Yesterday's LRB reviews Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord.

‘The SI,’ Debord writes towards the end of this volume, ‘possesses nothing – except its demand for totality.’ Philosophically as well as politically, Debord made his greatest contribution here, but in a way that has attracted the criticism of others on the left (Althusserians, Foucauldians, feminists, neo-Gramscians) ever since. I mean his theory of ‘spectacle’, which recovers Lukács on ‘the riddle of the commodity-structure’ in History and Class Consciousness (1923), first translated into French in full in 1960. ‘The problem of commodities,’ Lukács writes early in his essay, is ‘the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.’ Debord agreed, but he also understood that in consumer capitalism ‘the phantom objectivity’ of the commodity had grown exponentially, and that it had effectively merged with media-forms in such a way as to produce a world of spectacle, which he defines in his 1967 text as ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image’. This commodity-image had also proliferated like mad, colonising once protected areas of social life, and it was in these fields that the SI took up the fight – in ‘the battle for leisure’, above all – using strategies first sketched in these letters. The Situationists, Debord writes in June 1958, must indicate ‘the transition between the artistic commodity-object of today and the free experimental activity in a new dimension of culture’. But how to do so? Here as elsewhere Debord tended to swing between calls for immediate action – ‘a direct construction of a liberated, affective and practical existence’, as he puts it in On the Passage of a Few People . . . – and hopes for dialectical magic: ‘the alienating satisfactions of the spectacle can at the same time be outlines, in negative, for a planned development of affective life.’

It appears that the "demand for totality" inevitability constrains thinking. The "how to do so" may be outside any "totality", which being totalizing doesn't account for its own finitude.  ¶ 9:27 AM