HIMA 13,1_Rev_268_f9_183-193 3/14/05 2:52 PM Page 183
The Tribe JEAN-MICHEL MENSION, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith London: Verso, 2002
The Consul RALPH RUMNEY, translated by Malcolm Imrie London: Verso, 2002
Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts ELIZABETH WILSON London: I.B. Tauris, 2000
Reviewed by MICHAEL CALDERBANK
‘How Does One Become Guy Debord’? The highest aspiration of the revolutionary, it has been argued, is to be put out of business altogether. That is, the aim of a radical politics is to eradicate the very conditions that necessitate its emergence, and thereby dissolve the exceptional nature of its own stance. From this perspective, the contemporary fascination and nostalgia for the Situationist International (SI) might be seen, ironically, as symptomatic of the ultimate failure of their enterprise.1 The situationists, for their part, anticipated with dread the dangers of ‘recuperation’ into the Spectacle, the all-encompassing surrogate that they believed late capitalism was substituting for autonomous human experience. Here was a movement heavily steeped in aesthetic concerns that sought to challenge the very discursive and institutional specialisation of art itself. They understood from the beginning that their success could be guaranteed only in so far as they managed to engineer their own self-liquidation, and here it is tempting to see their self-destructive drinking binges and Debord’s eventual suicide as a distorted expression of the broader logic of the movement. By contrast, the erection of a whole academic sub-industry around the SI threatens to see them immortalised and turned into something of a fetish: the obsession with the last of the real revolutionaries, the authentic expression of radical Sixties’ counterculture at its purest. The tenor of such a retrospective fascination with the situationists might be taken as a painful measure of the isolation of cultural studies
1 As evinced, for example, by the recent publication of two biographies of Guy Debord and a burgeoning secondary literature. See Hussey 2001 and Jappe 1999.
Historical Materialism, volume 13:1 (183–193) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 13,1_Rev_268_f9_183-193 3/14/05 2:52 PM Page 184
184 • Michael Calderbank
from the political as such. Sentimental nostalgia for an age in which revolutionary social and cultural aspirations still seemed possible functions, in this context, to compensate for an admission of impotence in the present. Often implicit in this approach is the assumption that the situationists must have known, deep down, that their demands were too utopian to stand any chance of being realised. In this light, their project looks like a glorious last stand, prior to the inevitable triumph of consumer capitalism and onset of postmodern cynicism. Yet, what if we refuse to view their failure through the lens of such nostalgic inevitability, and stubbornly persist in the notion that the situationists genuinely believed it possible to realise their ‘impossible’ demands in full? What if we refuse to accept the current trend to develop cults of personality around the heroic failures of Debord and his comrades, and, instead, see the exaggerated presence of the SI in the contemporary cultural imagination as symptomatically masking a more fundamental repression still working to deny us consciousness of the real historical possibilities of revolutionary change? In this case, rather than seeking to isolate and fetishise the uniquely individual characteristics which defined the situationist ‘moment’, we would need to critically assess the obstacles preventing the radical self-dissolution they desired. This would involve a greater critical scrutiny of the specific context which gave rise to the articulation of such a project, and necessitate a more engaged evaluation of the specific tactical and strategic positions they adopted. The Tribe and The Consul are two texts which help us to place the specific social milieu from which the situationists emerged, since both are compiled from interview transcripts (with Jean-Michel Mension and the late Ralph Rumney respectively), two men who had early formative allegiances with Debord’s circle. The texts are the first two offerings from Verso’s imposingly titled series ‘Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time’, although it is evident from the conversational format that such a ‘history’ is of a proudly subjective and anecdotal variety, so those looking for rigorous analytical argument should steer clear. Rather, we are presented with a series of personal reminiscences, glimpsed nostalgically though an alcoholic haze, all of which makes for a lively and evocative, if somewhat insubstantial, read. We get little snippets, for example, of Rumney’s acquaintance with a fascinating array of individuals from Edward Thompson to Félix Guattari, William Burroughs to Georges Bataille, but we get only general hints of the parameters of Rumney’s own work. What does emerge however, from these patchworks of memories, is a vivid sense of the lived experience that colours the emergence of situationist ideas. Mension’s replies, in particular, provide us with an insight into life as a member of the group of hard- drinking, intellectually precocious young malcontents affectionately known as ‘The Tribe’, from which would emerge the breakaway Letterist International under the stewardship of one Guy Debord. Life at ‘Moineau’s’ (the low-life ‘dive’ which was to be the group’s unofficial base) comes across as unmistakably ‘bohemian’ in character,