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L'internationale Situationniste, Socialisme Ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary Author(S): Stephen Hastings-King Source: Substance, Vol

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L'internationale Situationniste, Socialisme Ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary Author(S): Stephen Hastings-King Source: Substance, Vol L'Internationale Situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary Author(s): Stephen Hastings-King Source: SubStance, Vol. 28, No. 3, Issue 90: Special Issue: Guy Debord (1999), pp. 26-54 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685432 . Accessed: 21/09/2013 14:33 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to SubStance. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 132.235.61.22 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 14:33:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions L'InternationaleSituationniste, Socialismeou Barbarie,and theCrisis ofthe Marxist Imaginary StephenHastings-King The SituationnisteInternationale was a small transnationalgroup of artist-revolutionariesthat came outof the neo-Dadaist Lettriste movement.' In Paris,Guy Debord and a small,changing cast of friendsand supporting characters2tracked through the Parisian cultural and politicalunderground alongthe path laid earlierby the Surrealists.3 Skilled as provocateurs,anxious to abandon theconstraints of artisticproduction and to acquire legitimacy as revolutionaries,Debord and hisfriends almost immediately began to look to thejournal Socialismeou Barbarie,edited by thegroup of the same name led by CorneliusCastoriadis.4 SB is a crucial,though little discussed, referent in theevolution of Guy Debord. The relationshipwas centralfor Debord, and worked on several levels.After months of discussion with SB militants,Debord joined the group for a few monthsduring 1960-1961.The mergerwas inconclusive and strained.However, in thepages ofthe journal L'Internationale Situationniste, SB played an importantrole as the symbol of the "new revolutionary movement"with which Debord increasinglyidentified. Initially, SB was simplypart of the political landscape. However, once Debord became more involved,SB became muchmore central, and the"Situ" journal much more deferentialtoward the older group.Debord was a sympatheticobserver of SB, and his accountsform one ofthe few views ofthe group from an outside perspective.SB functionsas an Archimedeanpoint around whichthe Situs triedto pivotfrom art and culturaldissent into revolutionary politics. When SB explodedin 1963and Castoriadisbegan to publish his long text "Marxisme et la th6orier6volutionnaire"-in which he arguesthat "it has come to the pointwhere one can eitherbe Marxistor a revolutionary"-Debord began a sustainedattempt to excludeSB fromthe revolutionary movement and to usurp its role in a new revolutionary vanguard. Elements of SB's 26 Substance# 90, 1999 This content downloaded from 132.235.61.22 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 14:33:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Crisisof the Marxist Imaginary 27 revolutionaryproject were central components in Debord's collageapproach toMarxism and culturalcritique as deployedin the1967 Society of the Spectacle and as dismantledin the1975 film of the same name. Debord's use ofSB is curiousfor its external viewpoint. He maps SB's notionsof the history of the workers' movement,bureaucratic capitalism and socialism as direct democracyonto a Marxistframework closer to Lukacs and Althusserin its abstractrelation to theworking class and revolution.In thispaper, I argue thatDebord's reversionto dialecticalMarxism is a responseto theimplosion of SB. Debord's collage approach to revolutionarypolitics makes him interestingas an actor withinand symptomof the crisis of the Marxist Imaginary. SB and the MarxistImaginary When the SituationisteInternationale began to publish its journal in 1958and to positionitself on thefringes of the Parisian cultural and political underground,Socialisme ou Barbariewas regardedas themost "proletarian" and sophisticatedof revolutionaryMarxist organizations. The groupwas founded by Castoriadis,Claude Lefortand a circle of less well-known militantsas an oppositionaltendency within the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste(PCI) in1946.The Chaulieu-MontalTendency, as it was known,broke with the PCI in 1948 over the problemof interpretingthe Soviet Union. Between1948 and 1956,SB developed a variantof Marxist revolutionarytheory notable for its sweep and attentionto the situationof the working class, then undergoing radical change through the implementationof Fordism and the crisis of Stalinism. By 1958, SB's revolutionaryproject had becomea primaryreference-point for new radical organizationsthat were emerging in thespace createdby theintensification ofthe Algerian War and theretreat into self-isolation of the Parti Communiste Franqais.SB's projectwas builtaround extended interpretations ofworking- class actionssince 1953 and seemedconfirmed by theHungarian Revolution of October-November,1956. SB defined the termsin which these new organizationsunderstood their situation. The followingis a cursoryoverview ofthe notion of theMarxist Imaginary, the social-imaginary formation that shaped how SB articulateditself and its object,its entryinto a protracted crisisand therole played in thisby theHungarian Revolution. The centralelements of revolutionary theory, or ofany vision of society (and in this,revolutionary theory is no moreor less a fantasythan any other), arewhat Cornelius Castoriadis has called "social-imaginarysignifications." These are the productof intellectuallabor expended upon social spaces, Substance# 90, 1999 This content downloaded from 132.235.61.22 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 14:33:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 28 StephenHastings-King shapingdefinitions of theworld, its history, the possibilities of change and modes available forpolitical entities to shape or participatein thatchange. Social-imaginarysignifications structure representational, intentional and affectiverelations to thesocial-historical.5 The post-warFrench Left was dominatedby the Parti Communiste Frangaisand its trade-unionally, the Conf6deration G6nerale du Travail.It and was, in turn,shaped by it.The PCF-CGTsystem agitated with primary referenceto a working-classconstituency: it also exertedan enormouspull overthe para-academic urban culture within which circulated most dissident Parisian studentsand intellectualworkers (Badie, 1977). The systemwas opposed to itsLeft by a seriesof small militant organizations that operated in a nebulous culturalenvironment that PierreBourdieu has called the "delimited field of ideological production."6 These organizationswere comprisedof "specialists in ideological production" who, lacking the material resourcesof the PCF-CGT system, worked to fashionpositions with specific referenceto thetextual tradition at thecore of the Marxist Imaginary. All hereticalprojects had to work throughMarxist significations as shaped by the dominantPCF-CGT position. They also had to position themselveshorizontally-with respect to each other-and vertically-with respectto an imaginedversion of the revolutionary working class. In postwar Marxism,the paradigm for such heresy was Trotsky,who arguedthat Stalin representedthe bureaucratizationof the Russian Revolution and was thereforenot Lenin's legitimate heir. For Trotsky, the ultimate demonstration ofhis claimswould come witha second proletarianrevolution. Led by the "real" revolutionaryvanguard and mobilizingthe "real" proletariat,the second revolutionwould sweep away Stalinismand institutein itsplace a more radical socialism.Most revolutionarygroups appropriated versions of thisnarrative to emplotthemselves and theirvision of the Imaginary. Centralto all versionswas a relationto theworking class. The construction of a representationof the "real" proletariatwas a fundamentalelement in collectiveself-fashioning for revolutionary organizations: this representation gave coherenceto intentionalrelations-to-the-world, which in turnenabled individualmilitants and workersto map affectonto a visionof revolutionary social change.7 PCF-CGTdominance over the delimited field and itsimagined working class made itselfevident in the fashioningof historiesof the workers' movementin general.The PCF-CGT system legitimated itself and itspolitical actionsin the presentwith reference to a narrativeof the past. Therefore, any counter-claimnecessarily involved the production of a counter-history. These counter-historieswere oftenfashioned through the lens of dogmatic Substance# 90, 1999 This content downloaded from 132.235.61.22 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 14:33:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Crisisof the Marxist Imaginary 29 Marxism,which caused themto reproducethe same self-referential,self- legitimatingcharacter as could be seen in the PCF-CGT.The effectwas to rendertranscendent Marx's historical-materialistcategories, which in turn led to conceptualand politicalclosure and stasis. By the mid-1950s,this conceptualstasis was generalizedamong the fragments of the revolutionary opposition. Socialismeou Barbariewas an exception.Turning the same heretical patternon the hereticsthemselves, SB announced itselfin 1948 with the slogan: "Withoutdevelopment of revolutionarytheory, [there can be] no developmentof
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