Consumed by night's fire
The dark romanticism of Guy Debord
Michael Lówy
Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse. And yet people have
tried. And they are still trying. They try to neutralize him, to water him down,
to aestheticize him or to deny his originality. It never works. The dynamite is
still there, and it might explode in the hands of anyone who picks it up and
tries to render it inoffensive.
Here is a very recent example published in a collection
edited by Philippe Sollers.[1] Apparently Debord is no
more than a 'literary dandy' writer with a dazzling style: 'All that remains of
him is litera ture.' In his works, 'the ethic is reabsorbed into the aesthetic'.
How can one integrate a revolutionary book entitled La Société du
spectacle into this asepticized approach? It's quite simple. You just ignore
it. It is not really wor thy of interest because, being an 'impersonal
theoretical work', it is not written in the first person singular. What is more,
it is too marked by turns of phrase and a lexicon borrowed from the young Marx
and Hegel, and they mar the beautiful style. 'Whe n he abandons the great
Germans, it shows in his style. For the better.' The author of this essay would
rather refer to Rivarol and Ezra Pound than to Marx and Hegel. For stylistic
reasons, no doubt.
Others, by contrast, refer only to the book Debord
published in 1967, or rather to its title, and reduce its theses to a banal
critique of the mass media. What he called the 'society of the spectacle' is
not, however, simply the tyranny of television - that most superficial and
immediate manifestation of a deeper reality - but the whole economic, social and
political system of modern capitalism (and its bureaucratic copy in the East).
It is based upon the transformation of the i ndividual into a passive spectator
who watches the movement of commodities, and events in general. This system
separates individuals from each other thanks to, among other things, a material
mode of production that constantly tends to re-create everything - from cars to
television - that generates isolation and separation. The modern spectacle,
wrote Guy Debord in one of those superb formulations he was so good at finding,
is 'an epic poem' but, unlike the Iliad, it does not sing 'the arms and
the man'. It sings 'commodities and their passions'.[2]
It may be a truism, but these days it has to be pointed
out with some force: Guy Debord was a Marxist. A profoundly heretical
Marxist, no doubt, but also a profoundly innovative one. He was open to
libertarian insights , but he still claimed to be a Marxist. His analysis of the
society of the spectacle owes a lot to Lukács's History and Class
Consciousness, which had already made the transformation of human beings
into spectators who watch commodities movi ng of their own accord a central part
of the theory of reification. Like Lukács, Debord sees in the proletariat an
example of a force that can resist reification. Through practice, struggle and
activity the emancipating subject breaks the contemplat ive mood. From that
point of view, the workers' councils that abolish the divorce between product
and producer, between decisions and execution, are the radical antithesis of the
society of the spectacle.[3]
In the face of all the neutralizations and castrations, the important thing
to remember is that Guy Debord's books - which will still be remembered a
hundred years from now - were written by someone who regarded himself as 'a
professional revolutionary working in the cultural field'. Under his influence,
situationism, that dissident wing of surrealism, fused the best traditions of
workers' council communism and the libertarian spirit of anarchism into a
movement designed to bring about a radical transf ormation of society, culture
and everyday life. It failed, but the imaginary of '68 derived some of its most
audacious dreams from situationism.
- Cécile Guilbert, Pour Guy Debord, Gallimard,
Paris, 1996.
- La Société du spectacle, 66; translated into
English as The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Zone Books, New York, 1994.
- Cf. Anselme Jappe, Guy Debord, Via Valeiano,
Marseilles, 1996. This is probably the best book on Debord to
date.
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