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A Few Extra Remarks |
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7 . l e n b r a c k e n
THESE STRUCTURALIST SCHOOLS split most dramatically with
Debord on the issue of historicity, which recognizes the
irreversible and successive nature of change in a way
that is alien to structuralists who seek to reveal the
intrinsic, timeless properties of objects under
investigation (and the interrelation of elements,
usually in a hierarchy). Part of Debord's appeal is
his ability to consider capitalism as being historically
transient - without this sense of historicity, his entire
project would be senseless: "the project of the domination
by all people of their own history, at all levels." Debord
engaged in a dialectical analysis of history, not an
anti-historical approach to structure.
THE ACT OF EITHER REVERSING or disrupting this "coherence
of the world," is a moment of real history and thus
constitutes the movement of irreversible time. To inflate
the importance of a minor phrase in a minor essay as Marcus
does is misleading because it fails to even allude to
Debord's conception - central to his major work - of
irreversible time.
MARCUS' USE of the "reversible connecting factor" on page
238 equates his reversible connecting factor with Jung's
activation of archetypes in Nazi Germany:
THIS WAS JUNG'S ACCOUNT of Nazism. In it was the power
principle Debord would grasp: the reversible connecting
factor, the idea that the empty repetitions of modern life,
of work and spectacle, could be detourned into the creation
of situations, into abstract forms that could be infused
with unlimited content.
AS I SAY IN MY FOOTNOTE: to say that Debord found a "power
principle" akin to one exploited by Nazis is a smear,
especially when it was Jung who wanted a German,
"non-Jewish," psychology in Germany: storm troopers,
concentration camps, mass anti-Semitism and ARBEIT MACHT
FREI. Moreover, the idea of abstract forms infused with
unlimited content would reek so badly of structuralism to
Debord that Marcus should've at least hinted that Debord
would object to this interpretation on the fundamental
grounds of historicity. When Debord is writing about the
"coherence of the world" he's clearly stressing his Marxist
interpretation of capitalism, from its economic base to its
corresponding superstructure, from its historical
development to its internal logic (the unity of the
historical and the logical always being first expressed in
the historical, which contains in it, the logical). This
has nothing to do with "abstract forms;" the groups who
have attempted to "reverse this coherence" sprang up in
their own unique historical conditions and applied their
own logic to the task of transforming history, of creating
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