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To Clarify Some Aspects
of the Moment
(Chapter 3)
In the period following the May 1968 occupations movement, reality has not
ceased extensively confirming radical historical thought, but the individuals who strove
to be the most conscious bearers of that thought have not proved capable of being so
effectively. The most revealing example of this apparent failure is obviously the
crisis of the Situationist International, but it is also reflected in the
“pro-situ” phenomenon and the general inversion of situationist activity and
thought into an ideology, situationism.
Situationist-inspired revolutionaries have not escaped the process of ideologization.
What we said above about the most modern expressions of revolt applies equally to this
“councilist” current; it, too, has played its part in the dramatic death throes
of leftism. Rather than detailing everyone’s particular mistakes, we intend to deal
with what is essential.
If situationism has been despised and criticized, it has always been for false
reasons, from a perspective that has itself remained pro-situationist. The pro-situ
regression was considered as an aberration, as the dregs of a movement, as a trendy fad,
and never for what it really was: the qualitative weakness of the whole, a
necessary moment in the global progress of the revolutionary project. Situationism is the
adolescent crisis of a situationist practice that has attained the decisive
moment of a first important extensive development, the moment where it must practically
dominate the spectacle that is taking hold of it.
If we ourselves can pitilessly deride these hesitations, weaknesses and poverties, it
is not because we are geniuses who have descended from the heavens, but because we
ourselves have experienced them in our own past activities. You can recognize a pro-situ
by the way he generously distances himself from the confusions of the moment, which he can
sometimes partially understand and denounce. The pro-situ levels his critique on the
perverted world “by placing himself, like a classic novelist, at a divinely
omniscient point of view.” Failing to comprehend real social or personal development,
he is characterized by a total lack of lucidity regarding his own historical engagement.
The “situ milieu” has become a whorehouse worthy of the old artist milieus,
full of shabby little roles, self-seeking hypocrisy in relationships, false consciousness,
pseudocritiques of bad faith, scapegoats on whom are concentrated all spite and idols on
whom are concentrated all jealousies.
What revolutionaries have lacked most up to now is dialectics, the sense of
necessary mediations, the calculation of the relation between revolutionary practice and
the totality it wants to transform, the practical appropriation of their own theory.
We have to resume “the dialectical process of the meeting of the real movement and
its unknown theory” while recognizing that this dialectical process is equally
present within the development of the individuals who are the most conscious
bearers of this theory. Theory must still meet its own producers.
All the essential requirements formulated by the situationists regarding organized
revolutionary practice were right, and it is first of all because they were right that
they were taken up by others, above all among the generations who lived the
occupations movement in France. But truth is itself a historical process, a process that
dialectically gains truth. All utilized concepts, including basic minimum requirements,
are of value only insofar as they elucidate the development of conscious practice
within the global reality, a practice that creates and transforms itself in a nonlinear
manner.
In this movement the minimum requirements cannot be simply applied as so many
recognized and invariable truths; they must essentially traverse in practice the
paths toward their own effective encounter, toward their practical truth.
The nondialectical application of these requirements, which reflected the poverty of
the pro-situationist current in regard to its own project, was the necessary first step
towards the effective realization of that project.
The authentic may be hidden behind a certain margin of error before being able to sweep
it away for good. The course of history leaves behind a lot of debris. The false is a
moment of the true. You don’t decide to be a situationist, you have to become
one. Revolutionary practice must discover, within the confusions of struggles, all the
complexities and interlinkings of its different moments. Revolutionaries do not themselves
escape from the complex and contradictory process of the conditions of production of class
consciousness.
The SI itself contributed toward its subjugation to spectacular processes, notably in
the preeminence of what was positively realized and in a certain margin of
theoretical certainty that was derived from the objectively experimented portion
of the situationists’ activity. It is this comfortable settling down within the
positive that characterizes the situ role. The more effective the objective
position of the SI in present history became (and the same will apply for all future
revolutionary organizations), the more perilous its heritage became for each of its
members to assume.
This aspect of itself which the SI too unselfcritically exhibited found its extension,
at a more extreme degree of reification, in the overall weakness of the current
to which it gave birth.
The degree of general false consciousness was still sufficient to ensure that the
influence radiating from the SI was that of its weakness rather than of its strength.
(This weakness is what appears as its strength in the perspective of the spectacle, e.g.
the “merits” of the SI that the press has recently begun to acknowledge, after
having scarcely so much as mentioned its existence during the previous decade.) But this
radiance was itself possible only due to the quality of the project in acts from
which it drew its radiant power.
The occupations movement was the fulfillment of the Situationist International, and
this fulfillment was its end. May 1968 was the realization of modern revolutionary theory,
its overwhelming confirmation, just as it was to a certain extent the realization of the
individuals who participated in the SI, notably in the revolutionary lucidity they
manifested within the movement itself.
But for the SI the occupations movement remained the conclusion of its long
practical research without being its supersession. The situationists did not prove capable
of laying the practical foundations for a more advanced stage of their existence. This
retrospective judgment is only apparently trivial. Because of what they must know about
themselves and about the limits they ran into in their internal relations, the
situationists are in fact the only ones who can really grasp and reveal their real
significance.
What is at issue in the crisis of situationist-inspired practice, whether in the mass
of idiotic little roles it has given rise to or in others’ honest requestionings, is
the whole fundamental question of organizational method. We have to critically
reconsider organizational methods, to take up once again the notions of radical practice,
of exemplariness, of communication of theory, in a disabused manner; remaining disabused
first of all regarding the diverse political and pseudotheoretical heirs of those notions
that have proliferated in the wake of May 1968. We have to confront once again the complex
and contradictory conditions of production of class consciousness in an era that continues
to demonstrate its capacity to maintain the conditions of unconsciousness. The mechanisms
of false consciousness are becoming more sophisticated, gaining in subtlety what they lose
in strength; it is this new fragility that must be comprehended and attacked. We have to
attack the reality of this era and no longer merely its superficially understood
abstract qualities; to attack its hesitations, its weaknesses and its poverties; to make
shame yet more shameful.
While the situationists were putting themselves in question, engaging in an
“orientation debate” in an effort to determine the appropriate next stages in
their venture, the satellite groups they had given rise to followed a hundred steps
behind, taking the SI as an uncriticized model and constituting themselves on the
inadequate basis of a limited implementation of a few certitudes derived from the
SI’s previous experience.
The dynamic human richness that would normally be expected in historic
encounters has not been evident in recent relations among revolutionaries. The would-be
most advanced nucleus of consciousness was in no way separate from the world of
separation, though it remained trivially separated from itself. The necessity for each
group to prove itself, to discover the bases for its own practice — a necessity
that is inseparable from striving for practical truth — was understood as the absurd
requirement to give proofs to other organizations that were playing the same
sordid game. The “councilist” supermen devoted themselves to contemplating the
illusions they were barely able to generate within their petty functionary relations.
The lives of revolutionaries during these last three years would by themselves provide
all the necessary data for a critique of the prevalent lack of communication.
The initial attempts to form autonomous groups, which now can easily be seen as having
been far too tainted or compromised with the poverty of a certain period, were
nevertheless not the result of a mere passing fad. This minimum condition of
organized practice was inscribed in the needs and possibilities of the individuals of that
period, and their failure has also revealed the limits of that period. This failure is not
susceptible to any simple or simplistic explanation (political reification, theoretical
underdevelopment, practicism, etc.). Although such explanations obviously contain a
certain element of truth, they are only particular effects of a complex entanglement of
factors whose concrete unity remains to be grasped. We could already enumerate
many aspects of this unity, aspects that are not unrelated to the general poverties and
possibilities of this period.
Revolutionary thought is completely contrary to a system of ideas (whereas situationism
is nothing other than such a system) magically claiming correctness or truth in the style
of all the presently decaying forms of separate thought, whether scientific, philosophical
or political. Our knowledge does not obey the logic of separate knowledge, but the
antilogic of historical existence, of the movement to realize the individual in
history. Our superior understanding of the world stems from our participation in its
conscious transformation. Revolutionaries of our era have to be in their acts the closest
and surest companions of the work of the negative; their consciousness must cleave to the
totality of the work of the negative in the ongoing historical process.
If we have had to reiterate some elementary points about the nature of theory, this is
because the use of theory has been forgotten in the aftermath of May. It is no
longer a matter of abstractly denouncing the abstractness of a few critical terms or
concepts that bore the whole subversive weight of reality during a moment whose conditions
have now elapsed. We have to apply ourselves to resharpening those terms and concepts,
giving them back their deadly cutting edge, so as to refine, for ourselves and for all
those with good reasons to take after us, their use in the service of historical
lucidity.
All the weapons that will vanquish the commodity system — including notably that
central weapon: consciousness — are already being forged. The more this craft
requires extreme capacities because of the conditions that have produced it, the more
easily will the heavy artillery of converging pleasures storm all the walls that still
separate us from our realization in history.
Without prejudging the precise forms that modern revolutionary organization must take
in the new era, it seems to us that from now on each of its aspects must
explicitly contain its own critique as being a mere aspect — so as to leave
no opening for that positivism that generally attacks everything that threatens
to overthrow existing conditions.
The forces of negation that are beginning to see the light of day must find themselves
in the same relation to revolutionary organization as a luminous source in front of a
point of refraction: an organization has no reason to exist other than as a link with
history, both for its participants and for those outside it. Irresistibly rebellious
forces must be able to recognize themselves in it without losing themselves in it; to
recognize in it their own historicity, to be placed before it as before the immensity of
their own tasks, the immensity of what remains to be done. A means is not something
admirable in itself; as soon as it is seen as such, its essential purpose has been lost.
Its element of positive realization acts like dead labor on living process: it petrifies
everything.
Organizational methods must return dialectically to their own foundations, explicitly
including themselves in the fluid movement of historical maturation, emerging from it only
the better to reimmerse themselves in it. The miserable contemplative manias of the reign
of mass passivity must not be able to find any organizational petrification to get their
grips on. Going beyond its elements of positive realization, modern revolutionary
organization will have to be a dictatorship of the negative: a practice that bears within
itself the critique of the spectacle.
The totally inhuman reality of the commodity as a social relation constantly
gains in cohesion, tending toward total reification of the world. The spectacle,
which is the expression of this movement, tends to degenerate into a mere tautological
representation of the economic, an image of the ensemble of socially accessible
enjoyments. But in this unifying process this coherence of the
commodity-as-subject-of-the-world at the same time brings out into the open the fundamental
incoherence of its alien coherence.
The system’s processes of internal wear and tear, along with the diverse movements
that are tending toward its radical negation, only accelerate this global process of
unification, dialectically forcing the whole system to put all its cards on the table,
thereby exposing the coercive solidarity of all its spectacularly separate
aspects. The potential practice of revolutionary organization and the movement for more
class consciousness which is the bearer of the historical negation of the commodity
are inseparable from this global movement. “We are necessarily on the same path as
our enemies — usually preceding them — but we must be there without any
confusion, as enemies.”
The moment when the commodity appears as the homogenous and total fulfillment of
universal history is at the same time the moment of its radical historical negation, the
moment of the conscious struggle for the totality.
What above all characterizes our era is the intensification of this process in
time, an intensification linked to the return of the proletariat as an acting
historical force. But this process is not itself uniform; it has neither a constant
intensity nor a linear growth. It develops erratically in time and in space, oscillating
from wonderful moments of breakthrough where everything seems possible to low points where
nothing does, but where, nevertheless, everything continues.
DANIEL DENEVERT
January 1972
Chapter 3 of Pour l’intelligence de
quelques aspects du moment (Paris, January 1972) was first translated in 1974 by
Robert Cooperstein, Dan Hammer and Ken Knabb. The present version, reprinted from Public
Secrets, is a new translation by Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
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