Sunday, January 19, 2020

A Genealogy and Critique of Guy Debord's Theory of Spectacle - PhD Thesis


Cover of the 1983 edition of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011

Tom Bunyard
This thesis addresses Guy Debord's theory of spectacle through its primary philosophical and theoretical influences. Through doing so it highlights the importance of his largely overlooked concerns with time and history, and interprets the theory on that basis. The theory of spectacle is shown to be not simply a critique of the mass media, as is often assumed, but rather an account of a relationship with history; or more specifically, an alienated relation to the construction of history. This approach thus offers a means of addressing Debord’s Hegelian Marxism. The thesis connects the latter to Debord’s interests in strategy, chance and play by way of its existential elements, and uses these themes to investigate his own and the Situationist International’s (S.I.) concerns with praxis, political action and organisation.
Addressing Debord and the S.I.’s work in this way also highlights the shortcomings of the theory of spectacle. The theory is based upon the separation of an acting subject from his or her own actions, and in viewing capitalist society under this rubric it tends towards replacing Marx's presentation of capital as an antagonistic social relation with an abstract opposition between an alienated consciousness and a homogenised world. Yet whilst the theory itself may be problematic, the conceptions of time, history and subjectivity that inform it may be of greater interest. Drawing attention to Debord's claims that theories should be understood as strategic interventions, and also to the S.I.'s calls for their own supersession, the thesis uses its observations on the nature of Debord's Hegelian Marxism to cast the theory of spectacle as a particular moment within a broader notion of historical agency. It thus contends that Debord's work can be seen to imply a model of collective political will, and offers initial suggestions as to how that interpretation might be developed.

Publication Name: PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011

How the Situationist International became
 what it was


Anthony Hayes

The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a small group of
communist revolutionaries, originally organised out of the West
European artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. The focus of my
thesis is to explain how the Situationist International (SI)
became a group able to exert a considerable influence on the
ultra-left criticism that emerged during and in the wake of the
May movement in France in 1968. My wager is that the pivotal
period of the group is to be found between 1960 and 1963, a
period marked by the split of 1962. Often this is described as
the transition of the group from being more concerned with art to
being more concerned with politics, but as I will argue this
definitional shorthand elides the significance of the
Situationist critique of art, philosophy and politics.
The two axes of my thesis are as follows. First, that the
significant minority in the group which carried out the break of
1962, identified a homology between the earlier Situationist
critique of art — embodied in the Situationist ‘hypothesis of
the construction of situations’ — and Marx’s critique and
supersession of the radical milieu of philosophy from which he
emerged in the mid- 1840s. This homology was summarised in the
expression of the Situationist project as the ‘supersession of
art’ (dépassement de l’art). Secondly, this homology was
practically embodied in the resolution of the debates over the
role of art in the elaboration of the Situationist hypothesis,
which had been ongoing since 1957. However, it was the SI’s
encounter with the ultra-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie that
would prove decisive. Via Guy Debord’s membership, the group
was exposed to both the idea of a more general revolutionary
criticism, but also ultimately what was identified as the
insufficiently criticised ‘political militancy’ of this
group. Indeed, in the ‘political alienation’ found in
Socialisme ou Barbarie, a further homology was established
between the alienation of the political and artistic
avant-gardes. This identity would prove crucial to the further
elaboration of the concept of ‘spectacle’.
By way of an examination of the peculiar and enigmatic ‘Hamburg
Theses’ of 1961, and the relationship between these
‘Theses’ and the Situationist criticism of art and politics
worked out over the first five years of the group, I will argue
that the break in 1962 should be conceived as one against
politics as much as art (rather than just the latter, as it is
more often represented). Additionally, I will outline how the SI,
through the paradoxical reassertion of their artistic origins,
attempted to synthesise their criticism of art with the recovery
of the work of Marx beyond its mutilation as Marxism. Indeed, it
was the synthesis of these critiques that enabled the
considerable development of the concept of ‘spectacle’,
opening the way to the unique influence the SI exerted in the
re-emergence of a revolutionary movement at the end of the 1960s.
Toward the realisation of philosophy: The Situationist International 
between 1957 and 1960







Three Situationists walk into a bar - Or, the peculiar case of the Hamburg Theses
Anthony Hayes

Guy Debord, filmmaker, Situationist and author of The Society of the Spectacle, called The Hamburg Theses ‘the most mysterious of all the documents that emanated from the Situationist International.’ What makes the Hamburg Theses most enigmatic, apart from the fleeting and elusive references made to them in the Situationist journal, is that they were never published — left to fade along with the memories of their ‘co-authors’. Nonetheless their significance to the group was paramount. The Theses were formulated in response to the crisis regarding the role of art and artistic practice within the group. In essence their apparent failure to appear was intended to reflect the Situationist project itself: the rejection of the fetish of objects and other forms of reified human activity beloved of capitalism. In the Hamburg Theses, then, we have the Situationist project expressed in its most concise and impossibly elusive form, making it one of the most vital works of the Situationist International.

Art, ideology, and everyday space: subversive tendencies from Dada to situationism

alastair bonnett

This is a paper about the transgression of the boundary between art and everyday
space. It traces the development of a practical and theoretical critique of this divide from
Dada and surrealism to situationism and postmodernism, whilst showing how these movements
have themselves often perpetuated a specialized notion of cultural production. The ultimate
failure of these movements, with the exception of situationism, to develop a coherent and
effective challenge to the dualism art—everyday space is related to their reliance upon the
artistic ideologies of antiart, indifference, and spontaneism.
More Info: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1992, volumo 10, pagos 69-86





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