Guy Debord

205 Pages·2011·4.22 MB·English

Guy Debord
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
with a Foreword by T. J. Clark
and a New Afterword by the Author
Anselm Jappe
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
i
r /
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1993, ]995, 1999 by Anselm]appe
English translation copyright © 1999 by the
Regents of the University of California
Foreword copyright © 1999 by T. J. Clark
Original Italian edition published in 1993 by
Edizioni Tracce, Pescara, Italy. Revised edition,
in French, published in 1995 by Via Valeriano,
Marseilles.
Lihrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
lappe, Anselm, 1962-
[Guy Debord. Englishl
Guy Debord / Anselm ]appe; translated from
the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith; with a
foreword by T. J. Clark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-21204-5 (alk. paper).
-ISBN 0-520-2I205-3 (pbk. : alk paper)
Debord, Guy, 1931- 2. Radicals
1.
France-Biography. I. Title.
HN440.R3 D43613 1999
303·48'4-dc21
[bl 98-37465
eIP
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
The paper used in this publication meets the mini
mum requirements of ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992
e
(R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
/-( c 316
~IU /Iv,! J 000 - 1J.~ 1.'$
Contents
Foreword by T.}. Clark / vii
Translator's Acknowledgments / xi
Abbreviations / xiii
A Note on Quotation from English Translations /
XVII
Part 1: The Concept of the Spectacle
Must We Burn Debord? /
I
The Spectacle-Highest Stage of Abstraction I 5
Debord and Lukacs I 19
History and Community as the Essence of Man I 3
I
Part 2: The Practice of Theory
The Letterist Interna tiona I / 45
The Situationists and Art I 63
The Critique of Everyday Life I 72
The Situationists and the Sixties I 81
May 1968 and After I 99
The Debord Myth / 105
The Spectacle Twenty Years On I II7
Part 3: Theory Past and Present
The Situationist Critique in Historical Context I 125
The Aporias of the Subject and the Prospects for Action / 135
Two Sources and Two Aspects of Debord's Theory I 148
Afterword to the English-Language Edition / 161
Bibliography I: Works of Guy Debord I 169
Bibliography 2: Selected Works on Debord and the Situationists I 175
Index / 181
L
Foreword
A book about Guy Debord-and Anselm Jappe's is far and away the
best we have so far, I think-ultimately stands or falls by what it has to
say about two interlinked puzzles that stand at the heart of Debord's
life and work. Such a book.need not spell out these puzzles exactly as I
do (you will see that lappe's terms are different), but I believe it ought
to be driven and haunted (as Jappe's undoubtedly is) by a similar sense
that broad questions about the nature of Debord's achievement con
stantly come up and get harder to answer the more unavoidable they
seem. The questions are these. First, how are we to understand the ob
vious (but scandalous) fact that in Debord's case politics was largely
writing-that it turned on the building of an inimitable polemical and
expository style, assembled over decades, born from a series of engage
ments with, on, and against the French language? Second, what does it
mean that this, the only political writing of our time-the only such writ
ing to have a chance of surviving its circumstances, I believe, the writ
ing that will be seen by future ages to have kept the possibility of politics
alive-issued from a situation so thoroughly at odds with the century,
or with most of the terms in which the century chose to present itself?
Why was distance and embattlement, of which Debord was the ultimate
exponent, so often the source of insight and sanity in his case, not "par
adise for a sect"? What does it tell us about the age that its true voice
its adequate description-came so exultantly from the margins?
Because Jappe succeeds in posing these two questions concurrently,
and knows full well that answering one of them involves answering both,
he manages to talk about Debord's achievement as one of voice, or lan
guage, without falling in with those in France who have been trying since
Debord's death, and even before it, to turn him into "a master of French
prose." At all events, the maneuver is futile. For a start, part of the work on
the language Debord was involved in turns on an agonized, and deeply
funny, running battle with the notions of mastery and Frenchness lurk
ing in the phrase above-"mastery" equaling "Frenchness," which in
vii
f/.:
viii Foreword
turn equals clarity, authority, classical balance, skeptical levity, etc. A
great deal of the agony/comedy in Debord's prose is provided by the
business of its continually swallowing, and half-regurgitating, mon
strous Hegelian, un-French, unclear turns of phrase and thought-so
that the reader is typically plunged, in a sentence or two, from icy Retz
or La Rochefoucauld aphorisms, shining with hate-filled economy, on
to smothering, fuzzy (inspiring) rigmarole, full of unrepentant dialecti
cal tricks, like the best bits of Feuerbach or the young Marx. (And there
is no "like" about it a lot of the time: the quotations and paraphrases
are verbatim. ]appe tracks many of these down.) This is "writing," sure
enough. I'd be inclined to say great writing. But it was not done by some
one who was only or essentially a writer (or a master of French prose),
any more than he was an "artist," "filmmaker," "politician," or even
"revolutionary." All of these identities, Debord never tired of telling us,
are what now stand in the way of the activities they once pointed to.
Political writing of the highest order is rare. Moments at which a par
ticular language is opened to a further range of possibilities-a new tone,
a new conception of human purposes, a sharper or wilder rhetorical as-
. cent-in any case happen infrequently. And moments at which this open
ing depends on the creation of a specifically political voice, rather than
an ethical, lyric, or epic one, are truly few and far berween. The Rousseau
of the Discourses would be one, Burke in the Reflections another. (The
Debord-Rousseau comparison is inescapable, I think, even down to the
confidence with which right-thinking commentators go on trying to re
duce the politics of both to personal deficiency, thinking that doing so
will lay the politics finally to rest. That never quite seems to happen.) But
the fact that both my points of comparison come from the late eigh
teenth century only puts the Debord puzzle in sharper relief. For Burke
and Rousseau were working with a political imagery and argumenta
tion already formed and enriched by many others, in a previous half
century's conversation. They had seen the imagery and argumentation
taken up in actual political practice, by despots and revolutionaries, and
put to the test of reality. The terms of the conversation had changed con
stantly as a result. In a word, they were the least isolated of men. They
did not need to invent a political language-still less to wrest the possi
bility of one from a surrounding farrago of lies and soundbites. They did
not live in the midst of a terrible, interminable contest over how best to
debauch and eviscerate the last memory-the last trace-of political as
piration. Those who complain ·of Debord's paranoia should look again
at what he was trying to do, and why he might have thought, in the
I9705 and I9805, that almost everything and everybody stood in his way.
Foreword ix
One main merit of jappe's book is that it manages to see and speak
to Debord's embattledness and isolation, and also to his being a social
animal. For no one was better, over whole stretches of his life, at mak
ing himself enough of a community for the purposes of the moment;
and if that community had nothing to do with the official "political"
culture of Sartre, Garaudy, and de Gaulle, then so much the better. Writ
ing was one social activity among others. The room on the rue Saint
jacques where The Society of the Spectacle got written was at once an
austere cell-with nothing on the shelves, I remember, but a few crucial
texts (Hegel, Pascal, Marx, Lukacs, Lautreamont's Poesies) laid open at
the relevant page-and the entryway to Debord's minuscule apartment,
through which friends and comrades continually passed. The process
was meant to be seen, and interrupted. One moment the deep, ventrilo
qual dialogue with History and Class Consciousness; the next the latest
bubble for a comics detourne, or the best insult yet to Althusser and
Godard.
Those names lead me finally to Debord's hostility to the very idea
of "representation," which everyone these days (except jappe) is sup
posed to think the weirdest and most naIve part of his worldview. For
what else can there be (says everyone) besides representation? What
could Debord possibly have meant by the notions brought on in his writ
ing to represent representation's opposite-"lived experience," for in
stance, or "imagination," or, worse still, "poetry"? Do they not lead us
inevitably back to a Rousseau-and-Lukacs realm of transparency and
face-to-faceness and therefore usher in a politics of purity and purging
to match? Not necessarily, is jappe's answer. In the end, in our present
age of "information," it may even be this side of Debord's politics-for
the moment the most despised, the most outdated-that will prove the
kernel of future action. For supposing we take Debord's writing as di
rected not to anathematizing representation in general (as everyone has
it) but to proposing certain tests for truth and falsity in representation
and, above all, for truth and falsity in representational regimes. Why
should there not be an alternative to our current "totalitarian dictator
ship of the fragment"? Why is it so difficult to think (and demand and
construct) "representation" as plural rather than as singular and cen
tralized: representations as so many fields or 'terrains of activity, subject
to leakage and interference between modes and technologies, and con
stantly crossed and dispersed by other kinds of activity altogether: sub
ject, as a result, to retrieval and cancellation-to continual reversals of
direction between object and image, and image and receiver? Why should
a regime of representation not be built on the principle that images are,
x Foreword
or ought to be, transformable (as opposed to exchangeable)-meaning
disposable through and through, and yet utterly material and contin
gent; shareable, imaginable, coming up constantly in their negativity,
their non-identity, and for that reason promoted and dismantled at
will? "History," to take up one of Debord's favorite quotations from
Lukacs, "is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms
that shape the life of man."
I know that in the age of symbol management it is sometimes hard
to tell Debord's utopia apart from the one on offer from Microsoft.
But they are different, in every respect; the one is a nerveless parody of
the other; and the fact that Debord's imagining of other worlds shares
so much with that of his opponents is potentially his imagining's strong
point. It is what lets The Society of the Spectacle go on haunting the
non-world of cyberspace-until the moment, which is surely not far
off, when the bourgeoisie begins to fall out of love with the speed-up of
the last two decades, and no longer gets higher and higher on the de
tails (the gadgetry) of its own proletarianization. Political writing is al
ways instrumental as well as utopian. Debord's is no exception. Only
sometimes writing has to reconcile itself to the idea that its time of in
strumentality-its time as a weapon-lies a little in the future. Jappe's
book is true to its subject, above all, because it reads Debord, and helps
us read him, with that future in mind.
J.
T Clark
May I998
Translator's Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Bruce Elwell and John Simmons for reading the trans
lation manuscript and offering help on many points. Thomas Y. Levin
graciously supplied me with some hard-to-find documents. To Mia Ru
blowska I am indebted for all kinds of aid, tangible and intangible. Above
all I must express my gratitude to Anselm Jappe, who reviewed the text
with me word by word and displayed seemingly inexhaustible patience
in dealing with my queries. This English-language edition embodies the
author's latest revisions. Needless to say, however, all shortcomings of
translation should be laid at my door.
D. N.-S.
xi