Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord

Why Everything is as it Seems

Eric-John Russell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350157644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Teoria critica

Revisiting Guy Debord's seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel's speculative logic to both, he traces Debord's intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord's critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

1

The Truth of the Spectacle

Some things are so wrong that not even their opposite is true.

Karl Kraus

A month after The Society of the Spectacle was published, Guy Debord wrote to Robert Chase, member of the American section of the Situationist International (SI), claiming that the primary task of their organization ‘is to produce the most adequate critical theory’ (2010: 329). It would not be the only time Debord would characterize the critique of the society of the spectacle as a critical theory: ‘In 1967 I wanted the Situationist International to have a book of theory … impos[ing] its victory on the terrain of critical theory’ (2006h: 1463; see also 1995: §7, §§204–11). Despite these references, his own direct relation to the critical theory coming out of Frankfurt via the Institut für Sozialforschung, despite the similarities to be examined, are few and far between. It is known that Debord’s personal library contained copies of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization.¹ Additionally, Debord’s archive notes include comments on Adorno’s ‘Music and Technique’, whose French translation appeared in issue 19 of Arguments in 1960.²

It is part of the argument of this book that Debord’s analysis, knowingly or not, carries the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory. To elucidate the connection, let us first outline precisely what is false about the society of the spectacle. Indeed, throughout The Society of the Spectacle, a social world is portrayed that is not just saturated by ‘[e]ach new lie of the advertising industry’ (1995: §70), or for which one finds ‘a lie that can no longer be challenged’ (1995: §105), but more ominously the spectacle appears as ‘the social organisation of the absolute lie’ (1995: §106) and as ‘the new potentiality of fraud [la tromperie]’ (1995: §215). Moreover, Debord frequently attaches a ‘pseudo’ prefix to various social phenomena and the book is littered with instances of ‘false consciousness’, ‘false models’, ‘false choices’, ‘false conflicts’ or ‘alternatives’, ‘false cohesion’, ‘false promises’, ‘false memory’, ‘false ideas’ and ‘false way[s] out’. The problem of deciphering exactly what qualifies this reign of falsehood characteristic of the spectacle is perhaps most perplexingly thrust upon the reader within §9: ‘In a world which really is topsy-turvy [réellement renversé], the true is a moment of the false’ (Debord 1970: §9).

This last thesis – and its intermingling of both truth and falsehood – offers the opportunity not only of expounding what makes the spectacle characteristically false, but also of reconstructing the affinity between Debord’s critical theory of society and the critical theory of Adorno³ while illustrating the continuity between Debord’s thought and Hegelian philosophy. Indeed, Debord’s ninth thesis is itself an appropriation of a line from the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, as will be argued, amounts to a variation on Adorno’s own inversion of the same line found within Minima Moralia. We therefore find a lineage of critical thought on the true and the false with the following three formulations:

1.‘The true is the whole’ (Hegel).

2.‘The whole is the untrue’ (Adorno).

3.‘In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false’ (Debord).

This chapter will proceed through these three quotations on the true and false as registers for explicating a theory of the society of the spectacle. More specifically, it is through these three signposts that what is precisely false about the society of the spectacle will become clear. We will begin by unfolding the constitutive relation between the true and false of Hegel’s philosophy. Adorno’s criticisms of this philosophy as a critique of identity will proceed as a critique of the exchange relation. How it is that Debord then poses his own rendition of the relation between the true and the false in order to illuminate the social reality of the spectacle will follow, with a final section on how Debord adopts a peculiar concept of ideology to elucidate his notion of falsehood. In a word, the chapter will evaluate the conceptual identity of the true and the false through Hegelian thought and assess its implications for a society dominated by forms of appearance. The aim in this chapter is to demonstrate why within the spectacle there is no truth hidden behind the false and that Debord does not contrast the spectacle with any concealed depth of displaced authenticity or true reality.

The true is the whole

Strictly speaking, there is nothing wholly false in Hegel’s philosophy. Everywhere its immanent movement, if followed, exhibits an ontological priority of the whole over its parts. However, the whole as a totality or the dynamically developing relations between parts cannot be assumed from the outset but is the unity of its own self-development. For Hegel, truth as the absolute is both the result and the process through which the result is generated. Beginnings, so apparently fickle in Hegel’s thought, are but the immediate prompt for the movement of the dialectic whose essential truth can be garnered only from its entire process. In a passage within the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows his cards: ‘The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself’ (1977c: 11).

While for Hegel it is the whole alone that is ultimately true, this is not to say that truth is merely an aggregation of finite parts or the sum total collection of immediacies. Importantly, the parts or individual moments of Hegel’s philosophy are not simply accorded subordinate status to the truthful whole. It is the mediation between parts, the necessary and immanent movement of particular moments that allows conceptual thinking to acquire its essential and universal meaning. Mediation is here conceived as the relational structure of content in and through the determinate negation of immediate appearance. The absolute emerges through the interrelationship of its moments and it is only through the whole that individual aspects can be understood in their full significance. Without stopping short or taking portions of his philosophy in their isolation do immediate phenomena acquire full determination, as moments of a totality, the systematic presentation of a whole that refuses to sit still.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit imparts the journey of natural or naive (natürliche) consciousness as it proceeds towards true knowledge (Wissenschaft), charting the ways in which it takes different shapes (Gestalten), developing through its own immanent movement. Through this process, Hegel offers a critique of immediacy in which the mediated determinations of immediate appearance unfold. Any authoritative claim of immediacy will, for consciousness through its voyage, lose its justification and disclose an abundance of determinations of which no immediacy is itself unmediated. Although ultimately disclosing a unity for which ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’ (1977c: 10), for the naive consciousness undertaking the trials and tribulations of the phenomenological movement, the knowing subject initially appears upon a precipice for which its object is seemingly set interminably apart. However, within both the preface and introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel elucidates how it is that this mode of exposition will ultimately render such a separation of subject and object to be a momentary Vorstellung.⁴ Within these opening passages and unbeknownst to the protagonist of the book, Hegel outlines its central idea: an exposition or presentation (Darstellung) of phenomenal knowledge in its modes of appearing. For Hegel, the Darstellung stands in contrast to momentary Vorstellungen insofar as the latter are designated as initial and unrefined representations, presuppositions or that which is simply taken for granted and apprehended without reflection, as characteristic of the immediacies of phenomenal knowledge. The Darstellung of the Phenomenology of Spirit thereby follows the journey of experience as ‘the conscious insight into the untruth of appearing [erscheinenden] knowledge’ (1977c: 50).

In addition to these two divergent categories of appearing found within Hegel’s philosophy – Vorstellung and Darstellung – two further categories are worth registering here in order to account for a full topography of the modality of appearances within Hegel’s thought. First there is Schein, commonly translated as ‘semblance’. As a verb, scheinen means to seem, shine or even glow. Its usage usually denotes a deception; it is what seems to be, but is not really so. Further, from the appearance of Schein we arrive at its usual correlative: Wesen or ‘essence’. Essence shows or appears but remains hidden under a veil of Schein. As such, Schein is dependent on something else, an essence not fully manifest. Related but not synonymous, and a concept which will play a larger role in the subsequent chapters of this book, is the category of Erscheinung which is usually given the translation of ‘appearance’, although ‘manifestation’ is also a helpful rendition. Unlike Schein, Erscheinung is also used for the appearance or the coming into existence of something. However, for Hegel, Erscheinung differs from Schein in two crucial respects.

Firstly, with Erscheinung, the essence fully discloses itself and tends to keep nothing hidden. It is the necessary manifestation of an essence. Thus, through the category and dynamic of Erscheinung we find Hegel rejecting any attempts at setting up a rigid dichotomy between appearance and essential reality. The two are understood as internally related. Erscheinung is the showing forth...