File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1994/avant-garde_21Apr.94, message 27


Date: Wed, 27 Apr 94 09:04:18
From: mroberts-AT-MIT.EDU (Martin Roberts)
Subject: Zone, Debord, and commodity fetishism


> i just noticed that the MIT/Zone edition of Debord's _Society of the
> Spectacle_ is listed as in-stock by the distributor my bookseller (and
> sometimes employer) orders from. has anyone actually seen this new edition?
> is it the much-discussed, but previously elusive "better" translation? 
> 
So now we have yet another edition of the _Society of the Spectacle_. Since it 
can be safely assumed that the publishers are familiar with the book's content, 
we must also conclude that the irony of re-pubishing a book devoted to the 
critique of commodity culture in Zone's high-gloss format is not lost on them. 
And if we do conclude this, then it's hard not to feel that there's a certain 
degree of bad faith involved in publishing the book in this form.

The rationale for the new edition, of course, is that it's a new translation. 
The old translation wasn't very good, admittedly, and it's nice to have a new 
one. But there's obviously more to it than that. The publishing industry is a 
business concerned, like any other, with profit, and everyone knows that one of 
the reasons for publishing a new edition of the book is because thanks to people 
like Greil Marcus and the ICA exhibition on the SI, situationism itself--irony 
of ironies--has emerged as an eminently marketable commodity among the 
postmodern intelligentsia. If Zone are publishing the _Society of the 
Spectacle_, it's because they think it will sell a lot of copies, as it 
undoubtedly will. But we can't be blamed for finding such a move bad faith.  

It isn't a matter of Zone's publishing the book somehow running counter to its 
"spirit."On the contrary--as Debord would be well aware, the recuperation of his 
book by the very system of commodity fetishism against which it's directed was 
entirely predictable and consistent with the logic of the spectacle. Perhaps the 
ultimate irony of Zone's new edition of the _Society of the Spectacle_, indeed, 
is that it is in itself the best demonstration of the continuing validity and 
relevance of Debord's book.

Which leads us to the final perverse twist: maybe it's *this* which is precisely 
the rationale for the publication of the book... [!] In other words, maybe Zone 
has published the book precisely to use its status as a commodity fetish to make 
an ironic statement on the very society of the spectacle which is the very 
subject of the book itself. From this perspective, the book's publication also 
has a performative/phatic function: in a sense, it also enacts what it 
critiques.

This is, indeed, precisely the kind of defense which could be made for  
publishing the book. Ultimately, it seems that the game of ironies and 
counter-ironies is irreducible, and that Zone's move must be seen *both* as a 
deliberate--even brilliant--demonstration of the validity of Debord's theory, 
*and at the same time* as an act of monumental bad faith.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I think the people at Zone are too smart *not* to 
be aware of this reversibility, and perhaps ultimate undecideability, of the 
arguments for and against the publication of Debord's book. And in my view, it's 
*this* which is the real bad faith, of a much more insidious kind from the 
superficial bad faith I talked about earlier. Because when all is said and done, 
as always, it's basically about making a profit, and there's still something 
repellent about using Debord's critique of the spectacle to do so. In the end 
it's no different from Paris designers turning Maoist costume into a new fashion 
style, or John Fluevog's appropriation of Mao's Little Red Book as the theme for 
a shoe catalogue. All exemplify the extraordinary and apparently limitless 
ability of capitalism to recuperate and neutralize even what is ideologically 
most vehemently opposed to it.     

Martin Roberts
______________________________________________________________________________
Martin Roberts                                          Foreign Languages, MIT
<mroberts-AT-mit.edu>                                      14N-421
(617) 253-4536 (voice)                                  77 Massachusetts Avenue
(617) 258-6189 (fax)                                    Cambridge, MA 02139




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