The Death of a Situationist

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According to an obituary in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (Fall/Winter 1994-95), Debord wrote his own epitaph in the autobiographical Panegyric (Verso, 1991): "All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction," he wrote there. "A doctor of nothing, [I] have firmly kept myself apart from all semblance of participation in the circles that then passed for intellectual or artistic." In an incident recounted by Bob Black in his book Beneath the Underground (Feral House, 1994), Debord, asked at a 1961 situationist exhibit at the London Institute for Contemporary Arts just what "situationism" was all about, replied, "We're not here to answer cuntish questions," whereupon he and his compatriots walked out. In a widely imitated attempt to prevent their artwork from being commodified, the Situationist International bound its books in sandpaper (so that they would destroy any other books on the library or bookstore shelf) and sold paintings by the meter. None of these or the group's other strategies worked for very long, as it turned out, but many of them -- as documented in the Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981) -- are fascinating attempts to use the media against itself.

Demonstrating their preference for everyday life "situations" (as opposed to museums and galleries) as spheres for critique and intervention, the situationists actually infiltrated the French students' association at the University of Strasbourg in 1966 and spent its treasury printing and distributing On the Poverty of Student Life, a satirical tract credited with helping incite the events of two years later. The uprisings of 1968 failed to change the world -- indeed, according to Debord's Comments, they only provoked the spectacle to learn "new defensive techniques" (one immediately thinks of the Mercedes company's use of Janis Joplin's anti-materialist song "Mercedes Benz" in a recent ad). But May '68 did succeed in drawing attention to the situationists, who, in response to their growing popularity, disbanded in 1972. Debord kept himself well hidden in the years following, and after the murder of his patron and friend Gerard Lebovici in 1984, he refused to allow his own films to be shown.

But if Debord wanted above all else not to be famous, why did he make films and write books in the first place? Surely not to please or fascinate; anyone who has actually seen Debord's first film, Howlings in Favor of Sade (1952), a mostly black screen accompanied by a dull, repetitive soundtrack, or tried to read Society of the Spectacle, which is written with an ever-increasing opacity seemingly designed to push readers out, rather than drawing them in, will understand that Debord's work was always profoundly anti-spectacle.

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