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Regis
Debray (b
1941) Mediology Classical
political marxism, Ecole Normale Superieure, |
Another revolutionaire of the
60’s who has been influencial within the cultural turn to the post-modern.
Debray’s credentials include 3 years imprisonment for fighting alongside Che
Guevara in Bolivia.
My notes on his theoretical
writings in prison. Found in Prison writings; The time of Politics, written May
1969. These are basically orthodox Leninist Althusserianism.
This essay could be described
as a concrete appraisal of Althusser’s conception of political
overdetermination, or crisis and transition. The are heavily involved with the
Leninist idea of intervention at a particular point in the crisis of the
system. In the time of revolution, which is a kind of condensed or exaggerated
time, the correct gesture is that which operates in view of the future
development of the objective state of affairs. The slogan “peace, bread, land”
not really a simple abstraction, it is rendered possible in this kind of
straightforward message by the highest degree of complexity provided by
analysis of the concrete terms of the political situation.
Debray regards that the
revolution will always only happen in a time of crisis. However, this does not
mean that all times of crisis are necessarily bound to be revolutionary. In his
charged critique of the Hegelian speculative histories of pre-destination,
Debray targets reformism. The latter is fundamentally eschatological – “In this
business like wait for the end, for the great evening, which may be nearer or
further away but which is always certain to come finally, what we are seeing is
the old religious attitude, though hidden beneath the most profane, the most
‘scientific’ of apparatus.” (93) The goal is prefixed, time is understood
mechanistically. Loss of votes, electgoral gains are seen as set- backs or
advances. It is further the definite
determination of the kind of economic processes, that make the time of labour
fixed by the imperative of accumulation. This kind of homogeneous time is
reflected in reformist political work, ‘so victory will result from political
work as it mounts up over a longer or shorter period, in the form of the
Party’s experience, the way it becomes gradually more established, the number
of people voting for it, the solidity of its infrastructure and so on, the sum
total of which constitutes a kind of fixed capital: what the movement has accumulated
since its origins.’
So the first conception of
the ideological opiate of historical time consists of this practical conclusion
that nothing is irrecoverable.
“The second supposition runs
thus: the movement of history is determined by its end; in other words the end
is seen as fulfilling the role of the classic goal; the notion of the goal is
the cause of what is really happening, providing unity and coherence efor
thousands of local movements, with the advances, the interruptions and the
imperceptible gains through which the general movement is concretely
embodied…In other words, this self creating totalisation necessarily relates to
an ideal totality, which we consider as
though it already existed, and which functions as the supporting
guarantee of the totalisation now in progress…The ideal totality, or the idea
of totality, ensures the infallibility of the empirical process of
totalisation. Noone then (leaders, activists, even the masses) can fail in any
radical way or rather, failure can only be by default. A political mistake has
no special positive effect, only a negative one. It may slow down the process,
hamper it, set it off course perhaps, but it cannot affect its nature. Any
error made is always something inessential. The practical conclusion from this
is that nothing is irredeemable…I sum up in brief, and in necessarily
philosophical terms, the postulates of our common attitude – our minimal dose,
if you like, of opium – the political force of what may be called reformism,
which remains persistent in spite of everything, weighs heavily upon our
attitude and its weakness. ‘Reformism’ is an irresistible temptation, arising
out of our cowardice.” (96)
Much of what follows, is
rather tedious historicisation of these elements, discussion of periods of
crisis and the role of social democracy.
May 1968
“In themselves, the
barricades in the Latin Quarter were a joke. It was their concrete connection
with a symbolic period (May 1968), with an economic situation and with the
struggles of the workers, which made them politically decisive.”
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Interview
with Debray by wired;
comments on mediology |
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Bibliography |
Revolution
in the revolution The
time of politics in Prison Writings (1975 Penguin) |
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