Guy Debord (Critical Lives)

by Andy Merrifield

  Our self-proclaimed democracy also constructs its own inconceivable foe: terrorists. ‘Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results.’ Spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, ‘but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable’.24 Every enemy of the spectacle is a terrorist enemy; all dissenters – grievances notwithstanding – are terrorists. Spectacular authorities need to infiltrate, compile dossiers and eliminate critique – authentic or not. Unexplained crimes are either suicides or terrorist attacks. Terrorists themselves soon feel the wrath of state terrorism: Mossad kills the Jihad in the Lebanon; the Contras do likewise with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; ditto the SAS with the IRA in Northern Ireland; the GAL with ETA in Spain and the CIA with al Quaeda in Afghanistan. In this context, Mafiosi flourish: Colombian drugs Mafia, Sicilian Mafia, Fundamentalist Mafia, and of course White House Mafia. New forms of economic integration necessitate new bonds of dependency and protection. As such, the ‘Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises.’25

  On and on Commentaires sur la société du spectacle went, lashing out, venting spleen, waxing majestically, with bile. In many ways, it was an even angrier text than Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici. It mercilessly indicted not actual newspapers or journalists, but the whole structure of society, our institutions and governments, all in cahoots together, all as pathological and deceitful as one another, all so in control that they’re out of control. In 1984 Debord branded sarcasm and irony to avenge the death of his friend; in 1988 he gave the finger to the totality of modern political and economic life. He signs off not with a revolutionary call-to-arms, but with an enigmatic passage from Sardou’s nineteenth-century Nouveau dictionnaire des synonymes français, ruminating on the meaning of the word vain. You sense this is some key, valedictory moment that Debord is sharing with us. It’s a parable of a life of intrigue and lost battles, disguised in a single paragraph, intelligible for those who know. It has a beguiling poignancy, a recognition that he was right all along, and being right meant he won even when he lost. For, although his struggles had somehow been in vain, that didn’t undermine the righteousness of the effort. Thus:

  one has worked in vain when one has done so without achieving the intended result, because of the defectiveness of the work. If I cannot succeed in completing a piece of work, I am working vainly; I am uselessly wasting my time and effort. If the work I have done does not have the result I was expecting, if I have not attained my goal, I have worked in vain; that is to say, I have done something useless … It is also said that someone has worked vainly when he has not been rewarded for his work, or when this work has not been approved; for in this case the worker has wasted time and effort, without this prejudicing in any way the value of his work, which indeed may be very good.

  Less than a year after Commentaires sur La Société du Spectacle, Debord wrote another book, a romantic and poetic eulogy to himself. In 1988 he’d negated, had spoken of everything he hated about the modern world, everything we knew was true; in 1989, he affirmed, he spoke about everything he loved about life. Even staunch critics couldn’t deny its literary brilliance and touching melancholy. Panégyrique supplanted pessimism with the joys of resistance and the pleasures of resisting. A leopard dies with his spots; so shall I, he vowed. He is what he is. In good times, he held no private interests; in desperate times, he feared nothing. ‘History is inspiring’, Debord recalled. ‘If the best authors, taking part in its struggles, have proved less excellent in this regard than their writings, history, on the other hand, has never failed to find people who had the instinct for the happy turn of phrase to communicate its passions to us.’26 During the Mexican Revolution, for instance, Francisco Villa’s partisans sang: ‘Of that famous Northern Division,/ only a few of us are left now,/ still crossing the mountains/ finding someone to fight wherever we go.’27 We are, he said, woven of a cloth that’s made to dream. He was a prime example of what his epoch didn’t want. Forgive him his faults.

  Panégyrique was Debord’s literary grand finale. He’d never approach its eloquence again. He would publish his last real book, Cette mauvaise réputation, in 1993, duelling once more with the French media, who refused to let up sullying the ex-Situ’s reputation. But penned when peripheral neuritis worsened, this was a bitter effort. Dante once said it is with a knife that the slandered should respond to such bestiality. They were different days, Debord laments. So he’ll use instead the more modern method of parody and polemicism. Not having worked demanded great talent, he reminded his critics. ‘I have never believed that anything in the world was done with the precise intention of pleasing me.’28 Perhaps the most telling line in the book, written a year before his death, is this: ‘I am not someone who could be drawn to suicide … by imbecilic calumnies.’29 ‘I hope’, he said, citing Georgias de Léontium as the book’s epigraph, ‘to have held myself to this rule at the commencement of my discourse. I have attempted to annul the injustice of this bad reputation and the ignorance of opinion.’

  One of the last things Debord wrote, three days before he took his own life, was a letter to the editor of a posthumous collection of ‘contracts’, agreements in which ‘nothing is legal; and it is exactly this special form that renders them so honourable.’ Debord said he’d had an idea for the cover of Des contrats:

  It’s a card from Marseilles tarot, to my mind the most mysterious and finest: the bateleur. It seems to me that this card would add, without having to imply it too positively, something one would be able to see as a certain mastery of manipulation; and in recalling opportunely the full extent of his mystery.30

  In Des contrats’ preface, a knowing Debord voiced a Spanish proverb: ‘We have only two days to live.’ ‘It is a principle’, he added, ‘naturally little favourable in financial speculation.’

  Debord will always seem like a bateleur, a little mysterious, a little menacing, and a lot impish. In an odd way, the bateleur might be the great symbol of revolt and resistance in our day: allusive and playful, intelligent and full of tricks, at once an outsider and a court jester. In every sense, they’re somebody who knows – a mythical medieval voyou qui sait. It’s someone able to live both within and beyond the integrated spectacle, using conjuring skills to deceive and to search for lost and new wisdom. The bateleur belongs to the oldest and most popular tarot variant now in use. Nobody knows, for sure, how tarot came about. Gypsies, Jews, Sufis, Freemasons and assorted religious and esoteric groups all claim authorship. And tarot makes allusions to the Gospels and the Book of Revelation, as well as to Cabbalist, astrological and Tantric teachings. Out of this complex mélange, Marseilles tarot somehow emerged, whose first-card protagonist is the mysterious juggler/magician/trickster.

  The bateleur signifies a beginning, somebody on the rise. For him, everything’s possible and trickery is his practised métier. Like all magicians, by gestures and through speech, he creates a world of illusions. His hand tricks the eye; he thrives off ambivalence. In luring us toward his act, egging us nearer his conjurer’s table, he invites us to go beyond appearances. He makes us feel uncomfortable. He looks and feels very strange and we’re not sure if he’s an impostor. But we know, too, that he might hold knowledge of secret essentials. He might possess the mysteries of unity that help us accomplish our destiny.

  The classic image of the bateleur, adorning Des Contrats and every Marseilles tarot card, is of a young man with blond curly locks wearing bright tricoloured – red, blue and gold – minstrel’s clothes. He looks sharp and cocky in his big floppy hat, standing in front of a wooden table, holding something red, perhaps a magic wand or a baton. On the table are various artefacts, elemental tools of his trade: glasses, knives and coins. The glass represents thirst, whose key constituent is water, the symbol of knowledge; the knives signify swords, emblems
of air, action and courage; the wand suggests a baguette, the image of primordial fire; and the coins are earthly material, evoking the land. The bateleur treads fearless along paths where your quest leads you. He never forgets that the grandest revolutions are made in peace and love. It’s interesting, and not coincidental, that Debord wanted to bid adieu with an illustration of an image of creation and commencement. His farewell constitutes a debut, a possibility. That was his final spell, the last wave of his red wand.

  The autumn of 1994 was particularly wet and dismal in the Haute-Loire. It poured for days on end. Damp seeped deep into the stone walls of every house and made things feel cold and unbecoming. Guests no longer visited Guy and Alice, and they spent quiet days and nights alone. He sipped wine slowly, read, smoked his pipe and played Kriegspiel while listening to rain dance off the roof and gush along the gutters. During his last months, Debord could hardly walk without his cane. He found getting in and out of the car difficult. Alice ran all the errands now, to Bellevue and Le Puy, to Saint-Paulien and Craponne. He rarely left the Champot Haut farmhouse. He’d refused to seek treatment in the early stages of illness; now it was too late, too futile. Nothing could be done. He’d refused to let up drinking, and the burning pain throughout his body worsened.

  According to medical encyclopedias, peripheral neuritis or alcoholic polyneuritis is a disease caused by the toxic effects of alcohol on the nerve tissue. It’s a drinker’s ailment. It can lead to long-term chemical poisoning of the body, which inflames the outlying nerves and affects the muscles in the arms and legs. At first, there’s a loss of sense of touch, then pins and needles, and, in more progressive cases, numbness and disability, as well as acute pain in joints and muscles. Insomnia and gout are not uncommon in an illness that seems to manifest itself as a cross between arthritis and multiple sclerosis. It’s a malady that is treatable and, indeed, curable, if spotted early and if the patient takes mineral supplements and physical therapy, exercises and, above all, stops drinking.

  Debord did none of this, of course. In fact, he did the exact opposite: he turned his life of drink into a form of lyrical poetry; his drinking problem became an oeuvre, a magnificent and terrible peace, writing some of the most prosaic passages of Panégyrique on the only thing, he said, he’d ever done with real aplomb.31 ‘There is what is drunk in the mornings’, he wrote,

  and for a long while that was beer. In Cannery Row a character who one could tell was a connoisseur professes that ‘there’s nothing like that first taste of beer’. But I have often needed, at the moment of waking, Russian vodka. There is what is drunk with meals, and in the afternoons that stretch between them. There is wine some nights, along with spirits, and after that beer is pleasant again – for then beer makes one thirsty. There is what is drunk at the end of the night, at the moment when the day begins anew. It is understood that all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly how it should be.32

  He’d hidden his fame in taverns, but now his secret was out; he’d drunk one too many coups for the road.

  Debord apparently owned several antique pistols and a Winchester rifle; any one of the former could have been used on himself, for the one fatal shot into his heart on that dreary afternoon on 30 November 1994. Did Alice know of his intention? It seems that she was complicit. It’s difficult to imagine how she felt at the hour, and in the days preceding, the secret she guards today, the memory she retains of him, the noise of a single shot ringing out across the moors … ‘Guy wasn’t condemned’, Alice said in a 1998 interview. ‘He condemned himself.’33 It’s the story of his life in a single sentence, a life lived on his own terms, set to his rules, clues of which were given in his 1973 film version of The Society of the Spectacle. The scene is purloined from Orson Welles’s 1955 movie Mr Arkadin, where the eponymous protagonist Gregory Arkadin, ruining himself as he stays true to his nature, relays the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The former wants the latter to carry him across a river he can’t swim himself. But if I take you on my back, the incredulous frog enquires, you’ll sting me and we’ll drown together. Why would I do that, responds the scorpion, it’s against my better interests. Halfway across he stings the frog, and, as they are both about to sink, the frog wonders: Logic? Where’s the logic? I could do nothing else, says the scorpion, it’s in my character. ‘Let’s drink to character!’ Debord shows Arkadin toasting. ‘Let’s drink to friendship!’

  Alcoholic polyneuritis was first spotted in the autumn of 1990. ‘D’abord presque imperceptible, puis progressive. Devenue réellement pénible seulement à partir de la fin de novembre ‘94’ stated Debord in a final letter, which he’d mail to Brigitte Cornand, to be included in a posthumous TV documentary, Guy Debord, son art et son temps. ‘Comme dans toute maladie, on gagne beaucoup à ne pas chercher, ni accepter de se soigner. C’est le contraire de la maladie que l’on peut contracter par une regrettable imprudence. Il y faut au contraire la fidèle obstination de toute une vie.’34 It was a typical Debordian refrain, majestic and undefeated to the bitter end, a leaf out of Manrique’s Coplas: ‘At first almost imperceptible, then progressive’, he’d said.

  It became really painful from the end of November 1994. As with all incurable illnesses, one gains a lot by not seeking to, nor accepting, to cure oneself. It is the opposite of an illness that one can contract by regrettable imprudence. One needs, on the contrary, the faithful obstinacy of an entire life.

  6

  Land of Storms

  It was, first of all, a game, a conflict, a voyage.

  Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni

  Debord was cremated in Saint-Etienne, the nearest big town to Champot. A few days later, Alice and several close friends travelled up to Paris where, from the banks of the Square du Vert-Galant, toasting Guy’s memory, she tossed his ashes into the Seine. The current carried his ashes downstream, towards some unknown tributary, out into a vast nameless ocean. Debord was floating downwind and downstream, and somehow he is taking others along with him, to places we can’t foresee, can’t predict. His spirit is there in all of them, even if his physical presence is absent.

  A stone stairwell, reeking of piss and faeces, on Paris’s oldest bridge, the Pont-Neuf, leads you down to the western tip of the Ile de la Cité. The square below, named after Henri IV’S notorious gallantries, is really a narrow triangular outcrop, replete with a neat lawn that’s shaped like the bow of a ship. At high water, it’s often cut off from the rest of the Ile; at other times, you can walk through a concrete trench and access one of Paris’s most tranquil and beautiful spots, a hidden oasis afloat on the Seine. The day Alice bid Guy farewell, rumour has it that a skull and crossbones was seen flying from some untraceable mast. At the square’s entrance, a plaque commemorates Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Order of the Temple, and a certain ‘Guy’, the mysterious commander of the Normandy Templars, both of whom were burnt alive there in 1314. (They were indicted for heresy by Pope Clement v; but at the stake protested their innocence. ‘I should reveal the deception which has been practised and speak up for the truth’, Jacques uttered. ‘I declare, and must declare, that the Order is innocent. Its purity and saintliness is beyond question.’)

  The Seine from the Square du Vert-Galant, where Debord’s ashes were scattered.

  Beyond the lawn is a cobblestone terrace with weeping willow trees that leads you to the water’s edge. The Louvre dominates the Right Bank; aglow with sunlight it contrasts starkly with the muddy-brown Seine. Ahead, in the foreground, is the pedestrian walkway, the Pont des Arts, no doubt shimmering in the frosty air the day a tearful Alice returned Guy to where he really belonged: to Paris, to the river he’d so adored throughout his life. The tide of destruction and pollution, Debord said, had conquered the whole planet. So he could return to the ruins of Paris, since nothing better remained anywhere else. For a while, he’d enjoyed the pleasures of exile; now, he knew there is no exile. Nobody can hide in a unified world.

 
Several years into the new millennium, an epoch Debord never lived to witness, our world seems forever besieged by violent storms. Weather fronts sweep in, destroy and move on increasingly swiftly, increasingly chaotically and unpredictably. History has never seemed so open, so unstable, so precariously teetering on the edge of a huge abyss: wars and terrorism, financial meltdown, ethnic cleansing, religious conflicts, class exploitations, epidemic diseases, irresponsible American imperial might. More than 1 billion people now scramble to make ends meet on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, the net worth of the world’s 358 richest individuals equals the combined income of the world’s poorest 45 per cent – some 2.3 billion people.