[D66] A Sick Planet

[René Oudeweg]

e-flux.com <https://www.e-flux.com/notes/506238/a-sick-planet>


  A Sick Planet - Notes - e-flux

Guy Debord
16-21 minutes
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/Written by Guy Debord in 1971, this essay was intended for publication
in /Internationale Situationniste 13/, which never appeared due to the
group’s dissolution. It was first published in the collection /La
planète malade/(Gallimard, 2004), which was translated into English by
Donald Nicholson-Smith and published by Seagull Books in/ /2008/. /One
of his lesser-known writings, Debord’s diagnosis of the ecological
destruction wrought by capitalism—its “rapid degradation of the very
means of survival”—and the ideological maneuvers and new reformism meant
to obscure this scientific certainty has only gained in relevance/.

***

“Pollution” is in fashion today, exactly in the same way as revolution:
it dominates the whole life of society, and it is represented in
illusory form in the spectacle. It is the subject of mind-numbing
chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying writing and speech,
yet it really does have everyone by the throat. It is on display
everywhere as ideology, yet it is continually gaining ground as a
material development. Two antagonistic tendencies, progression towards
the highest form of commodity production and the project of its total
negation, equally rich in contradictions within themselves, grow ever
stronger in parallel with one other. Here are the two sides whereby a
sole historical moment, long awaited and often described in advance in
partial and inadequate terms, is made manifest: the moment when it
becomes impossible for capitalism to carry on working.

A time that possesses all the technical means necessary for the complete
transformation of the conditions of life on earth is also a time—thanks
to that same separate technical and scientific development—with the
ability to ascertain and predict, with mathematical certainty, just
where (and by what date) the automatic growth of the alienated
productive forces of class society is taking us: to measure, in other
words, the rapid degradation of the very conditions of survival, in both
the most general and the most trivial senses of that term.

Backward-looking gas-bags continue to waffle about (against) the
/aesthetic/ criticism of all this, fancying themselves clear-eyed and
modern and in tune with their times when they argue that motorways, or
the public housing of a place like Sarcelles, have their own beauty—a
beauty preferable after all to the discomforts of “picturesque” old
neighborhoods. These “realists” solemnly observe that the population as
a whole, /pace/ those nostalgic for “real” cooking, now eat far better
than formerly. What they fail to grasp is that the problem of the
degeneration of the totality of the natural and human environment has
/already/ ceased to present itself in terms of a loss of quality, be it
aesthetic or of any other kind; the problem has now become the more
fundamental one of whether a world that pursues such a course can
preserve its /material existence/. In point of fact, the impossibility
of its doing so is perfectly demonstrated by the entirety of detached
scientific knowledge, which no longer debates anything in this
connection except for the length of time still left and the palliative
measures that might conceivably, if vigorously applied, stave off
disaster for a moment or two. This science can do no more than walk hand
in hand with the world that has produced it—and that /holds it
fast/—down the path of destruction; yet it is obliged to do so with eyes
open. It thus epitomizes—almost to the point of caricature—the
uselessness of knowledge in its unapplied form.

Admirably accurate measurements and projections are continually being
made concerning the rapid increase in the chemical pollution of the
breathable atmosphere, as of rivers, streams, and, already, oceans; the
irreversible accumulation of radioactive waste attending the development
of nuclear power for so-called peaceful purposes; the effects of noise;
the pervasion of space by plastic junk that threatens to tum it into an
everlasting refuse dump; birth rates wildly out of control; the demented
vitiation of foodstuffs; the urban sprawl everywhere overrunning what
was once town and countryside; and, likewise, the spread of mental
illness—including the neurotic fears and hallucinations that are bound
to proliferate in response to pollution itself, the alarming features of
which are placarded everywhere—and of suicide, whose rate of increase
precisely parallels the accelerating construction of this environment
(not to mention the effects of nuclear or bacteriological warfare, the
wherewithal for which is already to hand, hanging over us like the sword
of Damocles, even though it is, of course, avoidable).

In short, if the scope and even the reality of the “terrors of the year
1000” are still a subject of controversy among historians, terror of the
year 2000 is as patent as it is well founded; indeed, it is now based on
/scientific certainty/. At the same time, what is happening is by no
means fundamentally new: rather, it is simply the ineluctable outcome of
a longstanding process. A society that is ever more sick, but ever more
powerful, has recreated the world—everywhere and in concrete form—as the
environment and backdrop of its sickness: it has created a/sick planet/.
A society that has not yet achieved homogeneity, and that is not yet
self-determined, but instead /ever more/ determined by a part of itself
positioned above itself, external to itself, has set in train a process
of domination of Nature that has not yet established domination over
itself. Capitalism has at last demonstrated, by virtue of its own
dynamics, that /it can no longer develop the forces of production/—and
this, not in a quantitative sense, as many have taken it, but rather in
a /qualitative/ one.

[..read on..]
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