The Totality for Grownups
Responding to criticism is a fine art — especially when, as here, the criticism is serious and sustained and comes from all directions. Inevitably, what RETORT offers in reply is something of an arbitrary checklist of “points” we particularly disagree with, or misunderstandings we especially want to head off at the pass. One thing needs to be said first. We immensely value the criticisms directed at Afflicted Powers and in particular are grateful to Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, and Alex Vasudevan. Their combination of skepticism and enthusiasm and their constant sense of the urgency of the situation in which we find ourselves — the need for thinking from the Left that tries to respond, even at the risk of error and oversimplification, to the loss of landmarks over the past several years — have given us fresh heart.
Afflicted Powers is a polemical survey. Obviously, we believe that there is a place for such attempts at mapping the main coordinates of the new world situation. As we say in the book, we think that the Left would do well to recover from its two decades of panic over the dangers of “totalization” and begin the task of describing again the driving forces, the key determinants, of politics in the twenty-first century — no doubt always with a sense of the provisional, hypothetical, necessarily incomplete nature of the map being proposed.
This question of the proper scope and perspective of political writing at present cannot be disentangled from that of tone, voice, and style. “Mapping” and “surveying” are metaphors. They will steer us back, if we are not careful, into the territory of political science. Whereas what RETORT thinks is needed, now more than ever, is a political antiscience — a form of political writing that manages, at last, to wake us (the present writers included) from the sleep of reason. Afflicted Powers is an effort to do this. Therefore it takes risks. Polemic, as a form, always hovers on the edge of caricature: what is meant to provoke may simply produce a phobic reaction; any aphorism runs the risk of being taken as axiomatic. This last was especially likely to happen, we knew, in the case of our mobilizing the notion of “spectacle.” So it proved.
Which leads us to the opening half of David Campbell’s essay. It is hard to imagine a clearer exposition of the difficulties involved — philosophical difficulties, essentially, problems of truth and appearance — in any attempt to put the concept of spectacle to use. Campbell’s challenge here is certainly well taken, and replying to it adequately will take further thought. But here, on account, are two preliminary stabs. First, Campbell should realize (as no doubt he does) that he has shifted the discussion of spectacle to a level we deliberately wish to move it away from. It seems to us that the incorporation, over the past twenty-five years, of certain Debordian themes into a postmodern conceptual space — the space of rigorous and interminable skepticism about representation, reference, reality, and so forth — has by and large robbed spectacle of its original political force. We think that that force needs retrieving. And the best way to do so is to show spectacle as a concept that can actually be applied — empirically, perhaps simplemindedly — to events and structures in the world. Of course difficulties follow. Spectacle is a theory of the production of appearances: consequently, epistemological problems will always haunt it. “Image and reality” is the territory, like it or not, on which Debord situates his account of late capitalism. He does not begin with a quote from Feuerbach for nothing. It remains an open question, then, whether our minimalist program — our choice to operate with a “minimal, pragmatic, and matterof- fact” (AP, 19) adaptation of Debord’s picture of the modern world — can possibly work. But we are stubborn. We shall go on trying.
This leads to our second — again, preliminary — response. We print below a slightly revised version of one of the papers presented at the 2006 conference in Chicago. Obviously, the essay does not constitute a reply to Campbell’s worries. In a sense, it only dramatizes the gap — the political and theoretical gap — between us. But at least the paper makes clear what we think in the present conjuncture the concept of spectacle is for and how much and how little we want to claim for it.
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