Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents

edited by Tom McDonough
MIT Press, CambridgeMA, 2002
514 pages, illus. Trade US$44.95
ISBN 1-262-13404-7

Reviewed by Sean Cubitt,
Screen and Media Studies,
University of Waikato,
Private Bag 3105, Hamilton,
New Zealand

seanc@waikato.ac.nz

I heard it said recently by a respected new media critic that Tim Druckrey's collection of texts from Ars Electronica (1) constitutes an adequate, possibly definitive history of new media criticism. Historiography is in the air, along with the spectre of canon-formation. How to do the one without the other is a conundrum.

The revenge of the art institutions on its bitterest critics is posthumous beatitude. At least in the case of Walter Benjamin, the lack of any English-language translations until 1969 is a decent excuse, though not for the vast industry that has sprung up around him. Both Deleuze and Debord were scarely cold before the machinery cranked up, reassured, as TJ Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith complain in their vitriolic collection-closer, that Debord at least would not unleash his notoriously virulent pamphleteering against misconstruals and de--detournements of his thinking (as Debord has it, 'The ruling ideology . . . even succeeds in making use of subversive individuals: when dead, by doctoring their works', 31).

The Situationist International (SI) left a rather threadbare artistic legacy, unless you have a taste for Asger Jorn, and a legacy in any case now entirely art-historical, a movement to indicate the transitions between Fluxus and conceptualism, perhaps, or to signpost the route not taken.

On the other hand, the SI did drop off on the way a series of manifestos, tirades and slogans which, sometimes seen as the unacknowledged script for May 68, have continued to reverberate in anarchist and other new politics circles as well as acting as the bad conscience of academic Marxism. By now many of the analyses are outdated, the Hegelianism suspect, and the faith in workers' councils no longer convincing. The same could be said of Marx, not just of his defense of women against the labour market, but even of his highest achievement, the analysis of the commodity form. Politically, the SI's greatest achievement was to renovate that analysis, replacing it with the idea of spectacle. Philosophically, that represented an understanding that the commodity form has a history. Hagiographic squabbling over the interpretation of the SI's texts is less interesting than working onwards from the period of Bretton Woods and the Cold War to our own time, the years of the WTO and Kyoto.

But history is a great tool (and as Santayana said, those who do not understand it are condemned to repeat it). This collection, which aims to sit beside Ken Knabb's SI anthology, brings 22 rare texts back into circulation, together with eleven essays (seven of them reprinted from the MIT journal October) placing them in their time and beginning, as the editor has it in a phrase cited from Jean-Marie Apostolides, 'the phase of interpretation' (xvii)

Jonathan Crary's valuable chapter on the periodisation of the spectacle cites Debord's statement that, in 1967, the spectacle was barely 40 years old. Taking 1927 as his date, he cites the pefection of television, the integration of communications and entertainment in synchronised sound film and the rise of fascism. Oddly, there's no mention of 1929, the Wall Street Crash and the global downturn that resulted in the Keynesian doctrine of a consumption-driven economy. Even Baudrillard, whose sense of history is misty, is clear on the centrality of the Depression to the history of simulation. As GW Bush rams the US into immense public spending on arms, the old Ketynesianism warms up again: get them working and they will spend their way out of recession. More significantly, they will buy symbols: logos, brands, entertainments that are increasingly self-advertising machines imbricated in dense networks of recycling attention from advert to sweatshirt that advertisers the shop that advertises . . . Debord, at his best, was onto this game.

Sadly the current lionisation of the Situationists in the art world is less alert to the risk of branding. Historian of ideas Kristin Ross intervenes with a splendid interview with Henri Lefebvre, the lynchpin of the new geography and a pal of Debord's in the early days. Lefebvre's revolutionary understanding that space has to be produced, and is produced hegemonically, led to the siuationist concept of situations — real-space events dragging the world into a instant of self-realisation — and the famous derive, a meander through urban streets and squares seeking out ways of reconforming them to the needs and desires of the working class. This is the kind of activity we should really be undertaking in the new mega-galleries like the Tate Modern, where even contemporary art takes on the homogenising pall of art history and the art institution.

There are a number of archive essays here which are of some historical merit, and as a historian and academic I'm grateful for them. Sadly the 500 plus pages, which dwarf all five volumes of Debord's other writings, lack the political clout of those, even though they contain some fine examples of his venomous tongue. Constant's essays on architecture are still radical, but then the greatest architect of our era has just won the contract to rebuld the World Trade Centre, so the idea of radicalism in architecture is clearly still up for grabs.

Of the scholarly essays, Tom Levin's account of Debord's film work is the standout, a meticulous archeology of the films and the thinking behind them. It is perhaps characteristic of Levin as well as of media studies, when compared to art historical scholarship, that he can close his essay (apart that is from its 186 footnotes) thus: 'In its dismantling of the spectacle, the cinema of Guy Debord is thus also the dismantling of the (modernist, avant-garde, political) cinema as well' (p. 428). The problem for the majority of the other essayists is that the concept of art is unquestionable, in a way that the concept of cinema is not. As a result, the book reads more like an attempt to circle the wagons of the Situationist canon in the interests of barricading the concept of art behind the wreckage of looted artschools than as a massive, radical, root-and-branch assault on the ossification of creativity in the castle of taste.

 

(1) Druckrey, Timothy with Ars Electronica (eds) (1999), Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.