The Death of a Situationist

When avant-garde filmmaker and intellectual provocateur Guy Debord shot himself to death last November at the age of 62, it may have been because he was finally becoming—to his great dismay—a celebrity. As the founder and perhaps the most widely read polemicist of the Situationist International, a pan-European association of far-out artists and leftist writers who played a pivotal role in the student uprisings of 1968 in Paris, he had long been the subject of intense scrutiny; but unlike many other artists, activists, or intellectuals in his place might have done, Debord shunned the media spotlight and spent his entire post-1968 life in the shadows. Why? Because, as his most famous collection of essays, Society of the Spectacle (published in French in 1967 and in English by Black & Red, 1983) argues, the media and the cult of celebrity are instruments of the existing order’s mandate to keep us all hypnotized and passive. Debord would have no part of it.

Lingua Franca (March-April 1995) notes that most of Debord’s theories about what he termed the “spectacle”—that never-ending torrent of advertisements, media events, entertainment, and communication technologies that takes up all of our “free” time and separates us from the fruits of our labors, from one another, and even from ourselves—were worked out in “a demimonde of barflies, criminals, and utopian co-conspirators, a sizable number of whom had been incarcerated, at one time or another, in prisons and madhouses.” In choosing to spend his life with criminals and madmen, Debord may have been desperately seeking unmediated reality. For, as he writes in Society of the Spectacle, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail . . . everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” The real itself has been “inverted” by the spectacle until “life” is nothing but a magazine, “true” is a cigarette, and “the real world” is a so-horrible-it’s-fascinating faux documentary on MTV.

Mediation itself—not simply showbiz or TV—was Debord’s real bugaboo. In the society of the spectacle, existence is always and everywhere mediated by images designed to encourage passive consumption, and thus rob our lives of direct experiences, emotions, and relationships. We speak with words the spectacle has put in our mouths and gesture with motions we’ve seen at the movies. Once we lived life; today we watch it. It’s a mistake to imagine, Debord writes in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso, 1990), that despite occasional excesses, the media is inherently a valuable—or at least neutral—public service, since it facilitates communication. For Debord, the media is never neutral, since it always replaces direct communication. Anticipating e-mail and the Internet in Society of the Spectacle, Debord worries that “if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this communication is essentially unilateral”; in other words, it’s one-way communication from “the state” to each of us. The spectacle not only disallows dialogue, according to Debord, it is “the opposite of dialogue.” It is a monologue of “the existing order’s uninterrupted dialogue about itself.”