/02 VARIACION VALOR

If, as I have suggested, the object of the radical Lettrists and Situationists should be understood primarily as the self-formation and working-through of their own group experience, it accordingly becomes somewhat artificial to present their keywords and major concepts as stable entities readily transferable out of their situated contexts.

Admitting this, however, I will single out three important notions developed by the movements, both because they were treated to extended application by the partici-pants at the time and because taken together they have, in their subsequent reception, become something of the movement’s theoretical signature. These three major con-cepts are: dérive (drift or intentional wandering through urban space), détournement (recontextualizing/refunctioning of appropriated cultural materials), and spectacle (the systematic distantiation of reality through a socially structured domain of images). I will consider them briefly in turn.

The procedure of dérive was central to Lettrist and early Situationist concern with urbanism and urban experience. Its programmatic status was signaled by Debord’s dedication of a text to its “theory” (“Théorie de la dérive”). The dérive was linked, as Debord wrote, “indissolubly to the recognition of effects of a psychogeographi-cal nature and the affirmation of a ludic-constructive comportment opposed in all respects to the classical notions of the journey or the stroll” (Debord in Les Lèvres nues November 1956: 6). Already anticipated in key respects by the Surrealists’ collective wandering through the nighttime landscape of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, the dérive involved a kind of free exploration of certain areas of, or itineraries through, urban space, with both intentional planning to facilitate the emergence of new observations and experiences and recounting to record and detail the experiences undergone during the dérive. It was intended not only to elicit new physical and social details of urban sites, but also to “map” their psychological and affective dimensions, which Debord took to be an “objective” aspect of the interac-tions of urban dwellers with the specific atmospheres, shadows, spaces, pathways, and buildings that constitute the physical city. He thus wrote of an objective terrain of the passions (“terrain passionnel objectif”) and “a psychogeographical relief of the city”

that have their own determinism according to the social and physical morphology of urban space (Debord in Les Lèvres nues November 1956: 6). A second crucial aspect of the dérive, as a quasi-artistic practice spanning writing and performance, was its exem-plary ephemerality, anti-monumentality, and intransitivity – in short, its “situational”

character. An unattributed article in the December 1959 issue of Internationale Situ-ationniste, “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s,” formulated this facet of the dérive explicitly:

In fact, beyond its essential lessons, the dérive furnishes only knowledge that is very precisely dated. In a few years, the construction or demolition of houses, the relocation of micro-societies and of fashions, will suffice to change a city’s network of superficial attractions – a very encouraging phenomenon for the

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moment when we will come to establish an active link between the dérive and Situationist urban construction. Until then, the urban milieu will certainly change on its own, anarchically, ultimately rendering obsolete the dérives whose conclusions could not be translated into conscious transformations of this milieu. But the first lesson of the dérive is its own status in play.

(Internationale Situationniste 1997: 83) In connecting the ephemeral, game-like activity of the dérive to Situationist construc-tion, this text signals the attempt to link up two domains of Situationist urban activity, each with a leading figure temporarily aligned: Debord, in the activity of the dérive and the exploration of the passional landscape of the city; and Constant, a founder of the COBRA group and already by the late 1950s at work on the utopian city of situations that came to be know as “New Babylon.” Yet as the “Unitary Urbanism” text goes on to suggest, there is a third aspect to the dérive that is autobiographical and existential, as much an ethical question of “a life” and its destinies as an issue directly pertaining to architecture or urban design. “All the stories that we live,” the text reads, “the dérive of our life, are characterized by the search for – or the lack of – an overarching construc-tion. The transformation of the environment calls forth new emotional states that are first experienced passively and then, with heightened consciousness, give way to con-structive reactions” (Internationale Situationniste 1997: 83). In an essay entitled “Archi-tecture and Play,” published in the 30 May 1955 issue of Potlatch, Debord had similarly argued that “games” such as the dérive were important explorations of experiences that could, systematically pursued and instituted, open up new modes of individual and col-lective comportment, indeed, a new morality: “It is a matter now of making the transi-tion from arbitrary rules of play to a moral foundatransi-tion” (Debord 1996: 158).

The notion of détournement was already implicit in early Lettrist practice, but became a defining procedure for the radical International Lettrists by the mid-1950s and persisted in Debord’s writings and films long beyond the dissolution of the Situa-tionist International. The term itself refers to their method of appropriating – “detour-ing” – existing texts, images, or film sequences, modified through recaptioning or other means and placed in new contexts, which alters their meaning and function while continuing to refer back to their original sources (see Epstein, this volume).

Détournement became an important tool in the repertoire of the Situationists, not only for negative purposes, for critical parody and exposure of hidden ideological aspects of cultural and commercial goods, but also for positive constructions of new meanings and experiences. Rooted in the Lettrists’ admiration for Lautréamont’s Poésies, with its advocacy of plagiarism against literary property and its exemplification of its own precepts through the modified reuse of passages from Pascal and other classical writ-ers, it received theoretical formulation in an essay co-written by Debord and Wolman and published in the May 1956 issue of Les Lèvres nues. Significantly, the front page of the journal announced the authors to be none other than Aragon and Andre Breton;

Debord and Wolman thus presented their own theoretical tract as a détournement of a Surrealism that had latterly entered into the realm of “classics” available for Situationist

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plagiarism and redirection. As recent editions of Debord’s work have revealed, his application of the technique of détournement was pervasive and enduring, including both “artistic” works such as his collaborations with Asgar Jorn Fin de Copenhagen (1957) and Mémoires (1959; an autobiography including only appropriated sentences) as well as “theoretical” works and films such as Society of the Spectacle (1967) and In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (1976).

The concept of “spectacle,” the best-known concept associated with Situationism, was theoretically articulated at length by Debord in his 1967 book of short thesis-like numbered paragraphs, substantially constructed out of détourned quotations, entitled The Society of the Spectacle. Subsequently, in 1973 he would release a film version of the book, with voice-overs of passages from the book juxtaposed with various photographs and film sequences, as well as two follow-up texts, Refutation of All Judgments, Both Celebratory and Hostile, That Have Been Passed Up Till Now on the Film “The Society of the Spectacle” (1975) and Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle (1988). Over the course of the various paragraphs of Society of the Spectacle in which the concept was elaborated, “spectacle” took on various connotations, but the fundamental definition was given in the opening and closing paragraphs of the first chapter, entitled “Accom-plished Separation.” Debord first announced an all-encompassing new manifestation of capital, which had extended itself, as representation, into the basic experience of time and space in contemporary Western society: “All social life in which modern conditions of production hold sway may be characterized as an immense accumula-tion of spectacles. All that was directly lived now separates itself in a representaaccumula-tion”

(Debord 2006: 766). That representation, “spectacle,” he goes on to argue, forms a sys-tem of images that increasingly shape experience to their stereotypical measure. Lived experience is transformed through images and into further images by the economic and administrative apparatus of advanced capitalism, which has multiple branches in the state bureaucracy, mass media, consumer goods and leisure services, and culture industry. Under the guise of purveying enjoyment and meaning to an increasingly affluent populace, the spectacle actually produces an impoverishment of experi-ence, an “immiseration” not measurable, as Marx had once argued in the Communist Manifesto and Capital, in economic terms, but in the diminished quality and inten-sity of life itself. Misleadingly organized into spuriously individuated parcels of image-merchandise, into branded units of pseudo-communication, the spectacle actually offers only monotonous variations on its own structural reproduction and expansion.

This apparent diversification of images together with the real totalizing unity of spec-tacle reproduces the same in ever-new guises; in this expanding spectacular structure resides the essential dynamic of capital in the contemporary period: “Spectacle is capi-tal at that degree of accumulation at which it becomes image” (Debord 2006: 745).

VI. Conclusion

Debord drew far-reaching conclusions from his analysis of contemporary society as a “society of the spectacle,” a critique which encompassed within one systematic

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framework his criticisms of the artistic avant-garde (as feeding the spectacular appara-tus rather than destroying it), of the traditional forms of working-class and revolution-ary organization (as incapable of grasping the present-day dynamics of capital), of the academy (a domain of careerist managers and suppliers of the spectacle), and of the

“life” marketed as a society of leisure and consumable goods (immiseration masquer-ading as affluence). Two sole possibilities, Debord came to believe, existed to break the hold of the spectacle on consciousness and daily life, and taken together they can be seen as dialectically interrelated aims of the whole of Situationist thought and practice.

The first anti-spectacular possibility was collective, activist, even violent: the largely spontaneous May–June 1968 student revolt and general strike in Paris, in which Situa-tionist ideas and to a certain extent SituaSitua-tionist personalities played a significant role.

The Situationist group was tiny, and the revolt extended well beyond any direct influ-ence they might have exercised; yet the May–June 1968 rebellion seemed to embody their goal of provoking a creative outburst of radical criticism that would demand a utopian change in everyday life in the present moment. The other possible way of opposing the spectacle, more or less compulsory for Debord following the ebb of the militancy of 1968, involved strategic withdrawal, patient biding of time while prepar-ing subversive forays against the ever-more encompassprepar-ing spectacular society. Such radical “patiency” complementing Situationist activism – an infrequently considered but important aspect of Debord’s thinking – compelled him to live furtively at the mar-gins and at least metaphorically to go “underground.” For a number of years, thus, he lived abroad in a condition of public near-anonymity, in the company of a small circle of friends. It must also be recalled, however, that his strategy of anti-spectacular disap-pearance was punctuated by two major experiments in anti-spectacular “visibility”: his extended cinematic détournements entitled Society of the Spectacle (1973) and In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978).

Nonetheless, Debord’s plunge into subversive anonymity, accompanied by the encroaching illness caused by heavy drinking, nearly proved all too successful. Although intellectuals influenced by Debord, ranging from the sociologists Henri Lefebvre and Jean Baudrillard to the art historian T.J. Clark maintained the subterranean presence of Situationism in cultural and scholarly life, Situationism itself was largely forgot-ten in the later 1970s and early 1980s; many of Debord’s writings and books were unavailable for years. Not until his late “return” to public life with the publication of Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle and Panegyric in the late 1980s and 1990s, followed by his suicide in 1994, did the writings and films of Debord and his Situation-ist comrades again become available to a broader reading and viewing public, to renew their influence on contemporary radical culture and politics. Arguably, with the on-going development of far left anti-globalization politics and the burgeoning interest in neo-Situationist “relational aesthetics” in the contemporary art world, Debord’s thought and work is likely to continue to experience an active, unanticipatedly rich posthumous life.

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References

Chopin, H. (1979) Poesie Sonore Internationale, Paris: Jean-Michel Place Éditeur.

Curtay, J.-P. (1974) La Poesie Lettriste, Paris: Seghers.

Debord, G. (1996) Potlatch (1954–1957), Paris: Gallimard.

—— (2006) Oeuvres, ed. J.-L. Rançon, Paris: Gallimard.

Internationale Situationniste (1997), ed. P. Mosconi, Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard.

Les Lévres Nues (1954–1958), Brussels, Belgium.

McDonough, T. (ed.) (2002) Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationale: Texts and Documents, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vicas, A. (1998) “Reusing Culture: The Importance of Détournement,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11(2): 381–406.

Further reading

Berreby, G. (1985) Document Relatifs à la Fondation de l’Internationale Situationniste, Paris: Allia.

Jappe, A. (1999) Guy Debord, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kaufmann, V. (2006) Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans. R. Bononno, Minneapo-lis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Marcus, G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press.

McDonough, T. (2007) “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contes-tation in Postwar France, 1945–1968, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Situationist International [Online]. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/index.html (Accessed 6 Decem-ber 2010).

Wigley, M. (1998) Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

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