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OBITUARY: GUY DEBORD
FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL SECTION 84B, WHITECHAPEL HIGH ST.
LONDON E1
THE AUTHOR OF SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE HAS KILLED HIMSELF
Last Curtain Call for Guy Debord
We don't know how he died and still less why. We only know
that Guy Debord, around evening time on Wednesday 30th
November, took his life; the life that in the last few years
he himself - perhaps the last of the Situationists still
partly faithful to his own image of the resolute enemy of
the society of the spectacle - helped to make more
mysterious, more evanescent more elsewhere. Paradoxically
one could say that in reality death has brought him back to
life, in the sense that it has re-established the human
reality (death being our common destiny) of a character
whose notoriety and uncompromising stance of refusal would
make of existence a long theatrical piece, in which he would
improvise up until the end. But who was Guy Debord? There
are several answers, but at the same time such answers would
preclude the understanding of his identity as indefinable.
Writer? Film director? Situationalist? 'Doctor in
nothing...' as he liked to define himself in one of his
latest books? Of course all those things, but simply because
they are 'things' - which comes down to things he did - they
certainly do not reveal the whole man. It isn't for nothing
that the numerous French dailies which reported the news of
his suicide, not only didn't say how or why he died, neither
did they say anything about him, limiting themselves to an
inventory of the things he did, the things he said, how he
did them, how he said them but forgetting to say who, Guy
Debord, was. In reality it was the self-imposed mystery
which created the impenetrable and adventurist aura, barely
available to the media and prone to violent argument; Guy
Debord liked to hide his true self behind a blanket of
gossip, speculation and even spite in his dealings with
others, and to never let it see daylight. For the rest, for
someone who wrote a book: The Society of the Spectacle,
where the world is seen as a spectacle - which is to say a
false image which the economic system produces of itself in
order to dominate society - visibility was to be totally
denied. Thus the rare photos which he consciously planned so
that they should be published in his lifetime - were the
most hazy in the world and to a fair degree made him look
younger than his real age. Certainly, invisibility was
imperative!
It was not by chance that his first public work was a film
Hurlement en faveur de Sade (1952), in which there is no
picture and the spectator - truly stupefied by this purely
surrealist provocation - watched an alternated sequence of
white and then black screens, whilst listening to a mixture
of atonal dialogues involving numerous people leading up to
a silent, black screen for 24 minutes. This was the first
gauntlet against the spectacle thrown down by Guy Debord who
fought this battle throughout his life; a death sentence for
the cinema, at the time considered as the essence of the
artistic product of bourgeois society and for that reason
the extreme synthesis of its values in full decomposition,
since it expressed not the construction of a situation which
aimed to shed light on everyday life but rather a system of
falsification of reality in order to suppress it and
supplant it by means of a series of images aimed at cutting
the individual off from his daily existence and making of
him an illusory participant in the spectacle of consumer
society in his role as good/product of the spectacle.
The setting up in 1957 of the Situationist International was
partly the logical consequence of these artistic
presuppositions. Coming out of the European cultural milieu
as the convergence of several artistic experiences (COBRA,
the Lettrist International, the Movement for Bauhaus Cinema,
the London Psychogeographical Society) the SI from day one
aimed to represent - above all via Debord who was the editor
of its statement of principles - a critique of art brought
into being by the necessity of superseding it by creating
liberated situations in which life can effectively
experience its own possibilities and not become enclosed in
the repetitive role models that the society of the spectacle
constructs in order to dominate and exploit. But already in
those early years the different heads of the SI quarrelled
amongst themselves and Debord - who alone amongst them
represented the most coherent position with his objective of
achieving a total critique of art and a whole culture
skewered towards the production of values separated from
everyday life (and for that reason incapable of achieving
its own radical transformation) - came out better from
confrontations with those who presupposed the replacement of
art as simply a repeat of the architectural and urban
argument which aimed to make works of art no longer on
canvas but in the physical space of a city.
But the first years of the 60s saw a U turn in the politics
of the SI, and coincided with Debord's political phase,
which saw an achievement of sorts in making of the
organisation - now nearly purged of any artistic content -
the rallying point between the experience of the European
cultural avant guard and the experience of politico-
revolutionary groupings, in France represented by some
journals (Arguments and Socialisme et Barbarie) of a
revisionary Marxist leaning. These were the years when
Debord participated in the seminars of Lefebvre at Nanterre
and during which he developed his critique of daily life
which had already been expounded by this philosopher and
sociologist from Nanterre in the late 50s. The critique of
everyday life - the baby sister of theories of
alienation/separation produced by the spectacular society,
became the theoretical underpinnings of the SI and the theme
of his most famous book, already mentioned, in which the
theoretical and organisational experience of the workers
council ... represented the political and revolutionary
dnouement of the situationist theory. The Strasbourg scandal
and Paris 68 showed not so much that Debord and the SI were
gaining influence (as has always been claimed by the
historical hagiographer of the movement), but rather the
fortuitous meeting - and in many ways prospicious - between
the combative and revolutionary practice of the movement of
68 and the necessity to find an outlet for situationist
theory. If there had been no May 68 in France, would the SI
have become what it seemed to be after the event (that is
the high point of modern revolution)? And would the work of
Debord have come to seem clairvoyant and prophetic, as was
claimed by numerous commentators who proclaim his books on
the social spectacle to be the only texts able to give a
sense - sorry: a vision - to what happened in the East as
well as the West? All these considerations lead back to the
unanswered question of who Guy Debord was; a man who, at the
age of 62, decided to put an end to his life and to
foreclose his real life story asking forgiveness for his own
mistakes. But the truth of his story will still have to be
reconstructed by reference to his work which he has left to
posterity with the intention of becoming the first invisible
personality of the society of the spectacle. Will we ever
know the truth?
GIANFRANCO MARELLI FAI Milan Trans from Le Monde Libertaire
21 Dec. 94