Super-state and supra-state authorities impose their will on the world’s population, caretakering the common affairs of the global bourgeoisie, masterminding corporate bills of right and generally administering the integrated spectacle. Through assorted means they police and spearhead neo-liberal economic programmes everywhere. They both open up and seal off certain markets, lubricate free flows of capital and trade, and brandish big sticks over nation-states while promising an abundance of fresh carrots. Hence an ever-growing list of organizations and agreements, nostrums and acronyms: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), World Trade Organization (WTO), General Agreement of Tariffs and Trades (GATT), North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI). Bizarrely, all have accompanied refrains celebrating the virtues of the free market: the clumsy fist of the invisible hand. In its grip, hyper-modern media spurs primitive accumulation of capital.
Standing at the Square du Vert-Galant, on the banks of the Seine, in ‘old Europe’, watching the river flowing, it’s tough to ignore what’s wrong with our new world. At the beginning of our quest for Debord we stood in front of a large stone wall, nosing against his Champot fortress. Now, at journey’s end – at the place from where he departed – we watch the flowing river being driven by a relentless current. A wall is fixed and in your face, somewhere; a river is fluid and takes you elsewhere. Debord was a peculiar mix of each, both fixity and fluidity, a rock as well as a nomad, a defensive barrier and a perpetual gush of movement and imagination. He was, in Clausewitz’s terms, a block of ice in the course of a river’s flow; and yet, he was also a peripatetic wanderer, a river himself, whom nobody could step into twice. One implies stasis and preservation, the other movement and change. Clausewitz said the effectiveness of defence – the effectiveness of the fortress – hinged on two distinct elements, one passive, the other active. The latter, Clausewitz reckoned, couldn’t be imagined without the former. Passive fortresses act as ‘real barriers’: they block roads, immobilize movement, dam rivers. Accordingly, they become ‘oases in the desert’, ‘shields against enemy attack’, ‘buttresses for a whole system of defense’.1
In modern times, there’s plenty that people around the world need to defend themselves against and to stay vigilant about. There’s plenty that our present economic system wants to erase and colonize, wipe out and abuse, rip off and plunder, convert into some abstract space. ‘Capitalist production’, Debord told us in The Society of the Spectacle, ‘has unified space, which is no more bound by external societies.’
The accumulation of mass-produced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporative restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places. This power of homogenization is the heavy artillery that brought down all Chinese Walls.2
Debord’s sense of abstract space, like Marx’s sense of abstract labour, embraces the law of value, the world of commodities, vast networks of banks, business centres, production entities, motorways, airports and information highways. And while big corporations hold the initiative in its production and consumption, abstract space somehow sweeps everybody along, moulding places and people in its logo, incorporating peripheries while peripheralizing centres, being at once deft and brutal, forging unity out of fragmentation.
As the tear gas has flowed, not on the boulevard Saint-Michel but on Seattle’s streets, in Genoa, in Quebec, in Washington, in New York and elsewhere, and as cops wielding batons and water cannons have waded into young demonstrators, a re-energized militancy has generated steam. It’s posed unflinching questions about our fragile democracy and corrupt economic system, and it’s grappled for answers. It’s shown an amazing capacity to politicize people, especially young people, those hitherto disgruntled with ballet-box posturing. Steadily, but surely, a kind of new New Left has congealed, perhaps into the first social movement of the new century. Debord never saw any of these battles and ransackings; but one wonders what he would have made of them. This time around the hairstyles and fashions of the protesters are different, and they speak in a different tongue and jostle a new-fangled enemy, like the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the Bush administration, multinational corporations. Notwithstanding, their spirit remains Situationist at heart: these activists want the world, and they want it now. Maybe this is one coastline where Debord’s ashes have washed up, one beachhead of progressive defence and attack, a nearby shore where new oppositional vernaculars are spoken and new ‘situations’ re-enacted. He would have appreciated the play element of these new-wave protests. Their irreverent expression and gusto smacks of his Lettrist years and the early, idealist phases of the Situationists, when everything seemed possible and all was permitted. Then, as now, the politics of negation was a game. Then, as now, politics necessitated fun, meant creating a stir and kicking up a fuss; play nourished politics and political people were Homo ludens.
The idea harked back to Johan Huizinga, whose 1938 text bearing that stamp Debord had read during the 1950s. Huizinga and Debord agreed that the ‘play element’ was vital in human culture, always had been and always should be. In a 1955 commentary on Huizinga, made while still a Lettrist, Debord underscored the role of play in the journal Potlatch. In issue 20, he affirmed play as ‘the only field, fraudulently restrained by the taboos in durable pretension, of real life’. In politics, in urban life, he said, ‘it is a question now of converting the rules of play from an arbitrary convention into a moral foundation’.3 Making play with the moral foundation of society underwrote Situationist politicking and mimicked Huizinga’s reasoning from Homo ludens, who, almost twenty-years earlier, had asked:
More and more the sad conclusion forces itself upon us that the play-element in culture has been on the wane ever since the 18th century, when it was in full flower. Civilization today is no longer played, and even where it still seems to play it is false play – I had almost said, it plays false, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where play ends and non-play begins.4
In 2000 Americans averaged 1,979 hours on the job, an increase of 36 hours from 1990.5 For a lot of workers, more labour is required simply to prop up their income. As purchasing power has declined and personal debt has burgeoned, people need to put in longer hours (and do more than one job) to buy what they feel they ought to have. Work, henceforth, has overwhelmed everything, absorbing free time, becoming a new belief system, a new deity. Unsurprisingly, little or no time exists for the family or leisure, and even less for civic duties and politics. For the ‘lucky’ ones, their company caters for every physical, psychological and emotional need. The corporate campus becomes ‘a convivial cocoon’, a ‘workers’ paradise, with child care, exercise facilities, cafés, therapists, grief counselors, laundries, post offices, bookstores, break rooms stocked with soft drinks and aspirin, and even a concierge service attending to special needs – such as ordering flowers’.6
The ‘work-as-fun’ mentality reinforces Huizinga’s thesis on ‘false play’. After all, work-as-fun justifies non-stop toil, dreaming of riches and stock options, of hot dot.com start-ups, where hippie 20-somethings play Frisbee while they put in eighteen-hour days. Meanwhile, bankers, stock analysts and overworked executives, on rare weekends off, pay real money to indulge in high-end recreation, ballooning and bungee jumping, scuba diving and skiing.
Maybe the Great Refusal means slowing down and opting out, laughing at the rules and engineering one’s own festivals, one’s own weekdays, as Debord had. The writing had been on the wall all along: ne travaillez jamais! Current street protest seems to be harnessing this energy, grabbing the moment and turning it into a situation. What the world needs more than ever are modern-day Don Quixotes and François Rabelaises, new romantic men and women from La Mancha, defiant dwellers of abbeys of Thélème, wise magicians of laughter and tears, humanists and
utopians who reach for the stars because they want to stand upright. Play and laughter can become a revitalized seriousness, no joking matter, things essential and life-enhancing, not sidetracks and diversions to making money and accumulating commodities. Laughter can be therapeutic and political, with positive creative potentiality as well as negative critical power.
In the sixteenth century François Rabelais built a whole literary and philosophical edifice upon the positive aspects of laughter. His mockery of medieval authority can help us mock our own authority, our own contemporary seriousness and playing false, and restore a new sense of democracy, a new lighter meaning to life. In the bawdy and biting Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its great feasts of food and drink, and rambunctious revelling and coarse humour, Rabelais denounced medieval hypocrisy. ‘Readers, friends’, he warned his audience, old and modern alike, ‘if you turn these pages/ Put your prejudice aside,/ For, really, there’s nothing here that’s contagious./ Nothing sick, or bad – or contagious./ Not that I sit here glowing with pride/ For my book: all you’ll find is laughter: That’s all the glory my heart is after,/ Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you./ I’d rather write about laughing than crying, / For laughter makes men human, and courageous.’
Debord himself was fascinated by medieval times and by wisecracking free spirits; Alice keeps his fascination alive. ‘Guy shared my interest in the Middle Ages’, she admitted to me, en plein air, one late afternoon in July inside the Champot wall. ‘He was enthusiastic about this work of mine and always encouraged it’, she said, sipping red wine and puffing on her cigarillo. ‘It’s sad that he never saw me finish it.’ He didn’t live to see the final volume of her trilogy on slang and on the Middle Ages, Du Jargon héritier en Bastardie.
‘This will be my last treatise on the subject’, said Alice, ‘it’s over now, no more!’ Johan Huizinga figured heavily in her concluding text. He’d once said that the medieval era exuded ‘the ideal of the sublime life’. He said that the aspiration of attaining a pure and beautiful life, as expressed in the Middle Ages, sparked the notion of chivalry. This ideal of sublimity and chivalry, and the pursuit for a pure and beautiful life, still dramatizes Alice’s personal and intellectual disposition, as it had always dramatized Guy’s. It isn’t so difficult to comprehend why Alice’s feudal fascination persists. The Middle Ages internalized startling extremes; a sombre melancholy weighed on people’s souls. Zealous religious piety coexisted with unrestrained corporeal indulgence; fierce judicial judgements with popular sympathy and laughter; dreadful crimes with tender acts of saintliness. Everyday life, in a nutshell, was brutal and immediate, raw and flamboyant.
Play became an antidote to totalitarianism, of whatever stripe. (Huizinga, remember, wrote as Hitler’s darkness closed in, just as Mikhail Bakhtin, that other prophet of play, wrote about Rabelais during the long nights of Stalin’s purges.) Play flouted dogmatic norms and pilloried persecution. It set forth its own mores and created order. It also affirmed joy and embodied something profound. ‘In play’, said Huizinga, ‘we may move below the level of the serious, as the child does; but we can also move above it – in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred.’7 Alice concurred. ‘Need we add again’, she queried, at the close of Du Jargon héritier en Bastardie,
to that which we’d stated in the preamble, that ‘all play is first and foremost a free action … is liberty?’ It appears the answer to this question is, yes. This, at any rate, is what the preceding pages have attempted to emphasize. The finest players having been those who, free until the very end, conducted a game in which they themselves fixed the rules, guided by this virtue so badly perceived nowadays: faithful, before all else, to oneself.8
Alice had galvanized the arena of play into the realm of language, into the secret codifications ‘of those who know’, know how to play, who expressed it in their covert speech, and who set their own terms of reference. Like play, life, she said, was really a game of chance, a roll of the dice, a conflict and a voyage, haphazard and open, a special language-game. The toughest and most honourable players make rules for themselves; and, in the course of their unpredictable lives, stick by them, always. Her late husband’s spirit surely isn’t very far away. Indeed, Alice reminds us, borrowing as a last word his Situationist catchphrase from In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni: ‘it was, first of all, a game, a conflict, a voyage.’
Alice had come full circle, after going around and around in the night, utilizing her own linguistic palindrome. She’d begun with Guy and ends with Guy. She was visibly saddened that he was no longer around to share it. The voyage was over, she hinted, and now we must begin again at the beginning. ‘The idea of a voyage was something crucial for Guy’, Alice told me. He’d seen it the way Gypsies do: not so much experiential as ontological. It’s not that Gypsies necessarily voyage from place to place as they are voyagers; the voyage is immanent in who they are, in what they do, irrespective of whether they travel or not. Guy had similarly understood life as an ontological voyage. Time moves on, ineluctably, and people are consumed by fire. In In Girum, he’d signified the voyage through water and fire, through linear movement and punctuated passageways.9 Water is temporal, healing and unrelenting, with no stepping in it twice; fire is combustible, about love and passion and the Devil. Fire illuminates the night, ignites the spirit; yet water can dowse the flames, extinguishes the charge. Together, they beget the current of life as well as the path toward death… ‘All Guy’s favourite poets dealt with the finite aspect of time’, Alice said, ‘with its slipping away, with the fragility of life: Li Po, Omar Khayyám, and Jorge Manrique.’
Alice presented me with a copy of her latest book, Là s’en vont les seigneuries, whose title is a verse from her late husband’s translation of Jorge Manrique. ‘There are rivers, our lives’, Alice’s last sentence reads, ‘that descend towards the sea of death. There go the lordships themselves.’10 Là s’en vont les seigneuries is less a book than a long essay introducing a dozen richly evocative, sepia-toned photographs of a lost Spanish Atlantis, the village of Rello, in ancient Castile. These images offer various perspectives on an almost-abandoned medieval fortress (population of eighteen), whose walls are crumbling into dust, dissipating with the wear and tear of time. They conjure up a now-defunct Spain, one of El Cid and Don Quixote, of arid plains and sweeping vistas, of old knights and cavernous silences, of odours of lavender and thyme.
Ruins seem to fascinate Alice as much as they fascinated Guy. ‘He’ and ‘she’ (as they’re labelled in the text) visited Rello back in 1970. And Alice presents her most tender memoir to date on her late husband, a touching travelogue of that visit in which they sleep together in a tiny earthy room, scoff cheap tortilla and tapas, and drink vintage Rioja with comrades, ‘toasting France, Spain and friendship’.11 ‘Never will we drink so young’, says Alice, appropriating Guy’s stanza from In Girum. ‘In the sky, at night, amongst the stars, you will find me again’, she signs off. Hasta siempre, Amor. Medieval fortresses are scattered everywhere around Champot, too. One, at Polignac, a 20-minute car ride south-east from chez Debord, with its stark eleventh-century ramparts, even looks like Rello. Formerly the cradle of one of France’s grandest families, Polignac is similarly decaying, equally drifting away and eerily passé. Its fortress design, typical of a bellicose era when autocratic lords pitted themselves against one another, has as its pinnacle a fourteenth-century 32 metres high keep, sitting atop a great bulging outcrop of rock that’s visible from miles in the distance.
But where are the snows of bygone years?
Prince, do not ask in a week
Or yet in a year where they are;
I could only give this refrain:
But where are the snows of bygone years?
… I must stop talking like this;
the world is only illusion.
No one stands up against death,
Nor staves off its approach.
… Where is Guesclin, the good Breton knight,
o
r Dauphin, Count of Auvergne,
and the late brave Duke d’Alençon?
But where is the bold Charlemagne?
Within Polignac’s mighty walls, medieval knights and crafty bateleurs found safety. Within Champot’s mighty ramparts other crafty bateleur likewise found cover. Indeed, Champot felt like a passive adventurer’s Camelot, self-contained, warm and safe. The wall seemed even taller from inside, even more robust and cut-off from reality, because somehow the garden is sunken below the level of the outside path. ‘Guy loved the wall’, Alice confessed. He’d employed a local mason to heighten it.
It was the thing he liked most about the house. When we first summered here in the 1970s, Guy never thought he could live in the country. After all, he was a man of the streets and cities. But slowly he adjusted and grew to love the house, with its peace and its wall. He would look forward to coming. He would always be reading here… Guy read all the time.
The house, and the house next door, were both owned by her brother, Eugène Becker-Ho. As an ensemble, the houses had once been ‘the Debord colony’ – as some locals termed it. Debord once described the house as ‘opening directly onto the Milky Way’; now, Alice herself had immortalized this in her poem “Voie lactée’. She said Guy would go out at night, stand on the grass, and look up at the stars. ‘He loved looking up at the Milky Way; he’d watch it for hours. But for me it was just too vast. It made me feel vertiginous. The poem I wrote was a very personal thing’: ‘the stars that so fascinated you/ Alone/ At night’, but which made me ‘feel dizzy’. With ‘Raised eyes/ You found there/ Peace/ And Serenity.’12
Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Page 14
