Guy Debord Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, with a Foreword by T. J. Clark and a New Afterword by the Author Anselm Jappe University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London i r / University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1993, ]995, 1999 by Anselm]appe English translation copyright © 1999 by the Regents of the University of California Foreword copyright © 1999 by T. J. Clark Original Italian edition published in 1993 by Edizioni Tracce, Pescara, Italy. Revised edition, in French, published in 1995 by Via Valeriano, Marseilles. Lihrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data lappe, Anselm, 1962- [Guy Debord. Englishl Guy Debord / Anselm ]appe; translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith; with a foreword by T. J. Clark. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-21204-5 (alk. paper). -ISBN 0-520-2I205-3 (pbk. : alk paper) Debord, Guy, 1931- 2. Radicals 1. France-Biography. I. Title. HN440.R3 D43613 1999 303·48'4-dc21 [bl 98-37465 eIP Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I The paper used in this publication meets the mini mum requirements of ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992 e (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). /-( c 316 ~IU /Iv,! J 000 - 1J.~ 1.'$ Contents Foreword by T.}. Clark / vii Translator's Acknowledgments / xi Abbreviations / xiii A Note on Quotation from English Translations / XVII Part 1: The Concept of the Spectacle Must We Burn Debord? / I The Spectacle-Highest Stage of Abstraction I 5 Debord and Lukacs I 19 History and Community as the Essence of Man I 3 I Part 2: The Practice of Theory The Letterist Interna tiona I / 45 The Situationists and Art I 63 The Critique of Everyday Life I 72 The Situationists and the Sixties I 81 May 1968 and After I 99 The Debord Myth / 105 The Spectacle Twenty Years On I II7 Part 3: Theory Past and Present The Situationist Critique in Historical Context I 125 The Aporias of the Subject and the Prospects for Action / 135 Two Sources and Two Aspects of Debord's Theory I 148 Afterword to the English-Language Edition / 161 Bibliography I: Works of Guy Debord I 169 Bibliography 2: Selected Works on Debord and the Situationists I 175 Index / 181 L Foreword A book about Guy Debord-and Anselm Jappe's is far and away the best we have so far, I think-ultimately stands or falls by what it has to say about two interlinked puzzles that stand at the heart of Debord's life and work. Such a book.need not spell out these puzzles exactly as I do (you will see that lappe's terms are different), but I believe it ought to be driven and haunted (as Jappe's undoubtedly is) by a similar sense that broad questions about the nature of Debord's achievement con stantly come up and get harder to answer the more unavoidable they seem. The questions are these. First, how are we to understand the ob vious (but scandalous) fact that in Debord's case politics was largely writing-that it turned on the building of an inimitable polemical and expository style, assembled over decades, born from a series of engage ments with, on, and against the French language? Second, what does it mean that this, the only political writing of our time-the only such writ ing to have a chance of surviving its circumstances, I believe, the writ ing that will be seen by future ages to have kept the possibility of politics alive-issued from a situation so thoroughly at odds with the century, or with most of the terms in which the century chose to present itself? Why was distance and embattlement, of which Debord was the ultimate exponent, so often the source of insight and sanity in his case, not "par adise for a sect"? What does it tell us about the age that its true voice its adequate description-came so exultantly from the margins? Because Jappe succeeds in posing these two questions concurrently, and knows full well that answering one of them involves answering both, he manages to talk about Debord's achievement as one of voice, or lan guage, without falling in with those in France who have been trying since Debord's death, and even before it, to turn him into "a master of French prose." At all events, the maneuver is futile. For a start, part of the work on the language Debord was involved in turns on an agonized, and deeply funny, running battle with the notions of mastery and Frenchness lurk ing in the phrase above-"mastery" equaling "Frenchness," which in vii f/.: viii Foreword turn equals clarity, authority, classical balance, skeptical levity, etc. A great deal of the agony/comedy in Debord's prose is provided by the business of its continually swallowing, and half-regurgitating, mon strous Hegelian, un-French, unclear turns of phrase and thought-so that the reader is typically plunged, in a sentence or two, from icy Retz or La Rochefoucauld aphorisms, shining with hate-filled economy, on to smothering, fuzzy (inspiring) rigmarole, full of unrepentant dialecti cal tricks, like the best bits of Feuerbach or the young Marx. (And there is no "like" about it a lot of the time: the quotations and paraphrases are verbatim. ]appe tracks many of these down.) This is "writing," sure enough. I'd be inclined to say great writing. But it was not done by some one who was only or essentially a writer (or a master of French prose), any more than he was an "artist," "filmmaker," "politician," or even "revolutionary." All of these identities, Debord never tired of telling us, are what now stand in the way of the activities they once pointed to. Political writing of the highest order is rare. Moments at which a par ticular language is opened to a further range of possibilities-a new tone, a new conception of human purposes, a sharper or wilder rhetorical as- . cent-in any case happen infrequently. And moments at which this open ing depends on the creation of a specifically political voice, rather than an ethical, lyric, or epic one, are truly few and far berween. The Rousseau of the Discourses would be one, Burke in the Reflections another. (The Debord-Rousseau comparison is inescapable, I think, even down to the confidence with which right-thinking commentators go on trying to re duce the politics of both to personal deficiency, thinking that doing so will lay the politics finally to rest. That never quite seems to happen.) But the fact that both my points of comparison come from the late eigh teenth century only puts the Debord puzzle in sharper relief. For Burke and Rousseau were working with a political imagery and argumenta tion already formed and enriched by many others, in a previous half century's conversation. They had seen the imagery and argumentation taken up in actual political practice, by despots and revolutionaries, and put to the test of reality. The terms of the conversation had changed con stantly as a result. In a word, they were the least isolated of men. They did not need to invent a political language-still less to wrest the possi bility of one from a surrounding farrago of lies and soundbites. They did not live in the midst of a terrible, interminable contest over how best to debauch and eviscerate the last memory-the last trace-of political as piration. Those who complain ·of Debord's paranoia should look again at what he was trying to do, and why he might have thought, in the I9705 and I9805, that almost everything and everybody stood in his way. Foreword ix One main merit of jappe's book is that it manages to see and speak to Debord's embattledness and isolation, and also to his being a social animal. For no one was better, over whole stretches of his life, at mak ing himself enough of a community for the purposes of the moment; and if that community had nothing to do with the official "political" culture of Sartre, Garaudy, and de Gaulle, then so much the better. Writ ing was one social activity among others. The room on the rue Saint jacques where The Society of the Spectacle got written was at once an austere cell-with nothing on the shelves, I remember, but a few crucial texts (Hegel, Pascal, Marx, Lukacs, Lautreamont's Poesies) laid open at the relevant page-and the entryway to Debord's minuscule apartment, through which friends and comrades continually passed. The process was meant to be seen, and interrupted. One moment the deep, ventrilo qual dialogue with History and Class Consciousness; the next the latest bubble for a comics detourne, or the best insult yet to Althusser and Godard. Those names lead me finally to Debord's hostility to the very idea of "representation," which everyone these days (except jappe) is sup posed to think the weirdest and most naIve part of his worldview. For what else can there be (says everyone) besides representation? What could Debord possibly have meant by the notions brought on in his writ ing to represent representation's opposite-"lived experience," for in stance, or "imagination," or, worse still, "poetry"? Do they not lead us inevitably back to a Rousseau-and-Lukacs realm of transparency and face-to-faceness and therefore usher in a politics of purity and purging to match? Not necessarily, is jappe's answer. In the end, in our present age of "information," it may even be this side of Debord's politics-for the moment the most despised, the most outdated-that will prove the kernel of future action. For supposing we take Debord's writing as di rected not to anathematizing representation in general (as everyone has it) but to proposing certain tests for truth and falsity in representation and, above all, for truth and falsity in representational regimes. Why should there not be an alternative to our current "totalitarian dictator ship of the fragment"? Why is it so difficult to think (and demand and construct) "representation" as plural rather than as singular and cen tralized: representations as so many fields or 'terrains of activity, subject to leakage and interference between modes and technologies, and con stantly crossed and dispersed by other kinds of activity altogether: sub ject, as a result, to retrieval and cancellation-to continual reversals of direction between object and image, and image and receiver? Why should a regime of representation not be built on the principle that images are, x Foreword or ought to be, transformable (as opposed to exchangeable)-meaning disposable through and through, and yet utterly material and contin gent; shareable, imaginable, coming up constantly in their negativity, their non-identity, and for that reason promoted and dismantled at will? "History," to take up one of Debord's favorite quotations from Lukacs, "is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man." I know that in the age of symbol management it is sometimes hard to tell Debord's utopia apart from the one on offer from Microsoft. But they are different, in every respect; the one is a nerveless parody of the other; and the fact that Debord's imagining of other worlds shares so much with that of his opponents is potentially his imagining's strong point. It is what lets The Society of the Spectacle go on haunting the non-world of cyberspace-until the moment, which is surely not far off, when the bourgeoisie begins to fall out of love with the speed-up of the last two decades, and no longer gets higher and higher on the de tails (the gadgetry) of its own proletarianization. Political writing is al ways instrumental as well as utopian. Debord's is no exception. Only sometimes writing has to reconcile itself to the idea that its time of in strumentality-its time as a weapon-lies a little in the future. Jappe's book is true to its subject, above all, because it reads Debord, and helps us read him, with that future in mind. J. T Clark May I998 Translator's Acknowledgments I wish to thank Bruce Elwell and John Simmons for reading the trans lation manuscript and offering help on many points. Thomas Y. Levin graciously supplied me with some hard-to-find documents. To Mia Ru blowska I am indebted for all kinds of aid, tangible and intangible. Above all I must express my gratitude to Anselm Jappe, who reviewed the text with me word by word and displayed seemingly inexhaustible patience in dealing with my queries. This English-language edition embodies the author's latest revisions. Needless to say, however, all shortcomings of translation should be laid at my door. D. N.-S. xi