Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  In a typically racy polemic, ‘Les Gratte-Ciel par la Racine’ (skyscrapers by the root), published in Potlatch of 20 July 1955, Debord debunked Le Corbusier’s ‘radiant’ nostrums. It was ‘life definitely divided in enclosed blocks, in monitored societies; the end of any chance of insurrection and of encounter; automatic resignation’.24Streets full of people were henceforth incompatible with highways full of cars. ‘But, in our eyes, pedestrian voyages are not monotonous or sad; the social laws aren’t fixed in stone; the habits that we need to attack head-on have to make room for the incessant renewal of wonders; and the main comfort that we wish to be eliminated are ideas of order, and the flies who propagate them.’ Le Corbusier was ‘a particularly repugnant man, clearly more cop than anything else.’25

  Debord’s chief grumble was that of separation. The preeminence of order meant compartmentalization – of activity and people – in the name of efficiency. Everything had its place, its function: work here, residence there, leisure somewhere else. Spaces got hacked up and simplified, people got decanted, experience flattened. Separation meant the compartmentalization of consciousness, an inability for people to understand the totality of their lives. Separation in the city and in activity spelt separation in the mind, alienation, false consciousness, a retreat into contemplation. In 1961 Debord released his film Critique of Separation. ‘Our epoch accumulates power and has rational dreams’, a voice enunciates, in characteristic monotone.

  But no one recognizes these powers as their own. There is no access into adulthood: only the possible transformation, one day, of this long anxiety into a measured sleep. It is because no one ceases to be held in guardianship. The question of note isn’t that people live more or less poorly; but always that the rules of their life escapes them.26

  Then a subtitle flashes up, urging another intent: ‘To give each person the social space essential for the expression of life.’27

  In Critique of Separation, Debord’s voice-over said: ‘we have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few subtle differences, to a network of possible directions. We grow accustomed to it, it seems… In returning from an enterprise, everyone had less heart than when they had set out. Little dears, adventure is dead.’28 As the film opens out onto a panoramic view of central Paris, he warned: ‘As long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, the effort toward unity introduces other separations. The search for unified activity leads to the constitution of new specializations.’29

  False unity meant a new kind of fragmentation. Dérive sought to reveal the idiocy of separation, trying to stitch together – by highlighting the gaping holes – what was spatially rent. Dérive paved the way for a more profound urban and spatial impulse: ‘unitary urbanism’, a central item in the Situationist lexicon and in Debord’s thought. Unitary urbanism was a ‘living critique’. It would battle against planners, efficiency experts and technocrats, those who sat in fancy offices high above everyone; it would work against market-driven cities, against developers for whom cities are merely merchandise. The unitary city would be disruptive and playful, reuniting physical and social separations. It would emphasize forgotten and beleaguered nooks and crannies, mysterious corners, quiet squares, teeming neighbourhoods, pavements brimming with strollers and old-timers with berets sitting on park benches.

  In Naked City (1958), Debord and Asger Jorn deliberately cut up a map of Paris and rearranged the bits into a thrilling Dadaist collage. This kind of map gave all power to subjectivity, was ‘psychogeographical’, and expressed insubordination and chance rather than certainty. Few works of art, Debord said, could rival the beauty of a Paris Metro map, especially for foot passengers! He recalled how a friend once wandered through the Harz region of Germany blindly following directions of a map of London. These antics were ‘obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone’. Such would involve a ‘revolution in everyday life’. (In a taped talk presented by an ever-elusive Debord at a 1961 Paris conference on Everyday Life, convened by Henri Lefebvre, he put his radical credentials firmly on the table, if not in person: ‘The revolutionary transformation of everyday life isn’t reserved to a vague future. It is immediately placed before us by the development of capitalism and its insupportable demands, the alternative being the reinforcement of modern slavery. This transformation will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked under the form of commodities, at the same time as the end of all specialized politics.’)30

  Guy Debord’s and Asger Jorn’s Naked City.

  This revolutionary mantra has its radical roots in the youthful Karl Marx of 1844. When Marx drafted his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in Paris he wasn’t much younger than Debord, and was just as idealistic. The manuscripts were unpublished in Marx’s day, only resurfacing in the 1930s and translated into French as the country underwent its inter-war Hegel renaissance. Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism (1939) became the chief conduit of this Hegelian Marxism in France, and Debord had tuned in. He’d also read Hegel and the philosopher who’d first put Hegel ‘right side up’, Ludwig Feuerbach. Debord devoured Hegel’s oeuvre in his younger days and that close reading bore fruit with The Society of the Spectacle, which is full of Hegelian motifs. Debord sat in on lectures given by the great Hegel scholar Jean Hyppolite; and just before the publication ofthat book in 1967, he was all set to help the old professor out with a lecture at the Collège de France until Hyppolite had a change of heart and asked someone else.

  Debord had likewise studied the Hegelian Marx at the source, and most citations that he uses tend to derive from the early Marx, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. There, Marx tried to affirm the primacy of ‘free conscious activity’ in the ‘species-character’ of human beings. He said that humans are endowed with ‘vital powers’, ‘capacities’ and ‘drives’, and are not merely contemplative, one-sided beings.31 We come to know ourselves, Marx said, not by turning inward contemplatively, but by reaching out and feeling, seeing and comprehending the external world around us, the world outside our mind. Through practice, humans refashion external nature at the same time as they refashion their own internal nature. Humans are protean beings, desiring differentiated practice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity. Cut this off, convert it into a dread zone of necessity, and our essential powers are henceforth alienated.

  Debord and the Situationists deployed détournement to monkey-wrench accepted behaviour, to create light, to disalienate. Détournement helped fill things in, make life richer. Squatting, building and street occupations are classic examples of détournement, as are graffiti and ‘free associative’ expressionist art. All these actions would exaggerate, provoke and contest. They’d turn things around, lampoon, plagiarize and parody, deconstruct and reconstruct ambience, unleash revolutions inside one’s head as well as out on the street with others. They’d force people to think and rethink what they once thought; often you’d not know whether to laugh or cry. Either way, détournement couldn’t be ignored: it was an instrument of propaganda, an arousal of indignation, action that stimulated more action. It was ‘negation and prelude’, inspired by Lautréamont. Numerous détournements of buildings lay at the core of unitary urbanism.

  A prime example was the idea of the Dutch Situationist, Constant, whose prototypical city, New Babylon, intentionally reversed the Protestant tradition’s association of Babylon with evil and whoring: ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations’, said the Book of Revelation (16–18). For Constant and Debord, the accursed city of Satan, the great whore Babylon – where a fear of fornication and impurity becomes bound up with a fear of the city – suddenly symbolized the good city of the future. Debord had coined the name one winter’s night back in 1959, when he enthusiastically greeted Constant’s preliminary drawing-board visions. Constant was taken by the idea of ‘Dériville’ until
Debord proposed ‘New Babylon’.32 (The label stuck, even as their friendship waned.) Constant strove to model dérive by constructing more redolent passageways, shocking landscapes, superimposing routes and spaces onto each other, sometimes using existing cityscapes, at other times completely new cities. He conceived of urban environments brimming with texture, tone and topographic fantasy.

  Some of Constant’s plans are exhilarating, brightly coloured deconstructed landscapes and Plexiglas models of futuristic cities; a few actually look like giant aircraft hangars and half-finished shopping malls, massive construction sites with steel scaffolding gaping; others are sublime Piranesian labyrinths.33 In their own inimitable way, these are raw attempts to ‘concretize’ unitary urbanism, to make Marx’s normative Good Life, in which ‘the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all’, the means as well as the end. In New Babylon, all useful yet repetitive activity underwent automation; and technology, mobilized at the mass level, would release people from the daily drudge of necessity, guaranteeing a healthy dose of free time. There’d be big institutional transformations, too, like collective ownership of land and the means of production, together with the rationalization of the manufacturing of consumer goods, making scarcity old hat. Constant’s city, like unitary urbanism itself– like détournement and dérive – revealed the lie of urbanism, détourned for the sake of disalienation: ‘we need to defend ourselves at all moments from the poetry of the bards of conditioning – to reverse their rhythms.’34

  Debord cherished Paris musty and worn, caked in dust, like a well-thumbed rare book collection that still found faithful readers. He had a prodigious knowledge of antiquity, of classical French masters, whom he could cite from memory and allegorize at whim. He was fascinated by the past, by the tradition of the dead generations. But he was also an experimental thinker and political progressive, once confessing, in In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, his haunting film, a desire to ‘rebuild everything’. Released in 1978, a year after Louis Chevalier’s monograph, In Girum’s monotone voiceover uttered: ‘no longer an issue between conservation and change. We were ourselves, more than anybody, people of change, in a changing time. The owners of society were obliged, in order to sustain themselves, to change what was the inverse of ours.’35 With its black and blank screens, the film expressed both Debord’s preservationist ideals and his prefigurative impulses.

  Debord was a man of change; he wanted to rebuild everything, but he also loved the past. He somehow wanted to go back to the future, wanted to reconstruct the best of the old world in the worst of the new. He was thus a man of the future as well as the past, someone who wanted to connect with the past only insofar as it was a springboard to a possible future. He wanted to bring into our modern age the epic features of former ages, and propel them into a world yet to be, a world still awaited. The incessant, eternally reoccurring, trajectory of life is precisely reflected in the motif: we go round and round in the night. Time flows, like the rivers flowing through In Girum, sometimes the Seine, other times the Yang-tze, always moving; every ending has a new beginning, an à suivre, everything begins again in a new guise at the end. ‘All this gone forever’, Debord said, citing staple Li Po, ‘everything slips away at once, events and men – like the relentless flow of the Yang-tse, which loses itself in the sea.’ Paris is gone forever; there is no stepping back, no second act. The city had become an ‘ungovernable wasteland’,

  where new sufferings disguise themselves under the name of ancient pleasures; and where people are so afraid. They go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire. They wake up alarmed, and groping, search for life. Rumour has it that those who were expropriating it have, to top it all, mislaid it. So here is a civilization that is on fire, completely capsizing and sinking.36

  In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni would be Debord’s last truly experimental cinematic undertaking; he’d never make the like again. In a way, he didn’t have to: In Girum was his masterpiece, his chef-d’œuvre cinématographique, his epic voyage brought to the screen, his very own Iliad and Divine Comedy. It is a film about film – or, more accurately, about anti-film. It’s also a Situationist poem on the art of war, a document about the passage of time, a metaphysical exploration of Debord’s mind, to say nothing of his threnody on Paris. (The outspoken critic and novelist Philippe Sollers believes the film’s dialogue, which is reprinted in Debord’s Œuvres cinématographiques complètes, to be ‘one of the finest books of the twentieth century’.)37

  It is Debord’s most autobiographical and metaphysical venture. We glimpse him at various ages, at 19, 25, and at 45. We spot Alice, too, and her friend Céleste, in a crypto-lesbian embrace. There are aerial views of Paris, panned panoramas of nocturnal Les Halles, café entrances and interiors, cellars and caves, pirates and Robin Hood, scenes of cannon fire from battleships, cavalry charges, troop formations, battlefields, Custer’s last stand, the charge of the Light Brigade, all interspersed with snippets from Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. The tone throughout is sad and forlorn, like a romantic refrain, like Chateaubriand’s René, like a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the passage of time. The lyrics are poetic: ‘Midway through the path of real life, we were surrounded by a sombre melancholy, expressed in so much sad and mocking lines, in the café of lost youth.’38

  It was there where ‘we lived as forlorn children, our adventures incomplete’. Who else, he asked, could understand the beauty of Paris apart from those who can remember its glory? Who else could know the hardships and the pleasures we knew in these places where everything has become so dire? Once, the trees weren’t suffocated, the stars not extinguished by the progress of alienation. Liars have always been in power, he knew; but now economic development had given rulers the means to lie about everything. How could he not remember the charming hooligans and proud girls with whom he inhabited these dingy dives?

  Although despising all ideological illusions, and quite indifferent to what would later prove them right, these reprobates had not disdained to declare openly what was to follow. To finish off art, to announce in the midst of a cathedral that God was dead, to undertake to blow up the Eiffel Tower, such were little scandals indulged in sporadically by those whose way of life was permanently such a large scandal. They pondered on why some revolutions failed; and asked if the proletariat really exists, and, if this was the case, what it could be.39

  You could feel the earth move, Debord said, and time burn with an intense heat. But somehow, he knew, the domain of time had to be traversed in order to reach the goal of opportunity. One had to discover how to live, in the days to follow, in a manner worthy of such a fine beginning.

  ‘As for myself’, Debord mused, ‘I have never regretted anything I’ve done, and I admit that I am completely unable to imagine what else I could have done, being what I am.’40 Our formula for over-throwing the world, he said, wasn’t found in books: we found it in wandering in the night. It lasted for days; no day was like the previous day, and it never ended. It was a quest for an unholy Grail, with astonishing encounters, remarkable obstacles, grandiose betrayals, perilous enchantments. We caught a fleeting glimpse, he said, of the object of our quest; we couldn’t live in the spurious light of the true because we possessed very strange powers of seduction.

  We hadn’t aspired to subsidies for scientific research, nor to the praise of newspaper intellectuals. We carried fuel to where the fire was. It was in this matter that we definitely enlisted the Devil’s party, that is to say, in this historical evil that leads the existing conditions to their destruction; through the ‘bad side’ that makes history by ruining all established satisfaction.41

  The Situationists had met ‘to enter into a conspiracy of limitless demands’, seeing ‘glimmers of light in the setting sun of Paris’, finding themselves ‘enraptured with a beauty that would be swept away and which would not return.’ ‘We will soon need to leave this city that was for us so free, but which is going to fall entir
ely into the hands of our enemies. Already, without recourse, they’re applying their blind law, remaking everything in their likeness, that is to say, on the model of a sort of cemetery.’42 Society has always rewarded mediocrity, always rewarded those who kowtow to its unfortunate laws. ‘Yet I am, precisely at this time, the only person to have had some renown, clandestine and bad, and whom they haven’t succeeded to get to appear on this stage of renunciation … I am long practised at living an obscure and elusive existence.’ It is a métier in which nobody can ever get a doctorate; thus spoke our doctor of nothing, our ‘Prince of Division’. And so the epoch that Debord loved, with its thrills and innocence, melted away forever.

  3

  It Never Said Anything Extreme

  When it rains, when there are false clouds over Paris, don’t forget that it’s the government’s fault. Alienated industrial production makes it rain. Revolution brings fine weather.

  Guy Debord, La Planète malade

  Unlike a lot of other theorists, Guy Debord never wrote too much, never said more than was necessary, never made a career out of critique. His oeuvre is relatively modest, and each work rarely exceeds 100 pages. ‘Writing should remain a rare thing’, he advised in Panégyrique, ‘since one must have drunk for a long time before finding excellence.’ When he did put pen to paper he did so with beautiful economy, without affectation or fatigue. The Society of the Spectacle endures as his masterpiece, his best-known text. It’s a wonderful little book, a brilliant prose poem. Debord saw the book as an act of demystification, even as de-sanctification, as an exposé of the modern form of the commodity, as an indictment of the hypocrisy of our lives.