Reading Guy Debord (1967) The Society of the Spectacle (trans Knabb, K.). 2nd ed. (2012) Eastbourne, Soul Bay Press Ltd., Sussex.
Debord addresses these issues, although never ‘head-on’. He details signs of negation of the SotS (94) thus: (thesis 115, p.94):
New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically advanced countries. Although these signs are misunderstood and falsified by the spectacle, they are sufficient proof that a new period has begun. We have already seen the failure of the first proletarian assault against capitalism; now we are witnessing the failure of capitalist abundance. On the one hand, anti-union struggles of Western workers are being repressed first of all by the unions; on the other, rebellious youth are raising new protests, protests which are still vague and confused but which clearly imply a rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialized politics.
First of all we need to understand the role of negation as a struggle that says no and denies representations of the world presented as ‘truths’ that are self-evidently seen, spectacular in the full sense. These truths are turned around (see détournement p. 141, thesis 206) so that they are seen as what they are – evident falsities and lies. Herein we see the rationale of relational art which in exposing the truths of art to real and everyday relationships exposes their facticity or ‘madeness’, their nature as ideological constructions.
Although art is addressed many times – in the former as something rejected (and negated) by the young, I think the text addresses the pretensions of art-history even more head on, in analysing the function of specialised histories of culture. There are tremendous thoughts on this (not easy to decipher in the translation) in theses `182ff.’ (pp 130ff.).
Here I read ‘Art-history’ as inferred in the analysis of the object-forms of specialised cultural history. Thus:
Like philosophy the moment it achieved full independence, every discipline that becomes autonomous is bound to collapse – first as a credible pretension to give a coherent account of the social totality, and ultimately as a fragmented methodology that might be workable in its own domain. (131)
Note that art-history cannot even give a creditable account, even of ‘itself’. In fact it has life, if at all, only in the contradictory forms it contains.
The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the project of culture’s self-transcendence within total history, and its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency has linked its fate to social critique, the second to the defense of class power.
Each of these two forms of the end of culture has a unitary existence … within all the aspects of sensory representation (that is, within what was formerly understood as Art in the broadest sense of the word). … ,the critical self-destruction of society’s former common language is opposed by its artificial reconstruction within the commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of nonlife. (TH. 184f, pp.131f.)
As such art-history tends to share the features of the society of the spectacle, in ‘falsifying all social life’ in the creation of notions of an ‘illusory community’ (a community of gathered isolates – ‘loners without illusions’ p.61).
Those who collect the trinkets that have been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity indulgences – glorious tokens of the commodity’s real presence among the faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission. (TH. 67, p.60).
What is lost out of social life is the life of genuine desire replaced by mere wanting. Whereas the former relates to intersubjective consciousness, the latter only to ‘objects’. The true end of history is ‘consciusness of desire that is also desire for consciousness’ (p. 50) whose ends are emergent qualities rather than in the form of quantifiable objects, whose value is illusory. The relations of objects to ‘lies’ is important:
Thesis 143, p. 110. On ‘history’ (italics in original) turned into an object of spectacle.
‘The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history.’ … (turning to the proletariat) … ‘By demanding to live the historical time that it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable core of its revolutionary project; and each previously defeated attempt to carry out this project represents a possible point of departure for a new historical life.’
Food for thought here. Connect to:
https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2019/04/02/some-ideas-about-may-1968-from-abidor-m-2018/
Steve_Bamlett_blog 
2 thoughts on “Thinking about ‘art’ in May 1968 and the issue of an inclusive art-history (1):”