Here is the first draft of my presentation for my French and Italian Postwar Culture class: Presentation on Guy Debord: Since this is a course on culture, rather than on the history of ideas, my presentation will be a brief survey of all things Debord, rather than a detailed analysis of any one or two concepts central to the Debord “corpus.” The period that I will cover will begin with his “birth,” which for Debord begins in his twenties, and head to a close with some ideas of his involvement with the student uprisings of May 1968. This time span (which is no more than just 25 years) will give a sizeable, and hopefully provocative, enough impression to inspire one’s own dérive into Debordian territory, taking as it does Dadaist and Lettrist thought to their conclusions and preempting Deleuze to the philosophy of nomadism while developing what some may call a psychoanalysis of the street, erasing the boundaries between theory and practice, or as Debord wrote of May ‘68: “There could precisely no longer be either poetry or art, and that something better had to be found” (1991 26). Debord was born December 28, 1931. His father soon died afterwards and his mother sent the young Guy to live with his grandmother in Italy, where he would earn his baccalaureate in Cannes, where he would of course meet Isidore Isou at the film festival in 1951 where the latter’s film in the “cinéma discrepant” style Traité de bave et d’éternité [Venom and Eternity] was shown and awarded the “Prix de l’avant-garde” by Jean Cocteau. Of this time Guy would write later, “One would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment” (23). At the age of nineteen Guy joined the Lettrists, of which Isou, as the founder of the movement, was the self-installed leader. This was an extremely short alliance, as Guy and another Lettrist named Gil Wolman had begun criticizing Lettrism almost as soon as they joined it. Isou was a precocious Romanian avantgardist moved to Paris with a suitcase filled with manuscripts, and who had already published a manifesto at the age of sixteen. By interrupting a premiere of Tristant Tzara’s La Fuite [The Flight], Isou birthed Lettrism, and caught the eye of the publisher Gallimard, who would publish Isou’s Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et une Nouvelle Musique and novel L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie, both in 1947. Of Isou’s aesthetics we read in the former such proclamations as, “The word is the first stereotype” and “It is by making progress in words that one makes progress socially” (this is of course ironic). Against words, Isou will advocate practices of materiality (aural and visual) and letters, an absolute reduction of convention and subtraction from society, so that the poet “will create emotions against language, for the pleasure of the tongue” and “everything must be revealed by letters.” Isou will also assert that “Every idea needs a calling card to make itself known,” and that Lettrisme is the “new poetry” that will develop the “letterics material” of “nonsense words; words with hidden meanings in their letters; and onomatopoeias.” Of his understanding of the history of poetry we are given two phases: amplique and ciselante, the former characterized by growth and the latter by destruction or reduction. Isou of course intended to take Tzara’s reduction of poetry to the next level: that of the letter, a notion which scholar Vincent Kaufmann interprets as a gambit towards unmediated communication. Debord broke with Isou by publishing an invective against Charlie Chaplin during the latter’s visit to France in November 1952, which read, “Get lost, fascist worm, make a lot of money, be sophisticated [ . . . ], die quickly, we’ll provide you with a first-class funeral. We hope your last film is really the last” (2006, 19). In the same year, just one year after Isou’s film Traite, Gil Wolman’s L’Anticoncept and Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade premieres. In Hurlements Debord narrates, “Just as the projection was about to begin, Guy-Ernest Debord was supposed to step onto the stage and make a few introductory remarks. Had he done so, he would simply have said: ’Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion’” (22). On this “supplementary” revision, at least two points need emphasis. First, the script bearing the same title that premiered in the film magazine Ion included originally more scenes than what was actually produced; and second, there is special weight placed on Debord’s use of “wish” in his jab at his audience. There is already here developed, in other words, the themes of disappearance and desires, ideas toward Debord’s future preferred methods and subjects. To mark the end of the ciselante period of Isou’s Lettrism, at this time Debord forms the Lettrist International with his Saint-Germain-des-Prés gang of hooligans. LI can be viewed as comprised of two phases. The first phase, which generally last between 1952 and 1954, is later criticized by its second phase for its “satisfied nihilism.” In Debord’s Panegryic 1, he will write of this period that “Permanently ensconced there were people who could be defined only negatively, for the good reason that they had no job, followed no course of study, and practised no art” (22). The second phase begins in 1954 and lasts until 1957. It is comprised of the “intellectuals” of the original “tribe”: Debord, Gil Wolman, and Michèle Bernstein; physically marked by Debord’s operations moved from Rue du Four and Chez Moineau to Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève; and characterized as a “negative-critical or negative-terrorist” phase. Whereas the first phase was apparently called “International” because of its group including some North Africans, this second phase is much more artistic and disciplined, diverse in that it included several artists actually from several European countries, an ensemble of intellects linked by the serial publication Potlatch (1954-57). The first phase’s publication was a sporadic 2-4 page newsletter called Bulletin de l’Internationale lettrist. Though the first phase practiced negatively the end of art, it did contain in it the seeds for the Internationale situationniste, in that its second issue proclaimed that “Deliberately beyond the limited interplay of forms, beauty will be SITUATIONAL” (2006, 86). This notion of situation will be reiterated later in the first issue of Potlatch: “Beyond aesthetics, [poetry] consists entirely in man’s power to shape his life [ . . . ] Poetry is embodied in the shape of cities [ . . . ] that is, provisional and lived” (92-3). The Internationale situationniste was formed in 1958 and lasted until Debord dissolved the group in 1971. The formation of the Situationist International was also the formation of a new publication, the review Internationale situationniste. If an official break from Internationale lettrist needs to be found, one such sign could be Debord’s Mémoires, published and circulated clandestinely as a form of potlatch in 1958 (and not sold until revised in 1993), an anti-book composed entirely of quotations, or what Debord in his special use of appropriation will call détournement. Another sign of a break can be read in the 1957 article “Un pas en arrière,” in which Debord writes, “We must no longer lead an external opposition based only on the future developmnt of issues close to us, but seize hold of modern culture in order to use it for our own ends” (99). The key point about this quote is the move towards an interest in and critique of totalities. No long was there art against all, but rather now the object of interest was society as a whole, or more specifically, art as the city. In Mémoires Debord will write that “The sectors of a city are to some extent decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general” (49). This is from where some interpreters of Debord can claim that Debord was the most radical of avant-gardists, since with him the division between art and life disappear under the lens of interpretation, and it is from this point of view that we can now begin to move towards an assessment of the primary concepts of situationism popularly associated with Debord: détournement , dérive, and psychogeography. But first we need to introduce Ivan Chtcheglov, Le Corbusier, and Nieuwenhuys Constant. Chtcheglov was one of the original Lettrists to associate with Debord, and he with Jorn are two of the longest lasting friendships Debord would form in his life. Chtcheglov wrote in 1953 the “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau,” in it proposing and developing the idea of the dérive, or drift. First he acknowledges that “architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of mondulating reality, of engendering dreams” (1989, 2). After having developed this connection between the objective built environment and the subjective experience therewith, he points towards the area of effectivity: “On the bases of this mobile civilzation, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life.” In a later article published 1964 titled “Lettres de loin,” Chtcheglov will write of the dangers of the dérive, such that it may result in “breakdown, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration.” For the Situationists the city is the personal and through its practices they hoped to effect a revolution in the everyday. But the Surrealists already had their own ambulating practices, wanderings dictated by chance. The difference between the two is that the Situationists worked towards a minimum of objectivity in their psychogeographic maps. As Debord writes in his 1961 Critique de la séparation, “Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no individuals—only specters haunting the things anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated people moving randomly. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom” (1998, 97). The dérive is opposed to the “classical notions of the journey and the stroll,” as it should be undertaken in groups so that comparisons between dériveurs can take place: “all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small grops of two or three people who have reached the same awakening of consciousness, since the cross-checking of these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at objective conclusions” (51). Through this method the Situationists could collect data on the effects of the built environment in order to construct their psychogeographies. As much of an individualist Debord can seem, his egocentrisms were always in the service of a “collectivism” in which everybody all at once are free to fulfill their desires. The architect Le Corbusier was a primary target of the Situationists, who felt that the rationalism of Le Corbusier’s Unités d’Habitation and his Ville Contemporaine were alienating in their congealing together of every aspect of life into one central housing structure. One seeming premise in Corbusien architecture is the utter interchangeability between individuals, and so in each of Corbusier’s mega structures there manifests the sense of “artificial individuality” present today with out own corporations, as if for each role or type there would always be some individual to play that role in the larger organism. Against this using and “tooling” of the individual, of the utilitarianism of the market, Situationists advocated mobility and insubordination, writing in 1955 that we need to “flood the market [ . . . ] with a mass of desires whose realization is [ . . . ] only beyond the capacity of the old social organization,” in a move against habit, and in a sequence where “the new beauty can only be a beauty of situation [ . . . ] of a sum of possibilities” (1998, 6-7). As an example against Corbusien modernism we can look back as early as 1956 for Debord’s collaboration with the Danish COBRA art-collective co-founder Asger Jorn titled Guide psychogéographique de Paris: Discours sur les passions de l’amour. And at last, thesis 26 of La Société du spectacle can help us understand détournement with Constant’s New Babylon. It reads, “The generalized separation of worker and product has spelled the end of any comprehensive view of the job done, as well as the end of direct personal communication between producers [ . . . ] The triumph of an economic system founded on separation leads to the proletarianization of the world.” Constant’s New Babylon was a project begun in the pages of Internationale situationniste issues 3 and 4, from which atop columns was supposed to arise the solution to communication as separated by circulation in the urbanism dominant in his time. It was a conscientious project that attempted to actualize the unitary urbanism espoused by the Situationists, “creating our surroundings in direct relation to constantly changing modes of behavior” (2006, 142). The importance of communication here should be understood as the mode through which the poetics of life can be revolutionized, since it remains one of the heaviest casualties from separation adhering to the domination of the spectacle in Debord’s time. The problem with The New Babylon was that even if it beared in mind recuperating alienation, it was still predicated on “teams of specialized creators, who will thus be professional situationists” (143). In 1960 the expulsion of two Dutch artists prompted Constant to quit the SI. In 1962 Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotanyi, and Mustapha Khayati put an end to the “first period” (also known as the “artistic” phase) of the SI by declaring that “Situationist art” did not exist: “It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather of refusing the spectacle. [ . . . ] the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. There is no such thing as situationism or a situationist work of art or a spectacular situationist” (1989, 88). The second phase of the SI is also known as the “sociological phase” because of its concern with society as a whole whereby revolution can arise only when communication between each individual is totalized in its freedom, that is, when “everyone will become an ‘artist,’ in a sense that artists have not achieved: the construction of their own life” (2006, 158). In order to achieve this state where there is no division between creator and created, when communication is action, a generalized collective speech act, a defunctionalizing of appropriation needs to be mastered. It is called deterournement, and it is an anti-technique available to everybody. This capacity for revolution is premised on power as “the permanent lie and the ‘spcial truth,’ language is its permanent guarantee and the Dictionary its universal reference” (1989, 170). Against this totalizing police force of power in language, Khayati espouses that “the critique of the dominant language, the détournement of it, is going to become a permanent practice of the new revolutionary theory.” This notion of détournement connects directly with the revolutionary power of poetry and the influence Debord has had on the student revolts of May 1968, paticularly in the following juxtaposition of quotes: “Poetry must be understood as immediate communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality” (115); and “Poetry is nothing when it is quoted, it can only be détourned, brought back into play” (116). Because the spectacle has expropriated all classical alternatives “to the prevailing organization of life,” this exigency has likewise transformed the role of poetry into “its return in effective and unexpected forms,” culminating in the effect wherein “our era no longer has to write out poetic orders; it has to carry them out” (117). In this light can the revolutionary potential of détournement be accurately discerned, such as when the text that arguably sparked the student revolts of May ’68, “The Poverty of Student Life,” declares that the “free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival” (337). Works cited: Debord, Guy. Panegyric. Trans. James Brook. Vol. 1. New York: Verso, 1991. Print. Kaufmann, Vincent. Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry. Trans. Robert Bononno. Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989. Print. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Print. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. Print.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 17:07:28 +0000
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