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<address class="title"><a
href="http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1770-debord-20-years-late">http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1770-debord-20-years-late<br>
</a></address>
<h3 class="title">Debord 20 Years Later</h3>
<p class="byline"> By <a
href="http://www.versobooks.com/blogs?post_author=1095">McKenzie
Wark</a> / 01 December 2014 </p>
<p>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, <em>The Society of the Spectacle</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>spectacle</em>, and the cut and mix practices of
today’s aesthetics appeals to the apparently similar Situationist
practice of <em>détournement</em> for legitimation. He has been,
as he might say, <em>recuperated</em> back in to spectacular
commodity production. Such is the fate of all avant-gardes.<br>
<br>
<img src="cid:part3.09010304.00050700@ziggo.nl" alt=""></p>
<p><br>
Debord’s work is quite deservedly canonized. His writing has an
austerity and beauty all its own. His short autobiographical text
<em>Panegyric</em> is a masterpiece. His last work on film, <em>In
Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Game of War</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>McKenzie Wark is the author of <em><a
href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1162-the-spectacle-of-disintegration">The
Spectacle of Disintegration</a>,</em> (2013, Verso Books).</p>
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