McKenzie Wark’s latest dip into Debordiana, The Spectacle of Disintegration, focuses on Guy Debord’s comrades as well as on the Situationists’ bibulous prince. He gives Sit’-for-a-season T.J. Clark the most ink, though Clark’s early and late works of Art History are too rich for any bite-sized summary. But other, lesser figures in Debord’s orbit are ripe for Wark’s approach.
His account of Rene Vienet’s brave attempts to cultivate resistance to the French Left’s fascination with Chinese fascism sparked—and shamed—me by bringing to mind the lazy pleasure I once took in an essay on fantasies of French Maoists in an old anthology, The 60s Without Apology. While the author of that piece of intellectual history allowed most young Euro rads were clueless about the actual nature of Maoism, it didn’t occur to me to search out French leftists such as Rene Vienet who fought the fantasts. Wark explains how Vienet championed work by Belgian Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (AKA Simon Leys)—the “Orwell of the East”(to borrow Wark’s phrase). To Vienet and other Situationists, French Maoism was a joke that stopped being quirky fun long before the end of the 60s.
Wark’s accounts of Vienet’s anti-Maoist works and days deserve your attention, but I’ve chosen to post another chapter from The Spectacle of Disintegration below. It takes in Debord’s last film, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, which, in turn, detourns scenes from (among other films) Marcel Carne’s and Jacques Prevert’s Children of Paradise (1945). That movie glows in memory, though I’ve only seen it once on a small screen so I cop to taking any chance to remind readers of its existence. Guy Debord isn’t the only original to detourn lines/scenes from Paradise. Bob Dylan rolled with Carne’s and Prevert’s tagline on Blood on the Tracks: “‘Love is so simple’ to quote a phrase/You’ve known it all along, I’m learning it these days.” (Dylan’s white face makeup on mid-70s tours was probably inspired by Paradise‘s mime.)
I’ll let others pursue a paradisal Debord/Dylan tie. But I’m reminded just now (and not for the first time) Charles O’Brien must be Debord’s closest American fellow traveler. Though I should underscore, the connection there may be more a matter of synchrony than “influence.” While O’Brien has long relished Debord’s stuff, I don’t know when he first encountered it. (Somebody should ask him!) For now, though, let me provide a critique of The Coming Insurrection by the InvisibleCommittee: https://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2010/10/left_behind_the.html, which brings us back to Wark’s work. The chapter posted below ends with a friendlier line on The Invisible Committee.
On behalf of First, I’d like to thank McKenzie Wark and Verso Books for allowing us to reprint “The Devil’s Party” from The Spectacle of Disintegration. B.D.
Fortune against envy; fame against oblivion.
Baltasar Gracián
“Shipwreckers have their name writ only on water.”[1] Debord takes it to be Shelley’s epitaph, but it is also Debord’s. His last film, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978), perhaps his masterpiece, has an aquatic mood. The eddies and currents of the river as it flows into the sea are so many situations that form and disperse on its surface, to be replaced by others, and still others. In Girum has a slower rhythm, a more somber mood than Society of the Spectacle. The emphasis shifts toward a more fine-grained denunciation of the colonization of everyday life by spectacular images of the commodified world.
Against this, Debord can only posit the remembrance of lost friends and the implacable onrush of a historical time, which will return no matter how much the spectacle denies its existence. Martine Barraqué: “And oddly, while working on the last film (what I am telling you is quite harsh, right?) I had the impression of working with a veteran of war. That he could not write anything else that was new—that everything kept turning round and round in the usual ways because he had already said it all.”
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. The palindrome of the title means something like: We go into the circle by night; we are consumed by fire. If water is a figure for a particular quality of time, fire is another. The momentary conflagration, the clash of forces, the cavalry charge, or the fatal bullet which, Debord once noted, killed an uncommon number of his friends.[2] Fire is the other elemental time, and if we all are borne along by a liquid current, there are those few, those happy few, who are the friends of fire; the devil’s party, orbiting the flame, like moths to enlightenment. By the time of In Girum, the party of fire is a diminished band, the everyday situation no longer seems quite so resonant with a wider historical current. In the disintegrating spectacle negation no longer works against it from without. All that remains is the spark of a memory, to be recalled, over and over, until it torches time again.
In Girum détourns scenes from movies as Spectacle does, and sometimes the same films, but to different effect. Shanghai Gesture appears again, but this time Debord chooses not Gene Tierney but Victor Mature playing Doctor Omar, who describes himself as “a doctor of nothing … it sounds important and hurts no one, unlike most doctors.” Doctor Omar even has the temerity to steal a line from the Roman playwright Terence: “I am a thoroughbred mongrel. I am related to all the earth and nothing human is foreign to me.”[3]
He is the first of a series of characters appearing in In Girum who might be described as being of the devil’s party, agents of deception and division. While Robin Hood and Zorro make appearances as rather more straightforward fantasies of redemption from within the spectacle, Debord is drawn to the more ambivalent and dangerous trickster figure. Robin Hood and Zorro uphold the true society against the false one. Like Censor’s tract, the devil’s party undermines the true and the false order alike by appearing to be in possession of the secret of the relation between them.
Most of the films détourned in Debord’s seventies films are from his youth. A certain veiled autobiographical quality resides in them. Two seem to have particular resonance in this regard. Director Marcel Carné (1906–96) and screen-writer Jacques Prévert (1900–77) collaborated on two great films during the occupation, Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and Children of Paradise (1945). Carné and Prévert were leftists before the war. Drawing from Surrealism and popular cultural forms, they were leading exponents of a style sometimes called poetic realism.[4] Their wartime films were big productions, sanctioned by the pro-Nazi film apparatus, but were neither Nazi propaganda nor simply coded resistance allegories. These films and their makers fell rapidly out of favor with postwar audiences and taste-makers alike. It didn’t help that Arletty, who stars in both, was accused of collaboration. (Arletty: “My heart belongs to France, but my ass belongs to the world.”) These films later became a particular foil for new-wave filmmakers such as François Truffaut. That Debord would borrow scenes from them in 1978 comes with more than a few layers of significance.
Debord ignores the narratives and discards most of the major characters. He concentrates on the character of the Devil from Visiteurs and of Lacenaire from Paradise. “I come from far away. Forgotten in his own country, unknown elsewhere, such is the fate of the traveler,” says the Devil. He is the principle of division, the agent of historical time. Of the comrades of his youth, Debord will say they were “people quite sincerely ready to set the world on fire just to give it more brilliance.”[5] Or as the Devil says, “I dearly love fire! And it loves me.” In Visiteurs, the Devil sends his emissaries, Dominique and Gilles, into the world to create division through a little gender-queer sexual intrigue. As Gilles sings: “sad lost children, we wander in the night.” Or as Dominique explains the game: “Other people love us, and they suffer for us. We watch them and then we go away. A fine journey, with the Devil paying the expenses.”
“I declared war on society long ago.” From Paradise Debord takes mostly the character of Pierre François Lacenaire (1800–36), a real historical figure, the criminal-poet-philosopher, who was the model for Raskolnikov and fascinated many writers from Stendhal to André Breton. In his Memoirs, Lacenaire wrote, “I come to preach the religion of Fear to the rich, for the religion of Love has no power over them.”[6] The Lacenaire of Paradise says to some uncomprehending bourgeois: “It takes all kinds to make a world— or to unmake it.” Later he will pronounce his own panegyric: “I’ve become famous. I’ve pulled off a few little crimes and created quite a sensation.” Like the real-life Lacenaire, he would have preferred a literary success, but will settle for lasting infamy. “I have no vanity. I have only pride,” he says. If, as Adorno says, “every work of art is an uncommitted crime,” then to Lacenaire every crime is an act of commitment. Or as Vaneigem says of Lacenaire: “Intrinsic to the logic of an unlivable society, murder, thus conceived, can only appear as the concave form of the gift.”[7]
In Girum concerns itself with the world after a series of failed revolutions: France 1968, Italy 1969, Portugal 1974, Italy again in 1977. The flaming moment has passed. The camera holds steady on still pictures of everyday life invaded by the commodity. Debordian insolence is replaced by contempt. But if anything the pathos of the power of memory as the half-life of life itself, the distillate of lived time, is all the stronger. The small-mesh interpersonal aspect of such a project has its stand-ins, such as Doctor Omar, Lacenaire and the Devil.
The large-scale historical moment has its stand-ins as well. From the otherwise appalling Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Debord selects the famous scenes director Michael Curtiz made of the charge itself. From They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Raoul Walsh’s truly fantastic version of the life of George Custer—another film much used in Spectacle—Debord takes the scene of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. The cavalry charge is a particle of the combustible moment of historical action. The charge is to coarse-grained events what Omar, the Devil and Lacenaire are to finer ones.
“History advances with its bad side first,” as Debord détourns Marx and Engels from the Holy Family.[8] Representations—whether art or literature, cinema or song—are where the situation of lived time goes to die. They are the backwash of exhausted forces, which, in exhausting themselves, make the times otherwise. The seventies are a time in which all such forces appear spent. The charge is over, and it is not so much that the good guys lost, as that the fulcrum of conflict, the principle of division, disappears.
The eighties will be a time when the ruling class goes on the offensive again. But its victory is its undoing. Pursued to its limit, the spectacle undoes itself, and in so doing will create the conditions under which the party of fire might appear again, and the critique of the society of the spectacle in acts will reappear, dragging its theoretical understanding along, belatedly, behind it. It is as memory that failed moments of historical action have their other power. Cinema, and the spectacle in general, does a good job of subsuming and defusing the qualitative. It cannot abolish it. The spectacle is haunted by what negates it. Or so Debord seemed to think at the time. In the nineties his mood grew darker.
The police found his friend dead at the wheel of his car in an underground parking lot, with four bullet wounds in the back of his head. No money was taken, only his identification papers. In his pocket was a scrap of paper with the name ‘François.’ Gérard Lebovici was an agent and producer in the French movie business. The Nazis killed his mother in the camps. When his father died, he had to give up his ambition to be an actor. In 1960 he founded his own management agency. He was radicalized by 1968 and by his wife Floriana, née Valentin. In 1969 he founded the publishing house Champ Libre, which republished Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in 1971.
Debord denied having any editorial role at Champ Libre, but as his relationship to Lebovici became close, it did start to produce something like a Debordian canon, which grew to include editions of Carl von Clausewitz, Baltasar Gracián, George Orwell, Karl Korsch, and Debord’s own translations of the poetry of Jorge Manrique. The filmmaker Olivier Assayas, for whom Champ Libre was something of an education, best captures its qualities: “I remember, I was twenty when the Champ Libre reissue of the Internationale Situationiste bulletins came out in 1975. I was discovering Paris … In Champ Libre’s catalogue, even if Debord denies it—there resides something that emanates from his thought … The unique feature of Champ Libre’s editorial project was to have provided an extension of Debord’s ongoing dialogue with the works of the past, with the nebulous mass of intellectual and poetic affinities that he increasingly expanded, conjuring in his texts and in his films the shades of writers who, from across the centuries, were his intimates, on the same level as his brawling and drinking companions … At a time of fearsome ideological puritanism, Champ Libre published classics of political science, but also works that nobody had read for ages … I have never managed to consider Champ Libre as anything but an extension of Debord’s work, publishing as discourse, not only because of what was published there, but also for the juxtaposition of texts that produced another meaning, legible to those who could and wanted to read it.”[9]
Lebovici’s assassination—there is no other word for it—in March 1984 set off an extraordinary wave of speculation in the French media. Debord documented this with a small book, in which he writes: “We know now what a modern society can do with a parking lot.” Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici (1985) was in part a tribute to his friend: “This century does not like truth, generosity or greatness. Therefore it did not like Gérard Lebovici…”[10] But it had more to say about Debord himself and his curious relation to the spectacle. The occasion was the insinuation by more than one media mouthpiece that he was in some way connected to Lebovici’s death. Journalists identified themselves with the assassin, not the victim, and sought with considerable ingenuity to justify the killing. A recurring accusation, which Debord documents in his book, was that it was his friendship with Debord that somehow got Lebovici killed.
“Each epoch uses a particular vocabulary to exorcise the demons that plague it.”[11] The eighties were perhaps transitional in this regard. Where one paper accused Debord of accepting “Moscow Gold,” another connected him to his mother-in-law’s Chinese restaurant, an alleged haven for Moscow’s nemesis, the Chinese Communists. These were the old figures of the traitor, from a time when the diffuse and concentrated spectacles confronted each other, across the cold war divide, each internalizing the image of the other as its official enemy. Debord was also attacked variously as a guru, a mentor, a loner, a fanatic, an eccentric, an ideologue, a nihilist, an idealist, a demon, a pope and a terrorist.
Here a more recognizably contemporary figure of the traitor emerges. In the time of the disintegrating spectacle, the global commodity economy relies on Russian energy. The flow of cheap commodities is in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. New enemies of the people are required. Enemies like Julian Assange, the hacker-journalist-cypherpunk, publishing secret documents on the internet which reveal what those in the know already knew anyway. This was enough to get him labeled a terrorist and—worse—for the New York Times to question his personal hygiene.[12]
In the news stories he fulsomely quotes, Debord appears as a shadowy and clandestine figure. He points out that it has become a crime to withdraw from the spectacle when it seeks one out. To remain indeterminate, unnamable, this would be the essential move of those who belong, knowingly or not, to the devil’s party. The rumor that Debord disappeared after May ’68 is based on the illusion that he had previously appeared. As Debord insists, “I have never appeared anywhere.”[13] The spectacle equates the refusal of celebrity with terrorism. “The mere fact that I have not at all wanted to be around the dreary celebrities of the day would give me, if there were such a need, a sufficient prestige around those who have the unfortunate obligation of having to be around them.”[14] Not the least of Debord’s achievements was to appear in the spectacle only as its negation.
Two things in particular make Debord’s relation to Lebovici appear unacceptable. The first is the gift. Lebovici gave Debord the means to live well, to write, to make his films. In 1983 Lebovici even purchased the Studio Cujas cinema, where Debord’s films were the only ones screened, whether anyone showed up to watch them or not. As Martine Barraqué puts it, “people used to say that Guy Debord was Gérard Lebovici’s ballerina.”
One of the more extraordinary documents of Debordiana is the Contracts, which codify the agreements between Debord and Lebovici’s film company for Society of the Spectacle, In Girum and a film on Spain that was never made. While the first reads indeed like a contract, they become increasingly like a détournement of legal documents. In the last contract, for the Spain film, Lebovici gives and Debord agrees to nothing in return. It is if anything the negation of the contract. No consideration is offered in return for the gift.[15] Or rather, it is the very offering of nothing in return, except the explicit statement that nothing is owed, which permits Lebovici’s gift to approximate to the state of being a pure donation.[16]
Debord once claimed the virtue of having “invented some crimes of a new type.”[17] Principal among which was the refusal to appear within the spectacle on command. Where this tactic confers on most who try it nothing but obscurity, Debord succeeded in pulling off a uniquely anti-spectacular fame. This strategy was not without its dangers. To the state of a disintegrating spectacle, those who will neither stay in obscurity nor affirm the spectacle with their presence can only be categorized as traitors to the state. As the spectacle disintegrates, it grows far less tolerant of those who refuse it. As Gracián says, the state can counter almost any challenge to itself, but not mockery.
In November 2008 French anti-terrorist police arrested Julien Coupat (b. 1975) and held him for several months without trial. As a condition of his release Coupat had to surrender his passport and identity papers. He was the last to be released of a group that Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie called anarcho-autonomous. The government failed to secure any convictions on terrorist charges. The arrests were triggered by the attempted sabotage of a highspeed train. A group protesting the transporting of radioactive waste in Germany had already claimed responsibility for the sabotage. Coupat described his imprisonment as “petty revenge” in the face of the complete failure of the police action that rounded up him and his friends. Giorgio Agamben: “The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in this case debatable) way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, even when not one act can justify this accusation.”[18]
Just as the spectacle took Debord’s refusal of its charms for a threat to its existence, so too with Coupat. “Anti-terrorism,” Coupat writes, “contrary to what the term insinuates, is not a means of fighting against terrorism, it is the means by which it positively produces the political enemy as terrorist.” This is not the least aspect that connects the Coupat affair to the Situationist legacy. Coupat wrote a paper on the Situationists while at university. He may have been a member of the Tiqqun group, which was not unfamiliar with certain figures who once moved in Debordian circles. He may or may not be one of the authors of a text called The Coming Insurrection, and which may be the real reason for his arrest. Coupat declares that “unfortunately, I am not the author of The Coming Insurrection, and the whole affair will end up convincing us of the essentially policing role of the author-function.” He also notes that “In France one can’t remember power becoming so fearful of a book in a long time.”
Whatever its provenance, The Coming Insurrection is surely the first notable political text to pick up where the Situationists left off.[19] Published in the name of the Invisible Committee, it revives the glamour of the spectral party, the devil’s party. It takes the refusal of existing power, and its attendant everyday life, as far as the rejection even of the so-called leftist versions within it. It takes it as given that even the ruling class has lost its way. It shows a keen interest in urban affairs, but sees this as a time in which the metropolis has all but engulfed its rural peripheries. The creation of a life in the cracks of the commodity form has to remove itself from its major achievement—the modern city. Hence the group that was arrested with Coupat were known as the Tarnac 9, after the small town of some three-hundred-odd inhabitants in the Limousin region where they ran a cooperative store. Like Debord, late in life, they had withdrawn from the space of the city, to contemplate it from without, to act upon it from without.
Notes
1 Debord, In Girum, p. 50; Oeuvres, p. 1377. Actually the “name writ on water” is from Keats’ epitaph for himself, détourned from Fletcher’s “Philaster,” but it is borrowed again by Shelley in “Adonais” and “Fragment on Keats,” as well as by Christina Rossetti and Oscar Wilde. Shelley was indeed shipwrecked, and the shipwrecked above all perhaps have their names written on water. ‘Shipwreckers’ both détourns and corrects the thought. See Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2002.
2 Debord, Panegyric, p. 15; Oeuvres, p. 1633.
3 Terence, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto,” Heauton Timoroumenos, line 77.
4 Will Baker, Jacques Prévert, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1967; Edward Baron Turk, Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1989. The female lead in both films is Arletty.
5 Debord, In Girum, p. 33; Oeuvres, p. 1362.
6 The Memoirs of Lacenaire, translated by Philip John Stead, Staple Press, London, 1952, pp. 157–9. Here sounding as if he is détourning the Gospel of Matthew: “I come not to bring peace but the sword.” Lacenaire is also mentioned in Panegyric, p.7. Foucault compares Lacenaire unfavorably to another criminal-writer of the time: “No, I think that one must compare Rivière with Lacenaire, who was his exact contemporary and who committed a whole heap of minor and shoddy crimes, mostly failures, hardly glorious at all, but who succeeded through his very intelligent discourse in making these crimes exist as real works of art, and in making the criminal, that is Lacenaire himself, the very artist of criminality. It’s another tour de force if you like: he managed to give an intense reality, for dozens of years, for more than a century, to acts that were finally very shoddy and ignoble. As a criminal he was a rather petty type, but the splendor and intelligence of his writing gave a consistency to it all.” Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 1996, pp. 203–6.
7 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 111; Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 31.
8 Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 4, International Publishers, New York, 1976, p. 82. Or as Lefebvre says, “man moves ‘wrong foot forward.’” Introduction à la modernité. Préludes, Les éditions de minuit, Paris, 1962, p. 146.
9 Olivier Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, translated by Adrian Martin and Rachel Zerner, Synema, Vienna, 2012, pp. 49–50, 77, 101. See also Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, pp. 5–6. Assayas produced the DVD edition of Debord’s films, and not much else of value in this context, except perhaps demonlover (2007). Of course, there were in actuality many “authors” of the Champ Libre editorial direction. See Éditions Champ Libre, Correspondance Tome 1, editions Ivrea, Paris, 1996.
10 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 3; Oeuvres, p. 1540.
11 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 9; Oeuvres, p. 1543.
12 “He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.” New York Times Magazine, January 26, 2011. For Assange in his own words: Hans Ulrich Obrist, “In Conversation with Julian Assange,” e-flux journal, No. 25, May 2011, e-flux.com, and Julian Assange et al., Cypherpunks, O/R Books, New York, 2012.
13 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 23; Oeuvres, p. 1550.
14 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 44; Oeuvres, p. 1560.
15 Guy Debord, Des Contrats, Le temps qu’il fait, Cognac, 1995; Oeuvres, p. 1843ff.
16 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. Derrida’s critique is of the Christian-bourgeois idea of the gift as an unmotivated, selfless charity. But for ethnographers, and Situationists, the gift is always a stake in a game among rivals. See Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 127–8.
17 Debord, Panegyric, p. 17; Oeuvres, 1664.
18 See the documents collected and translated at tarnac9.wordpress.com, including an interview with Coupat from Le Monde, June 4, 2009; Giorgio Agamben, “Terrorismeou tragic-comédie,” Libération, November 19, 2008; Alberto Toscano, “The War Against Preterrorism,” Radical Philosophy, No. 154, March–April 2009.
19 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009. See also Benjamin Noys (ed.), Communization and Its Discontents, minor compositions, London, 2011. Most of the contributors to the latter are highly critical of Tiqqun and its offspring, such as the Invisible Committee, and pursue more theoretically rigorous concepts of an immanent Communism. Both a certain quality of the prose, and certain practical commitments, make The Coming Insurrection more germane to our story here, but interested readers can pursue these more rigorous, not to say dogmatic, versions of a Post-Situationist practice according to taste.
From June, 2013