Guy Debord - Softcover

Jappe, Anselm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629634492 ISBN 13: 9781629634494

Publisher: PM Press, 2018

Synopsis

This is the first and best intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957–1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, perhaps the seminal book of the May 1968 uprising in France. Anselm Jappe offers a powerful corrective to the continual attempts to incorporate Debord’s theoretical work into “French theory.” Jappe’s focus, to the contrary, is on Debord’s debt to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, to Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, and more generally to left-Marxist currents of council communism. His close reading of Debord’s magnum opus supplies a superb gloss that has never been rivaled despite the great flood of writing on the Situationists in recent decades.

At the same time, Debord is placed squarely in context among the Letterist and Situationist anti-artists who, in the aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the legacy of Dada and Surrealism. Jappe’s book offers a lively account of the Situationists’ theory and practice as this “last avant-garde” made its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory and action.

Guy Debord has been translated into many languages. This PM Press reprint edition benefits from a new author’s preface and a bibliographical update.

About this title

About the Authors

Anselm Jappe was born in Bonn in 1962. He is an independent scholar currently teaching art history and political and economic theory at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Sassari in Sardinia. He is the author of several works of critical theory. A collection of his essays translated by Alastair Hemmens is The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics (London: Zero, 2017).

Donald Nicholson-Smith was born in Manchester, England and is a longtime resident of New York City. He has translated the two main programmatic works of the Situationist International, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 2012) and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (revised edition, PM Press, 2012). In his youth he was a member of the Situationist International (1965–67) in Paris and a comrade-in-arms of Guy Debord.

T.J. Clark is an English art historian and a sometime Situationist. He has taught at Harvard and Berkeley and written widely on the social character of modern art, notably in The Painting of Modern Life (1984), Farewell to an Idea (1999), and Picasso and Truth (2013).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Guy Debord

By Anselm Jappe, Donald Nicholson-Smith

PM Press

Copyright © 2018 Anselm Jappe
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-449-4

Contents

Preface to the 2018 Edition, 
Foreword by T. J. Clark, 
Translator's Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
A Note on Quotation from English Translations, 
Part 1: The Concept of the Spectacle, 
Must We Burn Debord?, 
The Spectacle-Highest Stage of Abstraction, 
Debord and Lukács, 
History and Community as the Essence of Man, 
Part 2: The Practice of Theory, 
The Letterist International, 
The Situationists and Art, 
The Critique of Everyday Life, 
The Situationists and the Sixties, 
May 1968 and After, 
The Debord Myth, 
The Spectacle Twenty Years On, 
Part 3: Theory Past and Present, 
The Situationist Critique in Historical Context, 
The Aporias of the Subject and the Prospects for Action, 
Two Sources and Two Aspects of Debord's Theory, 
Afterword to the English-Language Edition, 
Bibliography 1: Works of Guy Debord, 
Bibliography 2: Selected Works on Debord and the Situationists, 
Updated Bibliographical Note, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Concept of the Spectacle

Must We Burn Debord?

Some historical periods display a strong belief in the power of critical thought. Cases in point are the reign of Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, the Chinese emperor who organized the first book-burnings in history, or the age that condemned Anaxagoras and Socrates, or the one that burned Bruno and Vanini at the stake. As recently as twenty years ago, in the Iran of the Shah, a schoolteacher was sent to prison for life because she owned a copy of Hegel's Science of Logic.

Our own era, however — meaning the last few decades in the West — has (not unreasonably) treated its thinkers as completely harmless individuals. Many a self-proclaimed sworn enemy of the world as it is has fallen rapturously into the welcoming arms of academia or of television. Guy Debord, though, must surely be numbered among the very few people deemed quite beyond the pale. For a long time, in fact, the police showed far more interest in him than did the agencies normally responsible for the diffusion of ideas. A time came, however, when this attitude could no longer prevent the theories developed by Debord and his Situationist friends from leaving their mark, despite all obstacles, on the spirit of the times. Since then another way of obscuring Debord's thinking has come into play, namely trivialization: there must be very few present-day authors whose ideas have been so widely applied in a distorted form, and generally without attribution.

That we live in a "society of the spectacle" is acknowledged by almost everyone — by television producers, by President Jacques Chirac, by the lowliest of mere spectators. The phrase seems practically de rigueur in every discussion of the invasion of life by the mass media, every denunciation of the effects on children of being stuck from babyhood on in front of the television screen; likewise the " spectacularization" of information is universally deplored apropos of the reporting of tragic events such as wars and catastrophes. Occasionally a slightly better informed commentator will mention that these terms are derived from the title of a book by a certain Debord, who is thus by implication depicted as a kind of less well-known Marshall McLuhan. Further details are rarely supplied.

Whether such "disinformation" is to be regretted is an open question. As an Austrian socialist of the first half of this century said, "When I began reading Marx, I was surprised never to have heard his name mentioned at school. When I began to understand Marx, I was no longer surprised in the least."

When Marx's theories are reduced to a simple economic doctrine concerning the supposedly inevitable pauperization of the proletariat, it is easy enough to trumpet the error of his thought. Here is a Marx eminently suitable for classroom discussion. A similar intent informs the presentation of Debord's ideas as nothing more than a theory of the mass media; a few specific points are then summarily conceded and the remainder of what he says passed over in silence. Nor is such a juxtaposition of Debord and Marx particularly arbitrary: a period that seeks to use the collapse of Soviet bureaucratic despotism and the seeming triumph of the Western model of social organization as weapons with which to deliver the coup de grace to everything remotely related to Marxist thought could hardly fail to be irked by one of the few theories of Marxist inspiration that has been confirmed repeatedly by the developments of the last thirty years.

There is another reason, too, why an analogy between Debord and Marx is not an arbitrary one: Debord's theories cannot be properly grasped unless they are first properly located within Marxist thought in general. Some people will doubtless find this surprising and question the idea that Debord might be of interest on account of his interpretation of Marx. Was not Debord first and foremost the representative of an artistic avant-garde that sought to transcend art by means of "détournements" "dérives" play, and "unitary urbanism"? Surely the fulcrum of Situationist agitation was the "revolution of everyday life"? These things certainly played an important part, yet placing all the emphasis on them means playing down Debord's theoretico-practical activity, burying him in effect in the great cemetery of past avant-gardes, and ultimately according him no significance for the present time save that of some "father of the video neo-avant-garde" or "precursor of punk" (and these labels are not made up). This kind of incomprehension is likewise betrayed by the ever more prevalent use of the word "Situationism"— a term the Situationists themselves firmly rejected from the outset on the grounds that it perversely froze their ideas into a dogma (IS 1/13; SIA, 45).

The chief concern of this study is the relevance to the present time of the notion of the "spectacle," as developed by Debord, and its utility in the construction of a critical theory of contemporary society. The intention is to show that the spectacle is the most highly developed form of a society based on commodity production and its corollary, the "fetishism of commodities." It is hoped that the real significance of this last concept will be clarified by showing the extent to which it constitutes a key to the understanding of the world of today, where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity itself that they now threaten it with extinction through ecological catastrophe or war. We shall be touching on the pertinence for the present day of a central portion of Marx's thought, the critique of the fetishism of commodities, and in this context considering Debord's relationship to those minority strands in Marxism which have defined themselves in terms of that pivotal topic.

The main aim is to advance understanding of the theoretical issues while shedding light on the relationship between Debord and his contemporaries. Certain issues, among them the question of revolutionary organization, will be given short shrift here, because, whatever importance they once had, discussion of them now tends to resemble the byzantine debate on the human versus the divine nature of Christ. Nor shall we devote much space to anecdotal and biographical details, which have been fairly well documented elsewhere. We will, however, be considering Debord's practical activity, his life, and what might be called his "myth," for they partake of an overarching desire for a rich life full of passion, not of passive contemplation, and embody a will to destroy whatever at present makes such a life impossible.

Aside from a growing disgust for those who used Marx to justify their gulags and their nomenklatura, it seemed in the nineteen-sixties that a good many Marxist or supposedly Marxist theories were outdated. These were years when capitalism showed no signs of any inability to increase its productive forces; it even seemed quite capable of ensuring a somewhat more equitable distribution than formerly of what it produced. This gave the lie to the belief that a revolution would be made by workers suffering ever greater poverty. Critical social thought proceeded to ask the most general, most simple, yet least frequently raised question: what use was being made of the immense accumulation of means now at society's disposal? Had life, as actually experienced by ordinary individuals, become richer? The answer, clearly, was negative. Whereas the power of society overall appeared to be limitless, the individual was deprived of any control over his own world.

Unlike many others, Debord did not interpret this state of affairs as an inevitable reversal of progress, or as the fate of modern man, to which there was no alternative but an improbable return to the past. Rather, he attributed the situation to the fact that the economy had brought human life under the sway of its own laws. Consequently, no change emanating from within the economic sphere would be sufficient so long as the economy itself was not subordinated to the conscious control of individuals. In what follows, an attempt will be made to explain, on the basis of Debord's own statements, how this claim differs from similar-sounding formulations that even the Pope might utter. The modern economy and its existence as a detached sphere will be analyzed here as the consequences of the commodity, of exchange-value, of abstract labor, and of the form of value. These are the topics that need addressing.

This has in fact been the concern, since the time of the First World War, of a minority tendency within Marxism that assigns central importance to the problem of alienation, considered not as epiphenomenal but as crucial to capitalist development. It is true that this still implies a very philosophical approach; the essential point, however, is the stress laid on the fact that the economy, once it has achieved autonomy, and no matter what form its development takes, can only be antagonistic to human life. The leading figure in this strain of Marxism is the Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923), who took up and further elaborated the Marxian critique of the "fetishism of commodities" in view of the transformations that had occurred in social reality since Marx's time. Later still, armed with the arguments of both Marx and Lukács, Debord would attempt to construct a theory of a particular variant of commodity fetishism that had arisen in the interim and that he called "the spectacle."

It is thus essential, if one is effectively to grasp the ideas set forth by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), to attend closely to his sources, to which he owes more than might at first be supposed. This is in no sense to diminish the originality of Debord's work, one of whose chief merits is that it adapts the earlier theories to a very different period. As he himself remarks in his autobiographical Panegyric (1989), "Men more knowledgeable than I have explained very well the origin of what has come to pass" (Pan., 83; Eng., 77) — following which observation he quotes his own earlier paraphrase of the Marxian theory of exchange-value (SS §46). The Society of the Spectacle does not contain many quotations as such; when they do occur, their purpose is to buttress Debord's assertions rather than to acknowledge his sources. A careful reading of the book reveals, however, that Debord hews narrowly to the Lukácsian tradition in Marxism, refining certain aspects of it and sharing certain of its problems. To trace the development of the critique of alienation in Marx, Lukács, and Debord is not, however, to endorse Debord's claim, apropos of The Society of the Spectacle, that "there have doubtless not been three books of social criticism of such importance in the last hundred years" (OCC, 183–84; Films, 133).

Debord's writings are not easily susceptible of paraphrase: for one thing their stylistic elegance militates against it, and for another there is a danger of "overinterpretation." Inevitably, therefore, it will be necessary to quote a good deal. As Debord himself emphasized, he wrote little (Pan., 42; Eng., 34), and only when it seemed to him necessary. No text of his was ever written to order, at the request of an editor or under the pressure of a contractual deadline. Any attempt at exegesis must confront the problem that Debord's work, for all its succinctness, claims to have said everything essential, explicitly refusing interpretation and demanding to be followed, so to speak, to the letter. For a very long time Debord approved of no reading of his thought that was not strictly literal, indeed tantamount to a pure reproduction of the original text.

The Spectacle — Highest Stage of Abstraction

The concept of "the society of the spectacle" is often taken to refer exclusively to the tyranny of the television and other such means of communication. For Debord, however, the "mass media" are but a "limited" aspect of the spectacle — "its most stultifying superficial manifestation" (SS §24). Invasion by the means of mass communication is only seemingly a deployment of instruments that, even when badly used, remain essentially neutral; in reality the operation of the media perfectly expresses the entire society of which they are a part. The result is that direct experience and the determination of events by individuals themselves are replaced by a passive contemplation of images (which have, moreover, been chosen by other people).

This perception is at the heart of all Debord's thinking and action. In 1952, when he was twenty years old, he called for an art that would create situations rather than reproduce already existing situations. Five years later Debord's founding platform for a Situationist International (SI) contained a first definition of the spectacle: "The construction of situations begins beyond the modern collapse of the notion of spectacle. It is easy to see how closely the very principle of the spectacle, namely non-intervention, is bound to the alienation of the old world" (Rapp., 699). The twelve issues of Internationale Situationniste (1958–69) attest to the increasing importance assumed by the notion of the spectacle in Situationist thinking. Its systematic analysis, however, awaited the appearance, in 1967, of the 221 theses that constitute Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

In contrast to the first stage of the historical development of alienation, which may be described as a downgrading of "being" into "having," the spectacle is characterized by a subsequent downgrading of "having" into "appearing" (SS §17). Debord's analysis is based on the everyday experience of the impoverishment of life, its fragmentation into more and more widely separated spheres, and the disappearance of any unitary aspect from society. The spectacle consists in the reunification of separate aspects at the level of the image. Everything life lacks is to be found within the spectacle, conceived of as an ensemble of independent representations. As an example here, Debord evokes celebrities, such as actors or politicians, whose function it is to represent a combination of human qualities and of joie de vivre — precisely what is missing from the actual lives of all other individuals, trapped as they are in vapid roles (SS §60–61). "Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle" (SS §25), and individuals, separated from one another, can rediscover unity only within the spectacle, where "images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream" (SS §2). Individuals are reunited solely "in [their] separateness" (SS §29), for the spectacle monopolizes all communication to its own advantage and makes it one way only. The spectacle speaks, "social atoms" listen. And the message is One: an incessant justification of the existing society, which is to say the spectacle itself, or the mode of production that has given rise to it. For this purpose the spectacle has no need of sophisticated arguments; all it needs is to be the only voice, and sure of no response whatsoever. Its first prerequisite, therefore, and at the same time its chief product, is the passivity of a contemplative attitude. Only an individual "isolated" amidst "atomized masses" (SS §221) could feel any need for the spectacle, and consequently the spectacle must bend every effort to reinforce the individual's isolation.

The spectacle has two main foundations: "incessant technological renewal" and the "integration of State and economy." And in its most recent phase it has three main consequences: "generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present" (Comm., 22; Eng., 11–12).

The spectacle is thus not a pure and simple adjunct to the world, as propaganda broadcast via the communications media might be said to be. Rather, it is the entirety of social activity that is appropriated by the spectacle for its own ends. From city planning to political parties of every tendency, from art to science, from everyday life to human passions and desires, everywhere we find reality replaced by images. In the process, images end up by becoming real, and reality ends up transformed into images.

Such images, furthermore, are necessarily distorted. For if on the one hand the spectacle is society in its entirety, at the same time it is also a part of society, as well as the instrument by means of which this part comes to dominate the whole. The spectacle does not reflect society overall; it organizes images in the interest of one portion of society only, and this cannot fail to affect the real social activity of those who merely contemplate these images.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Guy Debord by Anselm Jappe, Donald Nicholson-Smith. Copyright © 2018 Anselm Jappe. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1629634492
• ISBN 13: 9781629634494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224