First findings
The main points of our analysis can be summed up as follows:
a) The Marxist theory was significant in that it gave a language, a concept and a direction to industrial production at its advent and disclosed the new creative energies inherent in this industry. Marx accomplished his historic mission, developing the ideas of the great British economists Smith and Ricardo, and those of Saint-Simon; he adopted the methods and concepts of Hegel’s philosophy but redirected them against Hegelianism, and he redirected against the ‘upside-down world’ in general all that it had achieved; finally he stressed and clarified the fact that industry was capable of mastering nature and of transforming the actual material and social world.
b) It is now possible, a hundred years after the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), to take stock and sort out the achievements from the shortcomings in the Marxist doctrine. Once Marx had stressed the dual aspect of production (production of things and relations, production of works and produce) he went on to stress the production of produce – the essential, specific aspect of industrial production in a capitalist state; in this way it became possible (though that was not his intention) to give a unilateral interpretation to his theory and thence to science and to social reality. Moreover urbanization – a process that, though linked to industrialization, is distinct and specific – had barely started in Marx’s time, so that he was unable to grasp its significance or its relation to industrialization, did not, and indeed could not, perceive that the production of the city was the end, the objective and the meaning of industrial production. Whence a further limitation imposed upon his theory and an added occasion for misinterpretation, since industry was thus seen to contain its own meaning, rationality and objectives. Society today has acquired the reputation of dynamism when in fact it is stagnating in the no-man’s-land between industrialization and urbanization where industry and economic expansion still figure as objectives and the true goal is considered accidental and contingent.
In Das Kapital Marx dialectically (critically) analysed capitalist methods of production. He exposed (after Smith and Ricardo, but going deeper and further) the form of trade value and consumer goods as the cornerstone, the theoretical and historical basis of this method of production. Reverting to an earlier theory Marx denounced the dangers involved in the practically limitless expansion of trade value and money and their material power. Perceiving the ‘world’ of trade’s form, logic and language he foresaw its power both for destruction and for creativity; on the one hand its serious consequences, its virtualities, on the other hand the social force that could restrain this threatening tyranny, control the market and its laws and subordinate the mastery of nature to man’s adaptation of his own natural and social being.
c) Marx’s warning went unheeded, especially by those political parties that used his theories as a password (on the one hand economism where organization, programming and industrial rationality prevailed, on the other politism with the stress on institutional and ideological activism, both under the aegis of a philosophism of history, or of material reality). The theory of exchange, of trade value and its laws, and of overcoming them, lost its clarity, deteriorating into a utopian leftism (that aimed at transcending the law of exchange and value by a total revolutionary action) or an opportunist rightism adopting most of the theories of economism; and from this point the concept of adaptation was completely discarded by Marx’s followers. The working classes’ main mission was now seen to be political (the modification of state institutions) or economic (expansion of production involving trade expansion), thus the necessity to curb trade expansion was ignored, as were the methods and the social and intellectual scope of such a curbing. In this way one of the crucial lessons to be learnt from Marx and Das Kapital fell on deaf ears and was lost to social conscience, ideology and theories.
d) The conditions of capitalist production have not altered; indeed they have been consolidated by the discredit into which Marxist theories have fallen and favoured by historical events that accelerated technological development at an incalculable cost to society – two world wars and a third already in sight; in one half of the world these conditions are now firmly established, while weighing heavily on the other half. Such a situation has caused a considerable misappropriation of creative energy; the working classes should (and could) have taken upon themselves the realization of possibilities inherent in industrial production, but they have not (as yet) carried out this mission; there have been motives and causes, substitutions, displacements, replacements and diversions. To understand this complex process new analytical methods and a new intellectual approach are required; for want of such an analysis it has been possible to believe in the presence of hidden unfathomable structures within our society and, indeed, within all societies; if, in fact, the process cannot be imputed to an ‘agent’, analysis discovers none the less a class strategy whereby creative activity is replaced by contemplative passivity, and by the voracious consumption of signs, displays, products and even works of art so long as they are those of past ages; this thankless consumption thrives on history, works of art and styles but refutes history and no longer understands works of art, ignoring or rejecting their terms. The reductive process was practised before being sanctified as an ideology; all contemporary ideologies are reductive, including those that are taken for effective sciences; they ratify a disabling praxis disguised by promises and illusions of a final fulfilment. Ideologies turn facts into laws and actual reduction into ‘scientificness’.
e) Thus everyday life, the social territory and place of controlled consumption, of terror-enforced passivity, is established and programmed; as a social territory it is easily identified, and under analysis it reveals its latent irrationality beneath an apparent rationality, incoherence beneath an ideology of coherence, and sub-systems or disconnected territories linked together only by speech. To the question: ‘How can such a society function, why doesn’t it fall apart?’ the answer is: ‘By language and metalanguage, by speech kept alive under talk at one or two removes, under floods of ink.’ This territory seems firm enough, but it is not impervious to earthquakes, not by any means! Marx never considered economics as determinative, or as determinism, but he saw capitalism as a mode of production where economics prevailed, and therefore that it was economics which had to be tackled; nowadays everyday life has taken the place of economics, it is everyday life that prevails as the outcome of a generalized class strategy (economic, political, cultural). It is therefore everyday life that must be tackled by broadcasting our policy, that of a cultural revolution with economic and political implications.
f) The concept of revolution – even of total revolution – is still valid; moreover a revolution cannot be other than total.If the concept has become vague it is the fault of reductions, uncritically accepted and dogmatized. When the idea of revolution is restored to include all its implications, three planes can be distinguished:
1) An economic plane where revolutionary strategy makes its objective clear; the growth of industrial production and its planification are necessary but they are not all; the aim and direction (or the orientation and finality) are thus defined: to achieve an affluent economy and to increase industrial production, by total automation, in proportion to social needs (instead of to individual programmed demands), these needs being identified with the demands of a nascent urban society; but the automation of production must in no way involve the automation of the consumer, for such a consequence is symptomatic of a generalized mystification. When revolutionary action is restricted to the economic plane it gets bogged down and loses sight of its true objective.
2) A political plane where the objective of revolutionary strategy has not changed in the past century – from this point of view there is no cause to modify, revise or amplify Marx’s theory – the decay of the state remains its aim and directive. Restricted to the political plane alone, revolution produces Stalinism, the state as Idol, means taken for ends. No state-concerned and political structure is entitled to the name of Marxism if these aims and directives are not expressly formulated and do not constitute its social practice both in terms of strategical objective and on the plane of technique; short of which it is impossible (theoretically, in theory) to speak of revolution, Marxist doctrine or strategy, or of action directed towards improving the world, existence and society. Moreover it is only too true that, when one approaches the higher regions of state power, dialectics seem to lose their rights, for it is as though power could overcome progress, all progress, and ignore contradictions instead of settling them. And yet progress continues, for it is history whose progress is acknowledged by power because power makes it.
3) A cultural plane. This avenue has been blocked by economistic, politicizing and philosophizing interpretations of Marx’s doctrine. It had been assumed that once revolutionary action had undermined the economic basis and the political superstructures the rest would follow, that is ideologies, institutions, in one word culture; however the plane has re-acquired or acquired its specificness;* its significance was recognized when the revolution encountered obstacles and setbacks on the other planes. In the 1920s, shortly after coming to power, Lenin noted the urgent need for a ‘cultural’ transformation of the Soviet working classes, a transformation that would enable them to administer the country and its industry, master techniques and assimilate or even outstrip Western science and rationality. Today the elaboration of projects on the cultural plane is justified by the acknowledged specificness of this plane. It would seem that it might only be possible to by-pass the state and its institutions, to redirect ‘cultural’ institutions towards non-terrorist objectives when an overt, if not an official cultural crisis arises, a crisis of ideologies, of the institutions themselves, when terror would be inadequate for the closing of the microcosm. And it could only be possible to evade the compulsions of economism, of economic rationality, programming and that limited form of rationality that cannot see its own limitations, in so far as such compulsions do not succeed in closing the circuit according to their programming, in systematizing the whole of society; whence the advantage both of cracks in the structure and of the unforeseen demands of a progressive, pressing ‘reality’, urban reality.
Together with the concept of man and of humanism (the humanism of competitive capitalism and of the liberal bourgeoisie) the concept of creation has fallen into discredit. One of the first and most essential conditions for the realization of a cultural revolution is that the concepts of art, creation, freedom, adaptation, style, experience values, human being, be restored and re-acquire their full significance; but such a condition can only be fulfilled after a ruthless criticism of productivist ideology, economic rationalism and economism, as well as of such myths and pseudo-concepts as participation, integration and creativity, including their practical application, has been performed. A cultural revolution requires a cultural strategy with rules that can be set down.
The philosophy of compulsion and the compulsion of philosophy
For two thousand years it had been the philosopher’s role to understand the theoretical status of natural and social man in the universe and in his natural environment. The efforts of philosophy simultaneously supplied and symbolized the answer, while philosophy summed up the disconnected experiences and knowledge of various activities. The advent of industry completely changed the status of philosophy and of the philosopher; for this new praxis appeared on reflection to be the depositary of the creative energy proper to social man, that creative energy which was included in philosophy but submitted there to the limitations of speculative and contemplative thought, to philosophical systems. It had formerly been the philosopher’s task to disclose and formulate the significance of relations and phenomena, but now industry gave things a new meaning; a new direction; the mastery of material reality, taking the place of a ‘detached’ knowledge of phenomena and laws, the part once played by philosophy now devolved to a transfigured knowledge. Philosophy has taken part in the conflict between the city and the countryside, in the acceptance of ‘nature’ as such, in the prevalence of agricultural production, in the cult of uniqueness and in the division of labour in a society where labour was unequal, etc.; was its function to end there? Is philosophy extinct? Has it become a legend? Most emphatically not. Critical reflection, one of the products of the philosophical tradition, rejects a positivist solution; philosophy is not a thing of the past, indeed, it is starting a new lease of life; no longer restricted to the elaboration of systems, it is perpetually contrasting the philosopher’s image, his concept and his ideal of mankind with reality and experience; this involves a knowledge of the whole of philosophy, as quest and as goal, a knowledge of all the philosophers, of the historical context and conditions of the different philosophies, their conflicting relations and their general trend. The supreme aim of the new revolutionary doctrine is to re-interpret the philosophers who interpreted the universe, to learn from them the theoretical procedure of change, and to achieve by these means the theoretical revolution.
Thereby the tendency to elaborate (apparently) new philosophical systems is not without its dangers; a philosophical system cannot easily avoid, nowadays, incorporating well-worn, not to say worn-out theories, categories and problems, and, moreover, contributing to terrorism; for dogmatism is undoubtedly an aspect (and by no means the mildest) of generalized terrorism.
Certain words have made their appearance of late in the vocabulary of a would-be philosophical trend or a trend that merely dodges philosophical problems; such words acquire the value of what they signify: norms, compulsions, demands, imperatives, not to mention ‘rigour’ and, of course, the word ‘system’. These words reflect the limited rationalism of bureaucracy, of technocratic ideology, of industrial programming (which ignores the new problems of urbanism on behalf of a single organization, that of industrial expansion, and high-handedly decides the partition of territories, the distribution of populations).
We are thus witnessing the making of a system, the philosophy of compulsion. Social determinisms are no longer seen as obstacles to be overcome, data to be mastered and adapted by responsible measures, but as basic, essential, specific, as compulsive elements to be noted and respected; and this for the political motives we have already had occasion to condemn. Philosophy, now serving as metalanguage for this class strategy, disguises and justifies it, not by presenting it as a generalized plan or the result of political intentions, but by cataloguing it among the necessary evils; it is only too easy to pass from the philosophy of finitude and finality to that of a total acceptance of things as they are, of life as it is – a sophism that contradicts philosophy.
Philosophical tradition involves restrictions of a negative order, forbidding the assertion of certain absurdities, the pronouncement of tautologies or of postulates lacking in coherence; in this respect it is, like logic, an incomplete but essential discipline. This tradition attacks the philosophy of acceptance by radical analysis, distancing, rebellion and liberty; it sets against the philosophy of finitude the philosophy of desire. From such conflicts the mind emerges refreshed and restored, free from philosophical metalanguage, and avoids the two pitfalls: the death of classical philosophy, and the continuation of ancient philosophy.
He who asserts that he can do without a philosophical language is making an untrue statement and, furthermore, this sophist is using precisely such a language to formulate his claim. It is however true that metalanguage (including the metalanguage of philosophy and philosophy as metalanguage) finally convicts itself. But the intervention or a new philosophy or a philosopher of genius inventing new terms or changing the names of things is not an answer to the problem; if a scatty notion exists surely it is that of transforming existence through the transformation of words! No sooner is it stated than this proposition convicts itself. At the height of metalanguage the speaker raises his speech to the nth degree (is there an ultimate degree?) for the absolute message, the fiat lux of our age; but all to no avail. The answer is everyday life, to rediscover everyday life – no longer to neglect and disown it, elude and evade it – but actively to rediscover it while contributing to its transfiguration; this undertaking involves the invention of a language – or, to be precise, an invention of language – for everyday life translated into language becomes a different everyday life by becoming clear; and the transfiguration of everyday life is the creation of something new, something that requires new words.
The philosophical discipline preserves its educational, didactic purpose. With the city and in the city, alongside monuments and festivals, philosophy was primarily creation. Apart from being landmarks in historical time the different philosophical traditions indicate a ‘time-space’ relation, a space subjected to time, marked by it, a space on which time is inscribed. Such themes are central to a culture restored by a new preoccupation with everyday life, its analysis and transformation; for among the main objectives of the cultural revolution are the reinstatement of works of art without any prejudice to product, and the restoration of time as the supreme gift (life time); philosophy cannot be excluded from culture, and in the new culture it will be given a new and different significance by restoring – as with time and creation – its experiential value.
A radical critique of aesthetics and aestheticism as metalanguage is justified by the philosophical approach to art; moreover aestheticism today parodies the transfiguration of everyday life by the use of unmediated techniques – techniques that omit art as the medium of adaptation: swinging, singing mobiles, panels whose colour changes at a movement or at a word, musical corridors, a promenade made to look like a stage setting – this sort of aestheticism does not keep the promises it makes; and the restoration of art will make short work of these ‘modern’ antics.
Our cultural revolution
We have tried to prove that the ‘cultural revolution’ is a concept; it is implicit in Marx, explicit in the works of Lenin and Trotsky, and has been revived in a specific context by Mao Tse-tung in China. It is linked as a concept with the Marxist doctrine: what are the relations between basis, structure and superstructures, between theory and practice, between ideology, knowledge and strategic action? Are such relations fixed or changing, structural or contingent?
We do not intend to set up the Chinese revolution as a model; its interest and its significance lie in the fact that it gave new life and definition to the concept by expressing it in a ‘modern’ idiom; but the same scheme could not apply both to a predominantly agricultural nation and to one that is highly industrialized; it could not be transplanted, for a transposition of this kind is only possible in the minds of theoreticians influenced by the peculiar practice to which we have already alluded (displacements, substitutions, replacements).
Our cultural revolution cannot be envisaged as aesthetic; it is not a revolution based on culture, neither is culture its aim or its motive; we cannot aspire to infuse social reality and experience with culture, when our culture is fragmentary, crumbling and dissolving into moralism, aestheticism and technical ideology; this state of affairs would be more obvious were it not for the clearly defined terrorist role of a ‘culture’ where only philosophy still stands, and only on the condition that it is given a direction. The objective and directive of our cultural revolution is to create a culture that is not an institution but a style of life; its basic distinction is the realization of philosophy in the spirit of philosophy. The logical outcome of a critical appraisal of culture, of the prestige and glamour attached to this term, and of its institutionalization, is a total acknowledgement of philosophy, of its theoretical and practical significance, its educational, experiential, intellectual and social importance. The philosophy we have in mind is Western philosophy from Plato to Hegel, and we are concerned neither with American pragmatism nor with Confucius and Buddha; for it is common knowledge that the culture of the United States has no solid philosophical backing; that in the USSR the official culture adopted a philosophy derived from Marxist theories that were intended for a practical realization; while the East has a philosophy of its own that we shall not presume to discuss. The theoretical revolution which constitutes the first step towards a cultural revolution is based on philosophical experience.
The revival of art and of the meaning of art has a practical not a ‘cultural’ aim; indeed, our cultural revolution has no purely ‘cultural’ aims, but directs culture towards experience, towards the transfiguration of everyday life. The revolution will transform existence, not merely the state and the distribution of property, for we do not take means for ends. This can also be stated as follows: ‘Let everyday life become a work of art! Let every technical means be employed for the transformation of everyday life!’ From an intellectual point of view the word ‘creation’ will no longer be restricted to works of art but will signify a self-conscious activity, self-conceiving, reproducing its own terms, adapting these terms and its own reality (body, desire, time, space), being its own creation; socially the term will stand for the activity of a collectivity assuming the responsibility of its own social function and destiny – in other words for self-administration. Superficial observers note the distance that separates Peking from Belgrade, or they might contrast self-administration and cultural revolution; but such political comparisons are invalid in the context of concept and significance; self-administration involves certain contradictions in its make-up, among which are ‘cultural’ contradictions; thus, far from rejecting the cultural revolution, this phenomenon constitutes one of its features; though it does not solve the problems raised by self-administration this fact makes their exact formulation possible.
Let us set forth some of the aspects or elements of the revolutionary process:
a) Sexual reform and revolution. The changes contemplated are not concerned only with ‘male-female’ relations, juridical and political equality between contracting and engaged parties, nor with de-feudalizing and democratizing the relations between the sexes; the reform should modify the (emotional and ideological) relations between sexuality and society. Repressive society and sexual terrorism must be liquidated and dispatched by all the theoretical and practical means available; sexual repression must no longer be the concern (indeed, the main concern) of institutions; it must be eradicated; the more so as repression and terror are not limited to the control of sexual activities, but extend to all the energies and potentialities of the human being. It is not a matter of abolishing all control of sexual activities; indeed, a complete absence of control might result in the disappearance or lessening of desire by turning it into an unmediated need; desire cannot exist without control, although the repression based on control kills desire or perverts it. Control should be in the hands of those concerned, not enforced by institutions, still less by the joint methods of ethics and terror.
b) Urban reform and revolution. There should be no misunderstandings at this point; urbanism will emerge from the revolution, not the revolution from urbanism; though, in fact, urban experience and in particular the struggle for the city (for its preservation and restoration, for the freedom of the city) provide the setting and objectives for a number of revolutionary actions. Until the rationality of industrial planification undergoes a radical change and industrial administration is reorganized, production will never be geared towards urban existence and the social requirements of urban society as such. The battle is therefore fought out on the field of production and it is there that strategy must set its objectives. A practical realization of urban society involves both a political programme (covering the whole of society, the entire territory) and an economic control.
Furthermore, an urban reform could assume today the role and the significance that were, for half a century, those of the agricultural reform (and that it still preserves in some places); the structure of neo-capitalist ownership, laws and ideologies would be shaken by this revolutionary reform. Neo-capitalism and the society of Controlled Consumption are not concerned with checking the decay of what is left of urban existence today, with inventing new developments, enabling them to become generalized or with helping and encouraging the growth of a nascent urban society; while the very notion of play as a work of art, of the city as play, would strain the imagination of even the most cultured bourgeoisie who would therefore be quite incapable of providing the necessary spatio-temporal conditions.
c) The Festival rediscovered and magnified by overcoming the conflict between everyday life and festivity and enabling these terms to harmonize in and through urban society, such is the final clause of the revolutionary plan. This specification brings us back to where we began, to the concept of adaptation, setting it in its rightful position above the concepts of mastery (of material reality) and of praxis in the usual acceptance of the term.
Saint-Just said that the concept of happiness was new to France and to the world in general; the same could be said of the concept of unhappiness, for to be aware of being unhappy presupposes that something else is possible, a different condition from the unhappy one. Perhaps today the conflict ‘happiness-unhappiness’ or ‘awareness of a possible happiness-awareness of an actual unhappiness’ has replaced the classical concept of Fate. And this may be the secret of our general malaise.
Paris 1967
Notes
* We feel there is no call here to take sides for or against the cultural revolution in China. Is it Chinese society or the Chinese revolution that is returning to its source? Is this revolution – whether novel or renovated – opposing its own counter-terror to bureaucratic terrorism? Are play and the Festival being reinstated by this revolution? Or is it only mobilizing all available energy in the prospect of a new world war? What counts, what is significant, is the revival of a concept.