Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  Gambier’s bust of Chateaubriand, in the Square des Missions Etrangères, Paris.

  Chateaubriand came to rue du Bac to retire. With his American voyages done, his squabbles with Napoleon and Louis-Philippe over, his royalist days and pains of exile behind him, he commenced drafting his memoirs. But the waves and winds and solitude of the Brittany coast were never far away in his imagination, even while he went in search of the North-west Passage and fell in love with America’s native peoples, those ‘noble savages’ who stalked primeval forests. After that 1791 trip, Chateaubriand idolized the American wilderness, setting two romantic tales there, Atala (1801) and René (1802), vignettes that would figure prominently in his weightier Genius of Christianity (1802). Atala, Chateaubriand claimed, demonstrated ‘the harmonies of the Christian religion with the scenes of nature and the passions of the human heart’; René, like Goethe’s young Werther and Turgenev’s Bazarov, showed the foolish dreams and fatal melancholy of impassioned love.

  With his own voyages seemingly done, and his adventures likewise behind him, weeping over the death of Lebovici, Debord similarly retreated to his Mission at rue du Bac. As a canny urban physiognomist, he obviously knew Chateaubriand had lived opposite. From his building’s front door, Debord would have been able to glimpse Gambier’s stone bust. Was it accident or incident that brought him back so near to this stubborn Catholic romantic? Debord had studied Chateaubriand’s work. He’d cited it approvingly in Panégyrique, itself a Catholic title filched from Bossuet, the seventeenth-century theologian: ‘Chateaubriand pointed out – and rather precisely, all told: “Of the modern French authors of my time, I am also the only one whose life is true to his works.”’10 This same loyalty Debord could now privately savour, along with Alice, at the rue du Bac, drinking high-end Burgundy while listening to low-end cabaret.

  At rue du Bac, he and Alice tuned into the old shanties of Pierre Mac Orlan, singing along to Germaine Montero’s renderings of misty quays, sailors’ bars, all-night dancing and mysterious women of the night. The prolific novelist and essayist Mac Orlan revelled, as Debord did, in the secret odour of the demi-monde, achieving fame in the 1920s for Le Chant de l’equipage (1920) and Le Quai des Brumes (1927). (The latter became Marcel Carné’s noir classic starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan as the worn dancehall belle Nelly.) In his youth, Mac Orlan was an intrepid traveller himself who had lived in turn-of-the-century Montmartre, hung out at Le Lapin agile and befriended Modigliani, Picasso and Apollinaire. He once interviewed Mussolini, had a mad passion for rugby – especially for the Le Havre Athletic Club – and somehow, along the way, wrote his famous ditties for the accordion. Germaine Montero, Juliette Gréco, Monique Morelli and Catherine Sauvage have all sung Mac Orlan’s best titles.

  Those songs, like Mac Orlan’s stories, brim with comedy and mystery, and oscillate between the jocular and macabre. All of them somehow bask in the subtle ambiance he’d label fantastique social. ‘Like there exists an adventurer’, Mac Orlan had said, ‘active without imagination and often insensible, all the less endowed with a feeling that escapes us, there are creative people in the shadow of the fantastic who themselves participate a little in the impressions of some privileged onlooker.’11 These privileged participants became seminal ‘passive adventurers’, a category Mac Orlan made his own in a 1920 essay, Petit manuel du parfait aventurier. Passive adventurers stood in direct contrast to ‘active adventurers’, those young virile types, men of action who ran off with the Foreign Legion, joined the colonial infantry or set sail with the navy. Active adventurers explore to forget, to seek fortune, to find distraction. They desperately ‘need to conquer’, Mac Orlan thought. For the active adventurer, certain ‘traits are essential: the total absence of imagination and feeling. He doesn’t fear death because he can’t explain it; but he fears those who are clearly stronger than him.’12

  Passive adventurers, on the other hand, are more sensitive explorers, more cerebral, more studious and solitary, reading a lot and dreaming often. Passive adventuring, Mac Orlan maintained, is an art form, ‘a question of intellectual gymnastics, understanding everyday exercises and practising the methodology of the imagination’. ‘Like fetishism in the things around love, the passive adventurer applies his force to the mysteries of the personality of everyone.’13 Voyages here are more commonplace, more carefully chosen: cities and cabarets, burlesque and books, wine and song, love and hate, intimacy and death. ‘If I had to raise a statue of Captain Kidd’, said Mac Orlan, ‘I would put up at the foot of the monument the gentle and meditative figure of Robert Louis Stevenson, the immortal author of Treasure Island.’14

  Listening to Mac Orlan’s songs, reading his books, studying Debord’s life and following his trail, one could justifiably wonder: what kind of adventurer was Guy Debord? In a way, it’s obvious, but only now can we state it: he was a preeminent passive adventurer. There’s a telling moment in another Mac Orlan text, his novel La Vénus internationale (1923), in which Mathieu Raynold, a jaded publisher, remarks to his old friend Nicolas Gohelle: ‘A man lives two existences. Until the age of 45 he absorbs the elements surrounding him. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over; he doesn’t absorb anything more. Thereafter he lives the duplicate of his first existence, and tries to tally the succeeding days with the rhythms and odours of his earlier active life.’15 Perhaps Debord himself was now trying to negotiate these two existences, something he’d begun with In Girum Nocte et Consumimur Igni in 1978, a project he’d completed a little after his 45th birthday. Perhaps without knowing it, he was already retreating behind the high fortress wall in Champot, or to his sumptuous apartment at rue du Bac with the rhythms and odours of 1950s Paris, odours immutably inscribed in his imagination. In the past, Debord had been an ‘active adventurer’, a maverick voyager, somebody who’d actively sought out novelty and change. Later, he’d developed into a supreme Mac Orlanian ‘passive adventurer’, purposefully cutting himself off from anything real or active.

  That’s why Debord adored Mac Orlan: he let Debord glimpse himself in his own living room, at Champot, Arles, Florence or at the rue du Bac, where he could journey to distant shores, go to far-off urban spaces, make daring visitations, get drunk and dance, and still feel at home. And, like Debord, he could take you there with him. Debord’s life was an active voyage of discovery – engaging in covert activities here, disturbing the peace there; and yet, for all that, his enduring legacy is perhaps how he tapped the mysteries of the urban unconscious, unearthed the sentimental city, opening up its everyday heights and illuminated its nocturnal depths. Mac Orlan helped Debord retrace his steps through ruins and recapture an everyday sentimentality of an epoch of streets and hoodlums and cheap thrills. Alongside Mac Orlan, he understood not so much the promise of the future as the power of the past, a phantasmal zone that’s almost gone but needs defending. ‘It isn’t’, said Mac Orlan near the end his memoir Montmartre, ‘for regretting the past that one needs to meditate on this detail, but for regretting the future.’ ‘Where are the kids of the street’, Mac Orlan laments in A Sainte-Savine, one of his popular songs for the accordion, penny poems put to music that Debord knew so well, ‘those little hoodlums of Paris/ Their adolescence busted/ By the prejudices of midnight?/ Where are the gals of Sainte-Savine/ Singing in dancehalls aglow?’

  At rue du Bac, in the spring of 1988, Debord also put the finishing touches to Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, his admirable sequel to the 1967 original. Many people may then have thought that Debord was already dead, or that he’d disappeared into obscurity, gone underground somewhere, vanished into a black hole like his heroes Arthur Cravan, Lautréamont or François Villon. Moreover, two years after its publication the world had witnessed two incredible events that seemed to fly in the face of the book’s brooding thesis. The first was the tearing down of the dreaded Berlin Wall, heralding the implosion of decades of tyranny; the other was Nelson Mandela’s dramatic release from Robben prison after 20 years of incarceration. Each, in di
fferent ways, signified resounding victories for freedom and human rights, ushering in a dizzy optimism about a future that Debord deemed only bleak. Big changes could take place – indeed, they had happened. Things were really up for grabs, after all. At least it appeared so. The first chink in this optimism was the appearance of The End of History (1992) by Francis Fukyama, a Japanese-American conservative who had studied Hegelian philosophy in France.

  It was hard to know whether Fukyama’s epiphany came from the mighty German idealist or from the rambunctious Sex Pistols lead: ‘The end of history’ sounded like the ‘No future!’ refrain Johnny Rotten sang a decade previously, with irony and a dim sense of hope. Fukyama’s teleology was really an apologia for free-market capitalism. For intellectual credibility, he loosely appropriated Hegel’s philosophy of history: conflictual and contradictory history would cease, Hegel said, with the advent of the liberal bourgeois state, the absolute ideal incarnate, which would simultaneously recognize individual particularity within institutional universality. In Hegel’s shadow, Fukyama said history had given other big ideals a chance: fascism during the 1930s, communism after 1917. Both had been doomed alternatives, Fukyama thought, now dispatched to the dustbin of history. Only one idea stayed intact: liberal-bourgeois market democracy. Nothing else mattered; no alternative could be brooked: history had stopped dead in its tracks. It got no better than this; here we are, forever.

  Not long after, this mentality reinforced itself with yet another clarion call: ‘TINA’ – ‘There is no alternative’; and then, hot on its heels, came George Bush Senior’s speech on the ‘New World Order’. (These mantras would soon congeal into a headier thesis: globalization.) Once, history seemed to be opening up; now, everything perplexingly began to close down. Never had bright skies been so fast occluded by storm clouds. Suddenly, under our noses and before our very eyes, democracy was hijacked, usurped by free-market Stalinism. Meanwhile, another strange thing was unfolding: just when the Right was triumphant about its ‘meta-narrative’ of the market, the Left started to proclaim its incredulity to all meta-narratives, to all big stories about humanity and progress. Soon they’d begin to proclaim a viewpoint called ‘postmodern’. One of its ablest commissars was an ex-’socialism or Barbarism’ 1960s activist, Jean-François Lyotard, who stressed the non-foundational nature of truth. In our present ‘post-industrial’ society, Lyotard said, partial pragmatic truths – those refracted through the gaze of media lenses – are the best we can hope and struggle for. Truth, he argued, becomes like storytelling; each tale is difficult to adjudicate, because everything has relative plausibility.

  Thus the paradox: the Right had set off on its long march across the entire globe, dispatching its market missionaries, spreading TINA doctrines, cajoling here, oppressing there, using heavy artillery to smash anything in its path. At the same time, the Left had embarked on an intricate philosophical debate about the meaning of meaning. It was tough to know where to turn, or where to run. A lot of progressives embraced Lyotardian postmodernism or became besotted by deconstruction and post-structuralism. A few became Jacques Derrida groupies; others used clippers to shave off their hair, transforming themselves overnight into Michel Foucault lookalikes. Needless to say, Debord, the passé Marxist, the renowned drinker and metaphysician, the underground man of the Auvergne, was nowhere on anybody’s radical radar. Notwithstanding, he’d unfashionably anticipated these comings back in 1988, well before they’d come to fruition.

  His Commentaires on his earlier treatise were tinged with pathos and had a dark undertow. Yet his analytical scalpel hadn’t blunted 21 years on, nor had his prose lost its clinical lustre or icy precision. And he was dead right. ‘I am going to outline certain practical consequences’, he warned,

  still little known, of the spectacle’s rapid expansion over the last twenty years. I have no intention of entering into polemics on any aspect of this question; these are now too easy, and too useless. Nor will I try to convince. The present comments are not concerned with moralizing. They do not propose what is desirable, or merely preferable. They simply record what is.16

  He expected his record to be welcomed by 50 or 60 people, ‘a large number given the times in which we live and the gravity of the matters under discussion’.

  Regrettably, says Debord, there will be too many things easily understood. The first is how rapidly the spectacle has grown in strength since the disturbances of 1968 and their failures to overthrow existing order. We thought it was bad enough in 1967. Now, the spectacle had spread to its furthest limits on every side, while increasing its density at the centre, learning new defensive strategies, as well as innovative powers of attack. Since The Society of the Spectacle, the society of the spectacle, with barely half a century behind it, has become ever more powerful, perfecting its media extravaganzas, raising a whole generation moulded by its laws. Ordinarily, Debord wasn’t somebody who corrected himself.17 Things, however, had deteriorated so palpably that they’d outstripped his darkest prognostications. History, accordingly, had forced him to intervene yet again. In different circumstances he’d have considered himself ‘altogether satisfied with my first work on this subject, and left others to consider future developments. But in the present situation, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would do it.’

  It’s a tribute to Debord that Comments on the Society of the Spectacle was penned before the Berlin Wall was ripped down, before globalization – as an ideal and economic orthodoxy – was on every politicians’ lips and in every free-marketeers’ wet dream. The Wall had been the de facto demarcation between two rival forms of spectacular rule. On the eastern flank was a regime akin to what he’d formerly called the ‘concentrated spectacle’, with its ideology condensing around a dictatorial personality, whose mantle resulted from a ‘totalitarian counter-revolution’. On the western flank emerged the ‘diffuse spectacle’, the Americanization of the world, driven by wage-earners applying ‘freedom of choice’ to purchase a dazzling array of consumer durables. The latter system was used to frighten many ‘under-developed’ countries; yet, more and more, it successfully seduced them to jump on the bandwagon.

  With the Wall gone, the former Eastern bloc could now be seduced, too. Henceforth two hitherto separated spectacular forms came together into their ‘rational combination’: the integrated spectacle. ‘It is this will to modernize and unify the spectacle’, mused Debord in a 1992 preface to his original treatise, ‘that led the Russian bureaucracy to suddenly convert, like a lone man, to the present ideology of democracy: that is to say, the dictatorial liberty of the market, tempered by the recognition of the Rights of Spectacular Man.’18 ‘Nobody in the West’, Debord maintained, ‘had for a single day held forth the significance and consequence of one so extraordinary media event.’ By 1991 Russia had almost entirely collapsed, ‘expressing itself more frankly than even the West, the disastrous general evolution of the economy’.19

  When the spectacle was concentrated, ‘the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part’. The integrated spectacle has now

  spread itself to the point where it permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe.20

  Nothing is untainted anymore, nothing in culture or in nature; everything has had its halo torn off, its sentimental veil peeled back; everything has been ‘polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry. Even genetics has become readily available to the dominant social forces.’21

  The integrated spectacle, Debord said prophetically, has sinister characteristics: incessant technological renewal; integration of the state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies and an eternal present.22 Gismos proliferate at unprecedented speeds; commodities outdate themselves almost every week; nobody can step down the same supermarket aisle t
wice. The commodity is beyond criticism; useless junk nobody really needs assumes a vital life force that everybody apparently wants. The state and economy have congealed into an undistinguishable unity, managed by spin-doctors, spin-doctored by managers. Everyone is at the mercy of the expert or the specialist, and the most useful expert is he who can lie best. Now, for the first time ever, ‘no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant’. Now, too, there can be no enemy of what exists. ‘We have dispensed with that disturbing conception, which was dominant for over two hundred years, in which a society was open to criticism or transformation, reform or revolution.’

  Without any real forum for dissent, public opinion has been silenced. Masked behind game shows, reality TV and CNN, news of what’s genuinely important, of what’s really changing, is seldom seen or heard. ‘Generalized secrecy stands behind the spectacle, as the decisive complement of all it displays and, in the final analysis, as its most vital operation.’ With consummate skill, the integrated spectacle thereby manufactures consent, ‘organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood’. Ineptitude compels not laughter, but universal respect. The present is all that matters. In fashion, in clothes, in music, everything has come to a halt: you must forget what came before, or else reinvent it as merchandise. Furthermore, it’s no longer acceptable to believe in the future. ‘The end of history’, said Debord, pre-Fukyama, ‘gives power a welcome break.’ History has been outlawed, the recent past driven into hiding, the deep past a forgotten memory. The integrated spectacle covers its tracks, concealing the process of its recent conquests. ‘Its power already seems familiar,’ he said, ‘as if it had always been there. All usurpers have shared this aim: to make us forget that they have only just arrived.’23