![]() And the “as” and “so” here are not just logical operators: materiality -the continual production of representations of the world as substantial, resistant, “embodied,” “here and now,” having this specific otherness to human subjects’ wishes- is the necessary symbolic economy accompanying an economy of use-value, just as image (or virtuality, or image, or spectacle) is the necessary pseudo-sociality -the necessary shadow-form of a vanished encounter with things as bodies and bodies as totalities- for an economy of abstract equivalence. To cast the basic proposal in Marxist terms: as use-value is supplanted by exchange-value, so materiality cedes to appearance. It is certainly an extrapolation from Marx’s notion of the fetishism of commodities, but it puts more stress than Marx did on the phenomenal form of that fetishism: the specific character of the phenomenal form, the intensification of the form’s phantasmagoric power over human actors, and the specific political problems and opportunities that follow from that intensification. Spectacle is a theory of the ongoing consequences of that economic ghost-dance for the day-to-day substance of human interactions and self-understanding. The picture Marx paints is familiar: a system takes shape in which almost all human activities and products, and more and more natural goods, are deemed to have value only (or predominantly) by dint of their participating, as abstractions or phantoms, in a generalized circuit of exchange. ![]() Marx’s analysis of the form, as we understand it, is an attempt to describe what happens to social relations when a previous age-old pattern of face-to-face (and sword-to-sword) social dealings, rooted in hands-on work and consumption, are more and more comprehensively mediated by a money economy. Retort: We too, with reservations to be explained later, take the commodity form to be central to an understanding of the last four hundred years. Do you see a way in which these great forces -which, as alienated from their own historical agents have proven unfathomably destructive- can themselves be politically redirected toward their own conscious overcoming? Can these awesome forces be transformed and redeemed? What do you think of this statement? Do you think that spectacle points beyond itself in a similar way? Is spectacle a dialectical category?Īlong the same lines, we in Platypus feel that the enormous social and productive forces of capitalism continually both undermine and reproduce the possibilities of human potential and transformation. It is Platypus’ understanding that the commodity form should not merely be condemned, but rather-as the current form of social mediation- that it points beyond itself, that as the site of reification it is also the basis from which critical and progressive consciousness can be raised. ![]() Soren Whited: How would you describe the historical and conceptual relationship between the commodity form-first articulated by Marx and further elaborated by Lukacs as “the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects”-and the concept of spectacle-first formulated by Guy Debord as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”? That way, we hope, the common ground between Retort and Platypus will be clear-as well as the nature of our disagreements. ![]() A prefatory statement from Retort: Having talked over your questions at length, we find that they can be answered best by grouping together several of them and trying to spell out the key issues and assumptions we see underlying them. ![]()
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