Printed in Catalyst 8, Autumn 1991
Early this year a book called Comments on the Society of the Spectacle was published. Its author was Guy Debord, formerly unofficial leader of the Situationist International. Debord wrote:
These Comments are sure to be welcomed by fifty or sixty people; a large number given the times in which we live and the gravity of the matters under discussion.
The mock-humility is breathtaking - halfway to megalomania. How could Debord justfiy it? What has he actually done?
In 1952, Debord's first film Howls in favour of Sade appeared. The screen is either black or white throughout; the soundtrack is sporadic. The film's last line is
We live like lost children, our adventures incomplete.
Then twenty-four minutes of black screen and silence.
Enfants perdus ("lost children"): a French military term, denoting scouts sent into enemy territory and not expected to return.
In 1953 a group called the Lettrist International, whose members included Guy Debord and Ivan Shcheglov, mapped out the "psychogeography" of Paris by travelling through the city in a free-associative "drift". Shcheglov documented his conclusions in his Formulary for a new Urbanism:
The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.
And the strange statue of Dr Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. To explore Paris.
And you, forgotten... without music and without geography, no longer setting off for the hacienda 'where the roots dream of the child and the wine is finished off with tales from an old almanac'. Now that's finished. You'll never see the hacienda. It doesn't exist.
The hacienda must be built.
In 1957 the Lettrist International merged with the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, a group of avant-garde artists, to form the Situationist International (SI). The first issue of its journal included the following definitions.
Most of the SI's initial membership were avant-garde artists; by 1963 they had all left or been excluded. The SI dedicated itself to "bringing the violence of the delinquents onto the plane of ideas".
"It is a matter of finding, of opening up, the 'Northwest Passage' towards a new revolution that cannot tolerate masses of executants, a revolution that must surge over that central terrain which has until now been sheltered from revolutionary upheavals: the conquest of everyday life. We shall only organise the detonation: the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever".
In 1967 Debord's The Society of the Spectacle appeared. The book attacks hierarchy, wage labour and commodity production, but argues that all these forms of domination have been subsumed into the domination of life by images: the spectacle. Images are the currency of modern society; the spectacle itself is "capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image". As for politics, "the struggle of powers constituted for the same socio-economic system is disseminated as the official contradiction but is in fact part of the real unity - on a world scale as well as within every nation".
By creating situations the power of the spectacle can be broken and collective control over everyday life recovered. Workers' councils are the political form of this process. "In the power of the councils the proletarian movement is its own product... Only there is the spectacular negation of life negated in its turn".
The Society of the Spectacle - the film of the book - was released in 1973. "Imagine a work of the same sort as Capital, presented in the form of a Western" (Le Monde).
In April 1968 Debord wrote:
The new revolutionary currents of present-day society, however weak and confused they may still be, are no longer restricted to a marginal underground: this year they are appearing in the streets.
The SI must now prove its effectiveness in a subsequent stage of revolutionary activity - or else disappear.
from The Organisation Question for the SI
17TH MAY 1968 POLITBURO OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY GATE OF CELESTIAL PEACE PEKING SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE FACTORY OCCUPATIONS STOP LONG LIVE THE GREAT CHINESE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1927 BETRAYED BY THE STALINIST BUREAUCRATS STOP LONG LIVE THE PROLETARIANS OF CANTON AND ELSEWHERE WHO HAVE TAKEN UP ARMS AGAINST THE SO-CALLED PEOPLE'S ARMY STOP LONG LIVE THE CHINESE WORKERS AND STUDENTS WHO HAVE ATTACKED THE SO-CALLED CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE MAOIST BUREAUCRATIC ORDER STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE AUTONOMOUS AND POPULAR SORBONNE
In 1971 the SI was dissolved. Afterwards Debord wrote:
We have so well smashed the Situationist International in the preceding months that there is scarcely any chance that that title and image could become harmful in bad hands. The situationist movement - in the broad sense of the word - is now diffused more or less everywhere.
The British section of the SI was excluded en masse in 1967. The group later reformed under the name of King Mob [footnote]. King Mob sympathisers included Chris Bott and Jim Greenfield, later arrested in connection with the Angry Brigade, as well as Jamie Reid and Malcolm Edwards, who were heavily involved a few years later in the commercial promotion of punk music (Edwards having changed his name to McLaren).
Fascism and oppression
will be smashed
Embassies Spanish Embassy machine gunned Thursday
High Pigs
Spectacles
Judges
Property
- Angry Brigade, communiqué 1, December 1970
I don't understand this thing at all - this third-rate B-movie show, cheap dialogue, cheap essential scenery -
- Sex Pistols, Holidays in the Sun, October 1977
In 1991 Manchester entrepreneur Tony Wilson announced the temporary closure of his nightclub, the Haçienda (sic), saying that armed gangs had made the club unsafe. The South Manchester Reporter expressed scepticism about Wilson's motives, describing him as a "noted situationist". Wilson's past record as a lover of outrage includes condoning the Chinese government's actions in Tiananmen Square.
In 1988 Debord's Comments appeared in France. The book argues that the "integrated spectacle" has now superseded both the "concentrated spectacle" of state capitalism and the "diffuse spectacle" of the West. In the process both the market and central authority have increased in power. "The spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects". The spectacle is now free to absorb what were formerly spectacle-free zones (science, history, culture): "power believes that it no longer needs to think; and indeed can no longer think".
As for the development of authority, "the controlling centre has become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology". The result is a kind of institutional paranoia: "conditions have never been so seriously revolutionary, but it is only governments who think so". Ultimately "surveillance spies on itself"; "the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents".
In accordance with the situationists' opposition to copyright law, the book is now also available in pamphlet form (Pirate Press, £1.50).
In 1989 an exhibition of the work of the SI appeared in London. In the New Statesman and Society Philip Core wrote:
Before Pop and after Abstract Expressionism there was a still-born movement, based in continental Europe... Called "Situationism", this movement expressed a rebellious need to counterpose the creative and irreverent with the anticipated homogeneity of media society.
"Situationism" was described as "a non-starter as art per se".
Situationist practice in art or politics can take two forms. One is debased to the point where it enters the vocabulary of the spectacle: this is "situationism". The other is hard to define and harder to achieve. Debord believed himself the bearer of the one true revolutionary doctrine and shaped the SI accordingly in his own unswerving, intolerant image. Then, by dissolving the SI, he threw away the ladder. Aspiring to be a situationist now simply identifies you as a mere fan, a "pro-situ".
Many situationist theses are beyond debate. "Modern society is spectacular" is a statement on a par with "capitalism alienates" - once the terms are defined it's hard to disagree. And the spectacle itself alienates: under the spectacle "conditions have never been so seriously revolutionary". But the SI never did find the Northwest Passage that would link the everyday alienations of life in spectacular society and the forces which could overthrow it. In itself, the SI's utopian nihilism - "Direct action today, Land of Cockaigne tomorrow" - has never had much pulling power; not unless you count Paris in 1968, or Barcelona in 1936, Petrograd in 1921, Limerick in 1916...
Although I'm now an ex-pro-situ, I cannot entirely dismiss Debord or the situationists. Imagine it: everyday life organised around people's actual desires instead of the circulation of commodities. An end to all the forces that waste our lives, from secret police to security tags, from timesheets to entrance fees. An invisible city; a memory of utopia; a final revolution. A drunken adolescent reverie, never acted out since the wildcat general strike of May 1968, supported only by the most far-reaching social theory since the young Marx.
Guy Debord is alive and well and living in Paris. He is 59.
1. The "British section" is one of the many enduring myths of the SI. In fact King Mob included one or two of the four British members of the SI (Chris Gray, T. J. Clark, Donald Nicholson-Smith and Charles Radcliffe). Three of the four (Gray being the exception) joined the SI independently and in France.
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