Len Bracken—Debord, Adorno, Time

Len Bracken
Guy Debord—Revolutionary (1997)

...the difference between Adorno's ideas and Debord's relates less to the question of what would be desirable in itself than to the question of what is actually possible at the present moment in history. (117)

For Debord, as for Lukács, alienation arises from the predominance of the commodity system in social life; it is thus associated with industrial capitalism, and has not existed for more than about two hundred years. Within such a relatively brief period of time, changes occurring in the space of a decade may naturally assume great importance.

By contrast, the changes of a whole century can carry little weight for Adorno, whose yardsticks for measuring events are "the priority of the object" and "identity." By "exchange" he does not in the first instance mean the exchange of commodities embodying abstract labor...but rather a suprahistorical "exchange in general" that coincides with the entire ratio of the West. The antecedent here was the kind of sacrifice that sought to win the favor of the gods by means of an offering that soon become purely symbolic; this fraudulent aspect of sacrifice foreshadowed the fraud inherent to exchange. (119)

Generally I am strongly inclined towards the Long View, which Adorno represents here as against Debord's Shorter one, even if it would be easy to quibble with a few of the specifics here. The adolescent petulance and self-importance in Situationist writing can be overwhelming, and it seems that even two hundred years is quite a bit vaster than many of those young people's frame of reference. On Adorno's scale of time, rather, Capitalism cannot possibly be a new or unique problem but rather an instantiation of so many ancient problems given modern form. [Name of former roommate redacted] once attempted to stake out just such a position, which was not at all consistent with many of his other opinions, but which in and of itself was not too far off from what is being laid out here, and which I find compelling, at least as far as it goes. It is less clear to me that it is possible or profitable to, as [roommate] was implying, somehow oppose these endemic human problems while simply leaving Capitalism alone to continue to do God's work. "Exchange" is not new, but Capitalism IS built on exchange. Would a better -ism not necessarily be built on something else?

More of the same, but worth including:

One gets the general impression that for Adorno the particularity of different historical periods fades in the face of the working of certain unchanging principles that have obtained since the beginning of history, such as domination and exchange. ...the division between the thing and its concept had already begun in the animistic period with the distinction between the tree in its physical presence and the spirit that dwells within it. Logic arose from the earliest relationships of hierarchical subordination, and the identification of things by means of their ordering by kind begins with the "I" that remains identical through time. ...the same "reason" applied in the pre-Socratic period as applies today. For Adorno, therefore, it ought to be well-nigh impossible to surmount reification, for he sees it as rooted in society's very deepest structures. (119-120)

[from a notebook, 2017]