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Internationale Situationniste 79 a Special Issue Guesteditor, Thomas F Mcdonough Art Theory Criticism Politics OCTOBER Guy Debord and the Internationale situationniste 79 A Special Issue Guesteditor, Thomas F McDonough Thomas F. McDonough RereadingDebord, Rereading the Situationists T.J. Clark and WhyArt Can't Kill the Donald Nicholson-Smith Situationist International Claire Gilman AsgerJorn'sAvant-Garde Archives Vincent Kaufmann Angels of Purity Kristin Ross Lefebvreon the Situationists: An Interview Situationist Textson Visual Culture and Urbanism:A Selection $10.00 / Winter 1997 Publishedby theMIT Press 79 Thomas F. McDonough Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists 3 T.J. Clark and WhyArt Can't Kill the Donald Nicholson-Smith Situationist International 15 Claire Gilman AsgerJorn's Avant-Garde Archives 33 Vincent Kaufmann Angels of Purity 49 Kristin Ross Lefebvreon the Situationists: An Interview 69 Situationist Texts on Visual Culture and Urbanism: A Selection 85 Cover photo: AsgerJorn. The Avant-Garde Doesn't Give Up. 1962. Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists* THOMAS F McDONOUGH "He must be read and reread, for the same phrases are always cited. He is reduced to a few formulas, at best out of nostalgia but more often in a negative sense, as if to say: look at where thinking like that gets you!"' So cautioned Philippe Sollers one week after Guy Debord's suicide on November 30, 1994. It is advice well taken, if recent glosses on the life and work of this founding member of the Situationist International are any indication. When, twenty-odd years after the publication of his Societedu spectacle(1967), Debord circulated his Commentaires on this book (1988), it was greeted with general skepticism. The reviewer for Le Mondeconceded the verity of its characterizations: Can we decide against him, when he emphasizes the generalized secrecy predominant in this gray world? The more we speak of transparency, the less we know who controls what, who manipulates whom, and to what end. Those who are "well-informed" are generally the biggest fools. From censorship to crimes, "we live and die at the confluence of innumerable mysteries."2 Despite this, the reviewer concluded that "by virtue of seeing spies every- where" Debord had descended into an increasingly paranoid vision of the world. When an English translation was released two years later, the response was even less equivocal. LaurentJenny summarized the consensus: "Situationism has fallen from megalomania into paranoia."3 Another described it as "Adorno gone mad in a situation in which there is no longer any access to concrete experience, capitalism reigns supreme, and only a few marginal intellectuals can figure out * I would like to thank Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Aruna D'Souza for their critical readings of this essay. 1. Philippe Sollers, contribution to "Considerations sur le suicide de Guy Debord," Liberation, December 6, 1994, p. 34. 2. Roger-Pol Droit, "GuyDebord: le dernier des Mohicans," Le Monde,July 22, 1988, p. 11. 3. LaurentJenny, "The Unrepresentable Enemy,"Art + Text35 (Summer 1990), p. 112. OCTOBER79, Winter1997, pp. 3-14. ? 1997 OctoberMagazine, Ltd. and MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. 4 OCTOBER what is going on."4 In an analysis that would become virtually canonical in the anglophone scholarship on the Situationists, Debord was cast as the mirror image of Jean Baudrillard (whom the Situationists, incidentally, poked fun at in their infamous 1966 pamphlet, De la misere en milieu etudiant), repulsed by what fascinated the sociologist of hyperreality.5 In any event, the book was seen as a dead letter, clear evidence of its author's irrelevance. Such hostility makes the reaction to Debord's next book, Panegyrique (1989), rather unexpected. Coming less than a year after the Commentaires,it received the opposite response, one of virtually unqualified praise. It may not be surprising that a sensitive and sympathetic reader like Sollers picked up on the multiple ironies of this text, the "first volume of Memoirsby someone we believed to be unconditionally dedicated to the impersonality of revolutionary critique."6 (For example, Sollers noted that the author "makes fun of the word 'professional' but writes: 'I have been a very good professional. But in what? Such will have been my mystery, in the eyes of a blameful world."') Another reviewer wrote that, given the state of the world, "a man whose opinion of our society amounts to judging it 'blameful,' but who argues his 'critical theory' with intelligence, talent, and originality, deserves to be heard more than ever. For in such a time as this we are in danger of lacking dissenters."7 What had merely been paranoid one year earlier could now be seen as constructive, with the reviewer noting that "Debord's 'negativity' is boldly positive." Clearly the form of presentation of this "critical theory" allowed it to be assimilated much more easily; the memoir paradoxically permitted Debord to be seen not as a particular historical subject with a revolutionary project, but as "the great dissenter,"a mythical subject situated at the margins of "our" society. He could thus become "a master of sentiment and of resistance as much as and sometimes more than a master-thinker"-a "moralist,"in fact. An image of Debord was taking shape that was distinctly different from those applied to him earlier in his life. Now he was able to be seen as the melancholic social critic, intransigent but cherished for the anachronistic rectitude of his opinions. (In this light, even the Commentairescould be recuperated as the words of "the man who will not correct himself.")8 Of course, Debord himself must share some of the responsibility for this characterization: Panegyriqueis a cryptic text, 4. Paul Piccone, in "The Society of the Spectacle20 Years Later: A Discussion," Telos 86 (Winter 1990-91), p. 86. 5. See, for example, Paul McDonald, "Review: Guy Debord, Commentson the Societyof the Spectacle," Screen,vol. 32, no. 4 (Winter 1991), pp. 491-94; and Simon Reynolds, "Haute Anxiety," Village Voice, February 5, 1991, p. 68. 6. Philippe Sollers, "GuyDebord, vous connaissez?" Le Monde,October 2, 1989, p. 25. 7. Claude Roy, "Le grand desapprobateur," Le Nouvel Observateur,November 16-22, 1989, p. 163. 8. The title of a review of the 1992 Gallimard reedition of La Societedu spectacleand its Commentaires; the title is actually a pun, se corrigermeaning both to "correct oneself" and to "reform" (Francis Marmande, "L'Homme qui ne se corrige pas," Le Monde,October 2, 1992, p. 27.) Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists 5 which romanticizes its author to some extent.9 Yet the effort to cast him as a moralist, as a lone voice of virtue and ethics in a corrupt world, goes far beyond what may properly be read into his work. (And, it should be noted, this reading of Debord's work is a decidedly masculinist one, emphasizing his isolated, heroic life and his "manful" alcoholism, assimilating him into a long tradition of classical French writing.) Any suggestion of a critical project of transformation, never mind a Marxist critique of bourgeois society, disappeared from considerations of his books. By the time of his suicide, a commentator felt that Debord's great contribution was less in substance than in style: "His writing has largely contributed to the perception of his perfection: Debord was also, and perhaps primarily, a stylist of pessimism."10 This growing consensus, which sees Debord as a fundamentally romantic critic, or as an exiled scholar-poet (and hence reinforces his mythical status as a figure outside the boundaries of the culture he relentlessly critiqued), con- firms the need for a careful rereading of the work of Debord and that of his colleagues in the Situationist International at this moment. Against the continued mythologizing-engaged in by both sympathetic and hostile commentators- must be posed a careful analysis of the Situationist legacy, a project of archival retrieval, reconstruction, and historicization. This special issue of October makes a contribution to such a project, collecting critical essays and primary docu- ments that move far beyond the reduced formulas prevalent in much of the literature on this subject. Together, they provide an opportunity to reassess Debord and his colleagues in a new context-not as timeless "classics" of a melancholic pessimism, but as figures centrally engaged in the cultural politics of their time. However, this issue of Octoberis posed not merely against the French reading of Debord as a late-twentieth-century moralist-it has a distinctly Anglo- American context as well. The English-language literature on the Situationist International may be far from plentiful,11 but it is worth briefly discussing some 9. For Debord's participation in this transformation, see some remarks made by Greil Marcus in his review of the English translation of Panegyrique,"You Could Catch It," LondonReview of Books,March 25, 1993, pp. 12-13. 10. Roger-Pol Droit, "GuyDebord ou le sens de la revolte," Le Monde,December 3, 1994, p. 17. Even Sollers, who appreciated Debord for the content of his writings, wrote after his death that "Debord is already a classic among the classics,"although he qualified this by noting "not aesthetically but in terms of teaching about life. To live happily, live hidden" (Sollers, contribution to "Considerations," p. 34). 11. Bibliographic orientation may be found in numerous entries of John Gray, Action Art: A Bibliographyof Artists' Performancefrom Futurism to Fluxus and Beyond (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1993) and in Simon Ford, The Realization and Suppression of the Situationist International:An AnnotatedBibliography, 1972-1992 (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1995). 6 OCTOBER of the accounts that have so far been offered in order to better understand what remains lacking in them. Striking in these accounts is the near-universal tension between the desire to situate the S.I. at a particular historical juncture and the opposing wish to separate their works from the specific circumstances in which they were produced, with all the simplifications and misreadings this almost inevitably entails.
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