1 Living an Illusion: Beyond the Reality of Realism Our life is a voyage--In winter and in the night--We seek our passage... There is the fatigue and cold of morning in his well traveled labyrinth, like an enigma we have to resolve. It is a reality of illusions through which we have to discover the possible richness of reality. -- Guy Debord Real nature being lost, all becomes nature. -- Pascal No carnivorous plants grow, no toucans fly, nor do you find cyclones in The Discourse on Method . -- Alejo Carpentier I'm much closer to Rabelais' craziness than to Descartes' discipline. --Gabriel García Márquez Between Spectacle and Solitude On the face of it, 1967 is a forgotten year, disappearing into relative insignificance alongside the heady 365 days that followed it--1968, the year everybody remembers as the most remarkable of that decade. Yet some pretty noteworthy things happened in 1967: the "Be-ins" at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and the psychedelic "Summer of Love"; Che was captured and executed in Bolivia and Detroit erupted with some of America's worstm race riots; Jim Morrison of The Doors sang "We want the world and we want it NOW!" and Jimi Hendrix wondered "Are You Experienced?"; The Beatles, too, released what many believe their best album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , and Allen Ginsberg levitated the Pentagon in a giant medieval carnival protesting the Vietnam War. But perhaps the highlight of 1967 was something apparently more minor: the publication of two books, one ostensibly fact, the other a magical sort of fiction. People still talk about these books and with their spellbinding brilliance they continue to inspire (one still sells bundles, too). Although these books are both radical, and each radically different from the other--appearing on different continents and in different languages--they both have something important in common, and it's perhaps no coincidence that they should appear concurrently beside Sgt. Pepper's and Jimi Hendrix. Indeed, each succeeds in changing our perceptions about reality and about ourselves; each somehow turns the world we thought we knew upside down as well as inside out, and each, in turn, proceeds to put that world back together again, right side up. These two books are The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Few people would probably think of Debord, the prophet of spectacular capitalism, as a magical realist, just as fewer again would likely see García Márquez, the prophet of magical realism, as a theorist of the society of the spectacle. And yet, it's possible to conceive both men in this guise and to posit their respective masterpieces as works of art that push reality somehow beyond realism.1 In what follows, I want to bring these two texts together into dialogue--a strange dialogue that will help initially map out the ontological contours of Magical Marxism. Perhaps we can say that the four decades since the publication of these two books has been marked by both solitude and spectacle, by a spectacular solitude, and in saying this it's true that The Society of the Spectacle and One Hundred Years of Solitude remain two darkly pessimistic texts. In a way, they pinpoint the '68 generation's shortcomings as much as embody its utopian desires. Here, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, a '60s-style anarchist, an altermondialiste avant la lettre, sets the brooding tone: organizing 32 armed uprisings in the name of a radical liberal cause, he lost every one of them. On the other hand, with their almost supernatural lucidity, their dazzling erudition and phantasmal and mystical ideas, The Society of the Spectacle and One Hundred Years of Solitude also transmit a strange sort of optimism, a backdoor sense of hope, and offer another take on what our lives might be. In consequence, each book shows us how reality can be represented differently, how more acute (and astute) forms of subjectivity can create a more advanced sense of realism, a different type of objectivity, a more radical and active one. Each text, in a nutshell, equips progressives with the imaginative tools for staking out new trails of permanent subversion; narrow ones, of course... Reality Détourned It's not clear exactly when Debord began writing his political prose poem, his exposé of the modern form of the commodity. In a letter to Danish artist Asger Jorn, dated January 13, 1964, Debord said: "in the book I am presently preparing I hope that one will see, more clearly than in other preceding works, that the Situationist International worked at the center of problems modern society poses."2 At the end of 1964, Debord told another friend that his book "will not appear before the following year."3 In fact, The Society of the Spectacle eventually hit Parisian bookstores in November 1967 when working-class grievances festered and when post-war capitalism was entering a new more economically prodigious and ideologically devious phase. With its 221 short, intriguing theses, aphoristic in style and peppered with irony, The Society of the Spectacle is quirkily Marxian, uniting a left-wing Hegel with a materialist Feuerbach, a bellicose Machiavelli with a utopian Karl Korsch, a military Clausewitz with a romantic Georg Lukács. In so doing, Debord gives us stirring crescendos of literary power, compelling evocations of a world in which unity spells division and truth spells falsity. It is, Debord says, a topsy-turvy world where everything and everybody partakes in a perverse paradox, a world in which "the true" really is "a moment of the false."4 Debord wanted to détourn the reality of this non-reality, this world where ugliness signifies beauty, dishonesty honesty, and stupidity intelligence. He wanted to subject it to his own dialectical inversion, inverting the inversion, flipping it with his own spirit of negation, and in the process wrote a unique work of political art, utterly without precedent. Détournement is a key motif in Debord's political and literary arsenal: it pillories and negates existing reality in the name of a higher reality, in the name of a reality-invented; détournement is a new state of reinvented consciousness that rocks people out of their slumbering torpor, out of their modern passivity, monkey-wrenching received meaning in bourgeois reality, reveling in collective feats of resistance and acts of lampooning, sometimes outrageously crude and abusive, other times stylishly nuanced and daring. Squatting and occupying buildings and streets are classic examples of détournement , as are graffiti and free associative art. Détournement twists everything around, recreates meaning out of nonsense and nonsense out of meaning, highlights absurdity through the creation of a different sort of epic absurdity. Each thesis of The Society of the Spectacle is itself an explosive charge, a sequence of détournement , likely drafted at night, when tipsy, and honed by day, when sober. There's a lucidity and madness here only the schizophrenia of the day and night can induce: "The spectacle says nothing more than 'that which appears is good, and that which is good appears'" (Thesis #12); "the spectacle is the new map of the world, a map which exactly covers its territory" (Thesis #31); "the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image" (Thesis #34, original emphasis); "the real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation" (Thesis #47). The surrealist undertow of The Society of the Spectacle conjures up the realm of dream, releases unconscious yearnings and sublimates deep political desire. At times, the tone reincarnates Compte de Lautréamont, the true inventor of détournement , whose Maldoror (1869) expressed similar incandescent chants, similar mental derangements. Maldoror, who curses God and hails the "old ocean," is a bandit, Lautréamont says, "perhaps seven leagues away from this land" or "maybe only a few steps from you."5 Lautréamont wrote only at night, always at night, seated at a piano, drinking absinthe, hammering out words at the same time as he hammered out notes. Maldoror is infamous for deliberately opaque similes that became touchstones of Surrealism: "the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella"; "beautiful like the law of arrested development in the chest of adults whose propensity for growth isn't in rapport with the quantity of molecules that their organism assimilates."6 Following Lautréamont, chance meetings of disparate elements and their dialectical inversions give birth to terrible beauties, and to haunting magical truths, like "the epic poem" of the spectacle, "which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy"; like the way the spectacle "doesn't sing the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions," and "every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming- commodity of the world" (Thesis #66). And like the chance meeting of a boy with a crate of frozen mullet, and the ice he'd discover with his cherished grandfather, and how the whole of One Hundred Years of Solitude begins with this one image, gets détourned from this one image of wonderment and dazzling invention, so it was years later, in May 1967, a month before Sgt. Pepper's unleashed itself in record stores across the globe, that One Hundred Years of Solitude went on sale in Buenos Aires, opening with García Márquez's re-imagined childhood memory: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" (p. 9). Reality as Fantasy Legend has it that García Márquez and wife Mercedes were driving with their two sons to Acapulco for a family vacation, when the novel deemed a Latin American Don Quixote suddenly came to him in an epiphany, beginning with the chance encounter that distant afternoon when Gabriel's grandfather took him to see the ice. Turning the car around, García Márquez returned to Mexico City and for the next 18 months tapped away on his Olivetti electric typewriter a story that had been in his head for 18 years. "All I wanted to do," he recounted, years afterwards, "was to leave a literary picture of the world of my childhood which was spent in a large, very sad house with a sister who ate earth, a grandmother who prophesized the future, and countless relatives of the same name who never made much distinction between happiness and insanity."7 Yet the bizarre saga of the Buendias in the village of Macondo, hacked out of the middle of damp Colombian jungle, not far from a barnacle-encrusted Spanish galleon, takes on a reality way beyond a quaint family romance: it's a tale of paradise found and lost, an everyday saga of a magnificent and miserable humanity, a mad dream of a host of damaged characters whose only goal in life was to live to the full a wonderful human adventure. And they rarely let facts get in their way of their own stories, of the emergencies of their own passions. García Márquez always claimed that the Caribbean world of magic and drama, of mythological societies and fabulous plants, of pre-Colombian cults and slavery, of crumbling colonial empires, provided a taste for fantasy that was only barely exaggerated historical reality, oral memory as conveyed through the loosely grounded realism of his grandmother and grandfather. An adolescent penchant for bad Latin American poetry and Marxist texts (lent to him on the sly by his history teacher), together with a revelatory reading of A Thousand and One Nights and Kafka's Metamorphosis --when Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a gigantic insect--convinced García Márquez he wanted to be a writer, that he could be a writer; "I opened it [ A Thousand and One Nights ], and I read that there was a guy who opened up a bottle and out flew a genie in a puff of smoke, and I said, 'Wow, this is amazing!' This was more fascinating to me than anything else that had happened in my life up to that point." All that, too, convinced García Márquez that writing should be a poetic transformation of reality, that the source of creation is always reality, always somehow embedded in reality, yet a reality in which imagination is an instrument in its production and re-creation. The discovery was "like tearing off a chastity belt," García Márquez said; "you can throw away the fig leaf of rationalism," provided "you don't then descend into total chaos and irrationality."8 From this standpoint, imagination is one moment in the production of reality, a rhetorical re-description of reality, an aspect of hidden joinery in the edifice of social creation. Which itself isn't so un Marxist: Marx recognized how imagination is a force of production, a dynamic element in any labor process: "A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally."9 Against this methodological backdrop, One Hundred Years of Solitude was typed out, poetically reviving childhood memories, kick-starting a new literary genre bearing the name "Magical Realism," guided by an ever so wafer-thin line separating reality from fantasy, and fantasy from reality. Magical Realism draws artistic sustenance from reality, yet converts this reality into a reality détourned , into a reality of illusions. And somehow, as readers, as narrative appropriators, we live out this illusory reality ourselves, make our way through its labyrinth, believe it and believe in it, relate to it somehow, and end up joining in, wanting to participate in its folly, in its mad inventions and alchemy, in its outrageous endeavors and voracious binges, in its tenderness and compassion, in its rage. Therein, all power goes to the imagination; "things have a life of their own," Melquiades, the gypsy magician reminded José Arcadio Buendia, Macondo's patriarch. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls" (p. 9). José Arcadio hardly needs reminding: the patriarch's "unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic." He taught his two wayward sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, the wild man who'd eventually run off with the gypsies and the withdrawn child who'd become one of the nation's most fabled warriors, to read and write and do sums; "and he spoke to them about the magical wonders of the = world, not only where his learning had extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes" (p. 20). Reality Forgotten, Reality as (Non-)Separation One of the most bizarre Magical Realist episodes in One Hundred Years of Solitude is Macondo's insomnia plague. As the sickness takes hold, the insomniac is in a permanent state of vigil, and soon "the recollection of their childhood began to be erased from their memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of their own being, until the person sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past" (p. 43). The expert insomniac eventually forgets about dreams entirely, and about the act of dreaming. And even though nobody sleeps a wink, the following day people feel so rested that they forget about the bad night they've had. What's so curious about García Márquez's notion of the insomnia plague is how it captures an equally bizarre reality we ourselves have been living out for four decades now, a reality Debord labeled "the society of the spectacle," a reality where "the sun never sets on the Empire of modern passivity" (Thesis #13). Debord says that the society of the spectacle is founded on "the production of isolation" (Thesis #28), a condition that reinforces the idea of a "lonely crowd," of people bound, on the one hand, by a common economic and political system, yet, on the other hand, brought together in a "unity of separation," as spectators lost in an agglomeration of "solitudes without illusions" (Thesis #70). Spectacular media and technology, Debord says, "are the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man" (Thesis #20). The spectacle is the "nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep" (Thesis #21). But we can no longer sleep, of course, because of our insomnia plague, because the spectacle "is the guardian of sleep," and because our rulers profit from a plague that keeps us simultaneously asleep and awake, that deadens our imagination through its "permanent opium war" (Thesis #44). This spectacular insomnia nourishes a "unity of misery." Behind the thrill of hallucinated lucidity are but different manifestations of alienation, bundled together into intensive and extensive forms of domination, two forms of spectacle "depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports" (Thesis #64). The former, intensive variety, Debord calls the "concentrated" spectacle; the latter, "diffuse." Both deny and support each other. Together, they signify two rival and successive forms of spectacular power. The concentrated spectacle functions through cult of personality, through dictatorship and totalitarianism, through brute military repression; the diffuse is more ideological, and represents "the Americanization of the world," a process that simultaneously frightens and successfully seduces countries where traditional forms of bourgeois democracy once prevailed. The diffuse spectacle guarantees freedom and affluence, dishwashers and Big Macs. When the spectacle is concentrated, the greater part of society escapes it; when diffuse, only a small part. The concentrated spectacle, Debord says, "belongs essentially to bureaucratic capitalism, even though it may be imported as a technique of state power in more backward mixed economies, or in certain moments of crisis in advanced capitalism" (Thesis #64). Bureaucratic dictatorship of the economy "cannot leave in the exploited masses any notable margin of choice, since it had to choose everything itself." It has to ensure a permanent violence. "The imposed image of the good internalizes the totality of what officially exists, and usually concentrates itself in a single man who is the guarantor of its total cohesion" (Thesis #64).10 All Chinese once had to learn Mao and became Mao; every Soviet had to learn Lenin and Stalin, and became each man. On the other flank come different Gods: the diffuse spectacle "accompanies the abundance of commodities, the unperturbed development of modern capitalism" (Thesis #65). Mass consumption and star-commodities fill the frame and pollute the mind; different merchandise jostles on the stage and glistens in ads. The diffuse spectacle thrives off the gadget and the gimmick and indulges in the commodity, in BlackBerrys and cell-phones, in iPods and SUVs, in accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake. With the diffuse spectacle, commodity logistics reach "moments of fervent exaltation" (Thesis # 67) in which the only goal is the goal of submission. The insomnia plague is a fantastical construct invented in the mind of García Márquez, the master storyteller. All the same, it's an invention anchored in historical reality, a reality in which often "great dramas are condemned to oblivion in advance. We suffer from the plague of loss of memory. With the passage of time, nobody remembers that the massacre of the banana company workers actually took place."11 This spectacular massacre, occurring in Cienaga in December 1928, blurs fact and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, and even today nobody really knows the precise number of people killed. The strike broke out at the United Fruit Company's plantation when workers demanded written contracts, an eight-hour day and a six-day week. After a month of deadlock, with the intent of ending the strike, an army regiment was dispatched from Bogotá and soon set up machine-gun emplacements in the streets and on rooftops. Then, on Sunday December 6, late morning, they opened fire on a dense crowd of workers and their wives and children, who'd assembled in the public square after Mass, apparently to hear a speech from the governor. Amid the rattle of gunfire and incandescent chaos, people were swept away by a volley of bullets. "They were penned in," writes García Márquez, "swirling about in a gigantic whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to its epicenter as the edges were systematically being cut off all around like an onion being peeled by the insatiable and methodical shears of the machine guns" (p. 249). Perhaps 3,000 lay dead, perhaps only two or three. Perhaps there weren't any killings? Perhaps the massacre was but a dream, a popular nightmare, the ruse of history? José Arcadio Segundo, the great-grandson of José Arcadio Buendia, another of the family's anarchists, was there, and as he tried to rescue a small child in the street, he fell forward and crashed out into an unconscious state--just as the bullets were raining; hours later, he comes to, seemingly the sole survivor, covered in dried blood and face down in a darkness smelling of death, "on an endless and silent train," full of piled up corpses headed for the sea, for watery oblivion. Is he an amnesiac? Somehow, José Arcadio Segundo leaps off the train and returns to Macondo. "There must have been three thousand of them," he tells a woman afterwards. "What?" the woman replies. "The dead," José Arcadio Segundo clarifies. "The woman measured him with a pitying look. 'There haven't been any dead here'" (p. 251). When José Arcadio Segundo arrives home, the same bewildering response greets him: "There wasn't any dead."12 Later, José Arcadio Segundo stumbles around, frightened, traipsing through Macondo's deserted sodden streets searching for clues, for testimony, for anything that will confirm the drama he'd just seen with his very own eyes. Even José Arcadio Segundo's brother, Aureliano Segundo, doesn't believe José Arcadio's version of the massacre nor his spectral trip on the death train. And then, a few days later again, amid a tropical downpour that doesn't seem to want to relent, José Arcadio Segundo finally reads an official proclamation: the military authorities and striking workers had obtained agreement; on the Sunday of protest everybody returned home, peacefully; the workers accepted new conditions and for three days there were public festivities. This version, which was "repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand," put the event to bed, and bore the objective seal of approval: "there was no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the Banana Company was suspending all activity until the rain stopped." "'You must have been dreaming. Nothing happened in Macondo,'" an army officer insists, trying to placate a still-perplexed José Arcadio Segundo, "'and nothing ever will. This is a happy town'" (p. 252). * García Márquez 's portrayal of the insomnia plague, and his version of the Banana workers' massacre, are particularly fascinating and effective because they pinpoint how the reality of historical truth and the reality of (possible) subjective illusion become one and the same . There is no real way to tell either apart. We never know whether José Arcadio Segundo's version is a dream, whether it rests on a figment of his own febrile imagination, nor whether he's an insomniac turned amnesiac; neither are we sure of the official version, of everybody's insistence that "nothing happened in Macondo," that there were no dead. Thus fact and fiction mutually conspire, and negate each other; the lived becomes a representation, the representation a lived. How can we accept the authenticity of one version over another? Is there such a thing as "authentic" anymore? Aren't both versions as authentic as they are inauthentic? The blurring of one with the other, the inauthentic with the authentic, fact with fiction, the real with the meditated image, also speaks volumes about Debord's society of the spectacle, about how it has possessed us body and mind, how it now begets a different agenda for Marxist politics. Fetish Reality, the Reality of Fetishism In The Society of the Spectacle , Debord uses time-honored Marxist tools to describe and analyze a new phase of capitalist reality, one that seems to have gone immaterial, to have decoupled itself from its material thing-base, and rematerialized as an image, as a spectacle. Debord's book is experimental, is itself a piece of détournement , so perhaps it's hardly surprising that in mobilizing Marx he'd at the same time détourn Marx. Debord is adamant that the spectacle lies "at the heart of the unrealism of real society" (Thesis #6). This is a difficult concept for Marxists to get their heads' around. For what it suggests is that the separation between appearance and essence (Marx's trusty definition of science) has, like a piece of elastic, been stretched to such a degree that these two opposing ends of reality have now snapped and reformed as one. An epistemological duality has recoiled into an ontological unity: essence really is appearance, and appearance really is essence. Society's image of itself is the real reality of society, its reality is an image; society's form is society's content, its content is its form. It says nothing more than this. It is somehow fetishistic even to believe there's a fetishism anymore. A society hyper-separatedis a non-separated society, a society of "separation perfected." Over the years, Marxists have scrambled to retain their steely grip on Marx's celebrated concept of fetishism, the notion that there's "absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this."13 This, we are told, is what makes us stand apart from (and above) our bourgeois antagonists: with our analysis of fetishism we Marxists--beginning with Marx himself, continuing down the line with Lukács, and more recently reinforced by John Holloway-- can claim to cast a superior eye on real reality; indeed, we can see behind society's illusions, behind relations between things, can strip off these illusions, can unmask them to reveal the rational kernels lurking within mystical shells. But does Marxism really need to function that way anymore? Why does it still cling defensively to what is a conceptual banality? In an otherwise provocative book, Change the World Without Taking Power , Holloway too falls back on the solid old crutch of fetishism, devoting pages and pages of padded and largely irrelevant discussion to Marx's concept of fetishism, to the "tragic dilemma" (why "tragic"?).14 Holloway's thesis is a good and suitably magical one: how to struggle to change the world without taking power, how "the struggle to liberate power-to is not the struggle to construct a counter-power, but rather an anti-power, something that is radically different from power-over."15 Yet he beds his politics down in a dubious ontological realm, in the idea of "a fetishized world that confronts us," a reality in which there's a separation between the doing and the done. Marx, for Holloway, remains someone who can expose bourgeois sleights of hand to reveal the hidden world of capitalist alienation, demonstrating the "root" cause of people's subjugation and domination. Does Holloway really believe that? Do people around the world need Marx to reveal the root of their misery, to correct the illusions and lacunas of their vision of everyday reality? Don't they know this all too well themselves? Aren't they bludgeoned by a system that's all too obvious to them, that has absolutely no desire to conceal anything because it's based on raw, naked and highly visible power, on a brute force that doesn't need unmasking by anyone? Isn't it more the case that this ruling force wallows in the obviousness of its shenanigans because it knows that its opposition is too weak and feeble to stand up to its power? From this perspective, radical theory and radical struggles shouldn't concern themselves with repairing what realist Marxists like Holloway tell us has been sundered: addressing the ontological separation between the doing and the done is not a matter of "screaming," nor is it anything to do with discovering some real truth and rationality in an irrational and perverted world; rather, it's about moving out of this system, beyond it, outside of it, attacking it for sure, but by inventing something else, proposing something new. One of the problems with Marx's concept of fetishism is that it moves in exactly the opposite direction to radical politics: it's a theory that is retrospective , that tries to retrace and reveal past actions and processes, social relations that have since become materialized in things. Yet radical politics needs to operate on a different continuum: it needs to shift forwards, needs to be about trying to become at least the worst of architects, imagining something in the present tense while struggling to realize it in the future, prospectively . The apathy and alienation people experience and endure across the globe is rarely based on theoretical ignorance; it's based on hopelessness and disempowerment, on our very own modern form of insomnia: it's that which renders us senseless contemplative beings .16 Contemplation can sometimes be a knowing and accepting resignation, itself a quiet form of resistance, a dogged understanding that helps people survive, cope each and every day. But it can also condemn people to live the way the residents of Macondo were condemned to live when the insomnia plague broke out: in an eternal present that not only has no historical past, but, more crucially, has no dreams of any future either, of any alternative tomorrow or day after tomorrow. The spectacular society we inhabit today, then, isn't so much an opaque world of fetishized social relations as a society of overtly publicized images, beamed out everywhere and always; it's not a disguised world so much as a banal world, an obvious flattened reality in which we've all become permanent spectators, leading our lives in front of one giant television screen. We're now passive participants in a video game we ourselves have downloaded. We're permanently gawking at two-dimensional high-tech screens that have absolutely nothing else behind them. They are simply what they are: flat and two-dimensional, bereft of content. When kids see other kids, they play and amuse themselves together through collective activity, invent games and play act using their imagination; if somebody turns on a TV and places them in front of it, all dynamic activity ceases; kids no longer relate to other kids, no longer interact creatively with their surroundings. And they always lose the sparkle in their eyes they have when playing joyously with other children. Adults are no different. When we're confronted with TV screens, with spectacular images, whether in pubs, cafés, airport lounges, living rooms, or in our brains, we tune in but really switch off. This is a social contagion: the TV screen is our social reality. In response, Magical Marxism shouldn't be construed as a romantic Rousseauian plea for a lost non-separated world: it's a call to get rid of these TV screens in life, to live life not watching digital and distant images but engaging actively with something immediate , a call to resist the producers of these images, to dethingify oneself. In fact, if anything, for Magical Marxists this is quite the reverse of repairing a duality: it's again to create a separation, a separation between form and content, between surface image and real underlying texture. It's a call to bring a new content to life, to introduce deep texturing into something that's been flattened. It is to dream of and struggle for a third, fourth and perhaps even fifth dimension to reality. It's precisely in this vein that Jacques Rancière recently criticized Debord--wrongly, I believe--suggesting that the latter's fidelity to the young Marx is but proof of his innate romanticism, of his vision of the truth based on "non-separation."17 But Rancière caricatures Debord's critique of the spectacle without really engaging with its complexity. And he scoffs at Debord's radical model of action , of the cavalry charges and sweeping assaults made by proletarian warriors. In the wake of 1968, Debord released a film version of The Society of the Spectacle ; the rapid-fire captions, disarming classical music, footage of moody Paris vistas, exaggerated parodies of battle scenes and cavalry charges from old American Westerns, make it visually stunning and jarring. Isn't Debord right to invoke action instead of contemplative distance? His invocation of action isn't predicated on overcoming separation, or on some simple romantic humanism of yesteryear; it's more because Debord knows, as we now know, that there's really no separation anymore, that image and "real" reality are essentially one and the same thing. For us sensuous beings, however, for us magical humanists, action and active practice aren't just invoked to overcome contemplation, to help us feel alive; they're mobilized as creative ways to invent new truths about the world, to give us hope against hope, and to actively create a separation in which feeling can still be felt. Subverting Reality Fortunately, throughout our spectacular age, our 40-year solitude, we've always had people hell bent on staving off our insomnia plague, hell bent on resisting this image reality and the reality of its images; we've had our own Colonel Aureliano Buendias who've been inspired by strange gypsies, who've tried to uphold the power of dreams, dreams of a new future, of Macondos arising out of wild swampland. Indeed, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the introverted soul spurred into militant direct action, is something of a twenty-first-century radical role model, a character who can assist us in our fight against the slipping away of reality, against its colonization, because the colonel is somebody who invented another reality out of his own subversive will. Thus he doesn't reveal or discover anything through theory; he creates, he pioneers a new trail for a reinvigorated, less defensive kind of political practice. Even at the time of the insomnia plague, the young Aureliano conceived a formula to resist , to help protect against any loss of memory: a system of marking things with their respective names, using little pieces of paper pasted on every object. As a young adult, and like a lot of progressive people, he was bookishly smart and withdrawn. He absorbed himself in his workshop, making little gold fishes, and frequently lost himself in poetry composition. But because of his humanitarian feelings, Aureliano sympathized with the left-leaning Liberal Party; even so, "he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand" (p. 85). When Aureliano sees his conservative father-in-law tamper with the ballot boxes after the town's election, he knew then he had witnessed first-hand, very palpably, the sham of party political democracy. Though again, like many leftists, Aureliano never struck anyone as a man of action; he was, it seemed, "a sentimental person with a passive character, and a definite solitary vocation" (p. 88). But then, one Sunday morning, drinking his habitual mug of black coffee, just as the Liberal opposition to Conservative rule was escalating, and just as Macondo was steadily becoming a Tory garrison town, Aureliano tells his friend Gerineldo Márquez in a voice the latter had never heard before: "Get the boys ready. We're going to war." "With what weapons," Gerineldo wonders, incredulously. "With theirs," Aureliano replies (p. 89). From that point on, dressed in black high boots with spurs, in an ordinary denim uniform without insignia and with a rifle slung over his shoulder, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the commanderin- chief of the revolutionary forces, the anarchist warrior and man most feared by the government, was born; he'd reinvented his own radical self. Years later: on his waist he wore a holster with the flap open and his hand, which was always on the butt of the pistol, revealed the same watchful and resolute tension as his look. His head, with deep recessions in the hairline, seemed to have been baked in a slow oven. His face, tanned by the salt of the Caribbean, had acquired a metallic hardness. He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. (pp. 132-3) When Ursula, his mother, saw him then, she said to herself: "Good Lord, now he looks like a man capable of anything." "'Whatever you decide, will be done, Aureliano,' she sighed. 'I always thought and now I have proof that you're a renegade'" (pp. 133-4). One is struck by the strange affinity between Colonel Aureliano Buendia and the young Situationist Guy Debord, the 30-something author of The Society of the Spectacle , with their joint penchant for militant action and muckraking, for restrained austerity and exuberant spontaneity; their melancholic dispositions and occasional ruthlessness with friend and foe alike; their elusiveness and charismatic presence; and their fervent belief that politics was another form of war, that war was political activity, an art-form of resistance, a game of strategy, of attack and defense that should be studied as well as practiced. Colonel Buendia fought with the Duke of Marlborough, the early eighteenth-century English general, in his pocket, just as Debord, like Lenin, Mao, and Trotsky before him, had recourse to the German strategist and tactician of war, Carl von Clausewitz, whose On War (1832-37) was much scrutinized by the Situationist revolutionary.18 Debord agreed with, but reversed, Clausewitz's oft-cited phrase that "war is merely a continuation of politics with other means." As for Colonel Buendia, the Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) was his great mentor on the art of war, the general who became famous in the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14), who made war more offensive, more mobile, by searching out battle, by planning surprise attacks and lightning invasions, and who inspired the colonel in the "certainty that he was finally fighting for his own liberation and not for abstract ideals, for slogans that politicians could twist left and right according to circumstances." It was this principle that "fuelled him with an ardent enthusiasm" (p. 143). In war, defense is often the safest and strongest ploy; "an army that is hard pressed on all sides," Clausewitz says, "flees to their castle in order to gain time and wait for a better turn of events. By their fortifications ... [they] sought to ward off the storm clouds of war."19 And yet, as important as defense is, it's usually only offense, or counter-offense, that can win the battle and destroy any adversary. Thus, "the game of war" is, perhaps above all, a game of movement : a game of tactics and chance, of foresight and feign, of defense and attack, just like political activism and practical militancy. "One can occasionally win," Debord reckons, "without battle or without partial combats, and even win by a sole maneuver. One can also win by a single frontal attack without maneuvers. But outside of these two extreme cases, one normally employs a series of maneuvers, combats and a principal battle followed by new maneuvers." "One must not spare troops or maneuvers," he says, "nor dispense them vainly. Those who want to keep all will lose all. However, those who let themselves lose more than their adversary will no longer be able to contain the adversary."20 Debord's and Colonel Buendia's penchant for battle arises from a marked dislike for career politicians and their feeble rhetoric about social change. "We're wasting time," the colonel says, trying to negotiate with mealy-mouthed officials in their suits and ties. "We're wasting time while the bastards in the party are begging for seats in congress" (p. 115). The colonel hates those soft politicians and lawyers leaving the presidential office each morning, taking refuge in their dreary cafés to speculate over what the president had meant when he'd said yes, or no, or something quite different again. For Debord, too, active engagement is the only viable alternative to the bankruptcy of representative democracy, to the paralysis of contemplation, to the alienation of the spectator: "the more we contemplate," he says, "the less we live" (Thesis #30). Action brings us to life, gives meaning to our lives, and helps us become subjects in the creation of this life, masters of our own activity and body. Debord follows Marx's Fifth Thesis on Feuerbach: "Feuerbach," says Marx, with his own emphasis, "not satisfied with abstract thinking , wants sensuous contemplation ; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical , as human-sensuous activity."21 Debord's and the colonel's modus operandi expresses itself through such human-sensual activity, through a radicalism much more extra-political, much more intensely militant at the level of everyday life, at the level of everyday being: it's a struggle and resistance that's non-negotiable, invariably romantic and innately poetic . Their poetic sensibility, their radical actions, their unflinching attitudes to struggle and fighting, destabilize accepted notions of respectability and restraint; both men proclaim, in their separate ways, through their respective détournements and fantastical transformations of reality, an absolute non-conformity, a sneaky revolutionary practice. These days, we ourselves must go about our militant business, our militant politics, furtively, sneakily, in a manner that is attentive and unobserved, forever mindful of traps, of the innumerable ways in which present society can catch us out, ambush us, seduce us, buy us off somehow and enervate us. Above all, we must permanently sneak about if we're to remain faithful to ourselves, if we're to pursue, without let up, some kind of secret war of position. And those trails we need to stake out, those passageways through which we construct our own radical life, our life-project, will always likely be narrow , tiny fissures, slim cracks in the fragile superstructure of the spectacle, brief moments of chance, of possibility for radical action and freedom. What's inspiring here is how many people have never stopped sneaking about through narrow trails of permanent subversion, staking out their own trails; and these are "ordinary" men and women, too, forging a new alternative lingua franca between themselves. They're people who've had enough of the garbage the ad-man promises them, and they're achieving incredible things through their struggles in lonely, abandoned rural spaces as well as in teeming, over-priced urban places, in shantytowns and in raw jungles, in suburbs and downtowns and nowherevilles across the globe, re-appropriating and rebuilding worn-out properties, inventing life anew from breezeblock and the decaying and discarded jetsam of everyday life, out of things the rich throwaway, things that are no longer useable in the dumpster culture of modern market life. Moreover, practical mobilization here is invariably inspired by dream, by the normative desire for something different, for something more autonomous, beyond the mainstream, outside the repressive domain of law and order and capitalist consumerism--of doctoring ballot boxes to suit presidential ends. Importantly, it's no longer the spirit of negativity that dramatizes permanent subversion. These people know how messed up our world is; they've got better things to do than just critique it, than gripe about it, or waste energy analyzing what is already obvious. Their desires are to move on from denunciation and affirm something positive , to plot something constructive, an assertive ideal about how to think and act and dream. And often they are turning normative desire into an imagined reality, into a reality transformed. Just like the colonel, they aren't struggling for abstract ideals on some remote global plane, but are taking it upon themselves to create new life from the bottom up, practically. In places like the Auvergne, these people are engaged in rehabbing ancient cottages and farms, growing their own food, reenergizing old bars and restaurants, and they're transforming entire villages through meaningful and convivial political activity, beyond the hollow sloganeering of elected politicos. These people, like their counterparts in other lands, in lands faraway, are fed up with just interpreting the world and they know how they fit in (or don't fit in) to the overall system of capitalist domination. Instead, they now voice an ideal that is global in its localism, practical in its defiance of the world market, and poetic in its yearnings for the future. Such people are motivated to act precisely because of their dreams, dreams of wanting to return to the land, of living off the land, of farming organically without an organic label, of baking bread, raising goats, or inventing shoestring enterprises, of building housing and a new life. And in practically engaging with their dreams, these people discover other people en route, people with similar dreams who've likewise acted practically; in discovering how they share common values, and frequently a common enemy, they're devising new radical politics together, nurturing a new sort of social movement based around active, bottom-up-will rather than worthless handouts from above. These people act as much on instinct as on intellect; they are new rank-and-file foot soldiers waging war around "things they can touch with their own hands," just like the colonel said. And they're not afraid of getting their hands dirty either. In the process, their Macondos of the mind become real-life dream-states, hacked out of proverbial wild jungle, somehow beyond the spectacle, beyond the spectacular state. And in these fantastic democracies nobody ever gives orders with pieces of paper. Reality Lived, Reality Represented One of the most compelling lines from The Society of the Spectacle comes right at the beginning: "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" (Thesis #1). This idea is both easy and difficult to grasp: the idea that images are "at the heart of the unreality of real society" (Thesis #6), that lived reality--the reality one touches, smells, feels, and acts out-- has been materially invaded by an image to such an extent that the image becomes as real as real reality itself. The concept is easily enough understood for those of us who recognize the seductive power of the image, of corporate logos, of Big Macs and Coca-Cola, of Disneylands and Times Squares, of monopoly global media, of images of assorted Ayatollahs and Osama Bin Ladens, images that have now somehow lodged themselves deeply, almost instinctively, in the brains of everyone everywhere. On the other hand, the concept becomes trickier and more elusive when we are told, as Debord tells us, that the spectacular world is at once real and phony. The phony is real yet it is still inferior to a reality that is lived out directly as lived reality . This is difficult to comprehend because it's tough to break the immanent tautology, tough because one cannot, Debord says, "abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity." Indeed, "such a division is itself divided" (Thesis #8). Breaking through a false reality that is lived as true life, Debord says, necessitates putting some kind of practical force into action, into sustained permanent subversion. It means, perhaps more than anything else now, trying to reinvent sensual connection, to struggle for a more visceral, wholesome life-form; it means converting a negative practice into an affirmative living ideal. It means that if the spectacle is both real and fake, and if it is now pointless to draw any theoretical distinction between the two (between image-reality and representation-lived), then one must create out of practical necessity a false reality for oneself, a different sort of real falsity, a fantasy life in which one is true to oneself.22 The old Catalan bookseller near the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude is instructive here because he was sustained by "his marvelous sense of unreality" (p. 325). Nevertheless, once this wise old man started to get too serious, too analytical and nostalgic for a paradise lost, his marvelous state began to crumble, began to turn cynical and bitter , becoming contaminated by these twin sources of anti -magic. "Fuck rationality two times over," we might say, paraphrasing Colonel Aureliano Buendia's elder brother José Arcadio. Fuck it two times over because rationality has little to offer us radicals anymore. The rationality of science and the science of rationality are feeble when confronted with the power of the ruling class with their fictions and strategic recourse to partial truths they call the only objective Truth. And science is only as good as it relays evidence of these ruling truths, of the truth of its ruling class. Accordingly, should somebody today impose from above their own "rational" sense of spectacular unreality on us, Magical Marxists should counter, like the old Catalan bookseller, with a more marvelous type of unreality. If somebody tells us that pots of paint are weapons of mass destruction, we should fabricate our own war paint, and layer it all over our own reality, fill it with sparkling spontaneous energy, like a wild magical canvas from one of García Márquez's favorite artists, Wifredo Lam. On this canvas we might glimpse, as in a mirror, our own authentic image in an inauthentic world, our own primal dream-state whilst we're wide awake.23 Early Macondo, before the banana company ripped it off and the colonizer reduced it to ruins, offers us clues about the pre- and post-spectacular world, about how to live beyond the spectacle and beyond the spectacular state. Macondo had been a village founded by ordinary, intrepid people; they'd communally distributed the land, built modest adobe houses, opened up roads, "and introduced the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and without anyone having bothered them" (p. 53). No one was upset that the government hadn't helped. On the contrary, they were happy it had let them grow in peace. They hoped it would continue leaving them that way, because people "had not founded a town so that the first upstart who came along would tell them what to do" (p. 53). That first upstart was the Magistrate, Don Apolinar Moscote, who, one day, years after its founding, turns up at Macondo and announces to José Arcadio that he's the "official" representative that from now on he runs the show, and, moreover, he has a letter of authority from Bogotá to prove it. "In this town," José Arcadio counters, without losing his calm, "we do not give orders with pieces of paper." "And so that you know it once and for all," he continues, "we don't need judges here because there's nothing that needs judging" (p. 53).24 If the Magistrate wants to stay in town, as an ordinary citizen, he's quite welcome. Otherwise, "officials" aren't wanted or needed. The Magistrate says he's armed, but before he can do anything José Arcadio picks him up by the lapels and physically removes him from town. With our depersonalized institutions and mediated forms of power, it's rare that one can confront, face-to-face, one's real enemy, and rarer still that we can pick them up by the lapels and toss them out of town. Twenty-first-century power is too cowardly for that. And yet being active, immediate, and personal in one's confrontation, seeking one's enemy out and fending it off, is perhaps the best way of affirming and defending a strategy of what Henri Lefebvre called autogestion : a practice of self-management undertaken democratically by the community's own inhabitants, involving citizens more than just workers, and reorganizing life not only the workplace. Wherever autogestion exists, even if it exists only as a concept, as a hope, it stimulates and introduces its own antithesis of the state, challenges the state as a constraining force pitched above people, upon people. Autogestion is thus anti-statist and strengthens associative ties within civil society. It doesn't play by rules laid down by the state and its ruling class because it accepts different rules. By its very nature it is critical since "it radically contests the existing order, from the world of the commodity and the power of money, to the power of the state."25 Autogestion involves direct action, expresses militancy beyond established trade unions or parties, beyond anything purely reactive and defensive; it makes the magical imaginative leap from the narrow confines of a "political" revolution that Marx critiqued to the broader "social" revolution that he endorsed. It marks, in a word (and as we'll see in the next chapter), the coming of the coming insurrection . And like life at the beginning of Macondo, autogestion is born spontaneously and prospers under a "natural law"; it doesn't "baptize children or sanctify their festivals" (p. 73). And it has no need of holy men either, nor of their images, because "no one will pay any attention to them." People will "arrange the business of their souls directly with God, and they have lost the evil of original sin" (pp. 73-4). Curiously, Remedios the Beauty, Macondo's most dazzlingly attractive creature, embodies all the qualities of what a beautiful self-managed society might be, stripped of all repressive conventions and morals, liberated from all mediating images and with direct access to the real. Remedios the Beauty's startling "simplifying instinct" obeys no other law than the law of spontaneity.26 She wanders about the Buendia's house stark naked, in total liberty, and with her exceptional purity is able "to see the reality of things beyond any formalism" (p. 164). Even the colonel "kept on believing and repeating that Remedios the Beauty was in reality the most lucid being that he had ever known" (p. 195). She exists in a world of simple unmediated realities and was immune from the banana plague when it struck, from the invasion of spectacular United Fruit Company forces. Therein, perhaps, in its most basic form, resides the real solution for reclaiming the lived from the represented: the simplifying instinct, the revival of primitive, anarchic instincts which have been sacrificed in order to sustain the spectacular illusion of living in comfort, of living affluently. Perhaps, then, the moment is now ripe for such a different take on reality, for such magical primal action, for the invocation of the supernatural lucidity of Remedios the Beauty, especially for confronting the ugliness of global power? Perhaps the 40 years since Debord and García Márquez wrote their great books now herald a new era in which people will remember, dream again, and act upon their dreams? Perhaps, in this crisis-ridden age, people are at last prepared to fight against memory loss and stake out new narrow trails of permanent subversion, to fight for their dreams like Colonel Aureliano Buendia? Perhaps, amid the dust and rubble of the hurricane that has just swept through our ridiculous financial system, it's not too late to engage in the creation of a new utopia in which self-affirmation is possible and communities busy themselves in peace? ************* Excerpted from Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination by Andy Merrifield All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
