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
212
Ideology is the intellectual basis of class societies
within the conflictual course of history. Ideological expressions
have never been pure fictions; they represent a distorted
consciousness of realities, and as such they have been real
factors that have in turn produced real distorting effects.
This interconnection is intensified with the advent of the
spectacle — the materialization of ideology brought
about by the concrete success of an autonomized system of
economic production — which virtually identifies social
reality with an ideology that has remolded all reality in
its own image.
213
Once ideology the abstract will to universality
and the illusion associated with that will is legitimized
by the universal abstraction and the effective dictatorship
of illusion that prevail in modern society, it is no longer
a voluntaristic struggle of the fragmentary, but its triumph.
Ideological pretensions take on a sort of flat, positivistic
precision: they no longer represent historical choices,
they are assertions of undeniable facts. The particular
names of ideologies thus tend to disappear. The specifically
ideological forms of system-supporting labor are reduced
to an epistemological base that is itself presumed
to be beyond ideology. Materialized ideology has no name,
just as it has no formulatable historical agenda. Which
is another way of saying that the history of different
ideologies is over.
214
Ideology, whose whole internal logic led toward what Mannheim
calls total ideology the despotism of
a fragment imposing itself as pseudoknowledge of a frozen
totality, as a totalitarian worldview
has reached its culmination in the immobilized spectacle
of nonhistory. Its culmination is also its dissolution into
society as a whole. When that society itself is concretely
dissolved, ideology the final irrationality
standing in the way of historical life must also
disappear.
215
The spectacle is the acme of ideology because it fully
exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems:
the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.
The spectacle is the material expression of the separation
and estrangement between man and man. The new
power of deception concentrated in it is based on
the production system in which as the mass of objects
increases, so do the 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 thus the
real need created by the modern economic system, and the
only need it creates (Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts). Hegels characterization of money
as the self-moving life of what is dead (Jenenser
Realphilosophie) has now been extended by the spectacle
to all 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 pseudoconcreteness of its
universe. The contemplative aspect of the old materialism,
which conceives the world as representation and not as activity
and which ultimately idealizes matter is fulfilled
in the spectacle, where concrete things are automatic masters
of social life. Conversely, the dreamed activity
of idealism is also fulfilled in the spectacle, through
the technical mediation of signs and signals which
ultimately materialize an abstract ideal.
217
The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia demonstrated
in Gabels False Consciousness should be considered
in the context of this economic materialization of ideology.
Society has become what ideology already was. The repression
of practice and the antidialectical false consciousness
that results from that repression are imposed at every moment
of everyday life subjected to the spectacle a subjection
that systematically destroys the faculty of encounter
and replaces it with a social hallucination: a false
consciousness of encounter, an illusion of encounter.
In a society where no one can any longer be recognized
by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognizing
his own reality. Ideology is at home; separation has built
its own world.
218
In clinical descriptions of schizophrenia,
says Gabel, the disintegration of the dialectic of
totality (with dissociation as its extreme form) and the
disintegration of the dialectic of becoming (with catatonia
as its extreme form) seem closely interrelated. Imprisoned
in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of
the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows
no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him
to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics
of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as
his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations
of illusory escapes from a universal autism.
219
The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and
world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence
of the world. It also obliterates the boundaries between
true and false by repressing all directly lived truth beneath
the real presence of the falsehood maintained by
the organization of appearances. Individuals who passively
accept their subjection to an alien everyday reality are
thus driven toward a madness that reacts to this fate by
resorting to illusory magical techniques. The essence of
this pseudoresponse to an unanswerable communication is
the acceptance and consumption of commodities. The consumers
compulsion to imitate is a truly infantile need, conditioned
by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. As
Gabel puts it in describing a quite different level of pathology,
the abnormal need for representation compensates for
an agonizing feeling of being at the margin of existence.
220
In contrast to the logic of false consciousness, which
cannot truly know itself, the search for critical truth
about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must
struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies of
the spectacle, and admit that it is nothing without them.
By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudorevolutionary
collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for
immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling
laws of thought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing
but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears
in the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking
to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.
221
The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from
the material bases of inverted truth. This historic
mission of establishing truth in the world can be
carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized
and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class
that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power
to the de-alienating form of realized democracy to
councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys
its own actions. This is possible only when individuals
are directly linked to universal history and
dialogue arms itself to impose its own conditions.
continua >>>>>
|