Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  Howlings entered the limelight as cinematic anti-cinema. ‘An important squad of Lettrists’, one voice utters, ‘constituting thirty members, all donned in a dirty uniform which is their only truly original trademark, will unload at the Croisette with the firmly decreed desire of indulging in some scandal capable of drawing attention to themselves.’39 ‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe’, says another. Then, towards the film’s end:

  ‘I have nothing more to say to you./ After all the responses at inopportune moments, and youth getting older, night falls again from on high./ SILENCE FOR THREE MINUTES, DURING WHICH THE SCREEN STAYS DARK./ We live as lost children, our adventures incomplete./ SILENCE FOR TWENTY-FOUR MINUTES, DURING WHICH THE SCREEN STAYS DARK.’40

  One of the most enduring ideas from Howlings was a throwaway refrain: ‘The art of the future will be the shattering of situations or nothing.’ Indeed, it was around this notion of ‘situations’ that in July 1957, in a bar in a remote Italian village called Cosio d’Arroscia, Debord and delegates from assorted fringe organizations met ‘in a state of semi-drunkenness’. Present at the proceedings, representing the International Lettrists, were Debord and Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Walter Olmo; Elena Verrone and Piero Simondo propped up the Imaginist Bauhaus’s flank; Ralph Rumney, with his girlfriend Pegeen Guggenheim in tow, did their bit for London’s Psychogeographical Association. There and then, by five votes to one, with two abstentions, the Situationist International (SI) became a historical fact; a 25-year-old Debord assumed the mantle of power, demolishing all opposition, friend and foe alike, who would almost immediately feel the wrath of his penchant for expulsion. ‘To the door’ went ‘the old guard’ like Isou, whose ‘ambitions are too limited’ and whose ‘individual morality retrograde’.41 So, too, would go Rumney later for failing to deliver a report on Venice’s psychogeography. (It would eventually surface half a century later as a photographic novel called The Leaning Tower of Venice.)

  The SI reacted against bourgeois culture and politics on the one hand and the sterile, austere functionalism of high modernism on the other. Henceforth they engineered a concerted attack on two fronts. Bourgeois and modernist high culture eviscerated the city; each left its debilitating imprint on the built environment and on social space; each was pathological to the human spirit and to genuine freedom. In the modern city, Logos had triumphed over Eros, order over disorder, organization over rebels. And the old Communist Eastern bloc cities were reviled as much as their capitalist counterparts.

  Debord and fellow Situationists in Munich, 1959 (from left to right: Har Oudejans, Constant, Guy Debord and Armando).

  Le Corbusier’s machine aesthetic and ‘Radiant’ utopia likewise received the thumbs down, as did the rigid brutalism of the Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM). Ditto the notorious grands ensembles barrack blocks; ditto Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, touted as one of the pinnacles of the Modern Movement. All of these efforts, one way or another, embraced the Cartesian masterplan: strict zoning laws and spatial compartmentalization created veritable Alphavilles of the body and mind. In response, the Situationists defended the urban mix, wanted to get beyond the rational city, strove to reassert daring, imagination and play in social life and urban culture. And crucial therein was the notion of ‘constructed situations’.

  Play, as well as politics, was fundamental to any Situationist situation. Play nourished politics, and political man was very much Homo ludens. The idea had been brilliantly expressed by the Dutch historian and medieval specialist Johan Huizinga, whose insights Debord had studied in the early 1950s and tried to make part of Situationist culture. ‘The latent idealism of the author’, Debord wrote of Huizinga in issue 20 of Potlatch (30 May 1955), ‘doesn’t devalue the basic contribution his work constitutes.’ ‘It is now a question’, he added, ‘of converting the rules of play from an arbitrary convention to a moral foundation.’42 In Homo ludens, originally published in 1938, Huizinga reckoned that ‘Man the Player’ deserved a rightful place in our nomenclature alongside Homo sapiens and Homo faber (man the maker).

  One of the major characteristics of play, Huizinga said, was its free nature. Play was somehow about freedom, about stepping out of real life, entering a sphere of activity with its very own disposition. Therein lay play’s strength. ‘It adorns life’, he wrote, ‘amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual – as a life function – and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value.’43 Combat and war, Huizinga believed, also had play elements, which sparked Debord’s own ludic and combative passions. In the Middle Ages, flamboyant tournaments, jousting and duels involving quixotic knights with chivalric codes of honour were rituals redolent of the play-spirit.

  Fighting, as a cultural function, always presupposes limiting rules, and it requires, to a certain extent anyway, the recognition of its play-quality. We can only speak of war as a cultural function so long as it is waged within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals or antagonists with equal rights; in other words its cultural function depends on its play-quality.44

  ‘Situations’ were typically slippery and similarly playful Situationist inventions, as much metaphorical as material, with their own ‘war game’ rules and mentality. In a way, that’s what gave them their power. Situations were meant to be fleeting happenings, moving representations, the ‘sum of possibilities’. They’d be something lived, but also ‘lived-beyond’, full of possibilities. Debord and the Situationists wanted to ‘construct’ new situations, new life ‘concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambience and a game of events’. ‘New beauty can only be a beauty of situation.’ Situations would be practical and active, designed to transform context by adding to the context, assaulting or parodying context, especially one where the status quo prevailed. What would emerge was a ‘unitary ensemble of behaviour in time’.

  Here time becomes ephemeral: every situation became a ‘passageway’ somewhere into an imminent present without a future. In fact, situations were, according to Debord’s film of 1959, ‘the passage of some people through a rather brief period of time’. ‘The neighbourhood’, announces a male voice-over, ‘was made for the unfortunate dignity of the petite bourgeoisie, for respectable occupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street.’45 Old documentary footage of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the fog is shown; elsewhere, there are panoramic views of Les Halles, whose old market square overflows by day with people and vendors pushing little carts but becomes eerily melancholy at night and at dawn. Instead of just darkened screens, this time Debord’s dialogue and images are interspersed with white screens. ‘Everything being linked’, said a voice,

  we needed to change everything by a unified struggle, or nothing. We needed to reconnect with the masses, but around us is sleep… our life is a voyage – in winter and in the night – we seek our passage … There was the fatigue and cold of morning in this well-travelled labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a reality of illusions through which we had to discover the possible richness of reality.46

  Situations tried to relay ambience, reunifying what had previously been sundered. They were group preoccupations reasserting texture and quality to place, glorifying free play. Members of SI coined a few ingenious methods to prompt this cause. One was dérive, or drift, ‘a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the condition of urban society’. Dérive was a continuous flow in which protagonists embarked upon a Surrealist trip, a dreamy trek though varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighbourhoods. They’d map the city’s substructure, and primitive walkie-talkies helped them to communicate with each other, sometimes miles apart. Through these real and imagined perambulations, Situationists became latter-day flâneurs, aimless urban strollers who weren’t quite so aimless.r />
  As they shifted in and out of public spaces, they were intent on accumulating rich qualitative data, grist to their ‘psychogeographical’ mill, documenting odours and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies: ruined façades, foggy vistas of narrow, sepia-soaked streets, nettle-ridden paving stones, empty alleyways at 3 a.m., menace and mayhem, separation and continuity.47 Commenting on the Situationists in 1983, Henri Lefebvre, the veteran Marxist philosopher and professor, said that dérive was

  more of a practice than a theory. It revealed the growing fragmentation of the city. In the course of its history, the city was once a powerful organic unity; for some time, however, that unity was becoming undone, was fragmenting, and the Situationists were recording examples of what we had all been talking about… We had a vision of a city that was more and more fragmented without its organic unity being completely shattered.48

  Debord and the Situationists was a subject close to Henri Lefebvre’s heart. ‘One I care deeply about’, he admitted. ‘It touches me in some ways very intimately because I knew them very well. I was close friends with them. The friendship lasted from 1957 to 1961 or ’62, which is to say about five years … In the end, it was a love story that ended very, very badly.’49 Lefebvre was 30 years older than Debord, a prolific scholar and bon vivant, famous for popularizing Marx and Hegel, for books like La Conscience Mystifiée and Dialectical Materialism, as well as the path-breaking Critique of Everyday Life. Lefebvre’s Marxism was unashamedly festive and rambunctious, prioritizing ‘lived moments’, irruptive acts of contestation: building occupations and street demos, free expressionist art and theatre, flying pickets, rent strikes and a general strike. Like the Situationists, for some of whom he was a mentor in the early 1960s at the University of Strasbourg, Lefebvre loved the idea of politics as festival. Rural festal traditions, he wrote in Critique of Everyday Life, ‘tightened social links at the same time as they give free rein to all desires which have been pent up by collective discipline and necessities of work.’ Festivals represent ‘Dionysiac life … differing from everyday life only in the explosion of forces which had been slowly accumulating in and via everyday life itself.’50

  The two men became acquainted through women. Like Debord, Lefebvre was a peculiar mix of Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer. Michèle Bernstein’s childhood friend, Evelyne Chastel, was then Lefebvre’s girlfriend, despite the considerable age gap. One day, the couples bumped into each other on a Parisian street, not long after Lefebvre had quit the French Communist Party. (For thirty years, he’d feuded with its Stalinist hacks.) Debord was very happy finally to meet the theorist whose work he’d read and admired. ‘I remember marvellous moments with Guy’, Lefebvre recalled in Le Temps des méprises (Times of Contempt) ‘warm friendship, free of all mistrust and ambition.’

  He and Debord drank together and often talked all night, engaging in ‘more than communication’, Lefebvre remembered, ‘a communion – which remains an extremely vivid memory’. Back then, Lefebvre was probably Debord’s only living influence, even though Debord was never a Lefebvre student; meanwhile, the young man with glasses, the brains of the Situationists, charmed the older academic. They shared ideas and shaped each other’s visions of Marxism, praxis and the city. ‘I remember very sharp, pointed discussions’, Lefebvre said, ‘when Guy said that urbanism was becoming an ideology. He was absolutely right, from the moment that there was an official doctrine of urbanism.’

  They read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano together, supping not a few mescals themselves, exploring revolutionary politics and theory, and Debord even helped to organize Lefebvre’s teaching schedule. Debord and Bernstein sojourned at Lefebvre’s rambling summerhouse in the Pyrenean foothills at Navarrenx. (Bernstein famously freaked out on one muddy country dérive.) And through Lefebvre Debord met the young Belgian poet and free spirit Raoul Vaneigem, another avid Lefebvre reader who’d soon enter the Situ fray, bursting onto the scene with brilliant texts like The Revolution of Everyday Life and The Book of Pleasures.51 Around this time, too, Lefebvre discovered Constant and other anarchist Provos in Amsterdam, who later came to Paris and discovered Debord and his crew. ‘I went to Amsterdam to see what was going on’, Lefebvre remembered.

  There were Provos elected to the city council in Amsterdam … Then, after that, it all fell apart. All this was part and parcel of the same thing. And after 1960 there was the great movement in urbanization. The Situationists abandoned the theory of Unitary Urbanism, since Unitary Urbanism only had precise meaning for historic cities, like Amsterdam, that had to be renewed, transformed. But from that moment the historic city exploded peripherally, into suburbs, like what happened in Paris and all sorts of places … And then I think even the dérive, the dérive experiments were little by little abandoned. I’m not sure how this happened, because that was the moment I broke with them.52

  2

  The Café of Lost Youth

  The storms of youth precede brilliant days…

  Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies

  Those close to Guy Debord say that he was charming, fearsomely erudite and difficult, likely to break off friendships as quickly as he established them. ‘It is better to change friends than ideas’, he liked to practice and preach. He was a man who didn’t compromise for anyone, himself included. He was radical like Lautréamont, and modern like Cravan; but ancient like Omar Khayyám and Li Po, two of his favorite poets. Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát, like the four-line stanzas of the Tang poet Li Po, express central Debordian motifs, inspiring motifs he’d never renounce: a life of drink and wandering, the desire for freedom and pleasure, the finite nature of time and the uncertainty of the future. ‘Today’, Omar Khayyám wrote,

  tomorrow is not within your reach

  To think of it is only morbid:

  If the heart is awake, do not waste this moment –

  There is no proof of life’s continuance.

  In the extremity of desire I put my lip to the pot’s

  To seek the elixir of life:

  It puts its lip on mine and murmured,

  ‘Enjoy the wine, you’ll not be here again.’

  ‘Every night’, wrote Li Po,

  I come back from the river bank, drunk

  I have an unpaid bill

  in every tavern.

  Well, who lives to be seventy

  Anyway?

  ‘Debord had one of the sharpest minds I have ever encountered’, recalled Ralph Rumney in his autobiography, The Consul. ‘First, there was his voice, then his language, which was always elegant. Guy had charisma, genius, but also had a kind of hold, a kind of power, over whatever was going on around him.’ He was ‘magic, but malicious, too, when he wanted to be. Always delightful and then, from one day to the next, bang, he would shut the door in your face.’1 Those who surrounded Debord in the 1950s and ’60s were young and fanatical, talked about philosophy, art, film, politics, and drank a lot, usually in cheap cafés and bars, sometimes in the radical milieu of the Latin Quarter, at other times with the proletariat of the Marais.

  Chez Moineau’s at 22 rue du Four was an infamous Debordian hole-in-the-wall where he hung out and drank with Rumney and others. Close to the fashionable existentialist world of Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, it was a universe away in terms of clientele. Under Debord’s poor cloak was an already legendary drinker. He was a regular at Chez Moineau, whose mainstay wasn’t bourgeois highbrow types like Sartre and de Beauvoir, but hoods and gangsters, prostitutes and pimps, dropouts and runaways, petty criminals and alcoholics, latter-day accomplices of François Villon, misfit characters from the pages of Céline, Mac Orlan and Genet. This demi-monde was his perpetual source of play and adventure. ‘Paris then was never asleep in its entirety, and permitted you to debauch and to change neighbourhoods three times each night. Its inhabitants hadn’t yet been driven away and dispersed.’2 In Paris,

  there remained a people who had ten times barricaded its streets and routed
its kings. It was a people who didn’t give themselves to images … The houses were not deserted in the centre, nor resold to spectators … The modern commodity still hadn’t come to show us what it could do to a street. Nobody, because of urban planners, was obliged to go to sleep far away. You still hadn’t seen, by the fault of government, the sky darken and the good times disappear, and the false fog of pollution permanently covering the circulation of things in the valley of desolation.3

  The city still had time for ‘unmanageable riff-raff’, for ‘the salt of the earth’, for ‘people quite sincerely ready to set the world on fire so that it had more brilliance’.4 In fact, the city was so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there, rather than rich somewhere else; they preferred, like Debord, to lead an ‘openly independent life’, finding themselves at home in ‘the most ill-famed company’.