Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  The text appeared in late 1967, published by Buchet/Chastel, against a backdrop of an advancing post-war consumerism. Capitalism was tapping the parts nobody – Marx included – could have ever imagined: one-hundred-odd years on from The Communist Manifesto, the system was more rampant and expansive than ever before, in spite of its inherent crises. Newmarket strategies, new media, new acts of seduction, were colonizing leisure and consumption as well as production, appropriating and re-appropriating space, capturing everybody’s attention, pervading consciousness and consciences.

  Everywhere commercial dictates intruded into everyday life, and critical scholars were trying to figure it all out. In France, Henri Lefebvre ruminated on the perplexing ‘survival of capitalism’ and on ‘everyday life in the modern world’. In the USA, sociologists like David Riesman spotted ‘lonely crowds’, new types of low-grade alienation resulting from high-grade affluence; William H. Whyte chronicled the decaffeinated landscapes pioneered by smart ‘organization men’, those heads of bureaucracies and corporations who thrive on order and efficiency. Meanwhile, Marshall McLuhan harked that ‘the medium is the message’: it wasn’t so much the content of the commodity that mattered as its form, not so much selling what you make as selling the sell. Capitalism was going virtual, de-coupling not only from real places, but from the very materiality of the commodity itself. As The Society of the Spectacle’s opening refrain, thesis 1, puts it: ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’1 The reality of things moved away into a spectacular reality of images, into a deceived gaze and stupefication.

  After 1967 it was Debord himself who became the leading theorist and most ruthless antagonist of this new emergent phase of capitalism, something now economically more prodigious and ideologically more devious. The two flanks went hand in hand, rapidly becoming one flank; politics strove merely to manage the articulation. Now, the state, irrespective of ideological stripe, was itself subsumed within this system, and increasingly became a facilitator of spectacular capitalism, an executive committee managing the interests of a diverse (and sometimes destructive) bourgeoisie, forces and factions vying for spectacular growth and profits. Debord’s treatise, subsequently translated into dozens of languages, attempted to delve into the belly of the fabulous beast, showing how commodity logistics penetrated new depths of modern life. Meanwhile, he took Marx’s analysis to new heights, the culmination of a fifteen-year meditation on the downfall of the state, begun in earnest in 1952 at Moineau’s.

  Its 221 short, strange, elegant theses, aphoristic in style and peppered with irony and a few Nietzschean inflections, were reminiscent of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. Their underlying content remained vividly (and quirkily) Marxian, uniting youthful humanism with mature political economy, a left-wing Hegel with a materialist Feuerbach, a bellicose Machiavelli with a utopian Karl Korsch, a military Clausewitz with a romantic Georg Lukacs. Debord gives us a compelling evocation of a world in which unity spelt division, essence appearance, truth falsity. It was, he said, a topsy-turvy world where everything and everybody partook in a perverse paradox. As the young Marx wryly pointed out in 1844,

  I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful women. Therefore I am not ugly… I, in my character as an individual am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor… money is the real mind of all things and how can its possessor be stupid?2

  Debord wanted to détourn the reality of this non-reality, this world where ugliness signified beauty, dishonesty honesty, stupidity intelligence. He wanted to subject it to his own dialectical inversion, to his own spirit of negation. In the process, he wrote a unique work of political art, utterly without precedent or peer. It was radical critique and militant call-to-arms. Its theoretical exegesis sought to reveal the fetishism, to name the alienation; its immanent battle-cry wanted to stir the working class to organize and mobilize, to develop workers’ councils and end their slumbering torpor.

  Active human agency had to be summoned up to confront spectacular ‘contemplation’. Those icons of a hyper-modern capitalism, semiotics everyone today knows instinctively – be it MTV or CNN, Microsoft or News International, McDonald’s’ golden arches or Nike’s swoosh – cast a soporific haze over life. People needed to shake up and wake up. For on show is an old enemy wrapped up in new clothing, and wearing a new mask. ‘In the essential movement of the spectacle’, Debord warned in thesis 35, paraphrasing Marx from Capital, ‘which consists in possessing, in congealed state, all that existed in human activity in a fluid state … we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to appear at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.’ Thus, the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of the commodity required puncturing, warranted demystification. The Society of the Spectacle had, Debord claimed in 1992, ‘been written with the intention of harming the spectacular society.’ ‘It had’, he reasoned, ‘never said anything extreme’.3

  Much like Marx’s concept of the ‘value-form’ of the commodity, the ‘spectacle-form’ of the commodity was both historical and strategic. Spectacular society was the hyper-reified world of separation, ‘separation achieved’, Debord labelled it: workers separated from their activity, from their products of labour, from their fellow workers, even from themselves. Reification happens when something is denied, when something is taken away from a thinking subject, displaced into an object, into a thing external to the self, against the self; it forcibly sunders the mind from itself, from the activity of thinking. The more the commodity united and universalized the world, the greater the subjugation and fragmentation of workers’ consciousness. At the beginning of Capital, Marx pointed out how wealth in nineteenth-century capitalism appears as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’. In thesis 1 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord again paraphrased Marx: ‘In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.’ This was ‘a pseudo-world apart’, today a life where specialized images, global satellite networks, and high-tech gadgetry and multimedia dominate and cohere as ‘autonomous images’.

  It’s a world where, in our own lexicon, bytes reign over rights, corporate promotion over civic commotion. Such a world ‘says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears’” (12). ‘The attitude it demands in principle is this passive acceptance which it had, in fact, already obtained by the manner of its appearance without reply, by the monopoly of appearance.’ The spectacle is fundamentally tautological: it’s ‘the sun that never sets on the Empire of modern passivity’ (13). It ‘doesn’t realize philosophy’, but ‘philosophizes reality’ (19). It is ‘the nightmare of a modern society imprisoned’, a society that ‘only expresses its ultimate desire to sleep’. And the spectacle ‘is the guardian of this sleep’ (21). It is the subjugation of real men and women to an economy of images, the true reflection of the production of things in the human mind. The spectacle ‘is capital to such a degree that accumulation has become an image’ (34).

  In Capital’s opening chapter, Marx insisted that a commodity’s physicality, its palpable ‘thing’ quality, bore little or no connection to the social relations that made it. As an ‘it’ we hear nothing about social relationships between workers and owners, between minimum wage toilers and rich bosses, between Third World peasants and Wall Street stockbrokers. In the realm of the latter, the former is occluded, silenced, rendered imperceptible to the senses. This masking effect is something Marx deemed ‘fetishism’. He asks us to address our amnesia and shortsightedness. He asks us to probe the root of things, to expose bourgeois deceit and ideology, to get a more process and relational grip on reality, to shift our perspective. This task of change, Debord knew, was now more troublesome, for the fetishism is total, even mo
re complex, simply because there doesn’t appear to be a fetishism anymore. Now, spectacular images make us want to forget – indeed, insist that we should forget.

  In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx said that a worker ‘does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working.’4 Debord said that workers now no longer feel at home even when they’re not working; they’re no longer themselves at home, given that work and home, production and reproduction – the totality of daily life – has been subsumed, colonized and invaded by exchange value. ‘The spectacle’, he said in thesis 42, ‘is the moment when the commodity has reached the total occupation of social life.’

  In leisure time, workers became consumers, mere bearers of money; private life became the domain of the advertisement, of fashion, of convenience and processed food, of movie and pop stars and glamorous soap operas, of dreaming for what you already know is available, at a cost. The spectacle is, thesis 44 insisted, ‘the permanent opium war’. Free time and work time congealed into ‘spectacular time’. All boundaries between economic, political and private life have thereby dissolved. All the consumable time and space became raw material for new products, for new commodities. ‘The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities’ (49).

  Marx’s ‘estranged labour’ was now generalized into ‘estranged life’; a ‘false consciousness of time’, time turned into an abstraction, time abandoned. Spectacular time represented an eternal present, the denial of death. The spectacle, Debord said, marked capitalism’s seizure and denigration of history and memory; it equally signalled the seizure and denigration of space, which, like time, must be organized, ordered and patrolled. Disorderly old streets threaten the spectacular status quo; maintaining order in the street culminates in the suppression of the street. ‘Isolated individuals’ had to be ‘recaptured’ and ‘isolated together’, collected into ‘factories and halls of culture, tourist resorts and housing developments’, environments ‘expressly organized to serve this pseudo-community that follows the isolated individual right into the family cell’ (172). ‘Capitalist production had unified space.’ It is, thesis 165 went on,

  no longer limited by external societies. This unification is at the same time a process of extensive and intensive banalization. The accumulation of commodities serially produced for the abstract space of the market, just as it had to break all regional and legal barriers, all corporative restrictions of the middle ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, also had to destroy the autonomy and quality of places.

  In the second volume of Panégyrique, a fascinating photomontage of Debord’s whole life and work – truth in images, he called it, a sort of iconic ensemble – there is a reproduction of the original 1967 handwritten manuscript. Debord wrote everything longhand in small, careful cursive, using those ordinary squared exercise books so common in France. The Society of the Spectacle’s manuscript has a good bit of crossing out and correction, hinting uncertainty and indecision on the part of the creator; yet it also exhibits a neatness and precision. You sense this is the work of a perfectionist and craftsman, someone self-assured, a stylist who isn’t riddled with self-doubt, who takes pride, as Debord did, in not correcting himself, on being happy with their first finished effort. We can get close to Debord, the artist, if we get close to his work and learn how to look between the lines. We can learn from looking at him, too.

  In another shot from Panégyrique, volume II, there’s Debord, the 30-something scribe, hunched over, gripping a pen and deliberating over a notepad, wearing glasses and a scarf and looking very brainy. His seriousness doesn’t seem feigned. We can imagine him to be a man who didn’t smile often, despite having a dry wit. He didn’t like to think of himself as an ‘intellectual’, we know; still, his mind operated almost intuitively at the intellectual level, through theory and abstraction. He was a classic man of ideas, who always romanticized his other, the practical man, somebody who imbibed the world corporeally and sensually. The caption underneath this photo, from Philippe de Commynes’ Mémoires, reads ‘by which one work will you be able to know the grandeur of the prince who speaks to you, and also to your understanding?’5 The Society of the Spectacle provides the unequivocal answer.

  Each thesis is itself as a situation, as a poetic punctuation. Its surrealist undertow conjures up the realm of dream, releases unconscious yearning and political sublimation. At the same time, Debord’s insights are brutally realistic, wide-awake descriptions of what is and projections of what might be. For the first time, Marxist social theory is expressed as lyric poetry. Its tone reincarnates Lautréamont’s Poésies, his style of negation, letting us glimpse the veritable meeting of the commodity and the sewing machine on a dissection table. Debord was rightly proud of The Society of the Spectacle, and was glad it became a modern French classic. ‘I flatter myself’, he commented in his 1979 preface to the fourth Italian edition,

  to be a very rare contemporary example of someone who has written without being immediately refuted by events, and I do not want to say refuted a hundred or a thousand times like the others, but not a single time. I have no doubt that the confirmation all my theses encounter ought to continue right until the end of the century, and even beyond.6

  When the publisher Champ Libre, the brainchild of Debord’s millionaire mogul friend-to-be Gérard Lebovici, offered to republish The Society of the Spectacle in 1971, Debord wanted ‘nothing else for the cover of my book than a geographic map of the world in its entirety’. He said he wanted ‘an atlas of the beginning of the twentieth century, a map whose colours represented the global development of commercial relations, where it was then realized, and where one expected its future course’.7 The jacket of recent Gallimard editions possesses a brightly coloured fin-de-siècle globe, the colours representing an era of wide-reaching economic integration and internationalization, an epoch when, as Marx prophesied in the Grundrisse, capitalism really did ‘annihilate space by time’.

  Between 1880 and 1914 especially, the world market did come into its own; existing relations between nations and people were transformed, forever. It was a period when James Joyce, in Ulysses, heard ‘the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry’, when erstwhile autonomous, self-sufficient absolute spaces became relativized, became incorporated into value relations and commodity exchange. This marked the real triumph of the world of things, the heavy artillery that battered down all Chinese walls. Debord knew it and wanted it on the front of his book. ‘The root of the spectacle is in the terrain of the economy becoming abundant’ (58). The society of the spectacle began everywhere in coercion, trickery and blood; and yet it promised happiness and prosperity.

  Under the guise of separation, the spectacle nourished a ‘unity of misery’. Behind the lure of choice were but different manifestations of alienation, bundled together into intensive and extensive forms of repression. Of the former variety, Debord called the spectacle ‘concentrated’; the latter, ‘diffuse’. Both deny and support each other. Together, they signify two rival and successive forms of spectacular power. The concentrated functioned through cult of personality, through dictatorship and totalitarianism, through brute and crude force; the diffuse was more ideological, and represented ‘the Americanization of the world’, a process that simultaneously frightens and seduces countries where traditional forms of bourgeois democracy once prevailed. After all, it guarantees freedom and affluence, dishwashers and Big Macs. When the spectacle is concentrated, the greater part of society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part.

  Still from the film The Society of the Spectacle.

  The concentrated spectacle, Debord said, in thesis 64, ‘belongs essentially t
o bureaucratic capitalism, even though it may be imported as a technique of state power in more backward mixed economies, or in certain moments of crisis in advanced capitalism’. Bureaucratic dictatorship of the economy ‘cannot leave in the exploited masses any notable margin of choice, since it had to choose everything itself’. It has to ensure a permanent violence. ‘The imposed image of the good internalizes the totality of what officially exists, and usually concentrates itself in a single man who is the guarantor of its total cohesion’. All Chinese once had to learn Mao and became Mao; every Soviet had to learn Lenin and Stalin, and became each man. They were heroic images, absolute celebrities, and Debord hated them and all they stood for. Meanwhile, the diffuse spectacle ‘accompanies the abundance of commodities, the unperturbed development of modern capitalism’. Mass consumption and commodities fill the frame and pollute the mind; different merchandise glistens in stores. The diffuse spectacle thrives off the gadget, the gimmick, the fad. It indulges in the commodity, in accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake. With the diffuse spectacle, commodity fetishism reaches ‘moments of fervent exaltation’ whose only goal is the goal of submission.