Considering the story of my life, it is obvious to me that I cannot produce a cinematic “work” in the usual sense of the term.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
In the summer heat of a southern European capital city swept by tides of mass tourism, tax evading pensioners and “nomads”, real-estate speculation, gentrification and “touristification” – while its hinterlands burn and the physical infrastructure that makes possible this capital flight cracks and breaks -, a small, alternative cinema organises a retrospective of Guy Debord’s films. Whatever the motivation for the showings, the timing seemed more than fitting.
Debord’s films are often described as difficult, as theoretical, or worse, as anachronistic avant-garde experiments for idle intellectuals.
Leaving contempt and ignorance aside, the judgement of these films as “anti-cinema” says little if the sentence remains at the level of a slogan.
If in the society of the spectacle, society “broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers — the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens”, then the “cinema suits them well. Regardless of its subject matter, the cinema presents heroes and exemplary conduct modeled on the same old pattern as the rulers.” (Guy Debord, Critique of Seperation) Such a cinema though, which pretends to speak to and of a reality beyond itself , which pretends to speak the truth, is but a part of the spectacle of images that mediates, that is constitutive of, the social relations among people, while at the same time appearing as separate from those same relations. (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle)
The spectacle is the intensification of what Karl Marx called the “fetishism of commodities” – the false and celebrated appearance of the products of labour as possessing intrinsic value independently of that labour – extended to all social representation.
The consequent generalisation of alienation from real life that the spectacle engenders renders the critique of capital that much more formidable, for in Debord’s words, in “a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle)
The spectacle is not mere ideology, demanding only an unveiling for the truth to show itself; it is the warp and the woof of capitalist society, in which the distinction of truth and falsity has been erased. Criticism then has no other foundation than itself and it reflects itself in Debord’s and the Situationists’ use of détournement: the profanation and distancing from what has solidified into official truths; “Détournement re-radicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus transformed into lies.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle) And as Debord was to write in 1956, with Gil J. Wolman, “It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.” (A User’s Guide to Détournement)
Debord’s films are therefore “anti-cinema” in the sense that they endeavour to détourne the spectacular film image through repetition and stoppage – montage -, revealing thereby the illusion of representation. And with the fissuring of this last, the film image appears as image, weakening the hold of reality to which it presumably pointed to (e.g., the history of the leaders of nations and empires). Stated differently, the film image is de-created, opening up other possibilities of created images.
Debord’s and the Situationists’ “creation of situations” is effectively analogous.
It is thus in the critical de-creation/creation of film, and more broadly, of situations, wherein lies Debord’s ethics and politics.
In a series of posts that will follow, we celebrate Guy Debord’s remarkable films as much more than films, or as films as they can be. And we will close by publishing anew Giorgio Agamben’s 1995 essay, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”, which inspired these introductory remarks. But to begin, and as an introduction, a collection of passages from Debord’s and Sitauationists’ texts.
Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil-war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we believe that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.
There are several conflicting opinions about the forms and even the very nature of educative propaganda, opinions that generally reflect one or another currently fashionable variety of reformist politics. Suffice it to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot. It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even “modern” cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation.
A User’s Guide to Détournement*, Guy Debord, Gil J Wolman, 1956
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: *The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose. It has sometimes been translated as “diversion,” but that word is confusing because of its more common meaning of idle entertainment. Like most other English-speaking people who have actually practiced détournement, I have chosen to retain the French spelling and pronunciation of the noun (day-toór-nuh-maw) and to anglicize the verb: to detourn (dee-túrn). For more on détournement, see theses 204-209 of The Society of the Spectacle.]
Thus the pretensions of the artist in bourgeois society go hand in hand with the practical reduction of his or her realm of real action to zero, and denial. All modern art is the revolutionary claim to other professions, once the current specialization is one-sided, canned expression has been relinquished.
The delays and distortions of the revolutionary project in our time are well known. The regression that has therein manifested itself has nowhere been so obvious as in art. This has been made easier by the fact that classical Marxism had not developed a real body of criticism in this area. In a famous letter to Mehring, written at the end of his life, Engels noted: “we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in doing so we neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about — for the sake of the content.” Moreover, at the time when Marxist thought was coming into its own, the formal movement in the dissolution of art was not yet apparent. Likewise, it can be said that it is solely in the presence of fascism that the workers’ movement encountered in practical terms the problem of the formal “mode of appearance” of a political idea. It found itself poorly equipped to deal with it.
…
For revolutionaries, there can be no turning back. The world of artistic expression, whatever its content, has already lapsed. It repeats itself scandalously in order to keep going as long as the dominant society succeeds in preserving the privation and scarcity that are the anachronistic conditions of its reign. But the preservation and subversion of this society is not a utopian question: it is the most burning question of today, the one governing all others. …
…
We need to find operative instruments midway between the global praxis in which every aspect of the total life of a classless society will one day dissolve and the present individual practice of “private” life with its poor artistic and other resources. What we mean by situations to be constructed is the search for a dialectical organization of partial and transitory realities, what André Frankin, in his Critique du Non-Avenir, has called a “planning of existence” on the individual level, not excluding chance but, on the contrary, “rediscovering” it.
Situations are conceived as the opposite of works of art, which are attempts at absolute valorization and preservation of the present moment. That is the fancy aesthetic grocery of a Malraux, of whom it might be remarked that the same “intellectuals of the left” who are indignant to day at seeing him at the head of the most contemptible and imbecile political swindle once took him seriously — an admission that countersigns their bankruptcy. Every situation, as consciously constructed as can be, contains its own negation and moves inevitably toward its own reversal. In the conduct of an individual life, a situationist action is not based on the abstract idea of rationalist progress (which, according to Descartes, “makes us masters and possessors of nature”), but on the practice of arranging the environment that conditions us. Whoever constructs situations, to apply a statement by Marx, “by bringing his movements to bear on external nature and transforming it… transforms his own nature at the same time.”
In conversations that lead to the formation of the SI, Asger Jorn put forth a plan for ending the separation that had arisen around 1930 between avant-garde artists and the revolutionary left, who had once been allies. The root of the problem is that, since 1930, there has been neither a revolutionary movement nor an artistic avant-garde to respond to the possibilities of the time. A new departure, on both sides, will certainly have to be made to bring together problems and responses.
The obvious obstacles of the present have produced a certain ambiguity in the Situationist movement as a magnet for artists ready to embark on a new course. Like the proletarians, theoretically, before the nation, the Situationists are encamped at the gates of culture. They do not want to establish themselves inside, they decline to inscribe themselves in modern art, they are the organizers of the absence of that aesthetic avant-garde that bourgeois critics and which, forever disappointed, they are prepared to greet on the first occasion. This does not go without the risk of various retrograde interpretations, even within the S.I. Decadent artists, for example at the last fair held in Venice, are already talking about “situations.” Those who understand everything in terms of old-hat artistic ideas, as tame verbal formulas destined to assure the sale of tamer little paintings, may see the S.I. as having already achieved a certain success, a certain recognition: that is because they have not understood that we have gathered at a great turning point still to be taken.
Of course, the decay of artistic forms, while indicated by the impossibility of their creative renewal, does not immediately involve their actual disappearance in practice. They can go on repeating themselves with various nuances. But everything shows “the upheaval of this world,” as Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind: “The frivolity and boredom that are invading what still exists, and the vague presentiment of something unknown, are the preliminary signs of something else that is on its way.”
We must keep moving ahead, without attaching ourselves to anything either in modern culture or its negation. We do not want to work toward the spectacle of the end of the world, but toward the end of the world of spectacle.
[From libcom.org: The Meaning of Decay in Art, Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959)]
Détournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble, has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the SI. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element — which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense — and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.
Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old and new senses. And it is very practical because it’s so easy to use and because of its inexhaustible potential for reuse. Concerning the negligible effort required for détournement, we have already noted that “the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding” (A User’s Guide to Détournement, May 1956). But these points would not by themselves justify recourse to this method, which the same text describes as “clashing head-on against all social and legal conventions.” Détournement has a historical significance. What is it?
“Détournement is a game made possible by the capacity of devaluation,” writes Jorn in his study Detourned Painting (May 1959), and he goes on to say that all the elements of the cultural past must be “reinvested” or disappear. Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression. It arises and grows increasingly stronger in the historical period of the decomposition of artistic expression. But at the same time, the attempts to reuse the “detournable bloc” as material for other ensembles express the search for a vaster construction, a new genre of creation at a higher level.
The SI is a very special kind of movement, different in nature from preceding artistic avant-gardes. Within culture, the SI can be likened to a research laboratory, for example, or to a party in which we are situationists but nothing that we do can yet be situationist. This is not a disavowal for anyone. We are partisans of a certain future of culture and of life. Situationist activity is a particular craft that we are not yet practicing.
Thus the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation within contemporary cultural reality (since we cannot represent any common style whatsoever), is first of all the use of détournement. Examples of our use of detourned expression include Jorn’s altered paintings; Debord and Jorn’s book Mémoires, “composed entirely of prefabricated elements,” in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably uncompleted; Constant’s projects for detourned sculptures; and Debord’s detourned documentary film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time. At the stage of what the “User’s Guide” calls “ultra-détournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life” (e.g. passwords or the wearing of disguises, belonging to the sphere of play), we might mention, at different levels, Gallizio’s industrial painting; Wyckaert’s “orchestral” project for assembly-line painting with a division of labor based on color; and numerous détournements of buildings that were at the origin of unitary urbanism. But we should also mention in this context the SI’s very forms of “organization” and propaganda.
At this point in the world’s development, all forms of expression are losing their grip on reality and being reduced to self-parody. As the readers of this journal can frequently verify, present-day writing invariably has an element of parody. As the “User’s Guide” notes: “It is necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.”
This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action — an era in which the most serious ventures are masked in the ambiguous interplay between art and its necessary negation, and in which the essential voyages of discovery have been undertaken by such astonishingly incapable people.
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: Détournement as Negation and Prelude, Situationist International #3, 1959]
2
A revolutionary alteration of the present forms of culture can be nothing less than the supersession of all aspects of the aesthetic and technological apparatus that constitutes an aggregation of spectacles separated from life. It is not in its surface meanings that we should look for a spectacle’s relation to the problems of the society, but at the deepest level, at the level of its function as a spectacle. “The relation between authors and spectators is only a transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants. . . . The spectacle-spectator relation is in itself a staunch bearer of the capitalist order” (Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program).
One must not introduce reformist illusions about the spectacle, as if it could be eventually improved from within, ameliorated by its own specialists under the supposed control of a better-informed public opinion. To do so would be tantamount to giving revolutionaries’ approval to a tendency, or an appearance of a tendency, in a game that we absolutely must not play; a game that we must reject in its entirety in the name of the fundamental requirements of the revolutionary project, which can in no case produce an aesthetics because it is already entirely beyond the domain of aesthetics. The point is not to engage in some sort of revolutionary art-criticism, but to make a revolutionary critique of all art.
3
The connection between the predominance of the spectacle in social life and the predominance of a class of rulers (both being based on the contradictory need for passive adherence) is not a mere clever stylistic paradox. It is a factual correlation that objectively characterizes the modern world. It is here that the cultural critique issuing from the experience of the self-destruction of modern art meets up with the political critique issuing from the experience of the destruction of the workers movement by its own alienated organizations. If one really insists on finding something positive in modern culture, it must be said that its only positive aspect lies in its self-liquidation, its withering away, its witness against itself.
From a practical standpoint, what is at issue here is a revolutionary organization’s relation to artists. The deficiencies of bureaucratic organizations and their fellow travelers in the formulation and use of such a relationship are well known. But it seems that a completely conscious and coherent revolutionary politics must effectively unify these activities.
…
7
Revolution is not “showing” life to people, but bringing them to life. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its aim is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. The cinematic spectacle is one of the forms of pseudocommunication (developed, in lieu of other possibilities, by the present class technology) in which this aim is radically unfeasible. Much more so, for example, than in a cultural form such as a university-style lecture with questions at the end, in which dialogue and audience participation, though subjected to rather unfavorable conditions, are not absolutely excluded.
Anyone who has ever seen a film-club debate has immediately noticed the dividing lines between the leader of the discussion, the aficionados who regularly speak up at every meeting, and the people who only occasionally express their viewpoints. These three categories are clearly separated by the degree to which they have mastered a specialized vocabulary that determines their place within this institutionalized discussion. Information and influence are transmitted unilaterally, from the top to the bottom, never from the bottom to the top. Nevertheless, these three categories are quite close to one another in their common confused powerlessness, as spectators making a show of themselves, in relation to the real dividing line between them and the people who actually make the films. The unilaterality of influence is still more strict in relation to this division. The considerable differences among the various spectators’ mastery of the conceptual tools of film-club debates are ultimately diminished by the fact that those tools are all equally ineffectual. A film-club debate is a subspectacle accompanying the projected film; it is more ephemeral than written criticism, but neither more nor less separated. In appearance a film-club discussion is an attempt at dialogue, at social encounter, at a time when individuals are increasingly isolated by the urban environment. But it is in fact the negation of such dialogue since these people have not come together to decide on anything, but in order to hold a discussion on a false pretext and with false means.
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: Guy Debord, For a Revolutionary Judgment of Art. “Pour un jugement révolutionnaire de l’art,” written in February 1961, first appeared in Notes Critiques: bulletin de recherche et d’orientation révolutionnaires #3 (Bordeaux, 1962).]
The Situationist movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation. From now on, any fundamental cultural creation, as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.
The same society of alienation, totalitarian control and passive spectacular consumption reigns everywhere, despite the diversity of its ideological and juridical disguises. The coherence of this society cannot be understood without an all-encompassing critique, illuminated by the inverse project of a liberated creativity, the project of everyone’s control of all levels of their own history.
To revive and bring into the present this inseparable, mutually illuminating project and critique entails appropriating all the radicalism borne by the workers movement, by modern poetry and art, and by the thought of the period of the supersession of philosophy, from Hegel to Nietzsche. To do this, it is first of all necessary to recognize, without holding on to any consoling illusions, the full extent of the defeat of the entire revolutionary project in the first third of this century and its official replacement, in every region of the world and in every domain of life, by delusive shams and petty reforms that camouflage and preserve the old order.
Such a resumption of radicality naturally also requires a considerable deepening of all the old attempts at liberation. Seeing how those attempts failed due to isolation, or were converted into total frauds, enables one to get a better grasp of the coherence of the world that needs to be changed. In the light of this rediscovered coherence, many of the partial explorations of the recent past can be salvaged and brought to their true fulfillment. Insight into this reversible coherence of the world — its present reality in relation to its potential reality — enables one to see the fallaciousness of half-measures and to recognize the presence of such half-measures each time the operating pattern of the dominant society — with its categories of hierarchization and specialization and its corresponding habits and tastes — reconstitutes itself within the forces of negation.
Moreover, the material development of the world has accelerated. It constantly accumulates more potential powers; but the specialists of the management of society, because of their role as guardians of passivity, are forced to ignore the potential use of those powers. This same development produces widespread dissatisfaction and objective mortal dangers which these specialized rulers are incapable of permanently controlling.
Once it is understood that this is the perspective within which the situationists call for the supersession of art, it should be clear that when we speak of a unified vision of art and politics, this absolutely does not mean that we are recommending any sort of subordination of art to politics. For us, and for anyone who has begun to see this era in a disabused manner, there is no longer any modern art, just as there has been no constituted revolutionary politics anywhere in the world since the end of the 1930s. They can now be revived only by being superseded, that is to say, through the fulfillment of their most profound objectives.
…
The cultural creation that could be referred to as situationist begins with the projects of unitary urbanism or of the construction of situations in life, and the fulfillment of those projects is inseparable from the history of the movement striving to fulfill all the revolutionary possibilities contained in the present society. In the short term, however, a critical art can be carried out within the existing means of cultural expression, from cinema to painting — even though we ultimately wish to destroy this entire artistic framework. This critical art is what the situationists have summed up in their theory of détournement. Such an art must not only be critical in its content, it must also be self-critical in its form. It is a communication which, recognizing the limitations of the specialized sphere of established communication, “is now going to contain its own critique.”
…
The revolutionary role of modern art, which culminated with dadaism, has been to destroy all the conventions of art, language and behavior. Since what is destroyed in art and philosophy is nevertheless obviously not yet concretely eliminated from the newspapers and the churches, and since the advances in the arm of critique have not yet been followed by an armed critique, dadaism itself has become a recognized school of art and its forms have recently been turned into a reactionary diversion by neodadaists who make careers out of repeating the style invented before 1920, exploiting each pumped-up detail and using it to develop an acceptable “style” for decorating the present world.
However, the negative truth that modern art has contained has always been a justified negation of the society in which it found itself. In Paris in 1937 the Nazi ambassador Otto Abetz pointed to the painting Guernica and asked Picasso, “Did you do that?” Picasso very appropriately responded: “No. You did.”
The negation and the black humor that were so prevalent in modern art and poetry in the aftermath of World War I surely merit being revived in the context of the spectacle of World War III within which we are now living. Whereas the neodadaists speak of charging with (aesthetic) positivity the plastic refusal previously expressed by Marcel Duchamp, we are sure that everything the world now offers us as positive can only serve to endlessly recharge the negativity of the currently permitted forms of expression, and in this roundabout way produce the sole representative art of these times. The situationists know that real positivity will come from elsewhere, and that from now on this negativity will collaborate with it.
[From International Situationist Online: Guy Debord, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Art and Politics, June 1963]
4. The production of situationist films. The cinema, which is the newest and undoubtedly most utilizable means of expression of our time, has stagnated for nearly three quarters of a century. To sum it up, we can say that it indeed became the “seventh art” so dear to film buffs, film clubs, and PTAs. For our purposes this age is over (Ince, Stroheim, the one and onlyL’Âge d’or, Citizen Kane and Mr. Arkadin, the lettrist films), even if a few traditional narrative masterpieces are yet to be unearthed in the film archives or on the shelves of foreign distributors. We should appropriate the first stammerings of this new language — in particular its most consummate and modern examples, those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American “B” movies: newsreels, previews, and above all, filmed ads.
Although filmed advertising has obviously been in the service of the commodity and the spectacle, its extreme technical freedom has laid the foundations for what Eisenstein had an inkling of when he talked of filming The Critique of Political Economy or The German Ideology.
I am confident that I could film “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” in a way that would be immediately understandable to the proletarians of Watts who are unaware of the concepts implied in that title. Such adaptations to new forms will at the same time undoubtedly contribute to deepening and intensifying the “written” expression of the same problems; which we could verify, for example, by making a film called Incitement to Murder and Debauchery before drafting its equivalent in the journal, “Correctives to the Consciousness of a Class That Will Be the Last.” Among other possibilities, the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as a historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification. To be sure, historical reality can be apprehended, known, and filmed only in the course of a complicated process of mediations enabling consciousness to recognize one moment in another, its goal and its action in destiny, its destiny in its goal and action, and its own essence in this necessity. This mediation would be difficult if the empirical existence of the facts themselves was not already a mediated existence, which only takes on an appearance of immediateness because and to the extent that consciousness of the mediation is lacking and that the facts have been uprooted from the network of their determining circumstances, placed in an artificial isolation, and poorly strung together again in the montage of classical cinema. It is precisely this mediation which has been lacking, and inevitably so, in presituationist cinema, which has limited itself to “objective” forms or re-presentation of politico-moral concepts, whenever it has not been merely academic-type narrative with all its hypocrisies. If what I have just written were filmed, it would become much less complicated — it’s all really just banalities. But Godard, the most famous Swiss Maoist, will never be able to understand them. He might well, as is his usual practice, coopt the above — lift a word from it or an idea like that concerning filmed advertisements — but he will never be capable of anything but brandishing little novelties picked up elsewhere: images or star words of the era, which definitely have a resonance, but one he can’t grasp (Bonnot, worker, Marx, made in USA, Pierrot le Fou, Debord, poetry, etc.). He really is a child of Mao and Coca-Cola.
The cinema enables one to express anything, just like an article, a book, a leaflet, or a poster. This is why we should henceforth require that each situationist be as capable of making a film as of writing an article (see the “Anti-Public Relations Notice” in Internationale Situationniste #8). Nothing is too beautiful for the blacks of Watts.
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: René Viénet, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action
Against Politics and Art. “Les situationnistes et les nouvelles formes d’action contre la politique et l’art” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967).]
Our series on Guy Debord’s films has relied extensively on three excellent websites: Bureau of Public Secrets, Ubu Web, Situationist Film.
Guy Debord’s film eye
Considering the story of my life, it is obvious to me that I cannot produce a cinematic “work” in the usual sense of the term.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
In the summer heat of a southern European capital city swept by tides of mass tourism, tax evading pensioners and “nomads”, real-estate speculation, gentrification and “touristification” – while its hinterlands burn and the physical infrastructure that makes possible this capital flight cracks and breaks -, a small, alternative cinema organises a retrospective of Guy Debord’s films. Whatever the motivation for the showings, the timing seemed more than fitting.
Debord’s films are often described as difficult, as theoretical, or worse, as anachronistic avant-garde experiments for idle intellectuals.
Leaving contempt and ignorance aside, the judgement of these films as “anti-cinema” says little if the sentence remains at the level of a slogan.
If in the society of the spectacle, society “broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers — the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens”, then the “cinema suits them well. Regardless of its subject matter, the cinema presents heroes and exemplary conduct modeled on the same old pattern as the rulers.” (Guy Debord, Critique of Seperation) Such a cinema though, which pretends to speak to and of a reality beyond itself , which pretends to speak the truth, is but a part of the spectacle of images that mediates, that is constitutive of, the social relations among people, while at the same time appearing as separate from those same relations. (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle)
The spectacle is the intensification of what Karl Marx called the “fetishism of commodities” – the false and celebrated appearance of the products of labour as possessing intrinsic value independently of that labour – extended to all social representation.
The consequent generalisation of alienation from real life that the spectacle engenders renders the critique of capital that much more formidable, for in Debord’s words, in “a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle)
The spectacle is not mere ideology, demanding only an unveiling for the truth to show itself; it is the warp and the woof of capitalist society, in which the distinction of truth and falsity has been erased. Criticism then has no other foundation than itself and it reflects itself in Debord’s and the Situationists’ use of détournement: the profanation and distancing from what has solidified into official truths; “Détournement re-radicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus transformed into lies.” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle) And as Debord was to write in 1956, with Gil J. Wolman, “It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.” (A User’s Guide to Détournement)
Debord’s films are therefore “anti-cinema” in the sense that they endeavour to détourne the spectacular film image through repetition and stoppage – montage -, revealing thereby the illusion of representation. And with the fissuring of this last, the film image appears as image, weakening the hold of reality to which it presumably pointed to (e.g., the history of the leaders of nations and empires). Stated differently, the film image is de-created, opening up other possibilities of created images.
Debord’s and the Situationists’ “creation of situations” is effectively analogous.
It is thus in the critical de-creation/creation of film, and more broadly, of situations, wherein lies Debord’s ethics and politics.
In a series of posts that will follow, we celebrate Guy Debord’s remarkable films as much more than films, or as films as they can be. And we will close by publishing anew Giorgio Agamben’s 1995 essay, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”, which inspired these introductory remarks. But to begin, and as an introduction, a collection of passages from Debord’s and Sitauationists’ texts.
Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil-war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we believe that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.
There are several conflicting opinions about the forms and even the very nature of educative propaganda, opinions that generally reflect one or another currently fashionable variety of reformist politics. Suffice it to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot. It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even “modern” cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation.
A User’s Guide to Détournement*, Guy Debord, Gil J Wolman, 1956
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: *The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose. It has sometimes been translated as “diversion,” but that word is confusing because of its more common meaning of idle entertainment. Like most other English-speaking people who have actually practiced détournement, I have chosen to retain the French spelling and pronunciation of the noun (day-toór-nuh-maw) and to anglicize the verb: to detourn (dee-túrn). For more on détournement, see theses 204-209 of The Society of the Spectacle.]
Thus the pretensions of the artist in bourgeois society go hand in hand with the practical reduction of his or her realm of real action to zero, and denial. All modern art is the revolutionary claim to other professions, once the current specialization is one-sided, canned expression has been relinquished.
The delays and distortions of the revolutionary project in our time are well known. The regression that has therein manifested itself has nowhere been so obvious as in art. This has been made easier by the fact that classical Marxism had not developed a real body of criticism in this area. In a famous letter to Mehring, written at the end of his life, Engels noted: “we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in doing so we neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about — for the sake of the content.” Moreover, at the time when Marxist thought was coming into its own, the formal movement in the dissolution of art was not yet apparent. Likewise, it can be said that it is solely in the presence of fascism that the workers’ movement encountered in practical terms the problem of the formal “mode of appearance” of a political idea. It found itself poorly equipped to deal with it.
…
For revolutionaries, there can be no turning back. The world of artistic expression, whatever its content, has already lapsed. It repeats itself scandalously in order to keep going as long as the dominant society succeeds in preserving the privation and scarcity that are the anachronistic conditions of its reign. But the preservation and subversion of this society is not a utopian question: it is the most burning question of today, the one governing all others. …
…
We need to find operative instruments midway between the global praxis in which every aspect of the total life of a classless society will one day dissolve and the present individual practice of “private” life with its poor artistic and other resources. What we mean by situations to be constructed is the search for a dialectical organization of partial and transitory realities, what André Frankin, in his Critique du Non-Avenir, has called a “planning of existence” on the individual level, not excluding chance but, on the contrary, “rediscovering” it.
Situations are conceived as the opposite of works of art, which are attempts at absolute valorization and preservation of the present moment. That is the fancy aesthetic grocery of a Malraux, of whom it might be remarked that the same “intellectuals of the left” who are indignant to day at seeing him at the head of the most contemptible and imbecile political swindle once took him seriously — an admission that countersigns their bankruptcy. Every situation, as consciously constructed as can be, contains its own negation and moves inevitably toward its own reversal. In the conduct of an individual life, a situationist action is not based on the abstract idea of rationalist progress (which, according to Descartes, “makes us masters and possessors of nature”), but on the practice of arranging the environment that conditions us. Whoever constructs situations, to apply a statement by Marx, “by bringing his movements to bear on external nature and transforming it… transforms his own nature at the same time.”
In conversations that lead to the formation of the SI, Asger Jorn put forth a plan for ending the separation that had arisen around 1930 between avant-garde artists and the revolutionary left, who had once been allies. The root of the problem is that, since 1930, there has been neither a revolutionary movement nor an artistic avant-garde to respond to the possibilities of the time. A new departure, on both sides, will certainly have to be made to bring together problems and responses.
The obvious obstacles of the present have produced a certain ambiguity in the Situationist movement as a magnet for artists ready to embark on a new course. Like the proletarians, theoretically, before the nation, the Situationists are encamped at the gates of culture. They do not want to establish themselves inside, they decline to inscribe themselves in modern art, they are the organizers of the absence of that aesthetic avant-garde that bourgeois critics and which, forever disappointed, they are prepared to greet on the first occasion. This does not go without the risk of various retrograde interpretations, even within the S.I. Decadent artists, for example at the last fair held in Venice, are already talking about “situations.” Those who understand everything in terms of old-hat artistic ideas, as tame verbal formulas destined to assure the sale of tamer little paintings, may see the S.I. as having already achieved a certain success, a certain recognition: that is because they have not understood that we have gathered at a great turning point still to be taken.
Of course, the decay of artistic forms, while indicated by the impossibility of their creative renewal, does not immediately involve their actual disappearance in practice. They can go on repeating themselves with various nuances. But everything shows “the upheaval of this world,” as Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind: “The frivolity and boredom that are invading what still exists, and the vague presentiment of something unknown, are the preliminary signs of something else that is on its way.”
We must keep moving ahead, without attaching ourselves to anything either in modern culture or its negation. We do not want to work toward the spectacle of the end of the world, but toward the end of the world of spectacle.
[From libcom.org: The Meaning of Decay in Art, Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959)]
Détournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble, has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the SI. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element — which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense — and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.
Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old and new senses. And it is very practical because it’s so easy to use and because of its inexhaustible potential for reuse. Concerning the negligible effort required for détournement, we have already noted that “the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding” (A User’s Guide to Détournement, May 1956). But these points would not by themselves justify recourse to this method, which the same text describes as “clashing head-on against all social and legal conventions.” Détournement has a historical significance. What is it?
“Détournement is a game made possible by the capacity of devaluation,” writes Jorn in his study Detourned Painting (May 1959), and he goes on to say that all the elements of the cultural past must be “reinvested” or disappear. Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression. It arises and grows increasingly stronger in the historical period of the decomposition of artistic expression. But at the same time, the attempts to reuse the “detournable bloc” as material for other ensembles express the search for a vaster construction, a new genre of creation at a higher level.
The SI is a very special kind of movement, different in nature from preceding artistic avant-gardes. Within culture, the SI can be likened to a research laboratory, for example, or to a party in which we are situationists but nothing that we do can yet be situationist. This is not a disavowal for anyone. We are partisans of a certain future of culture and of life. Situationist activity is a particular craft that we are not yet practicing.
Thus the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation within contemporary cultural reality (since we cannot represent any common style whatsoever), is first of all the use of détournement. Examples of our use of detourned expression include Jorn’s altered paintings; Debord and Jorn’s book Mémoires, “composed entirely of prefabricated elements,” in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably uncompleted; Constant’s projects for detourned sculptures; and Debord’s detourned documentary film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time. At the stage of what the “User’s Guide” calls “ultra-détournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life” (e.g. passwords or the wearing of disguises, belonging to the sphere of play), we might mention, at different levels, Gallizio’s industrial painting; Wyckaert’s “orchestral” project for assembly-line painting with a division of labor based on color; and numerous détournements of buildings that were at the origin of unitary urbanism. But we should also mention in this context the SI’s very forms of “organization” and propaganda.
At this point in the world’s development, all forms of expression are losing their grip on reality and being reduced to self-parody. As the readers of this journal can frequently verify, present-day writing invariably has an element of parody. As the “User’s Guide” notes: “It is necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.”
This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action — an era in which the most serious ventures are masked in the ambiguous interplay between art and its necessary negation, and in which the essential voyages of discovery have been undertaken by such astonishingly incapable people.
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: Détournement as Negation and Prelude, Situationist International #3, 1959]
2
A revolutionary alteration of the present forms of culture can be nothing less than the supersession of all aspects of the aesthetic and technological apparatus that constitutes an aggregation of spectacles separated from life. It is not in its surface meanings that we should look for a spectacle’s relation to the problems of the society, but at the deepest level, at the level of its function as a spectacle. “The relation between authors and spectators is only a transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants. . . . The spectacle-spectator relation is in itself a staunch bearer of the capitalist order” (Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program).
One must not introduce reformist illusions about the spectacle, as if it could be eventually improved from within, ameliorated by its own specialists under the supposed control of a better-informed public opinion. To do so would be tantamount to giving revolutionaries’ approval to a tendency, or an appearance of a tendency, in a game that we absolutely must not play; a game that we must reject in its entirety in the name of the fundamental requirements of the revolutionary project, which can in no case produce an aesthetics because it is already entirely beyond the domain of aesthetics. The point is not to engage in some sort of revolutionary art-criticism, but to make a revolutionary critique of all art.
3
The connection between the predominance of the spectacle in social life and the predominance of a class of rulers (both being based on the contradictory need for passive adherence) is not a mere clever stylistic paradox. It is a factual correlation that objectively characterizes the modern world. It is here that the cultural critique issuing from the experience of the self-destruction of modern art meets up with the political critique issuing from the experience of the destruction of the workers movement by its own alienated organizations. If one really insists on finding something positive in modern culture, it must be said that its only positive aspect lies in its self-liquidation, its withering away, its witness against itself.
From a practical standpoint, what is at issue here is a revolutionary organization’s relation to artists. The deficiencies of bureaucratic organizations and their fellow travelers in the formulation and use of such a relationship are well known. But it seems that a completely conscious and coherent revolutionary politics must effectively unify these activities.
…
7
Revolution is not “showing” life to people, but bringing them to life. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its aim is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. The cinematic spectacle is one of the forms of pseudocommunication (developed, in lieu of other possibilities, by the present class technology) in which this aim is radically unfeasible. Much more so, for example, than in a cultural form such as a university-style lecture with questions at the end, in which dialogue and audience participation, though subjected to rather unfavorable conditions, are not absolutely excluded.
Anyone who has ever seen a film-club debate has immediately noticed the dividing lines between the leader of the discussion, the aficionados who regularly speak up at every meeting, and the people who only occasionally express their viewpoints. These three categories are clearly separated by the degree to which they have mastered a specialized vocabulary that determines their place within this institutionalized discussion. Information and influence are transmitted unilaterally, from the top to the bottom, never from the bottom to the top. Nevertheless, these three categories are quite close to one another in their common confused powerlessness, as spectators making a show of themselves, in relation to the real dividing line between them and the people who actually make the films. The unilaterality of influence is still more strict in relation to this division. The considerable differences among the various spectators’ mastery of the conceptual tools of film-club debates are ultimately diminished by the fact that those tools are all equally ineffectual. A film-club debate is a subspectacle accompanying the projected film; it is more ephemeral than written criticism, but neither more nor less separated. In appearance a film-club discussion is an attempt at dialogue, at social encounter, at a time when individuals are increasingly isolated by the urban environment. But it is in fact the negation of such dialogue since these people have not come together to decide on anything, but in order to hold a discussion on a false pretext and with false means.
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: Guy Debord, For a Revolutionary Judgment of Art. “Pour un jugement révolutionnaire de l’art,” written in February 1961, first appeared in Notes Critiques: bulletin de recherche et d’orientation révolutionnaires #3 (Bordeaux, 1962).]
The Situationist movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation. From now on, any fundamental cultural creation, as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.
The same society of alienation, totalitarian control and passive spectacular consumption reigns everywhere, despite the diversity of its ideological and juridical disguises. The coherence of this society cannot be understood without an all-encompassing critique, illuminated by the inverse project of a liberated creativity, the project of everyone’s control of all levels of their own history.
To revive and bring into the present this inseparable, mutually illuminating project and critique entails appropriating all the radicalism borne by the workers movement, by modern poetry and art, and by the thought of the period of the supersession of philosophy, from Hegel to Nietzsche. To do this, it is first of all necessary to recognize, without holding on to any consoling illusions, the full extent of the defeat of the entire revolutionary project in the first third of this century and its official replacement, in every region of the world and in every domain of life, by delusive shams and petty reforms that camouflage and preserve the old order.
Such a resumption of radicality naturally also requires a considerable deepening of all the old attempts at liberation. Seeing how those attempts failed due to isolation, or were converted into total frauds, enables one to get a better grasp of the coherence of the world that needs to be changed. In the light of this rediscovered coherence, many of the partial explorations of the recent past can be salvaged and brought to their true fulfillment. Insight into this reversible coherence of the world — its present reality in relation to its potential reality — enables one to see the fallaciousness of half-measures and to recognize the presence of such half-measures each time the operating pattern of the dominant society — with its categories of hierarchization and specialization and its corresponding habits and tastes — reconstitutes itself within the forces of negation.
Moreover, the material development of the world has accelerated. It constantly accumulates more potential powers; but the specialists of the management of society, because of their role as guardians of passivity, are forced to ignore the potential use of those powers. This same development produces widespread dissatisfaction and objective mortal dangers which these specialized rulers are incapable of permanently controlling.
Once it is understood that this is the perspective within which the situationists call for the supersession of art, it should be clear that when we speak of a unified vision of art and politics, this absolutely does not mean that we are recommending any sort of subordination of art to politics. For us, and for anyone who has begun to see this era in a disabused manner, there is no longer any modern art, just as there has been no constituted revolutionary politics anywhere in the world since the end of the 1930s. They can now be revived only by being superseded, that is to say, through the fulfillment of their most profound objectives.
…
The cultural creation that could be referred to as situationist begins with the projects of unitary urbanism or of the construction of situations in life, and the fulfillment of those projects is inseparable from the history of the movement striving to fulfill all the revolutionary possibilities contained in the present society. In the short term, however, a critical art can be carried out within the existing means of cultural expression, from cinema to painting — even though we ultimately wish to destroy this entire artistic framework. This critical art is what the situationists have summed up in their theory of détournement. Such an art must not only be critical in its content, it must also be self-critical in its form. It is a communication which, recognizing the limitations of the specialized sphere of established communication, “is now going to contain its own critique.”
…
The revolutionary role of modern art, which culminated with dadaism, has been to destroy all the conventions of art, language and behavior. Since what is destroyed in art and philosophy is nevertheless obviously not yet concretely eliminated from the newspapers and the churches, and since the advances in the arm of critique have not yet been followed by an armed critique, dadaism itself has become a recognized school of art and its forms have recently been turned into a reactionary diversion by neodadaists who make careers out of repeating the style invented before 1920, exploiting each pumped-up detail and using it to develop an acceptable “style” for decorating the present world.
However, the negative truth that modern art has contained has always been a justified negation of the society in which it found itself. In Paris in 1937 the Nazi ambassador Otto Abetz pointed to the painting Guernica and asked Picasso, “Did you do that?” Picasso very appropriately responded: “No. You did.”
The negation and the black humor that were so prevalent in modern art and poetry in the aftermath of World War I surely merit being revived in the context of the spectacle of World War III within which we are now living. Whereas the neodadaists speak of charging with (aesthetic) positivity the plastic refusal previously expressed by Marcel Duchamp, we are sure that everything the world now offers us as positive can only serve to endlessly recharge the negativity of the currently permitted forms of expression, and in this roundabout way produce the sole representative art of these times. The situationists know that real positivity will come from elsewhere, and that from now on this negativity will collaborate with it.
[From International Situationist Online: Guy Debord, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Art and Politics, June 1963]
4. The production of situationist films. The cinema, which is the newest and undoubtedly most utilizable means of expression of our time, has stagnated for nearly three quarters of a century. To sum it up, we can say that it indeed became the “seventh art” so dear to film buffs, film clubs, and PTAs. For our purposes this age is over (Ince, Stroheim, the one and onlyL’Âge d’or, Citizen Kane and Mr. Arkadin, the lettrist films), even if a few traditional narrative masterpieces are yet to be unearthed in the film archives or on the shelves of foreign distributors. We should appropriate the first stammerings of this new language — in particular its most consummate and modern examples, those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American “B” movies: newsreels, previews, and above all, filmed ads.
Although filmed advertising has obviously been in the service of the commodity and the spectacle, its extreme technical freedom has laid the foundations for what Eisenstein had an inkling of when he talked of filming The Critique of Political Economy or The German Ideology.
I am confident that I could film “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” in a way that would be immediately understandable to the proletarians of Watts who are unaware of the concepts implied in that title. Such adaptations to new forms will at the same time undoubtedly contribute to deepening and intensifying the “written” expression of the same problems; which we could verify, for example, by making a film called Incitement to Murder and Debauchery before drafting its equivalent in the journal, “Correctives to the Consciousness of a Class That Will Be the Last.” Among other possibilities, the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as a historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification. To be sure, historical reality can be apprehended, known, and filmed only in the course of a complicated process of mediations enabling consciousness to recognize one moment in another, its goal and its action in destiny, its destiny in its goal and action, and its own essence in this necessity. This mediation would be difficult if the empirical existence of the facts themselves was not already a mediated existence, which only takes on an appearance of immediateness because and to the extent that consciousness of the mediation is lacking and that the facts have been uprooted from the network of their determining circumstances, placed in an artificial isolation, and poorly strung together again in the montage of classical cinema. It is precisely this mediation which has been lacking, and inevitably so, in presituationist cinema, which has limited itself to “objective” forms or re-presentation of politico-moral concepts, whenever it has not been merely academic-type narrative with all its hypocrisies. If what I have just written were filmed, it would become much less complicated — it’s all really just banalities. But Godard, the most famous Swiss Maoist, will never be able to understand them. He might well, as is his usual practice, coopt the above — lift a word from it or an idea like that concerning filmed advertisements — but he will never be capable of anything but brandishing little novelties picked up elsewhere: images or star words of the era, which definitely have a resonance, but one he can’t grasp (Bonnot, worker, Marx, made in USA, Pierrot le Fou, Debord, poetry, etc.). He really is a child of Mao and Coca-Cola.
The cinema enables one to express anything, just like an article, a book, a leaflet, or a poster. This is why we should henceforth require that each situationist be as capable of making a film as of writing an article (see the “Anti-Public Relations Notice” in Internationale Situationniste #8). Nothing is too beautiful for the blacks of Watts.
[From Bureau of Public Secrets: René Viénet, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action
Against Politics and Art. “Les situationnistes et les nouvelles formes d’action contre la politique et l’art” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967).]
Our series on Guy Debord’s films has relied extensively on three excellent websites: Bureau of Public Secrets, Ubu Web, Situationist Film.