It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
In this paper, I explore Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes by closely examining the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s film The Society of the Spectacle (1973), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the uprising, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” Debord’s Marxist perspective on Watts understands the insurgents as potential revolutionary actors, primed for a “second proletarian assault against class society” (SotS, Thesis 47). To complicate Debord’s position, I look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, which understands anti-black violence not as contingent upon capitalist alienation but instead as gratuitous violence required to uphold the figure of Humanity within civil society.
Do I think we can make it through rioting? Do you think we can make it through on promises!? —Watts man1
It is hard to explain to someone what it feels like to be black in a white world. The things that happen to you daily, that are very much a part of you, are hard to remember because they become so routine. There is really nothing I can tell you here that would fully let you know what it is like because it is too horrible and too deep to really communicate to anyone. —Watts woman2
Five months after the Watts Rebellion took place in August 1965, ABC News aired a report featuring interviews with several black Watts residents. The middle-aged white host informs us that by interviewing these residents, he hopes “to add understanding to the most difficult of all domestic problems in America.” That problem was and is race. Beneath the populist tone, the television program reflected a tension that continues to pervade Marxism and most liberatory politics: Is race a division within the proletariat manufactured by the managerial class to fracture any revolutionary potential? Or does racism emerge from a premodern world, transforming alongside capitalism’s evolution?3 With this tension in mind, we can rephrase the two quotes that open this paper. In the first quote, the Watts man suggests the Watts riot is, at least in part, a symptomatic manifestation of spectacle espousing toxic racisms and structural hierarchy. We can no longer make it on your promises—promises of jobs, wealth, proper housing, an end to police violence. No more promises of “progress.” To put it crudely, if one reads the quote from a strictly class-oriented Marxist perspective, the antidote to this man’s ailments are political-economic, and come with the overthrow of capitalism.
In the second quote, a woman from Watts implicitly situates social death as central to her analysis of why the Watts uprising occurred. The explosion in Watts was white society’s chickens coming home to roost. Aware that she is speaking with ABC, she addresses the white world as Other in informing the listener—white society—they cannot understand. It is too terrible to communicate to anyone. Reading between the lines, one suspects she means that, as a black woman, she cannot be heard in this particular white venue for speech. This inability to be heard in a public venue signifies her social death. The interviewee uses “anyone” as a stand-in for the whole of white folks because they have access to the public sphere or civil society; through this popular television program, they will hear her words and see her picture but never understand her. The routine quality of this racist horror that constitutes black life in Watts is beyond words. Inversely, it is implied that many black people understand this horrible-ness that exceeds description. This second interviewee requires not the end of capitalism but the end of white civil society.
In this paper, I will explore this tension in Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes. This project is overdue. Debord’s oeuvre continues to inform many academics, artists, and activists, yet there remains little scholarship on Debord’s understanding of race within the spectacle.4 I will closely analyze the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle (hereafter SotS), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the rebellion, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” To complicate Debord’s Marxist perspective, I will look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, in particular the work of Frank Wilderson, which posits anti-black violence as gratuitous violence. For Wilderson, anti-blackness is required to uphold the figure of humanity within white civil society and Western civilization.
Finally, I hope to show that Debord foreshadows an anti-state Marxism, particularly what is known as “communization” current, and may not be entirely at odds with anti-blackness as is suggested by Afropessimism.5 Communization is a theoretical elaboration of Marxism emerging out 1968 uprisings. While there are significant divergences within the current, communization generally shares a rejection of the Party form and a rejection of the seizure of the means of production. Instead, it views revolution as an “immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production.”6 With the destruction of capitalist relations, communization rejects the affirmation of the proletariat as a subject and works toward its abolition. I contend that this shift in theoretical vision from affirmation to abolition offers a non-conflictual relation to anti-blackness and allows for multiple grammars of suffering within a struggle against capital and anti-blackness.
Guy Debord’s (1931–1994) best-known work, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the “Spectacle,” Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.
Debord defines the spectacle as the “autocratic reign of the market economy.” Though the term “mass media” is often used to describe the spectacle’s form, Debord derides its neutrality. “Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term ‘media,’” he writes, “and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service.” Instead, Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable “degradation” of our lives.
Debord was a founding member of the Situationist International (1957–1972), a group of avant-garde artists and political theorists united by their opposition to advanced capitalism. At varying points the group’s members included the writers Raoul Vaneigem and Michèle Bernstein, the artist Asger Jorn, and the art historian T.J. Clark. Inspired primarily by Dadaism, Surrealism, and Marxist philosophy, the SI rose to public prominence during the May 1968 demonstrations during which members of the group participated in student-led occupations and protests. Though the extent of its influence is disputed, there is little doubt that the SI played an active intellectual role during the year’s events. Graffiti daubed around Paris paraphrased the SI’s ideas and in some cases directly quoted from texts such as The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967).
The first English translation of Debord’s text was published in 1970 by Black and Red Books. The book’s cover features J.R. Eyerman’s iconic photograph of the premiere of Bwana Devil (1952), the first 3D color film. Originally reproduced in LIFE magazine, the image captures the film’s audience gazing passively at the screen with the use of anaglyph glasses. In the foreground, a besuited, heavy-set gentleman watches the screen intently, his mouth agape. Eyerman’s photograph reduces the audience members to uniform rows of spectacled spectators. Although the image encapsulates Debord’s contempt for consumer culture, it reductively implies that his work was mediaphobic (Debord later adapted The Society of the Spectacle into his first feature-length film by utilizing footage from advertisements, newsreels, and other movies). If we were to judge The Society of the Spectacle by Black and Red’s cover, we might assume that the book is a straightforward critique of media-driven conformity. Debord’s insights however, were far more profound.
The Society of the Spectacle consists of 221 short theses divided across nine chapters. The first thesis reworks the opening line of Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867):
Marx: The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.
Debord: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.
By paraphrasing Marx, Debord immediately establishes a connection between the spectacle and the economy. The book essentially reworks the Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and alienation for the film, advertising, and television age. This concern is encapsulated by Debord’s fourth thesis (emphasis my own):
The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Debord observed that the spectacle actively alters human interactions and relationships. Images influence our lives and beliefs on a daily basis; advertising manufactures new desires and aspirations. The media interprets (and reduces) the world for us with the use of simple narratives. Photography and film collapses time and geographic distance — providing the illusion of universal connectivity. New products transform the way we live. Debord’s notions can be applied to our present-day reliance on technology. What do you do when you get lost in a foreign city? Do you ask a passer-by for directions, or consult Google Maps on your smartphone? Perhaps Siri can help. Such technology is incredibly useful, but it also engineers our behavior. It reduces our lives into a daily series of commodity exchanges. If Debord were alive today, he would almost certainly extend his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. Debord would no doubt have been horrified by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets. Did you tweet today? Why haven’t you posted to Instagram? Did you “like” your friend’s photos on Facebook yet? To be clear, Debord did not believe that new technology was, in itself, a bad thing. He specifically objected to the use of perceptual technologies for economic gain. The spectacle, which is driven by economic interest and profit, replaces lived reality with the “contemplation of the spectacle.” Being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing. We no longer live. We aspire. We work to get richer. Paradoxically, we find ourselves working in order to have a “vacation.” We can’t seem to actually live without working. Capitalism has thus completely occupied social life. Our lives are now organized and dominated by the needs of the ruling economy:
The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object is expressed in the following way: The more [the spectator] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desires. – Thesis 30
The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. – Thesis 33
The proliferation of images and desires alienates us, not only from ourselves, but from each other. Debord references the phrase “lonely crowds,” a term coined by the American sociologist David Riesman, to describe our atomization. The Society of the Spectacle’s first chapter is entitled “Separation Perfected,” a quality that Debord describes as the “alpha and omega of the spectacle.” Referring to the Marxist concept of false-consciousness, Debord describes how the spectacle conceals the “relations among men and classes.” The spectacle functions as a pacifier for the masses, a tool that reinforces the status quo and quells dissent. “The Spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears,’” writes Debord. “It demands […] passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.”
Although he characterizes the spectacle as a singular and omnipresent “repressive pseudo-environment,” Debord also acknowledges its warring and contradictory nature. “Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one,” reads thesis 66. As spectators, we regularly experience advertisements for rival products — Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Delta and US Airways, The X-Factor and The Voice. Often we’re presented with conflicting desires or messages. For instance, a television drama depicting an AA meeting might be preceded by a glamorous vodka advertisement. Such logical inconsistencies are buried by the spectacle’s relentless proffering of goods and imagery. Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way. “Thus by means of a ruse of commodity logic,” writes Debord, “what’s specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves towards its absolute realization.” Put more simply, our fetishization of images and commodities leads us to overlook the spectacle’s contradictory qualities. “The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided,” Debord observes. “Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction.” Debord’s acknowledgement that the spectacle is comprised of competing agents and interests strengthens his critical stance, since it prevents detractors from accusing him of characterizing capitalism as a mindless, monolithic entity.
Debord defines two primary forms of the spectacle — the concentrated and the diffuse. The concentrated spectacle, which Debord attributes to totalitarian and “Stalinist” regimes, is implemented through the cult of personality and the use of force. The diffuse spectacle, which relies on a rich abundance of commodities, is typified by wealthy democracies. The latter is far more effective at placating the masses, since it appears to empower individuals through consumer choice. The diffuse spectacle of modern capitalism propagates itself by exploiting the spectator’s lingering dissatisfaction. Since the pleasure of acquiring a new commodity is fleeting, it is only a matter of time before we pursue a new desire — a new “fragment” of happiness. The consumer is thus mentally enslaved by the spectacle’s inexorable logic: work harder, buy more.
In his 1988 follow-up text, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord introduces a third form: the integrated. As its name suggests, the integrated spectacle is a combination of diffuse and concentrated elements. Debord bleakly concludes that the integrated spectacle now permeates all reality. “There remains nothing, in culture or nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted according to the means and interests of modern industry,” he writes. Today, the integrated spectacle continues to provide abundant commodities while defending itself with the use of misinformation and misdirection. According to Debord, it does this primarily through the specter of terrorism:
Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
Debord’s observation appears particularly prescient today when one compares the amount of media coverage that terrorism receives in comparison to climate change (the latter being the direct consequence of our relentless consumerism). First time readers of Debord’s work may prefer to read Comments first, since it is a brisker and more informal read than The Society of the Spectacle. Unlike his original text, Debord refers to contemporary events to illustrate his arguments, including the Iran-Contra affair, Manuel Noriega’s dictatorship of Panama, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
Comments also examines the phenomenon of celebrity culture. Debord observes that fame “has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing.” Although The Society of the Spectacle largely focuses on broader themes such as alienation, Debord dedicates two extended theses to the subject of “stars.” He is particularly contemptuous of celebrities, branding them the “enemy of the individual.” The star markets a lifestyle of leisure, “compensat[ing] for the fragmented productive specializations that are actually lived.”
As embodiments of the spectacle, celebrities necessarily “renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify [themselves] with the general law of obedience to the course of things.” Their Individuality is sacrificed in order to become a figurehead of the profit-driven system. After all, celebrities not only peddle commodities, but are commodities themselves. They serve as projections of our false aspirations. For Debord, this makes them less than human:
The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. – Thesis 61
Debord had an equally withering attitude towards the art world. In Comments, Debord blithely declares that “art is dead,” describing current artistic practices as “recuperated neo-dadaism.” His conclusion is unsurprising given the anti-art stance he extolled as a member of Paris’ avant-garde scene. His attitude towards art and art history is exemplified by two key passages in The Society of the Spectacle:
The affirmation of [art’s] independence is the beginning of its disintegration. – Thesis 186
When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. – Thesis 193
Debord believed that Dadaism and Surrealism marked the end of modern art, describing them as “the last great assault of the revolutionary proletarian movement.” For Debord, art was another phenomenon that had been subsumed by the spectacle. Its commodification reduced art movements into “congealed past culture:”
Once this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes possible, it is also the end of the world of art. In this age of museums, when artistic communication can no longer exist, all the former moments of art can be admitted equally. – Thesis 189
Debord cites a study by Clark Kerr in which the economist suggested that industries involving the “consumption of knowledge” (i.e. arts, tech, and entertainment) would become the “driving force” in the development of the US economy. It marks another instance in which Debord’s observations appear to parallel our contemporary situation.
The Society of the Spectacle’s critical longevity can be partly attributed to Debord’s refusal to describe the spectacle’s form. By focusing instead on the spectacle’s ever-shifting qualities, Debord encourages the reader to scrutinize the world around them. It is for this reason that the book is routinely celebrated for its prescience. A contemporary reader can readily apply Debord’s analysis to the fracturing of the media industry, the rise of the internet, or to the use of social media. Note how Debord starts multiple sentences with the phrase “the spectacle is…”:
The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. – Thesis 49
The spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery. – Thesis 63
The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma. – Thesis 71
Debord’s aggressive use of repetition parallels the spectacle’s omnipresence and reinforces his critique. It’s a clever rhetorical device. Full of pithy aphorisms, The Society of the Spectacle reads less like an academic text and more like a manifesto — a call to arms against passive spectatorship. One of the book’s most cited passages is the ninth thesis: “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” As with the book’s opening sentence, the ninth thesis plays off the work of another philosopher. Debord’s aphorism is an inversion of a passage from the preface of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): “The false is a moment of the true.” The Society of the Spectacle is littered with both subtle and explicit references to the work of other thinkers. Aside from Hegel and Marx, Debord also references György Lukács, William Shakespeare, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Niccolò Machiavelli. This meta-textual approach places Debord’s work into a lineage of celebrated texts whilst also embodying the SI’s concept of détournement, a term variously translated as “diversion,” “detour,” “reroute,” and “hijack.”
The concept was initially devised by the Letterist International (founded by Debord) and later revised by the SI. In a 1957 essay entitled “A User’s Guide to Détournement” Debord and the artist Gil J. Wolman define the concept as:
The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersed[ing] the original elements and produc[ing] a synthetic organization of greater efficacy.
The SI championed détournement as a means of interrupting the fabric of the everyday — whether it be repurposing old film reels, subverting iconic images or slogans, or devising literature inspired by the works of other writers. The concept bridges the appropriating practices of avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, with the activist “culture jamming” of groups such as The Yes Men and the Billboard Liberation Front. In subverting and referencing the work of other authors, Debord uses The Society of the Spectacle as a means of demonstrating its practical use. The act of détournement imbues revered and historicized works of art and literature with new life, thereby overcoming their congealment at the hands of the spectacle. As Debord and Wolman write:
Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of real class struggle.
The concept of Détournement represented the synthesis of many of Debord’s ideas, particularly his anti-art and anti-commodity stances. He did however, acknowledge its weaknesses, namely that an act of détournement requires the viewer’s familiarity with the original, pre-détourned subject matter. Debord compensates for this in The Society of the Spectacle by preceding each chapter with a prominent quote, thereby alerting the reader to the meta-textual nature of his work. Despite its cultural influence, the concept of détournement raises a number of questions. For instance, how does one measure the efficacy of a détourned work? Can a détourned work be subsumed by the spectacle, and if so, how does one prevent such an action?
Although The Society of the Spectacle is recognized as an incisive indictment of the consumerist experience, readers may well reject Debord’s assertion that capitalism has inherently degraded our social lives. After all, how can society produce new services and products without some form of industrialization? On this particular point, Debord is unrelenting, arguing that capitalism — having already served our most basic survival needs (the means to food, shelter, etc.) — relies on fabricating new desires and distractions in order to propagate itself and maintain its oppression over the working classes:
The new privation is not far removed from the old penury since it requires most men to participate as wage workers in the endless pursuit of […] attainment … everyone knows he must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern commodities. – Thesis 47
At the heart of Debord’s critique is his belief that capitalism is an inherently uncreative system. The obsession with profit demonstrably works against human interest, especially when it comes to the protection of the environment. In Comments, Debord quotes Daniel Verilhe, a representative of Elf-Aquitaine’s chemicals subsidiary, who, at a conference regarding a ban of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) argued that it would take at “least three years to develop substitutes and the costs will be quadrupled.” “As we know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one and has no market value,” scoffs Debord.
The most significant criticism that can be leveled at The Society of the Spectacle is Debord’s failure to proffer any convincing solutions for countering the spectacle, other than describing an abstract need to put “practical force into action.” In his final thesis, Debord declares the pressing need for “self-emancipation” from the spectacle:
This “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is only possible where individuals are “directly linked to universal history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.” – Thesis 221
In 1994, six years after he described the spectacle as “the most important event to have occurred this century,” Debord killed himself at his home in the remote French village of Champot. A life of hard drinking had led to a diagnosis of peripheral neuritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition whereby the body’s nerve endings burn away. By most accounts, Debord had long since retreated from the French intellectual scene, spending his days drinking with friends and obsessively engaged in games of strategy (Atlas Press republished A Game of War, which Debord co-authored with his wife Alice Becker-Ho, in 2008). Andrew Hussey, a biographer of Debord, described his decline as “a slow suicide.” In an 2001 article for the Guardian, Hussey wrote:
It depressed him in his later years that [his] insight had long since ceased to be a revolutionary call to arms but the most accurate, if banal, description of modern life […] While Debord’s public life was predicated upon his revolutionary intentions, in private he sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism.
“Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best,” Debord quips in his 1989 memoir. “Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.” Indeed, for someone who wrote comparatively little, Debord cast a huge shadow over postmodern theory and discourse. His interrogation of capitalism and visual culture preempted the work of theorists such as Jean Braudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard, each of whom dedicated their work to the frenetic and orgiastic world of images in which we live.
Although the ‘spectacle’ has become a clichéd term for the modern condition, there is no denying the richness of Debord’s original text. The Society of the Spectacle is littered with tangential lines of enquiry such as the psychological impact of modernist architecture, or the nature of celebrity. Each successive reading unveils another layer of nuance. For instance, take this passage in which Debord reflects upon a quote by the sociologist Joseph Gabel:
The need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a completely different pathological level, “the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence.” – Thesis 219
Note the words “need” and “representation.” Ask yourself — what compels us to buy the latest tech gadget? Why do we spill our feelings out on Facebook, in posts that are archived on servers deep underground? Which is more important, the expression of the feeling itself, or the knowledge that it will be documented and seen by others? Why do we incessantly take selfies, or record our every moment for posterity? Are we afraid of being a nobody — of being on “the margin of existence?” If you’re concerned with how you appear, then are you really living? Even now, almost 50 years after its original publication, The Society of the Spectacle reads as if it were written for our time:
The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.” – Thesis 218
This thesis proposes an intellectual biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934-Present). Vaneigem was a member of the Situationist International (SI) between 1961 and 1970. Today the SI is widely recognised as one of the significant avant-garde groups to have contributed to the historical events that shook France in May 1968. Most people will have come to Vaneigem through his Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), (THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE) which he wrote as a member of the SI and was published just months before the largest wildcat strike in French history. Vaneigem is therefore of interest from a cultural history or history of ideas perspective because his work embodies both a political moment and because it emerged out of debates that are still informing contemporary theory. Moreover, Vaneigem is something of an anomaly in that he has always worked outside and against intellectual and political institutions, he comes from a working-class background and he has lived the great majority of his life in the province of Hainaut, the old industrial heartland of Belgium, where he was born. This makes Vaneigem an outsider in a world that has ostensibly been dominated by the Parisian intellectual elite. More often than not Vaneigem has been dismissed, even vilified, by academics interested in the Situationist International. This is all the more surprising given that his Situationist comrade Guy Debord (1931-1994) has become a cause célèbre among the intellectual left since his death, igniting a veritable publishing industry in France and the English-speaking world. The intention of this thesis is not an attempt to earn Vaneigem the dubious acclaim that has feted Guy Debord these past decades. Rather, it endeavours to contextualise, clarify and bring out the complexity of the life and work of Raoul Vaneigem, making him the focus of a critical commentary that will reassess his place in the field.
How the Situationist International became what it was
Anthony Paul Hayes
A thesis
submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
The Australian National University.
April, 2017
Abstract
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.
This work influenced the broad left in France and Europe including the post structuralists, and post modernists, who watered it down and created a specter of itself for their own academic pursuits.
It is forty years old and still caustically accurate as a critique of post- modernist capitalism.
The Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord Originally published in 1967
The revolutionary thinker, Guy Debord was the leading figure of the French intellectual group who called themselves The Situationist International. His text, The Society of the Spectacle written in 1967 is one of the greatest theoretical examinations of our socio-cultural condition, describing in pinpoint accuracy, the dreadful corporate globalization craze currently sweeping the planet. His work was instrumental in sparking the student uprisings in Europe in the late sixties. In 1989 he published his "Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle" Both texts are chillingly accurate descriptions of the world of simulation and lies that mankind has transformed his life into. In December of 1994, at the age of 62, Debord killed himself.
cobra, lettrism, lettrist international, international movement for an imaginist bauhaus, heatwave, council for the liberation of everyday life, the enragés and more
virtually every situationist text available in english: journals, books, tracts, essays, articles, manifestos, documents and correspondence
books, essays and articles by former situationists from the sixties to the present day
a month-by-month breakdown of events from the alba congress to the theses on the si and its time
Situationist Library is an archive of primarily English language scholarship on the Situationist International (SI) and the artistic outputs of the SI and related movements. This library differs from other online archives of the SI’s work in that it includes secondary research in addition to the group’s original writings.
I’ve organized this site under three pages:
SI Library
SI Library includes an extensive digital archive of scholarship and primary documents on the SI. This research emphasizes the French section of the SI, but also includes research on sections in Scandinavia, England, Italy, and the U.S. Additionally, I’ve included what I refer to as, for lack of a better term, Neo-SI Scholarship in order to differentiate scholars that are implementing SI theoretical contributions in a less academically conventional way, although I recognize it’s an awkward and perhaps problematic categorization (should others have ideas on better organization, please be in touch!). While I have included primary documents where possible, especially previously hard-to-find documents, this is not the best archive of primary documents: three SI archives are linked in the sidebar that have done and continue to do important and notable work.
SI Films
SI Films links to several films including those of the Lettrist filmmakers (precursor to the SI), situationist filmmakers such as Guy Debord and René Viénet, as well as miscellaneous video utilizing strategies or theoretical frameworks conceptually informed by the SI, including contemporary video projects not directly related to the SI.
SI Film Texts
Lastly, SI Film Texts hosts the situationists’ writings on art and film, as well as contemporary scholarship on the film works of Debord and Viénet. Scholarship on the the film contributions of Debord in particular is perhaps the most quickly growing field in relationship to situationist scholarship, expanding our knowledge about Debord’s work to include his cinematic oeuvre in addition to his more well known written works like The Society of the Spectacle.
This website and archive was largely compiled as I was working on my own project and realized that there was no archive of SI scholarship. The library reflects the limits of my knowledge and energy I’m able to contribute to it, for example, my ability to keep up with broken links, seek out and add new articles, etc. It is a DIY project acting as an aggregate of what I’m able to find online or publish easily, but I am not serving in any official capacity. With that said, to my knowledge, this digital library is the largest archive of secondary research on the Situationist International that has been compiled in English.
Nov 2, 2012 - Libcom.org's reading guide to the Situationists, a revolutionary Marxist ... Guy Debord - Interesting text on the 1965 riots in Watts, Los Angeles, ...
An analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets made by people in London and San Francisco explores specific events and types of locations that are associated with different emotions. Panote Siriaraya of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 1, 2023.
A growing body of research examines social media posts and location data to explore human behavior and emotions; for instance, to compare levels of happiness between geographic regions. However, much of that work has been limited to larger geographic scales and is focused on just one emotion at a time, or on a general assessment of positive versus negative emotion.
Siriaraya and colleagues now demonstrate how human emotional expression can be explored at a finer-grained level using Tweets and information on specific buildings, businesses, and other locations of interest from the public platform Open Street Map. They used computational tools known as neural networks to analyze nearly 2 million Tweets made by more than 200,000 people in London and San Francisco, identifying when and where people expressed anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, or trust.
The analysis showed that different location types were associated with expression of different emotions. For instance, in both cities, tweets made in train stations, bridges, and other transportation sites tended to express less joy and more disgust. Tweets from hotels and restaurants showed higher levels of joy. Additionally, proximity to certain sites—and not just being within the sites—was associated with a difference in expressed emotions.
Specific events appeared associated with higher levels of specific emotions; for instance, San Francisco users displayed their highest levels of anger, disgust, and sadness on the day of the 2017 Women’s March, and London users showed high levels of fear and sadness during two local terrorism attacks. New Year’s Eve coincided with high levels of joy in both cities.
The researchers caution against overgeneralizing their results; for instance, the study only included Tweets in English. Nonetheless, they could help pave the way to additional fine-grained research to inform such fields as urban planning and tourism.
The authors add: “Our study highlights how it is possible to portray the characteristics of fine-grained emotions at a detailed spatial and temporal level throughout the whole city, using publicly available data sources.”
Citation: Siriaraya P, Zhang Y, Kawai Y, Jeszenszky P, Jatowt A (2023) A city-wide examination of fine-grained human emotions through social media analysis. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0279749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279749
Author Countries: Japan, Switzerland, Austria
Funding: This work was partially supported by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Program (MIC/SCOPE) #171507010 (https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/joho_tsusin/scope/) and the Japan society for the promotion of science KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16H01722, 17H01822, 22K12274 and 22K19837 (https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/index.html). Apart from these, there was no additional external funding received for this study.
Grid cells not only help us navigate our own paths in a complex environment, but also help us analyse the movements of other people, scientists from the University of Vienna have now shown for the first time. Their new study in Nature Communications also suggests an explanation for a mechanism that could lead to disorientation in dementia patients.
Whether you are making your way through a crowded pedestrian zone or striving towards the goal in a team game, in both situations it is important to think not only about your own movements but also those of others. These navigation and orientation processes are carried out by brain cells that register our current position, where we are coming from, where we are moving towards and in which direction we are looking. Through their joint activity, they create a "map" of our surroundings. A special type of these cells are the so-called grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, a small brain region in the middle temporal lobe. They function like the brain's own GPS, because they not only represent our position in space, but can also put it in relation to other points in the same space.
Whether these grid cells are also involved in mapping the movements of other individuals on this map was the question that the scientists led by Isabella Wagner and Claus Lamm from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna addressed. For this purpose, the scientists tested participants that either navigated themselves in a virtual environment, or observed the movements of another person while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
They found that the brain activity recorded while watching others was comparable to the activity of grid cells. In addition, the team was able to show that this activity was part of a larger network of brain regions that are associated with navigation processes. Interestingly, however, it turned out that the better a subject was at following the path of others, the less active this network was. "We interpret this as greater efficiency of the grid cells, which might make it less necessary to engage the larger brain network," Wagner explains.
The results of the study thus suggest that grid cells belong to a larger network of brain regions that, among other aspects, coordinates navigation processes. However, this network is particularly affected by ageing processes and especially by dementia. Wagner explains: "The function of grid cells decreases with age and dementia. As a result, people can no longer find their way around and their orientation is impaired." The group's further research is now dedicated to the question of whether grid cells are also involved in recognising other people - an aspect that is often impaired in advanced dementia.
How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.
As a founding member of the avant-garde movement Situationist International, an international movement of artists, writers and poets who aimed to break down the barriers between culture and everyday life, Debord wanted a revolutionary approach to architecture that was less functional and more open to exploration.
The reimagining of the city proposed by psychogeography has its roots in dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination. Tristam Hillier’s paintings such as La Route des Alpes 1937 could be described as an early example of the concept.
Psychogeography gained popularity in the 1990s when artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller began using the idea to create works based on exploring locations by walking.
If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth,
psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking
earth, mind and foot.
Cover of Guy Debord's 1957 “Psychogeographic guide of Paris." The territory is fragmented and depicts only the emotional connections of different places.
By: Karen O'Rourke
“Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it,” says the writer and psychogeographer Wilfried Hou Je Bek. “This has as much to do with the space as with our hardwired instincts to determine if it is safe.”
Graphy comes from the Greek graphein (to write), a decidedly polysemic word. If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth (geos), what about psychogeographers? The Latin prefix psyche (breath) adds a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot. Psychogeographic writing can be thought of as an alternative way of reading the city. Wilfried Hou Je Bek calls it “the city-space cut-up.” Just as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin cut and reorganized newspaper texts to reveal their implicit content, so too psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways.
This article is adapted from Karen O’Rourke’s book
Although the various practices gathered under the umbrella of psychogeography are ancient, the term itself was first used by members of the Lettrist International, a Paris-based collective of radical artists and cultural theorists that was active in the early 1950s. They described it as “a science of relations and ambiances” they were developing “to give play in the society of others [le jeu de société; literally, “the parlor game”] its true meaning: a society founded upon play. Nothing is more serious. Amusement is the royal privilege that must be made available to everyone.”
Writing in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues, Guy-Ernest Debord attributes the term to an “illiterate Kabyle.” Its vagueness appealed to the loosely organized group that adopted it to describe its various activities. Because geography deals with the impact of natural forces (such as climate and soil composition) “on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world,” wrote Debord, psychogeography should examine the “specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” To accomplish this ambitious investigation, he and his friends recommended drifting:
The practice of de-familiarization and the choice of encounters, the sense of incompleteness and ephemerality, the love of speed transposed onto the plane of the mind, together with inventiveness and forgetting are among the elements of an ethics of drifting we have already begun to test in the poverty of the cities of our time.
Contemporary practitioners take their cue from Debord, who proposed one of psychogeography’s first genealogies. It began with Giovanni Piranesi’s labyrinthine stairways and gathered Claude Lorrain, Jack the Ripper (“probably psycho-geographical in love”), Edgar Allan Poe, and André Breton (deemed “naively psycho-geographical in encounters”), among others.
Each psychogeographer has his own list: Ralph Rumney’s included “Renaissance architect Serlio, French garden designer Le Nôtre, and all builders of grottoes, follies and mazes”; Iain Sinclair turns to William Blake, “the Godfather of Psychogeography”; Rebecca Solnit makes a case for satirist John Gay, the author of “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” (1716); Wilfried Hou Je Bek singles out Horace Walpole, who, over a period of 30 years, transformed his Tudor mansion into a Gothic castle “meticulously designed to provoke a vast array of sensations in its visitors”; Merlin Coverly cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for the way it depicts the seamy underside of the city as reflecting dark corners of the human psyche.
“On Saturday evenings,” wrote opium-eater and peripatetic Thomas de Quincey, “I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance.”
Among the precursors found on nearly every list is opium-eater and peripatetic Thomas de Quincey: “On Saturday evenings,” wrote de Quincey, “I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance” in search of an occult “Northwest Passage” allowing one to cross London unhampered. The Figure of the Flâneur
Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur is often cited as a model for today’s run of psychogeographer. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” and epitomized by Baudelaire’s painter friend Constantin Guys, the flâneur was something of a dandy who ambled through the Paris arcades while ordinary people scurried to work all around him. Free from the pressures of the workaday world, he sought the random encounters that the city streets were always ready to offer.
Guys, “the painter of modern life,” was a man of the world whose domain was the crowd, “just as the air is the bird’s and water that of the fish.” He desired nothing more than to merge with the throng and to dwell in “the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite,” Baudelaire wrote in an essay on the painter. The crowd was “[a]n enormous reservoir of electricity” that gave him the opportunity “to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen by the world” to the extent that the man himself has become a mirror, “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness,” “an ego thirsting for the nonego and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.” Baudelaire completes this portrait in “The Crowds,” one of the prose poems that comprise “Le Spleen de Paris” (“Paris Spleen”): “It is not given to everyone to be able to bathe in the multitude: enjoyment of the crowd is an art” that requires “a taste for dressing up and masque, a hatred for domesticity and a passion for travel. The solitary and thoughtful stroller derives a singular intoxication from this universal communion.”
In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin reappropriated Baudelaire’s dandy for his own purposes, contrasting “the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd” with “the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of the gentleman of leisure.” He claimed that “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them” as a way of protesting against “the division of labor which makes people into specialists.”
In the tradition of Restif de la Bretonne, who wandered through Paris on the eve of the French Revolution (“Les nuits de Paris,” 1788–1794), Benjamin’s contemporaries Louis Aragon (“Paris Peasant,” 1925), André Breton (“Nadja,” 1928), and Philippe Soupault (“Last Nights of Paris,” 1928) put to paper their citywide ramblings. Like Baudelaire, they celebrated the inadvertent poetry of shop window displays, fleeting glances, elusive women, chance encounters, and mysterious pursuits.
Drifting for members of the Lettrist International did not mean only walking. The adventure began during a transportation strike in the summer of 1953 on the platform at the Gare de Lyon, where the group was trying agit-prop. Failing to rally any of the stranded passengers to the strikers’ cause, Guy Debord, Jean-Michel Mension, and their friends sauntered out of the station (or were they chased out?) and began flagging down cars. Hitchhiking nonstop through Paris, they changed their destinations to fit that of the drivers. Their goal, as Debord noted facetiously, was to add to the confusion.
Later, this “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” was accomplished on foot and by taxi, “depending on whether the goal [was] to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself.” In “Dérive by the Mile,” Michèle Bernstein, a novelist and a founding member of the Situationist International, argued in favor of replacing private transport in Paris with large numbers of low-cost taxis, which would be more conducive to recreational drifting. As they travel varying distances in a set time and follow an essentially random itinerary, taxis combine freedom of movement with automatic disorientation.
The situationists prided themselves on detecting the “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.”
Conversely, walking was better for close-up views that focus on the environment at hand. The situationists prided themselves on detecting the “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres,” as Debord wrote in “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” It is a subjective science. When Guy Debord describes the urban ambiances that he and fellow lettrist Gil J. Wolman gathered while drifting through the north of Paris, his judgments are peremptory: Here he sees a “repulsive petit-bourgeois landscape”; there he deems a staircase leading to a network of alleys to be “annoyingly picturesque”; farther on, he consecrates “the impressive rotunda by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux” as the center of an “important psycho-geographic hub” because it is “a virtual ruin left in an incredible state of abandonment, whose charm is singularly enhanced by the curve of the elevated subway line that passes by at close distance.”
A drift could last as long as the drifters wanted it to — a whole day or, as Debord suggests in his “Theory of the Drift,” the time between two periods of sleep:
The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-drift of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
It comprised both restless movement and alcohol-fueled talk. Speaking in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo in September 2003, Jean-Michel Mension described those early drifts as leading frequently from one neighborhood bar to another. It was not usually a solitary pursuit. Debord’s and Wolman’s drift began at 10 a.m. and finished at an unspecified time in the evening when the two drifters abruptly decided to put an end to it. On the way, they made a number of “stops — sometimes long, sometimes brief — at various bars patronized by the bargemen” on the right bank of the canal Saint-Denis, before arriving in a Spanish bar known as the Tavern of the Rebels.
In recent decades, for poachers and protesters, artists, activists and drifters, walking has emerged as a means of reclaiming public space. From the Paris suburbs to London’s ring road, pedestrians are reappearing (or springing up) in spaces dedicated to automobile traffic. For many of them walking is a process of self-education.
Remaking the World?
What is psychogeography’s legacy? In its diverse forms, it embodies the desire to renew language, social life, and oneself. For contemporary psychogeographers, the drift is purposeful; it can reveal the city’s underlying structure. Iain Sinclair aims for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “alert reverie,” a kind of double presence that is both in the here and now and in the imagination:
Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, trampling asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to assert itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin de siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy — but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything.
In “Theory of the Drift,” Debord proposed the idea of a “possible rendezvous” as a means of “behavioral disorientation.” Here, a person is given an appointment at a particular time and place but has no idea if someone will be there to meet him or who that person is. Not knowing what to expect, he will study his surroundings and start conversations with passers-by: “He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the ‘possible rendezvous.’ In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn.”
Courting the unexpected is often combined with the unabashed apology of subjectivity. Stewart Home, the English artist and writer who in 1992 revived the London Psychogeographical Association, states: “For me photography is most alluring when both the person behind the lens and what is being photographed self-consciously manifest their subjectivity. Traveling across ‘Britain’ to discover ‘America’ is only one of the many ways in which such subjectivity might remake the world in both photographic and material form. . . . The psychogeographer . . . knows that the world cannot be recorded, it can only be remade.” “Remaking the world” is usually done in smoke-filled cafés. If these debates rarely lead to concrete action, what about walking?
Karen O’Rourke is an artist and emeritus professor at Jean Monnet University Saint-Etienne, France, and the author of “Walking and Mapping,” from which this article is adapted. Her work explores the relationship between art practice and the concepts of network, archive and territory.
