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Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Edited by Tom Mcdonough G D   S I G D S I OCTOBER BOOKS Rosalind E. Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Mignon Nixon, editors Broodthaers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp Aberrations, by Jurgis Baltrusˇaitis Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, by Denis Hollier Painting as Model, by Yve-Alain Bois The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk The Woman in Question, edited by Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, by Jonathan Crary The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will, by Joel Fineman Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, by Nagisa Oshima The Optical Unconscious, by Rosalind E. Krauss Gesture and Speech, by André Leroi-Gourhan Compulsive Beauty, by Hal Foster Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, by Robert Morris Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, by Joan Copjec Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, by Kristin Ross Kant after Duchamp, by Thierry de Duve The Duchamp Effect, edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, by Hal Foster October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996, edited by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, by David Joselit Caravaggio’s Secrets, by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875, by Carol Armstrong Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Bachelors, by Rosalind Krauss Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, by Jonathan Crary Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, by Ed Ruscha Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough G D S I T D T MD A OCTOBER B T MIT P C, M L, E © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Bembo by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guy Debord and the situationist international : texts and documents / edited by Tom McDonough. p. cm. “An October book.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-262-13404-7 (alk. paper) 1. Debord, Guy, 1931– 2. Internationale situationniste. 3. Radicalism. 4. Art, Modern—20th century. I. McDonough, Tom. HN49.R33 G89 2001 303.48'4—dc21 2001054649 C T MD Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia ix G M The Long Walk of the Situationist International 1 Selected Situationist Texts G D The Great Sleep and Its Clients (1955) 21 G D One Step Back (1957) 25 G D Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency (1957) 29 G D One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists (The SI in and against Decomposition) (1957) 51 G D Theses on Cultural Revolution (1958) 61 G D Contribution to the Debate “Is Surrealism Dead or Alive?” (1958) 67 M B In Praise of Pinot-Gallizio (1958) 69 C C Extracts from Letters to the Situationist International (1958) 75 Editorial Notes: Absence and Its Costumers (1958) 79 Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art (1959) 85 C A Different City for a Different Life (1959) 95 Editorial Notes: Critique of Urbanism (1961) 103 Editorial Notes: Once Again, on Decomposition (1961) 115 R V Comments against Urbanism (1961) 119 Editorial Notes: Priority Communication (1962) 129 Editorial Notes: The Avant-Garde of Presence (1963) 137 Editorial Notes: All the King’s Men (1963) 153 G D The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art (1963) 159 T F Perspectives for a Generation (1966) 167 M K Captive Words (Preface to a Situationist Dictionary) (1966) 173 R V The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art (1967) 181 The Practice of Theory: Cinema and Revolution (1969) 187 C G Asger Jorn’s Avant-Garde Archives 189 L A Architecture and Play 213 T MD Situationist Space 241 K R Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview 267 C V K Angels of Purity 285 G A Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films 313 T Y. L Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord 321 J C Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 455 T. J. C D N-S Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International 467 Letter and Response 489 This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia T MD “Dadaism,” wrote Guy Debord in his foundational 1957 “Report on the Con- struction of Situations,” “wished to be the refusal of all the values of bourgeois society, whose bankruptcy had just become so glaringly evident” on the bat- tlefields of the First World War. From New York and Zurich to Paris and Berlin, that disgust with common values aimed at “the destruction of art and writing,” at what in Benjaminian terms we might call the desacralization of culture. “Its historical role,” Debord judged, “was to have dealt a mortal blow to the tradi- tional conception of culture.”1 This “wholly negative definition” of its task was simultaneously dadaism’s greatest success and most devastating error, in Debord’s eyes, for while, on the one hand, it definitively confirmed the intellectual nullity of bourgeois cultural superstructures (doomed thereafter, in an anticipation of Peter Bürger’s thesis, to “mere repetition”), on the other hand this negation came precisely too soon, positing the destruction of art before its most utopian prom- ises had been fulfilled. This mutual destruction and fulfillment of art was a task that would fall to the avant-garde being constituted by Debord at that very moment.2 Yet despite this careful historical analysis, dadaism’s negativity would always hold a powerful attraction for the founder of the Situationist International. In the late 1970s, amidst the ebbing of the revolutionary tide which crested around May T MD ’68, Debord looked back with nostalgia to his own youth at the margins of a bo- hemian Paris of the 1950s, and saw there a kind of repetition of dadaism’s moral revolt, of its refusal of bourgeois values. As he remembered it in 1978, “there was at that time, on the left bank of the river ..., a neighborhood where the nega- tive kept court.” This court was founded on the determined refusal of society’s “universally accepted assertions,”and instead embraced as its sole principle of ac- tion the carefully guarded secret of the Old Man of the Mountain: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” It could hardly be surprising that Debord’s great model lay in Arthur Cravan, “deserter of seventeen nations,” adventurer, boxer, and dadaist.3 It would seem, then, that fundamental to Debord’s larger conception of society were the following linked dichotomies:bourgeoisie/revolutionary avant- garde, affirmation/negation. Each term faced the other across an unbridgeable divide, and over that chasm each was engaged in a mortal battle with its oppo- site. How devastating, then, to read the conclusions reached by historian Man- fredo Tafuri regarding dadaism’s destruction of the cultural heritage of bourgeois society; for in his view, this negation of the traditional conception of culture was not an element in that society’s overthrow, but rather in its strengthening. As Tafuri argued, dadaist negativity comprised the “conditions for the liberation of the potential, but inhibited, energies” of the bourgeoisie—or rather, he wrote, “of a renewed bourgeoisie, capable of accepting doubt as the premise for the full acceptance of existence as a whole, as explosive, revolutionary vitality, prepared for permanent change and the unpredictable.”4 The destruction of bourgeois values, undertaken as the highest aim of the avant-garde in culture, could function precisely as the prerequisite to a more effective operation within “that field of indeterminant, fluid, and ambiguous forces” that Tafuri described as capitalism itself. Not negation posed against affir- mation, as Debord saw it, but negation as inherent in the system; not dadaist ir- rationality against bourgeois rationality, but “a wholly new type of rationality, which was capable of coming face to face with the negative, in order to make the negative itself the release valve of an unlimited potential for development.”5 It was Marx himself who, at the very commencement of modern industrial society, x I: I S U described how “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”6 Yet the salient characteristic of bourgeois society for Debord was predominantly not this sweep- ing away of “all fixed, fast-frozen relations,” but the very opposite—what he called in a telling phrase “a freezing of life.”7 What is at issue here is the potential misrecognition on the part of the Situationist International of the role of the avant-garde in advanced capitalist society; rather than being the latter’s absolute contestation, Tafuri raised the disturbing possibility that it was this society’s nec- essary adjunct.8 The situationists themselves were forced by circumstances to face this very possibility throughout their history;even they could not remain blind to the con- tinuing revolutionary character of bourgeois society.
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