Well beyond its own marginal activist circles, Situationism, of which Guy Debord was the central character, coloured the spirit of the times in the 1960s and had a diffuse but important influence on the movements of 1968. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which he developed a critique of consumer society, urban alienation and generalized commodity fetishism, could be read as a precursor of the 1968 movements.
Born in Paris in 1931, in 1951 Guy Debord joined the Lettrist International founded by Isidore Isou. In 1952 he created his first feature film, Howls in Favour of Sade (without images [only a screen that is either black or white]. In October that year, the first issue of the journal L’Internationale lettriste appeared and the group disrupted a Paris press conference where Charlie Chaplin was presenting his film Limelight. In 1954 Debord campaigned for abolition of the word ‘saint’ in street names and conversations. Between 1954 and 1957 he published 29 issues of the journal Potlatch. The group was briefly close to the Surrealists before violently breaking with them. In 1956, together with Gil Wolman, Debord published A User’s Guide to Détournement and Theory of the Dérive.
A 1957 meeting in Cosio di Arroscia, Italy founded The Situationist International was founded in 1957 at a meeting in Cosio di Arroscia, Italy. With Debord, a critique of art and urbanism was radicalized through readings of Marx, Lukács, Goldman and Lefebvre. In 1960, Debord signed the Manifesto of the 121 against the war in Algeria and attended meetings of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Castoriadis led him to discover council-communist authors (Korsch, Pannekoek, Mattick). The following year, however, Debord quit the group and in 1962 published Theses on the Paris Commune. In 1963, he violently attacked Lefebvre for supposedly plagiarizing the work in his own book on the Commune.
In 1966, Debord published The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy on the riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles the previous year, and The Class Struggles in Algeria. The small Situationist group in Strasbourg took over the local chapter of the student union Unef and published the anonymous pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy, written by Mustapha Khayati with advice from Guy Debord. In 1967, Debord published Society of the Spectacle with the Buchet-Chastel and Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution of Everyday Life with Gallimard in France. During the demonstrations and strikes of 1968, these writings inspired a small current, including the ‘Enragés’ at Nanterre and the ‘Conseil pour le maintien des occupations’ (Council for the Maintenance of Occupations) in the occupied Sorbonne.
In 1972, the Situationist International dissolved itself and Debord published The Real Split in the International. In 1978, he filmed In girum imus mode et consumimur igni and published A Game of War. This was followed by Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici (1985), Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) and Panégyrique, volume 1 (1989). Guy Debord committed suicide on 30 November 1994.
The question of the city
Following on from the Lettrist experiment of the early 1950s, Situationism has its origins in a critique of the degradation of art into spectacle. In 1953, Debord wrote that ‘our time is seeing the death of the aesthetic’. The retreat of the revolutionary movements of the 1930s had led to an irreversible retreat of ‘movements that tried to assert liberating innovations in culture and in everyday life’. Art, after having been ‘the common language of social inaction’, was now doomed to dissolve into the spectacle of the market economy.
The question of the city figured prominently in Situationist literature of the 1950s. Its project of ‘unitary urbanism’ was opposed to an architecture subordinated to the ‘massive and parasitic’ contemporary existence. The Situationist project proposed including travel time in working time, and envisaged a shift from traffic as a supplement to work to travel as pleasure, strolling and wandering. In this, it claimed to be inspired by the Commune, which was presented as ‘the greatest celebration of the 19th century’ from the point of view of everyday life. Modern urbanism, on the other hand, was a ‘technique of separation’, in which the city tended to ‘consume itself’ and annihilate itself in ‘new cities’ where ‘nothing would happen’: ‘the forces of historical absence begin to compose their own exclusive landscape’ (Debord, 1967).
The ghetto rebellion in Watts in 1965 gave Debord food for thought about the suburban riots that foreshadowed the explosiveness of our own suburbs. In his eyes, those were not race riots, but class riots. The ‘advertising of abundance’ encourages people to demand everything, right away. Pillage thus appears as the summary fulfilment of the communist promise to satisfy everyone ‘according to their needs’: ‘The Watts youth without a future has chosen another quality of the present’ (Debord, 1966).
But insofar as dissatisfaction itself becomes solvent and commodified, ‘blissful acceptance of what exists can also be joined by purely spectacular revolt’. The world that the spectacle makes visible is in fact ‘the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived’. The economy thus transforms the world into ‘the world of the economy’. The ‘spectacle does not sing the praises of men and their weapons’ but ‘the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world’. The spectacle is ‘the concrete inversion of life’ and ‘the official language of generalized separation’; more so, ‘the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity’, ‘the completed split inside man’. ‘The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.’
What can we hope to oppose to this absolute and completed form of alienation? Is the true revolutionary the person of leisure, as Debord wrote in Potlach? The mural slogan he is credited (not by Michel Mansion) with would seem to confirm this: ‘Ne travaillez jamais ! – Never work!’ But the separation of leisure and work is still a spectacular separation! It is capital itself which, having emptied productive work of all meaning, has endeavored to ‘place the meaning of life in leisure’, so that it is no longer even possible to ‘look upon leisure as a negation of everyday life’ (‘Perspectives For Conscious Changes in Everyday Life’, 1961). The world that the spectacle makes visible ‘is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived’, and the spectacle itself is the moment when ‘the commodity has achieved the total occupation of social life’ (Debord, 1967).
This conception of the spectacle as the supreme stage of commodity fetishism and absolute alienation neutralizes all subversive action, which is condemned to combat alienation in forms that are themselves alienated. Everything is recoverable and recuperated. This is why, wrote Debord in 1990 in a pre-posthumous confession, ‘we have to admit that there was no success or failure for Guy Debord and his excessive pretensions.’ (‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’, 1978. The successive self-dissolutions, splits and settling of accounts, culminating in solitude and suicide, thus appear to be the logical outcome of an impasse constructed in theory.
Starting from an observation of the exhaustion of Art, following the historical defeat of revolutions, the Situationist project was initially defined as a ‘science of situations’ that would borrow from psychology, urban planning, statistics and morality in order to achieve something radically new, ‘the conscious creation of situations’: ‘The new beauty will be situational, that is to say provisional and lived’ (Potlach 5, 1954). Situationism in the 1950s set out to ‘construct the situations and adventures’ from which the great civilization of the future would emerge, to explore the possibilities of an ‘ethic of dérive’ and a ‘practice of détournement’, defining dérive as a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances’ and détournement, unlike mere quotation, as ‘the fluid language of anti-ideology’.
Planetary bureaucratization
After Socialisme ou barbarie introduced Debord to the question of bureaucracy, he denounced the planetary bureaucratization of art and culture. He defined the colonial neo-bureaucracies as lumpen-bourgeoisies, ‘underdeveloped versions of the old European bourgeoisie’. He saw Boumedienne’s coup d’état in 1965 as the sign of an emerging bureaucracy as Algeria’s ruling class. Similarly, in China, the bureaucracy was said to be the sole owner of ‘state capitalism’. From this rise to planetary power, Debord concluded that ‘the error in organization is the central political error’.
In the society of the spectacle, all the actors, not just the proletarians who are shackled to work, lost their subversive capacity. He advised Mustapha Khayati to make clear in his pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life ‘our contempt for them, to remove all doubts about the contempt universally deserved by their milieu’ (Debord, 1966). Debord felt that in 1968 the students were nothing more than the rearguard of the movement. As for managers and the upper strata of the salaried workforce, they were no more than ‘the metamorphosis of the urban petty-bourgeoisie from independent producers to salaried workers’. They were ‘consumers par excellence’. As for immigration, magnified by certain Maoist currents, the ‘risk of apartheid’ had already become an inevitability, with ‘the logic of ghettos, racial confrontations, and one day bloodshed’ on the horizon (Debord, 1985). For capitalism at its spectacular stage ‘rebuilds everything in tinsel and produces incendiaries everywhere’ while ‘its setting everywhere becomes inflammable’.
The Mafia, which once appeared to be a ‘transplanted archaism’, destined to fade away in the face of the modern state, had, with the decomposition of the state, once again become a ‘modern and offensive power’ with ‘the victory of secrecy, the general resignation of citizens, the complete loss of logic and the progress of universal venality and cowardice’: ‘in the spectacular, the laws sleep’ (Debord, 1988). We have ‘already begun to put in place some of the means of a kind of preventive civil war’ and ‘emergency procedures are becoming standard procedure’. This perfect democracy was ‘itself manufacturing its inconceivable enemy, terrorism’.
A world foreclosed
Debord’s vision of the future is certainly fertile and perceptive. But the conception of the world as spectacle forecloses any possibility of strategic openness. In his view, Marx has the merit of going beyond the scientific thinking of his time to give the understanding of struggle priority over that of causal laws, and to envisage a theory of historical action as a ‘strategic theory’. Now, ‘strategy is very precisely the complete field of deployment of the dialectical logic of conflict’ (Debord, 1988). The victory of spectacle over strategy thus becomes conducive to the resurgence of a utopia conceived as ‘experimentation with solutions to current problems without concern for knowing whether the conditions for their realization are immediately given’. The revolutionary movement must become ‘an experimental movement’. But this utopia, conceived in the manner of Lefebvre as ‘a sense of the possible that is not [yet] practical’, is not that of utopian currents, most of which define themselves by their rejection of the history of socialism. They turn their backs on all strategic thinking, because ‘a state in which there is a long-term deficit in historical knowledge can no longer be strategically led’ (Debord, 1988).
Since the ‘incomplete liberation of 1944’, revolutionary policies have been in constant retreat, and the avant-garde has been transformed into a rearguard. Debord criticized Lucien Goldman for having spoken of an ‘avant-garde of absence’ to designate, in art and writing, a certain refusal of reification. What Goldman called absence is nothing other than ‘the absence of the avant-garde’. For Debord, this term is wrapped up in a nostalgia for purity and absolute novelty, giving rise to a recurrent pattern of purges and exclusions, in an illusory effort to ward off the constant threat of novelty being absorbed by mortifying fashion. The fetishization of the avant-garde as an ‘elective community’ resulted in the paranoid fear of desertion, betrayal and recuperation which all political and aesthetic sects feed on. The tragic solitude of the Debord at the end is an extreme and extremely desperate expression of this: ‘Halfway along the path of real life, we were surrounded by a dark melancholy, expressed in so many mocking and sad words, in the café of lost youth.’ And ‘we are now crossing this landscape devastated by the war that a society wages against itself and against its own possibilities’ (Debord, 1978).
9 May 2007
Published in Antoine Artous, Didier Epsztajn and Patrick Silberstein (eds), La France des années 1968, Syllepse, Paris, 2008, pp. 742-7. French orginal: www.danielbensaid.org.