[D66] Debord 20 Years Later

[Oto]

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1770-debord-20-years-late


      Debord 20 Years Later

By McKenzie Wark <http://www.versobooks.com/blogs?post_author=1095> / 01
December 2014

Twenty years ago, on 30 November 1994, Guy Debord put his affairs in
order and shot himself through the heart, ending one of the most
brilliant and original careers in modern European history. In his
sixty-three years he had co-founded the Situationist International, the
last of the historic avant-gardes. He had written some enduring
revolutionary texts, including his best known, /The Society of the
Spectacle/. And he had made several remarkable avant-garde films. For
someone who managed to live up to his early slogan “Never Work!” he was
remarkably busy.

He is now something of a canonical figure in literature, cinema and the
art world. It has become commonplace to refer to the media sphere as a
/spectacle/, and the cut and mix practices of today’s aesthetics appeals
to the apparently similar Situationist practice of /détournement/ for
legitimation. He has been, as he might say, /recuperated/ back in to
spectacular commodity production. Such is the fate of all avant-gardes.


Debord’s work is quite deservedly canonized. His writing has an
austerity and beauty all its own. His short autobiographical text
/Panegyric/ is a masterpiece. His last work on film, /In Girum Imus
Nocte Et Consumimur Igni/ is a highpoint in avant-garde cinema. The
movement he co-founded, the Situationist International, endured for some
fifteen years and involved some remarkable collaborators, such as
Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Constant and Raoul Vanegeim, whose work
is also celebrated and studied.

But for all that, Debord’s life and work has not entirely lost its
radical charge. A key to this is the practice of détournement. All of
his work contains chunks of material ‘plagiarized’ from other sources.
For Debord, all of ‘culture’ is a commons, something made by and for
everyone. Détournement is the practice of copying from the archive, but
also of correcting it. This literary communism anticipates a more
thorough communism to come. The practice of living and working outside
the lines of private property can begin here.

Détournement had something of a pedigree in French poetry. It was the
method Lautréamont used to compose his masterpiece, the Chant of
Maldoror. Debord’s project takes this and other strategies from art and
literature and applies them to the task of the critique and negation
from within of contemporary media. What Debord calls spectacle much more
than just another word for media, however. It is a key term in a
critique of the totality of commodified life, that world we all
experience how as a declension of being into having, and of having into
appearing.

Debord’s is a total critique of a totally commodified world. But there
are intimations of another life, still to be found, in the interstitial
moments and cracks of everyday life, if one can live without dead time.
This is that time devoted to selling one’s labor and then using the
piddling wages paid for it to buy back the commodities labor makes. A
young Debord had found intimations of another life while wandering the
streets of Paris, a practice call the dérive. Experienced outside of
work and leisure, the psychogeography of the city hints at the design of
another city, for another life. A city of constructed situations for
permanent play

It was apparent to Debord that the capitalism of postwar France was a
new and strange kind of commodity economy, one in which even the parties
and trade unions of the working class had become mere images of
themselves. If there was a challenge to the spectacle it might come from
boredom with the paltry pleasures of commodified life. And come it did,
most famously as ‘May 1968’. Usually thought of as a student revolt, it
was also one of the biggest general strikes in history.

The revolution against the spectacle did not come to pass. By 1972
Debord had wound up the Situationist International and gone into a kind
of internal exile. His later work has a tone of revolutionary nostalgia,
intended not to mythologize past struggles but more to give courage to
those to come to look to their own situation and find what might be
possible.

One thing that sharply separates Debord from other post-68 thinkers is
that he does not celebrate the radical potential of desire or poetry or
the free-floating sign. His thought is quite cold and strategic. Its
finest embodiment is actually a board game. The /Game of War/ is a
training exercise in how to think strategies and tactics, quite
different from the magical thinking about ‘revolt’ or the ‘event’ that
still dogs Francophone thinking.

As commodified life changes form, so too do the strategies and tactics
that might work in and against it. There’s not much leverage any more in
Debordian détournement or dérive. This stage of the spectacle actually
welcomes cut and paste ‘creativity.’ It is rather difficult to wander
the streets when every step of the way is to be recorded by surveillance
cameras. The lesson to be extracted from Debord is more that one has to
start with a clear analysis of the present situation, then draw on past
methods, repurposing them as you go.

The society of the spectacle was no static entity for Debord. He saw it
in the sixties as having two forms: the concentrated and diffused. The
former was characteristic of Soviet and Maoist states, the latter of the
so-called free world. By the seventies, he thought France and Italy were
examples of what he called the integrated spectacle, in which the
capitalist economy of the diffuse spectacle and the involuted, secretive
state of the concentrated form merged. 

These days one might speak of a disintegrating spectacle, in which the
centralized forms of mediating the spectacle break down into fragments
but retain their commodified form. Thus these days we all have to
participate in making display ads and writing advertising slogans –
selfies posed in newly purchased outfits – assuming the burden of
doubling the consumption of things with the consumption of images. All
against the background of what Debord called a sick planet, groaning
under the weight of waste.

McKenzie Wark is the author of /The Spectacle of Disintegration
<http://www.versobooks.com/books/1162-the-spectacle-of-disintegration>,/
(2013, Verso Books).

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20141208/49959d9f/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 44320 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20141208/49959d9f/attachment-0001.jpe>