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href="https://www.e-flux.com/notes/506238/a-sick-planet">e-flux.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">A Sick Planet - Notes - e-flux</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Guy Debord</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">16-21 minutes</div>
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<p><em>Written by Guy Debord in 1971, this essay was
intended for publication in </em>Internationale
Situationniste 13<em>, which never appeared due to the
group’s dissolution. It was first published in the
collection </em>La planète malade<em> (Gallimard,
2004), which was translated into English by Donald
Nicholson-Smith and published by Seagull Books in</em>
<em>2008</em>. <em>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</em>. </p>
<p>***</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Backward-looking gas-bags continue to waffle about
(against) the <em>aesthetic</em> 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, <em>pace</em>
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 <em>already</em>
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 <em>material
existence</em>. 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 <em>holds it fast</em>—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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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 <em>scientific certainty</em>. 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<em> sick
planet</em>. A society that has not yet achieved
homogeneity, and that is not yet self-determined, but
instead <em>ever more</em> 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 <em>it can no longer develop the forces of
production</em>—and this, not in a quantitative sense,
as many have taken it, but rather in a <em>qualitative</em>
one.</p>
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