly embracing
   the machinations of reformism or making common cause with
   pseudo-revolutionary dregs, those driven by the abstract wish for immediate
   efficacity obey only the laws of the dominant forms of thought, and adopt the
   exclusive viewpoint of actuality. In this way delusion is able to reemerge
   within the camp of its erstwhile opponents. The fact is that a critique
   capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide its time. 

221 
   Self emancipation in our time is emancipation from the material bases of an
   inverted truth. This "historic mission to establish truth in the world" can
   be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and
   manipulated masses, but -- only and always -- by that class which is able to
   effect the dissolution of all classes, subjecting all power to the
   disalienating form of a realized democracy -- to councils in which practical
   theory exercises control over itself and surveys its own action. It cannot be
   carried out, in other words, until individuals are "directly bound to
   universal history"; until dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own
   conditions upon the world. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord
