Consumed by night’s fire The dark romanticism of Guy Debord

Michael Löwy

Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to among other things, a material mode of production that defuse. And yet people have tried. And they are still constantly tends to re-create everything – from cars trying. They try to neutralize him, to water him down, to television – that generates isolation and separation. to aestheticize him or to deny his originality. It never The modern spectacle, wrote Guy Debord in one of works. The dynamite is still there, and it might explode those superb formulations he was so good at finding, in the hands of anyone who picks it up and tries to is ʻan epic poemʼ but, unlike the Iliad, it does not render it inoffensive. sing ʻthe arms and the manʼ. It sings ʻcommodities Here is a very recent example published in a col- and their passionsʼ.2 lection edited by Philippe Sollers.1 Apparently Debord It may be a truism, but these days it has to be is no more than a ʻliterary dandyʼ writer with a pointed out with some force: Guy Debord was a dazzling style: ʻAll that remains of him is literature.ʼ Marxist. A profoundly heretical Marxist, no doubt, but In his works, ʻthe ethic is reabsorbed into the aes- also a profoundly innovative one. He was open to lib- theticʼ. How can one integrate a revolutionary book ertarian insights, but he still claimed to be a Marxist. entitled La Société du spectacle into this asepticized His analysis of the society of the spectacle owes a lot approach? Itʼs quite simple. You just ignore it. It is not to Lukácsʼs History and Class Consciousness, which really worthy of interest because, being an ʻimpersonal had already made the transformation of human beings theoretical workʼ, it is not written in the first person into spectators who watch commodities moving of singular. What is more, it is too marked by turns of their own accord a central part of the theory of reifi- phrase and a lexicon borrowed from the young Marx cation. Like Lukács, Debord sees in the proletariat an and Hegel, and they mar the beautiful style. ʻWhen he example of a force that can resist reification. Through abandons the great Germans, it shows in his style. For practice, struggle and activity the emancipating subject the better.ʼ The author of this essay would rather refer breaks the contemplative mood. From that point of to Rivarol and Ezra Pound than to Marx and Hegel. view, the workersʼ councils that abolish the divorce For stylistic reasons, no doubt. between product and producer, between decisions and Others, by contrast, refer only to the book Debord execution, are the radical antithesis of the society of published in 1967, or rather to its title, and reduce the spectacle.3 its theses to a banal critique of the mass media. In the face of all the neutralizations and castra- What he called the ʻsociety of the spectacleʼ is not, tions, the important thing to remember is that Guy however, simply the tyranny of television – that most Debordʼs books – which will still be remembered a superficial and immediate manifestation of a deeper hundred years from now – were written by someone reality – but the whole economic, social and political who regarded himself as ʻa professional revolutionary system of modern capitalism (and its bureaucratic copy working in the cultural fieldʼ. Under his influence, in the East). It is based upon the transformation of the situationism, that dissident wing of surrealism, fused individual into a passive spectator who watches the the best traditions of workersʼ council communism and movement of commodities, and events in general. This the libertarian spirit of anarchism into a movement system separates individuals from each other thanks to, designed to bring about a radical transformation of

Radical Philosophy 87 (January/February 1998) 31 society, culture and everyday life. It failed, but the Exchange value and the society of the spectacle have imaginary of ʼ68 derived some of its most audacious dissolved the human community, which was once dreams from situationism. based upon a direct experience of the facts, a real Guy Debord is open to criticism. This aristocratic dialogue between individuals, and common action to spirit was trapped into a haughty solitude. He admired resolve problems. Debord often mentions the pastʼs the baroque, and cunning political strategists such as partial realizations of an authentic community: the Machiavelli, Castiglione, Baltasar Gracian and the Greek polis, medieval Italian republics, villages, neigh- Cardinal de Retz. He made the preposterous claim that bourhoods and popular taverns. Adopting (implicitly) he was the only free individual in a society of slaves. Ferdinand Tönniesʼ distinction between Gesellschaft But it has to be recognized that, unlike so many of his and Gemeinschaft, he stigmatized the spectacle as ʻa generation, he was never prepared to reconcile himself society without communityʼ.6 to the existing order to things in any way. I will take the example of one text to illustrate Guy One of the things that makes Debordʼs writings so Debordʼs dark or gothic [noir] romanticism – in the fascinating is their irreducibility, their darkly romantic sense in which certain English novels of the eighteenth sheen. When I speak of romanticism, I do not mean century can be said to be gothic [noir]: the script for – or not simply – a nineteenth-century literary school, the film In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. At but something much greater and much more profound: once poetic, philosophical, social and political, the text the great tradition that protests against modern capi- is a splendid parole. The script itself and the images talist-industrial society in the name of the values of function as complementaries within the framework of the past. It begins in the mid-eighteenth century with an iconoclastic – in the strict sense of the word – use Jean-Jacques Rousseau, runs through German Frühro- of classical cinema. The words have an intrinsic value mantik, symbolism and surrealism and is still with us. independent of the function of the image. In that sense, This is, as Marx himself noted, a critique that follows capitalism like its shadow from the day it was born to the day it dies (oh, happy day). Like a structure of feeling or a world-view, romanticism runs through every domain of culture: literature, poetry, the arts, philosophy, historiography, theo- logy and politics. Torn between its nostalgia for the past and its dreams of the future, it denounces the devastation wrought by bourgeois modernity: the disenchantment of the world, mechanization, reification, quantification and the dissolution of human communities. Despite the constant refer- ence to a lost past, romanticism is not necessarily retrograde; in the course of its long history, it has taken both reactionary and revolutionary forms.4 it is significant that, in 1990, Debord republished only Guy Debord belongs to the utopian and subver- the text, not the full screenplay, and simply added a sive tradition of revolutionary romanticism that goes series of footnotes. from William Blake to William Morris, from Charles The film is made up of quotations from other films, Fourier to André Breton. He never ceased to denounce and the text is also full of quotations, some with the and deride the ideologies of ʻmodernizationʼ, and was sources given (von Clausewitz, Marx and Swift), others never afraid of being accused of being ʻanachronisticʼ. without any sources (the Bible, Victor Hugo). Debord ʻWhen “being absolutely modern” became a special deals with them in the way that highwaymen deal with law proclaimed by the tyrant, the one thing the honest their victimsʼ property. He wrenches the passages he slave feared above all else was being suspected of cites out of their context, integrates them into his own being attached to the past.ʼ5 discourse and thus gives them a new meaning. Nor did he ever hide the fact that he felt a certain Being a professional provocateur, Debord begins nostalgia for pre-capitalist forms of community. his screenplay with a direct attack on his audience.

32 Radical Philosophy 87 (January/February 1998) The vast majority of his audience consists of the amoursʼ of a bygone age runs through the entire text commodity societyʼs privileged wage-earners, the like some subterranean murmuring.9 willing victims of the society of the spectacle who It is not, however, a matter of going back to the cannot tear themselves away from ʻcompeting in the past. Few twentieth-century authors have been as conspicuous consumption of nothingʼ. That, however, successful as Guy Debord in transforming nostalgia is not his primary goal. He tells how the Paris of the into an explosive force, into a poisoned weapon to 1950s gave birth to a totally subversive project. The be used against the existing order of things, into a title of the film is a Latin palindrome – ʻWe wander revolutionary breakthrough into the future. He and in darkness and we are consumed by fireʼ – and its his friends initially pursued this quest in the dérives ambiguous imagery sums up the feelings and dilem- – the ʻsearch for a different, baneful Grailʼ, with its mas of a group of young people whose slogan was ʻsurprising encountersʼ and ʻperilous enchantmentsʼ ʻreject everything that is commonly acceptedʼ. The – that allowed them to grasp once more ʻthe secret 10 group found themselves in the forefront of ʻan assault of dividing what was once oneʼ. on the order of the worldʼ that foreshadowed May ʼ68. ʻPerilous enchantments.ʼ The phrase is important. And whilst the enemy was not destroyed, these young Whilst the ethos of modern civilization is, as Max fighters still planted their weapons ʻin the throat of the Weber saw so clearly, die entzauberung der Welt, system of ruling liesʼ.7 It is not simply its poetic quality, romanticism is above all an attempt – and often a desperate attempt – to re-enchant the world. How? its philosophical originality, its critical rigour or its Whilst conservative romantics dream of a religious haughy impertinence that gives the script its fascinat- restoration, gothic romantics from Charles Maturin ing power. It is also the passion and imagination of a to Baudelaire and to Lautréamont have, for their part, mode of thought inspired by the subversive tradition no qualms about taking the side of Faustʼs Mephis- of gothic romanticism. topheles, of the spirit that always denies. Like his romantic forebears, Debord has nothing but The same is true of Guy Debord and his friends, scorn for modern society: he constantly denounces its those servants of a negative dialectic who sided with ʻbad, unhealthy, gloomy buildingsʼ, its technological the devil, ʻor in other words the historical evil which innovations, which are usually of benefit only to busi- is leading existing conditions to their destructionʼ. nessmen, its ʻmodernized illiteracyʼ, its ʻspectacular Living in a corrupt society which claimed to be united, superstitionsʼ and especially its ʻhostile landscapeʼ, harmonious and stable, their most ardent wish was to which meets ʻthe concentration-camp requirements become ʻemissaries of the Prince of Divisionʼ. They of present-day industryʼ. He is particularly savage wished to be disciples of the ʻprince of darknessʼ. about the neo-Haussmanesque and modernizing town ʻAfter all, it is a fine title; the present system of planning of the Fifth Republic, which promoted the enlightenment awards none more honourable.ʼ11 sinister adaptation of the city to the dictatorship of the Like the romantic poets (Novalis), Debord prefers car. According to Debord, this policy was responsible symbols of darkness to those of an Aufklärung that for the death of the sun, as the sky over Paris was can be so easily manipulated by the ruling class. But darkened by ʻthe false mist of pollutionʼ which perma- whilst the romanticsʼ favourite nocturnal source of nently darkens ʻthe mechanical circulation of things in illumination was the moon – as in the famous line by this valley of desolationʼ. He therefore has no option Tieck which sums up the literary and philosophical but to reject ʻboth the bourgeois and the bureaucratic programmme of early German romanticism in two version of this modern scandalʼ, and regards the ʻaboli- words: die mondbeglantze Zaubernacht (the enchanted tion of classes and the stateʼ as the only solution to moonlit night) – the screenwriter of In Girum Imus its contradictions.8 Nocte et Consumimur Igni is more interested in the This revolutionary anti-modernism goes hand in light of fires: ʻThis is how a new age of fires was hand with a nostalgic glance back to the past – it gradually set ablaze; no one who is alive at this matters little whether it is the ancient palace of the moment will see it end: obedience is dead.ʼ12 king of Ou, which has been reduced to ruins, or the Are the flames already licking at the walls of the Paris of the 1950s, which contemporary town planners spectacular fortress? Can we already see, as Guy have turned into a gaping ruin. A poignant regret for Debord thought he could in 1979, the writing on the ʻbeauties that will never returnʼ, for periods when ʻthe walls of Babylon: ʻMene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsimʼ? stars had not been put out by the rise of alienationʼ, Perhaps. In any case, he was not wrong to conclude: and a fascination with the ʻladies, knights, armour and ʻThis societyʼs days are numbered; its reasons and

Radical Philosophy 87 (January/February 1998) 33 merits have been weighed in the balance and found 4. For a more detailed discussion of the paradoxical nature wanting; its inhabitants are divided into two groups, of romanticism, see Robert Sayle and Michael Löwy, Révolte et mélancolie: Le Romantisme à contre-courant and one of them wants it to die.ʼ13 de la modernité, Payot, Paris, 1992. Faithful to the injunctions of gothic romanticism, 5. Guy Debord, Panygérique, Gallimard, Paris, 1989, p. Guy Debord was a sort of twentieth-century adven- 83; translated into English as Panegyric, trans. James turer. But he was a member of a particular species, Brook, Verso 1991. 6. La Société du spectacle, §154. which was defined in these terms by a manifesto 7. Guy Debord, ʻIn Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur issued by the Internationale Lettriste in 1954. The Igniʼ, in Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, Edi- signatories included ʻGuy-Ernest Debordʼ. ʻAn adven- tions Champ Libre, Paris, 1978, pp. 224, 257, 264. A turer is someone who causes adventures to happen, partial translation of In Girum Nocte, with an introduc- tion by Lucy Forsyth, appeared in Block 14, Autumn not someone who happens to have adventures.ʼ14 The 1988. maxim could stand as an epigraph for his life. 8. Ibid., pp. 193, 202, 212, 220–21. Translated by David Macey 9. Ibid., pp. 217, 219, 221, 255. 10. Ibid., pp. 247–9. 11. Ibid., pp. 249, 251. Notes 12. Ibid., p. 242. 1. Cécile Guilbert, Pour Guy Debord, Gallimard, Paris, 13. Guy Debord, Préface à la quatrième édition italienne de 1996. ʻLa Société du spectacleʼ, Editions Champ Libre, Paris, 2. La Société du spectacle, §66; translated into English as 1979, p. 41; translated into English as Preface to the The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson- Fourth Italian Edition of the Society of the Spectacle, Smith, Zone Books, New York, 1994. trans. Frances Parker and Michael Forsyth, Chronos, 3. Cf. Anselme Jappe, Guy Debord, Via Valeriano, Mar- London, 1979. seilles, 1996. This is probably the best book on Debord 14. ʻUne Idée neuve en Europeʼ, Potlach 7, August 1954, to date. p. 46.

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34 Radical Philosophy 87 (January/February 1998)