Ninety-seven years later, during the equally turbulent ‘May-days’ of 1968, history repeated itself on Paris’s streets. In 1968 Debord and Lefebvre duelled for an answer. The Nanterre sociologist claimed that the Situationists
proposed not a concrete utopia, but an abstract one. Do they really imagine that one fine day or one decisive evening people will look at each other and say, ‘Enough! We’re fed up with work and boredom! Let’s put an end to them!’ and they will then proceed into eternal Festival and the creation of situations? Although this happened once, at the dawn of March 18, 1871, this combination of circumstances will not occur again.
‘The ‘68 movement didn’t come from the Situationists’, Lefebvre insisted years later. ‘The movement of March 22 was made up by students … It was an energetic group that took form as the events developed, with no programme, no project – an informal group, with whom the Situationists linked up, but it wasn’t they who constituted the group.’18
In the wake of the ‘68 uprising, Debord released a film version of The Society of the Spectacle, dedicating it to his wife, Alice Becker-Ho, whose beautiful image, clad in flat cap, leaning on a wall with a cigarette drooping nonchalantly from her mouth, fills one frame. It evokes an Alice-cum-Brando’s Johnny pose: Alice, whattya rebelling against? Whattya got? The film’s dialogue closely follows Debord’s original book text; but the rapid-fire captions, disarming classical music and exaggerated footage makes it visually stunning. As usual, there are battle scenes and moody vistas of Paris, spliced between images of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro, all giving speeches; Debord plainly disapproves. There are news clips from the ’68 Renault strike, with workers locked inside the factory by the unions; scenes from the Bourse alive with frenzied traders, participating in money mayhem; there’s a vision of the Tower of Babel amid pitched battles from Vietnam and Watts, circa 1965; Paris’s streets are ablaze, and students can be seen fighting cops; there are burning barricades at night, the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, street altercations in Italy in the 1960s, Italian police leaping from jeeps, truncheoning a crowd of young people; West German security forces patrol another street, while Soviet tanks push back German workers in Berlin in June 1953.
There’s also a shot of the Enragés-SI Committee, along with Debord himself, in that white jacket. Then a speech flashes up on the screen:
Comrades, with the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes being occupied for the last two days by workers and students of that town, and today extending in several factories, the Sorbonne Occupation Committee calls for the immediate occupation of all factories in France, and for the formation of workers’ councils. Comrades, spread this word and reproduce it as fast as possible.
A subtitle appears in English, from Shakespeare’s Henry v: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ Then, wall graffiti from an occupied Sorbonne: ‘Run quickly comrade, the old world is behind you!’19
Afterwards, the film relays a speech from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Souvenirs, from his eyewitness account of a similar uprising in Paris almost exactly 120 years earlier:
From 25 February onwards, a thousand strange systems frantically take leave from the brains of innovators and spread in the troubled minds of the mob. It seems that, from the shock of the Revolution, society itself had been reduced to dust and one had entered into a competition for a new form that needed to raise an edifice in its place. Everyone proposed a plan of their own; this one produced in newspapers; that one on posters that would soon cover walls; another loudly proclaimed by word of mouth. One intended to destroy the inequality of wealth, another the inequality of education – a third undertook to level the oldest of all inequalities, that between man and woman; one specifically rallied against poverty and indicated remedies for the torment of work that has tortured humanity since its earliest existence.20
Years later, Debord confessed he’d loved Tocqueville’s Souvenirs on the revolution of 1848 because the latter ‘had so well seen its weaknesses’.21 He admired the conservative author of Democracy in America because the weaknesses he’d pinpointed, which eventually unhinged the 1848 workers’ movement, applied so poignantly to its twentieth-century counterpart. Souvenirs revealed the bitterness of struggle during the February revolution and the subsequent ‘June Days’, when the garde mobile massacred the insurgents. Debord updated this tragedy, turning it not into farce but grist for his own diagnostic mill. Tocqueville was himself unseated in February from the Legislative Assembly, but resumed his post after re-election and after the ‘party of order’ recaptured power. Although he’d recognized the ‘foolishness’ of the 1848 revolutionary ‘mob’, he tried – at first anyway – to understand and sympathize with it, and even admired its participants. Before long, his hatred of socialism won out, and back in the Assembly he soon got tough, voting against amnesty for those convicted in the mobilizations; he also vetoed legislation limiting the working day to ten hours. For a while, Tocqueville served under Louis Napoleon’s new presidency, until his coup d’état of 1851. The torn Tocqueville despised the right-wing authoritarianism of the Second Empire, and never forgave the man Marx called ‘Crapulinski’ for his affront to representative democracy and civil liberties.22
The film of The Society of the Spectacle sealed a magical era for Debord, begun in adolescence in Cannes in 1951 with the Lettrists, and concluding in middle age in 1972 in Paris, after the Situationists had come apart at the seams in their ‘veritable split’. But he regretted nothing. The dissolution of the Situationists, he said, marked their resounding success. ‘Whoever considers the life of the si’, he contended, ‘finds there the history of the revolution. Nothing has been able to sour it.’23 It was how it had been for the Communards, who really lived it, whose fulfilment was already there. Fulfilment was already there for Debord, too: he really did live it in ‘68, and now it was over. Nothing could sour it. He’d never live permanently again in Paris. Where could he go? Where could he shelter as the ‘repugnant Seventies’ kicked in? He had told us in In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni that he’d have to leave Paris. It had fallen to the enemy. He was a marked man now, an agitator, a villain, a fugitive; the French secret police began its dossier on him; they’d track him closely as he’d flee to Italy, to Spain, and of course to Champot. The media wouldn’t be far behind. There was, it seemed, nobody for Debord to expel now, except himself.
As the dust from 1968 settled, emptiness prevailed in the ruins. Many soixante-huitards suddenly found themselves stuck between a rock and the hard place, between a degenerative past and an impossible future. For a moment, the dream of spontaneous freedom became real, in wide-awake time. An instant later, it disappeared in a puff of smoke, perhaps forever. In 1968 people demanded the impossible; soon ‘the end of history’ would grip. In 1967, the venerable year that The Society of the Spectacle revealed itself to the world, Jim Morrison of The Doors screamed: ‘we want the world and we want it now!’; in 1977 punk Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols bawled a new Zeitgeist: ‘no future, no future for you and me!’ What had happened in those ten years? Debord himself never gave the question even a first thought. He was already wandering with Alice. But Rotten’s cry was a final catharsis, a stark valedictory gesture to the heady 1960s – and a plague-on-your-house denunciation of the Coca-Cola realism to come. Those children of Marx, who’d been going round and round trying to overthrow spectacular society, eventually got consumed by it; they’d plunge down the same abyss they’d been staring down for far too long.
The street-fighting 1960s had shaped Debord, had left their imprint on his being. At the same time, he was ready to bid the decade farewell, happy to move on from those years of hope and days of rage. In an odd sense, too, Debord was a peculiar ‘68er since he was of an older stock, coming of age instead in the 1950s. Moreover, he often liked to brag that his disposition was even older than that, was more baroque, harking back to another century: his Marxism, we might say, went back to the future from the seventeenth-century. ‘I was not conver
ted by May 1968’, he once confessed. ‘I am an older bandit than that.’24 Indeed, he liked to call himself ‘Gondi’, after the strange seventeenth-century Cardinal de Retz, Jean François Paul de Gondi.
Debord idolized Retz, the master of deception, the folk hero and trusted patron of Paris’s poor and dangerous classes, who between 1648 and 1652 helped incite the street protests against Louis xiv, revolts that became known as ‘The Fronde’. Retz welcomed the name frondeur, a term originally applied to rampaging gangs of street ruffians who brandished slings (frondes) and ran riot across medieval France. Seventeenth-century frondeurs took pride in wearing this once pejorative appellation; Retz and his coterie of aristocratic dissidents appropriated it in their risky revolt. Debord was a peculiarly distant cousin of Retz, as it were, many times removed; he was the cardinal’s twentieth-century alter ego. Descriptions of Retz even bear an uncanny resemblance to Debord. The cardinal was small with a large head, had a squat body, short spindly legs and a bulbous nose. His eyesight was bad, very myopic. ‘Madame de Carignan told the queen one day that I was very ugly’, Retz wrote in his ten-volume Mémoires. ‘It was perhaps the only time in her life that she didn’t lie.’
The cardinal was an odd mix of Catholic holy man – who never actually believed – and libertine. He was a priest and a duellist, a courtier and a conspirator. He womanized while he spread the Gospel. ‘He would save the soul of others while condemning his own to perdition.’25 At the time, he was one of a handful of men who recognized the raw power of popular discontent, of the ‘popular masses’ rebelling against the punitive taxes levied by the rich on the poor. At any rate, he mobilized pulpit oratory, blending moral passion and political rhetoric, to arouse the people and to subvert the Church. Meanwhile, he tried to dislodge the monarchy, being loved by the people and distrusted by the crown. He simultaneously incited mob violence and earnestly preached peace. He was duplicitous and conniving, both worshipped and reviled, as he indulged in a life of intrigue and bewildering adventure.
At one point, 30,000 people followed him onto the barricades: ‘Now everyone was following me’, he recalled in those Mémoires that Debord loved so much, ‘and it was just as well, for this swarming mass of refuse was armed to the teeth. I flattered them, I caressed them, I insulted them, I threatened them, and at last I convinced them.’ After the civil war, Retz did several years of hard time at Vincennes prison. Later, almost broken, he was dispatched to the château of Nantes and placed under house arrest. But he deceived his captors and made off one tumultuous night, dislocating his shoulder en route, yet escaping to freedom. Eventually, he’d journey to Spain and then onwards to Italy, as Debord would three hundred years down the road. From then on, both men would lead, in exile, a fugitive and vagabond existence. Together, they’d become aesthetes of subversion and Debord the frondeur of our spectacular age.
4
Aesthete of Subversion
More is demanded to produce one wise man today, than seven formerly; and more is needed to deal with a single individual in our times, than with a whole people in the past.
Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
The storms in the Haute-Loire move in rapidly, especially in summer, in late afternoon. At first, the sun disappears behind dark clouds that sneak up as the wind gusts. Soon trees begin to sway back and forth, creaking in the breeze. Next, sudden flashes appear on the horizon. The winds get stronger and stronger; everything turns black. Lightning strikes, everything is lit up brilliantly white, then claps of thunder. The rains come slowly, initially in large drops, and you can smell the sweetness of raw earth rising. Then mighty hailstones lash down. As the winds turn more violent, the lone person, openly exposed to the monsoon, is defenceless.
These dramatic weather patterns aren’t too dissimilar to storms that break out across the economic and political landscape. Each, after all, takes place when the temperature is hottest, when the pressure dial approaches danger level. Often nobody pays attention to the inclement forecast. In such heat, wealth accumulates, business booms and stock prices grow, until, suddenly, the bubble bursts and the heavens open. Crashes and storm clouds have become increasingly frequent under capitalism since the early 1970s – since Debord embarked on his European wanderings. As he fled post-’68 Paris, and as its new Platonic republic banned poets, storms began to hit global capitalism particularly hard. Debord observed a few of them indoors, from his Champot fortress under siege; he also weathered many more wandering in Italy and Spain.
The first dark cloud appeared in the summer of 1971, on a hot August day, when, without prior warning, President Richard Nixon devalued the dollar. He wrenched it from its gold standard mooring, heralding the United States’s unilateral abandonment of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Gone, practically overnight, was the system of financial and economic regulation that had been the mainstay of a quarter of a century of ‘spectacular’ capitalist expansion. It’s impossible to imagine the long boom of the 1950s and ‘60s without this 1944 pact, without the free movement of capital being held in check, without stabilizing domestic management of trade and finance. Yet, 25 years on, as the us economy bore the brunt of a costly war in Vietnam, a chill wind started to waft back westwards.
Indeed, the year 1971 ushered in an American balance-of-trade deficit: the nation was importing more than it exported. Nixon knew fixed exchange rates couldn’t be sustained, not without overvaluing the dollar, not without losing competitive ground. So he let the dollar drift, devalued it, and loosened Bretton Woods’s grip. World currency hereafter oscillated; capital could now more easily slush back and forth across national frontiers. A deregulated, unstable capitalism had had its birth pangs, a terrible beauty was about to be born. And if that wasn’t enough, the 1973 oil embargo by the petroleum exporting countries (OPEC) – a punitive measure in the face of the Arab-Israeli conflict – rained another bout of thunder and lightening. From $1.90, the price of a barrel of oil skyrocketed to $9.76. (In 1979, because of Iran – Iraq squabbles, it upped again, from $12.70 to $28.76 per barrel.)
The halcyon days of cheap fuel were effectively over. Violent breezes battered every advanced economy. Storms turned into deep, soggy recessions; oil price hikes couldn’t be absorbed by assorted economies already on the brink. In 1975, unable to fund its public services, unable to cope with increased energy costs, New York City declared itself bankrupt. The fiscal crisis of the state pervaded every level of government, as did public sector strikes, whose workers weren’t going to get wet without a fight. In 1978–9 Britain underwent a ‘winter of discontent’. Refuse and utility workers lobbied James Callaghan’s Labour government for cost-of-living pay rises. Power cuts, rubbish mountains and rank-and-file acrimony greeted the Prime Minister’s austerity appeals: Labour’s Keynesianism, its capitalism with a human face, was about to perish forever.
Elsewhere, economic storms betokened other political unrest. In Italy, where Debord sojourned at the beginning of the 1970s, extra-parliamentary volatility became the new disorder filling the party political void, flourishing in the ruins of state-managed capitalism. In 1969 Italy saw a ‘hot autumn’ of labour unrest, its most sizzling class struggle in the post-war era. Wildcat strikes and wide-scale stoppage paralysed the country. Workers demanded better pay and more respect, or else. Sabotage occurred at the Fiat factory in Turin; then at the Pirelli plant in Milan; then at a hundred others elsewhere. And then, in December 1969, to cap it all, a bomb exploded at a bank in the Piazza Fontana, near Milan’s busy cathedral, killing sixteen people, decapitating a few and maiming many more. Police immediately arrested two left-leaning anarchists; but, by 1971, they’d discover that, actually, neo-fascists had been the culprits, probably with the government’s blessing, and probably aided by Italy’s secret police, the dreaded SID. With the centre-left coalition government in tatters, unable to handle strikes, sabotage, scandals and bombings, to say nothing of post-1973 recession and inflation, ‘extremist’ factions, both left and right, came to the f
ore.
The Red Brigade became the most notorious left-wing species, kindred souls of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, and they denounced everything and everyone: the government, the senile Italian Communist Party (PCI) – who, Red Brigaders said, had long reneged on the revolutionary struggle and had fossilized Italian Marxist politics. In the Red Brigade’s hands, class struggle took on a violent ‘Leninist’ turn, and necessarily meant vanguard militancy and armed guerilla warfare. By 1970 they’d gone underground. Soon they would infiltrate the ‘red’ factories of Milan, conduct sabotage, burn automobiles, plant bombs and mastermind political kidnappings. Their campaign rapidly became a campaign of self-annihilation, something parasitic, internally divisive and debilitating for radical Left solidarity. Soon the Red Brigade became Public Enemy Number One, fervently dismissed by the authorities as crazy terrorists.
They were dismissed in other circles, too, especially by ‘Censor’, aka Gianfranco Sanguinetti, the mysterious author of the pamphlet ‘The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy’ (1975). Sanguinetti adopted the sly alias ‘Censor’ to assume the role of a cool-headed, ruthless Italian capitalist, framing the ‘Italian question’ from their reactionary standpoint. (The pseudonym was borrowed from Marcus Porcius Cato, a Roman historian and statesman, who’d fought against Hannibal and philosophized about austerity and bygone Puritanism.) Five hundred copies of the pamphlet were mailed to Italy’s elite businessmen, economists, politicians and journalists, urging them to co-opt the reformist Communist Party and career unionists, while getting tough on the ‘autonomous’ revolutionary workers’ movement – before it was too late. The Red Brigade, Censor said, was marginal and insignificant; the real dangers came from the loose-knit and anarchistic autonomous groups, who touted the illegality of wage-labour and who saw the Italian crisis not as an economic crisis but as a crisis of the economy.
Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Page 8
