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A Few Extra Remarks |
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6 . l e n b r a c k e n
given the unreality of the spectacle, it is real.) This
dialectical process isn't a "reversible connecting
factor;"after all, every category is historical, and
nowhere else but in Marcus (and the poor translation) do we
see a reference to a "reversible connecting factor" in the
analysis of Debord and his concepts. Not in the French,
English or American literature on the subject (tell me
where "cohérence réversible du monde" is used by
post-situationist writers?). Nor, to my knowledege,
in the Italian.
IT DOESN'T HELP THAT MARCUS takes Debord's line "even the
true is a moment of the false" out of context, as he does
on page 328 to demonstrate that the "reversible connecting
factor" is also the use of genitive inversions (this
example isn't a genitive inversion, nor is, as I
demonstrate below, Marcus' other example, a quote from
Marx). I say that it doesn't help our understanding because
one of the basic aspects of contradiction is that a
proposition cannot be simultaneously false and true - in a
specific example, however, something that is true can be
describing the way an object is false. Perhaps Debord is
simply characterizing this process with a little rhetorical
flourish. To take Debord out of context like this is
mystifying; and it might be better to learn one's cases
before attempting to invert them. For all of Marcus' love
of the "taste of negation," he completely disregards the
notion that negation is a logical operation whereby a new
proposition is inferred from a given proposition. Instead,
he proceeds like a Burroughs cut up - caught in a tornado.
To put it another way, if Debord's propositions are true,
Marcus' negations of them are false, and thus self-negating
in a dialectical way. The time is thus at hand for a
repetition at a higher level of some of the features
of the original project.
THE TRANSLATION OF "FACTOR" ("the reversible connecting
factor in the world") presents still more problems. Marcus
makes the point that "Debord was a mathematician" (p 141),
which is erroneous; he was a logician, and a Hegelian one,
which is to say that he was a dialectician. Even the math
in Debord's board game (the various coefficients for
numerous maneuvers in different positions calculated for
both sides, offense and defense), are, he makes clear in
the rules to the game, secondary to strategic intuition.
Whereas the "of the world" denotes the concept of totality
that is central to Debord's thought, one "factor" implies
other factors of more or less importance. As Martin Nicolaus
points out in his forward to Marx's Grundrisse, Hegel
and Marx used "the term 'moment' to refer to what in a
system at rest would be called 'element' or 'factor.'" My
guess is that if Debord had carefully considered the
translation, he would've objected to the use of "factor"
due to the connotation of a Weberian theory of factors
that describes social, technical and cultural factors in
their external interactions. This is a mechanistic
methodology alien to Debord, modeled as it is on
the empirical sciences.
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