Guy Debord: Art War

By the time the first visitors passed through the hushed corridors of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the setting for ‘Guy Debord: An Art of War’, the exhibition had already sparked an outcry. Most critiques weighed in on what Raphaëlle Rérolle in Le Monde called the ‘malice’ of the state-run BnF in acquiring the archives of a lifelong enemy of institutions and intellectual property rights.⁰¹Others took aim at the manner of the 2011 acquisition – a 2.7 million Euro cheque to his widow Alice Debord and the romancing of rich donors to fund it – or the show’s calculated citation of Debord as a ‘national treasure’.⁰²That the BnF had stamped Debord’s vast archive of reading notes with their logo, while forbidding visitors to take photographs due to copyright infringement, was too much for Antonio Casilli, whose howls of ‘recuperation’ soon bolstered the pro-Situationist chorus.⁰³

As the war was waging outside the BnF’s walls, it was awkwardly ensconced within them too; in keeping with the Sun Tzu reference in the title, ‘Guy Debord: An Art of War’ largely confined its attentions to Guy Debord the strategist. This, alongside theorist and Enragé (with reference to his role in the events of May ‘68), ⁰⁴was one of the only tags he endorsed, as Giorgio Agamben informed visitors in a panel by the exhibition’s entrance. And yet, despite the bellicose theme, the BnF’s curators seemed conflicted by their task – with an apologia in the same spot admitting that Debord’s entry into a museum context raised the spectre of what it called the ‘mummification’ or neutralisation of his explosive canon. Its effect, like an essay by Mark Francis connected to the Pompidou Centre’s 1989 show on the Situationist International (SI),⁰⁵was to inspire a certain unease: just as belligerence seems the entrenched response of pro-Situationist collectives, so the urge for self-justification dogs all those who approach Debord’s works; both parties, apparently intimidated by his aura, frequently end up indulging in hagiography.’

It is quite natural that our enemies succeed in partially using us. We are neither going to leave the present field of culture to them nor mix with them. […] We must simply work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters.Although Debord never intended his writings to be dissected by the academy – The Society of the Spectacle (1967) was written as the theoretical accompaniment to an imminent conflagration, like The Communist Manifesto – he certainly foresaw their recuperation. Displaying a vim seemingly absent in the opposing camp, the Situationists wrote, ‘It is quite natural that our enemies succeed in partially using us. We are neither going to leave the present field of culture to them nor mix with them. […] We must simply work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters’.⁰⁶But now, over forty years since the SI disbanded, it is hard to know what risks – beyond bad faith – the BnF or like institutions might run in approaching Debord’s archive. ‘50 years of recuperation’, in the words of McKenzie Wark,⁰⁷have seen the assimilation of avant-garde Situationist practices such as the dérive and détournement by everyone from anti-globalisation movements like Occupy Wall Street, to culture-jammers Adbusters, the Haçienda nightclub, and Benetton ad man Oliviero Toscani.⁰⁸

At the same time, despite a counter-insurgency led by luminaries including Régis Debray and Jean Baudrillard, the theories outlined in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle refuse to go away.⁰⁹Viewed as the handbook of May 1968, in later life it has been deployed in cultural theory as a vague synonym for the evils of mass media, or roped into conspiracy theories about an ‘inside job’ on 9/11. ¹⁰While pro-Situationist collectives may expend their energy sifting rightful heirs such as Julien Coupat¹¹from pretenders to the throne, in reality the BnF’s exhibition was less of an anachronism than a mirror to the SI’s widespread co-option. In fact, as Steve Shaviro depressingly notes, it is precisely the SI’s radical rejection of commercial culture that has made it ‘one of the most commercially successful “memes” or “brands” of the late twentieth century’.¹²

Beyond the reactionary posturing, another – equally entrenched – point was raised during the pro-Situ scrimmage. New York collective NOT BORED! translated and détourned Laurent Wolf’s interview in Le Temps with the two curators of the show,¹³using the resulting text to repeatedly highlight their accent on Debord as a figure of the artistic avant-garde rather than a revolutionary Marxist. ‘He participated in political action staring [sic] at the beginning of the 1960s. Then, after the dissolution of the Situationist International, he belonged more and more to the literary field’, asserted Emmanuel Guy (one of the curators).¹⁴And later: ‘Debord’s strategy was to find a way to transmit a discourse of emancipation’. As NOT BORED! summarily pointed out, these comments ignore Debord’s participation in politics at least as early as the formation of the Lettrist International in 1952, not to mention throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after the SI’s dissolution. More critically, they ignore the nature of Situationist praxis – which, NOT BORED! asserts, ‘includes both “discourse” and action’.

These comments ignore Debord’s participation in politics at least as early as the formation of the Lettrist International in 1952, not to mention throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after the SI’s dissolution. More critically, they ignore the nature of Situationist praxis – which, NOT BORED! asserts, “includes both ‘discourse’ and action”.

This point was succinctly put by two one-time Situationists – T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith – in their 1997 essay ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’.¹⁵Here they set themselves against ‘the established notion of some sort of epistemological (and practical) break in the SI’s history, taking place in the early 1960s, by which “art” gave way to “politics”, arguing instead that, ‘It was the “art” dimension, to put it crudely – the continued pressure put on the question of representational forms in politics and everyday life, and the refusal to foreclose on the issue of representation versus agency – that made their politics the deadly weapon it was.’ Critically, they claim that it is the established Left – and not the art world, erroneously assumed to be the SI’s greatest enemies in the 1960s – that has obscured this fact, matching each of its ‘received notions’ about the SI with the corollary truths that the Left is trying to hide.¹⁶The essay was penned partly in response to a 1989 article in the New Left Review by Peter Wollen,¹⁷related to the SI exhibition he co-curated at the Pompidou that year; the latter focused almost exclusively on the Situationists’ aesthetic credentials.¹⁸

At the heart of the exhibition, laid out in an oval ‘reading room’, were hundreds of small white Bristol cards onto which Debord had copied salient passages from texts for future reference. Spanning themes from ‘Machiavelli & Shakespeare’ to ‘Strategy’, particularly ripe lines were treated to the annotation ‘dét[ournable]!’ in the margin. Although conveying his literary erudition, the notes – frozen in walls of suspended glass – made for a strangely static display, forcing visitors to make like Debord’s ‘Homo Spectator’ to decipher their inscrutable scrawl.²¹Marrying a peremptory treatment of the contents of Debord’s works with a focus on their visual – commodifiable – interest, the reading room provided an apt synthesis of the BnF’s presentational tactics. As a corollary, too often the exhibits in Debord’s archive (an undeniably rich resource in the right hands) were treated to a clumsy, passive censorship. Symbolically, Fin de Copenhague (1957),²²which announced both the SI’s interventionist techniques and revolutionary typography, simply remained a closed book. Films like the prose poem In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, created by Debord in the 1970s with his publisher/patron Gérard Lebovici, fared a little better, albeit annexed (in the name of democracy?) to an un-ticketed pen outside the exhibition.

Although conveying his literary erudition, the notes – frozen in walls of suspended glass – made for a strangely static display, forcing visitors to make like Debord’s “Homo Spectator” to decipher their inscrutable scrawl.Unlike the Pompidou exhibition and another held by the Centraal Museum Utrecht in 2006,²³ the BnF’s focus was firmly on Debord rather than the Situationists. (The publicity shot was symptomatic, as the ‘prime mover’ of the SI emerged in a Photoshopped swathe of sepia from an image of his collaborators in drab greyscale.) But it was a move that ran the risk, as Olivier Beuvelet put it, of ‘making him appear as a party leader without an army’. ²⁴In the event, sections on the two avant-garde movements Debord founded – the Lettrist International (1952–1957) and the Situationist International (1957–1972) – were relegated to chronological displays that stressed the historical dimension of his collective adventures. Accordingly, key SI techniques like the dérive, psychogeography and the related concept of unitary urbanism were seriously underplayed; the only trace of the latter was a maquette of architect Constant Nieuwenhuys’ utopian ‘New Babylon’. At its foot, arrows attached to the floor shunted visitors to other display cases: less invitations to drift, it seemed, than imprecations to move towards the next exhibit.

After charting the events and failure of May ‘68, the last rooms markedly lost momentum. For most critics this period is synonymous with Debord’s retreat from politics, and return – via the autobiographical Panégyrique (1989) – as a man of letters adopted by figures including Philippe Sollers and Michel Houellebecq. ²⁵In fact, Debord was never so prolific as after the SI’s dissolution, marshalling his attention to subjects as diverse as the Red Brigades, climate change and Manuel Noriega. It would be hard to condense these opaque later texts, often tagged pejoratively as conspiracy theory, in a gallery context, but their exclusion only exemplified the BnF’s purposefully light grasp of Debord’s politics. Instead it closed its campaign with a copy of his Game of War, or Kriegspiel,²⁶of which only a handful were ever made. Finally providing the synthesis that the strategy theme had grasped at throughout, the game represents, in McKenzie Wark’s words, ‘an expression in a new form of something both the early “artistic” and later “political” phases of the Situationist International had in common […] namely, a concept and a practice of strategy’.²⁷The game’s aim, rather than conquering territory, is to disrupt the enemy’s lines of communication; it was hard to forget that the BnF – less through its preservation, than its presentation of Debord’s archive – had done just that, ensuring that the ‘Art of War’ concluded, (un)spectacularly, in stalemate.