Abdelhafid Khatib, a comrade of Debord’s from the Letterist International days, wrote a detailed psychogeography of the Les Halles district of Paris, noting with care how its ambiences morph from one place to another, from one time to another. Here the dérive starts to yield definitive results. Particularly appealing to Khatib is the way the carts of the vegetable vendors make temporary barricades in the streets at delivery time, forming a changeable maze. Shifting from psychogeography to the prospect of the construction of situations, Khatib declares that “any solution aimed at creating a new society requires that this space at the center of Paris be preserved for the manifestations of a liberated collective life.”1 It is a model for “perpetually changing labyrinths” constructed consciously for drifting. It hints at a space and time free of necessity, in which a liberated life could be free to create its own necessities, its own games.
Khatib’s text came at a time when other necessities imposed themselves. Since it began in 1954, the Algerian war of independence had been met with increasing French repression. Colonial war destabilized the French state, and brought Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958. But rather than strengthen French power in Algeria as some of his supporters wished, de Gaulle began searching for an alternative policy. This led in turn to assassination and coup attempts against de Gaulle. As the war reached its peak, Paris became the scene of bombings and reprisals. A curfew was declared. It would not be healthy for an Arab man like Khatib to be wandering the streets at night, jotting things down in a notebook.
Opposition to the war among French intellectuals generally took one of four positions. One was Catholic, and appealed to conscience. One was republican, and appealed to the rights of man. Another was third-worldist, and put the anti-colonial struggle in place of class struggle as the motor of history. The last was revolutionary, and scripted the line the Communist Party ought to take if it really was the representative of the international proletariat.2 Situationist thought and action always conceived of itself outside of the conscience-talk of public intellectuals, and was never romantic about underdevelopment. Debord’s Correspondence of the late 1950s shows instead a skeptical engagement with the would-be Bolsheviks and non-party Marxists of the French left.
The anti-colonial struggle, the crisis of the French state, and the theoretical debates of the time converged to force a more profound articulation of Situationist theory. Initially skeptical of the Socialism or Barbarism group, Debord would gradually warm to their consistent critique not only of capitalism and colonialism, but also of the socialist states. They saw in the wildcat strikes and periodic eruptions of revolt in both Eastern and Western Europe the signs of a new revolutionary movement. Debord would read them together with the leading theorists of what Lenin had once described as the “infantile disorder” of left-wing and workers-council communist thought of a previous era: Lukács, Karl Korsch (1886–1961), Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960).3 This would culminate in the text that is Debord’s masterpiece: The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which is above all a détournement of the texts circulating in the radical milieu of the time.4
In deciding between the competing Marxist currents, there are many paths not taken. Debord would be close to, then estranged from, the veteran Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. He would also encourage and collaborate for a time with Asger Jorn on the development of a distinctive Marxist project. Jorn’s pamphlet Critique of Political Economy (1960) was published with a cover to match Debord’s Report on the Construction of Situations (1957), as if to give it the same status as a statement of Situationist research results. It seems some of the copies were seized by customs agents, so it never achieved the level of circulation intended for it.5 In this often overlooked text, Jorn tries to draw together his earlier pataphysical rewritings of Marx with the results of the Letterist International’s experiments, in a new synthesis which goes beyond the project of the construction of situations to a new theory of value that might embrace them.
The burden of Jorn’s critique of political economy is to show that something is left out of Marx’s equation of labor with value. It is not labor alone that creates value. On the one hand Jorn restores a role for nature, for materiality. On the other, he insists on the role of another class in the creation of value, even if he does not quite have a language with which to describe it. This other class he occasionally calls the creative elite, in contrast to “the delicious name of the power elite.”6 The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills (1916–62) is a powerful restatement, in the teeth of the cold war, of the existence in the West of a ruling class, in control of modern means of production and communication.7 Mills exposes corporate, state and military power as an integrated nexus, in the hands of a ruling caste with a consistent world view. The same people circulate through the commanding heights of all of the institutions at the disposal of the power elite. Democratic governance is a sham. The mass parties no longer control their leaders. One-way communication has usurped the space of civil dialogue.
Jorn’s creative elite is something else. It has no power, but its significance is that it can give form to value. It renews the form of things. The term creative elite seems at first ill-chosen, even for Jorn, who has very little time for the elites of the art world. The sources of creation in Jorn are popular. He happily describes himself as a vulgar Marxist—after vulgus, of the people.8 Where Marx identifies himself with another class—the proletariat—and reconstructs the world from its point of view, Jorn sees the world from the point of view of his own class, or at least from his own milieu—the bohemia of Saint-Germain that Bernstein documents and the extensive network of other creative bohemias with which the peripatetic and multilingual Jorn was intimately familiar.
Like William Morris (1834–96), and drawing on his own anthropological studies, Jorn thinks something has come between art and life. Unlike Morris, his response is a socialism that is not utopian, nor is it quite what Marx and Engels would recognize as scientific. Rather, Jorn’s socialism is experimental. Where Marx begins with a critique of bourgeois economics, Jorn begins with a critique of socialist economics. Unlike most critics of the Stalinist regimes from the left, Jorn sees them not as wrong in implementation, but in essence. The Trotskyites saw them as deformed workers’ states. The Socialism or Barbarism group dispensed with this formula, but not (yet) with the socialist ideal. Probably without knowing it, Jorn picks up the critical thread of Marcel Mauss and others who thought the problem with the socialist states was not just a political deformation, but fundamentally economic.9
Marx was fascinated by capital, almost seduced by it.10 He marveled at its astonishing productivity, its vast accumulation of wealth. While denouncing its violence and inequity, Marx could still love capital’s productivity, which the revolution would deliver to the proletariat as its rightful inheritance. Jorn sees capital quite differently. He thinks it has not increased but abolished true wealth, which is variability in consumption. In abolishing difference, the wage relation and the commodity form impoverish the world. For Jorn, the bourgeois revolution of 1789 and the proletarian revolution of 1917 were “two sides of the same affair.”11 Jorn makes the astonishing claim that in their effort to abolish poverty, socialism abolishes wealth along with it. Socialism is a permanent politics of devaluation. This was not inevitable. This was the significance of Gallizio’s industrial painting: it showed, experimentally at least, that difference was not incompatible with abundance.
For Marx, wealth and value are the same, and value is derived from labor. Jorn sees Marx’s writings as a critique only of the capitalist form of value, not of value in general, and certainly not of value-forms to come. Jorn wants a concept of value more in line with the pataphysical writing on natural science he developed in the 1940s and ’50s. Marx’s theories assume a nature in which form, complexity and difference can be spirited away by the white-hot flame of reductive analysis. Marx’s scientific socialism rests on a materialist worldview which reduces the complexity of forms to an underlying essence. Jorn’s materialist attitude to life intuits the possibility of a science of forms, and of the centrality of this science of forms in connecting natural science not only to social science, but to an experimental practice. Elements of such an experimental practice persist in modern art, but its roots are ancient. It continues a communism of the collective making and unmaking of forms.
Marx lacks a sense of the materiality of forms. The concept of form is never placed in relation to that of substance. Marx thinks instead of form and content. A content is what is enclosed in a form. Marx insists that the content of the form of value is always labor. Labor is the truth hidden within the form. In Marx, “The transition from use value to exchange value happens by the devaluation of the article of utility’s material actuality.” Use value and the article of utility are the same. But, says Jorn, “if we accept that the use value is the commodity’s actual substance, then it is impossible to perceive an article of utility as being identical with a natural form. An article of utility is not a natural form but a cultural form.”12 The question of form cannot be discarded like an old tin can.
Use value is the same as the article of utility for Marx. In Jorn, use value is the opposite of article of utility. Use value is the negation of an article of utility, of its form. Use value is the using up, the consumption of an article of utility. Use value is a negation of a quality. This brings us to Jorn’s most striking conclusion: “The market value of things is not conditioned by their quality, far less by their amount. It is conditioned by their differences, their variability.”13 Form is not a husk to shuck off, revealing some essence that is an independent content, the universal essence that is labor. “The exchange value of two commodities is thus not their equivalence but their dissimilarity.” Jorn restores the claim of form, and at two moments in the production process: natural form and the form of the article of use.
Having dispensed with Marx’s dialectic of form and content, he does not pursue the complexity of Marx’s value theory much further. Rather, he unfolds his own subtle analysis of value. One is tempted to say that Jorn’s value is as subtle as Marx’s, but that would of course mean in Jornian terms that, being equivalent, it had no value. The point might be rather to stress its incommensurable difference. If Marx discards the question of form, Jorn stresses it. There are many kinds of form in Jorn. Money as pure equivalence is actually valueless, except as a form. It is empty form. The form that matters to Jorn is the form of substance, but there are others, notably container form and cultural form.
Jorn replaces political economy with aesthetic economy. He does not want to reduce the appearances of value as form to the content of labor, and in so doing make the working class the exclusive heart of economy. The working class is present in Jorn. Unlike bourgeois economics, he does not want to hide them away behind the surface-effects of exchange. Rather, he shifts attention away from exchange to production; not to production as quantity, but production as quality, as difference. The key to this is not labor as the universal content of value, but form as difference, as the production of differences. Labor may be the content of value, but creation is its form. There is both a laboring class and a creating class. Capitalism is the alienation of labor from creation.
In short: substance is value, value is process, and process is difference. Substance is something that can’t be measured. It is a materiality of differences, without number or dimension. Dimension is the quantity of a particular quality. Value is a particular quantity of qualities undergoing a process or change. Natural form becomes substance in a process that makes not quantity but other kinds of form, or qualities. Substance is the material reality of the change or transformation. Substance is the ornamentation of natural form. Tintomara’s turn is the transformation of natural substance into aesthetic substance.
To complicate things somewhat, Jorn proposes seeing substance as having its own form, or rather, that substance is potential for transformation. In an article of utility, the volatile form of substance is held in a certain tension with another kind of form, what Jorn calls container form. Jorn reads Marx as seeing all form as container form, a form which, analytically at least, can be opened to reveal a universal and homogenous substance—labor. But not all form is container form. Substance has its own form which is different from container form and works against it. A substance form is volatile; a container form, relatively inert.
“A substance is a possibility of value.” But only a possibility. Value is not a state of things, but comes and goes. One cannot own value. Quality is an attribute of matter; value is the dynamics of matter. “The value of a form … thus depends upon the ease with which one can dissolve the form and liberate its latent energies, whilst its character of quality consists in its resistance to this.”14 Form as container is thus only a special case of form, an instance where value can be easily produced, the quality of the thing readily overcome.
Viewed in quantitative terms, container form seems desirable. Containers yield their contents readily. Container form maximizes the amount of value that can be extracted. But for Jorn the failure of socialist economics lies in actually attempting to realize Marx’s conceptual separation of value from form as mere container. Socialist economies measure their progress in terms of rising quantities, all the while presiding over a massive devaluation. The extinction of difference, of the qualities of substances, is an impoverishment of the world. Jorn’s critique might apply in attenuated form to socialist economies. Now that most of these have ceased to exist, the salience of Jorn’s critique for capitalist economies is all the more acute.
Jorn challenges the central tenet of socialist thought: that the worker alone makes value, that value is labor power. He even claims that mechanical and industrial work is without value at all. The equivalence of units of labor time under industrial conditions, for all its efficiency, does not make more value, it abolishes value altogether. It is not labor, but time that is alienated from the worker. “Surplus value is not created in the work but in the variability of the work.”15 Difference is value. Who creates difference? The creative elite. There are two classes that make value. One is exploited by commodity production; the other marginalized. Jorn’s is a recognizably romantic critique of the modern world, but what is distinctive is how far into the realm of the economic Jorn is prepared to pursue it.
Jorn’s is perhaps a perverse kind of Leninism. It is not the party that brings class consciousness to the workers from without, but bohemia. The nucleus of a radical form of action is not the specialists in political praxis, but the connoisseurs of the free use of time (Gilles and Carole, wandering the labyrinth of the city at night). Theirs is not a politics of work, but an aesthetics of leisure. Both capitalism and socialism make free time over in the image of work. Sounding a theme that will be a major one in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Jorn claims that the industrial worker’s life is eventless, as she does not transform or change things. Leisure time has the same quality, or rather lack of quality, as work. Leisure is as much a sham as work.
Both socialist and capitalist societies have parallel ideologies of form: that container form abolishes differences. The container appears to function as a unit, making substance forms equivalent. Differences are—apparently—abolished as the units increase in number. Jorn calls this “tin can philosophy.”16 It equates the abolition of difference with progress. Both socialist and capitalist societies specialize in the efficient delivery in uniform containers of what has no value. In place of this, Jorn wants an ecology of forms.
The article of utility becomes a commodity when the producer has no use for it. It can either be given away as part of a gift economy of rivalry and recognition, the potlatch, or it can be exchanged. Either way, the problem is what to do with the surplus. Jorn’s economics, like that of Georges Bataille, is not about economizing or efficiency, but expenditure, or wealth. Not scarcity but abundance is the key to his thinking: “wealth is surplus, abundance, multiplicity.”17 Where he differs from Bataille is in this emphasis not just on quantitative surplus, but a surplus of difference. Bataille sees both capitalist and socialist economies as distinct from all hitherto because they accumulate rather than disperse surplus, thereby reproducing the problem of surplus at ever higher levels. Jorn sees both capitalist and socialist economies as distinctive for their impoverishment of surplus as multiplicity.
The politics Jorn practiced is also about surplus rather than scarcity. Politics is surplus fellowship. For Jorn, the state is an anti-politics. The statesman is the prototype of the manager, and whatever else they may be, socialist states are fanatically managerial. In Engels’s phrase, in socialism, the administration of men ought to be replaced by the “administration of things.” It became the management of men as if they were things, not least during what Henri Lefebvre called “Stalin’s assault on the universe.” The socialist vision, from Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) forward, is for cybernetics to replace politics. “Statistical robots will compute, guided by effective soundings of public opinion, in accordance with the wishes or otherwise of the majority.” Socialism abolishes the state only to make it universal, a container for everything. The socialist goal is in opposition to working-class interests, “for bureaucracy is the container system of society.”18 As Debord was increasingly turning towards a political conception of praxis, Jorn was turning away from it. The parting of the ways, this time, would at least be amicable.
If there is a Situationist praxis, it has to take time in a quite different sense to a Marxist one. It is not just that capital quantifies time and cheats the worker of the value of it. Rather, it is that the quantification of time suppresses the qualitative aspect of the transformation of one substance into another. The slogan “live without dead time” comes to mean something quite specific here. It is not that the situation is the spontaneous irruption of a pure event, severing all ties with the past, freeing itself from the grip of technologies, built spaces, all the massive forms of dead labor. As Debord wrote to Jorn: “I am in agreement on the question of time. To put the accent on non-preserved art or all other deliberately ‘direct’ situationist activity is not—has never been—a choice between amnesia and refusing history.”19 But this leaves open the question of what a progressive orientation might be, if it is neither the purely quantitative piling up of wealth, nor the sudden revolutionary break that abolishes the old world in an instant.
For all their differences, Jorn and Marx are in love with a notion of progress, and this is instructive. It is perhaps the key to resisting the slide of critique towards certain kinds of conservatism, not to mention mere resistance. It’s a question of redefining what progress might mean. In Jorn, progress is transport; progress is movement. “In order to give possibilities of orientation, progressive movement must be movement collected from within in relation to the surrounding element.”20 Orienting action is like turning the rudder of a boat in a swift and uncertain current. It is not an act of domination, of imposing a will on time. It is an act which works both with and against the current of the times, ornamenting it.