The spectacle, Debord said, is ‘the epic poem’ of capitalism trying to impose its will on everything and everybody. It’s a struggle that cannot stop unless it is forced to. Only the revolutionary subject, collectively organized and tactically mobilized, can threaten this ‘twilight world’, can ‘subject space to lived time’ (178). Lived time meant ‘the critique of human geography through which individuals and communities have to construct sites and events corresponding to the appropriation of, not just their labour, but of their total history’ (178). This would necessitate a reconstructed urbanism in accordance with ‘the power of workers’ councils, of an anti-statist dictatorship of the proletariat’, the ‘greatest revolutionary idea’ ever (179). This reconstruction would prompt a real ‘sense of place’, a successfully détourned urban environment, so bridging the dialectic between particularity and generality, between its rooted identity and its open borders. It would re-establish the autonomy of place, ‘without reproducing an exclusive attachment to the soil, and by reclaiming the reality of the voyage and of life understood as a voyage in every sense’ (178).
Negation would retain something positive; pessimism would keep hold of a grain of optimism: the re-articulation of history opened up the possibility for a new history. Debord’s radical politics in the 1960s lamented past times and spaces while holding a bitter yearning for a better tomorrow. His critique bewailed what the spectacle had taken away, especially in his adolescent Paris, and rallied for what had yet to be achieved in the post-spectacular age. He knew that critical theory could only go so far here: it wasn’t sufficient in itself. Praxis was necessary to weld thought to action, to launch radical war. Otherwise, the concept of spectacle would become itself another spectacle, a hollow rhetoric, defending, in the final analysis, the same spectacular order it sought to overthrow. ‘To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle’, he said in thesis 203, ‘it is necessary for people to put into action a practical force.’ ‘Unified critique’ must somehow meet ‘unified praxis’.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Theory, Debord knew, cannot expect miracles from the working class. All the same, workers, students, artists, activists and malcontents must somehow join hands, coordinate organization and unleash militant spontaneity. Streets would become the stage and the stake in this two-pronged radicalism. It was there where most harm might be done to the spectacle. Streets become the staging for spectacular ‘counter-spectacles’, sites for the construction of new participatory situations, for ‘real war’, not ‘war on paper’. The ink had hardly dried: Debord’s theory became a practical force, gripping the masses on Paris’s streets, barely six months after its publication. ‘To be free in 1968’, read one wall graffito then, ‘is to participate’. In his Mémoires the seventeenth-century agent provocateur Cardinal de Retz prophetically wrote ‘One could truly say that what makes them different from all other forms of power is their ability, having reached a certain point, to do everything which they believe themselves capable.’
The Society of the Spectacle became SI’S book of theory and therapy, entering the fray when working-class grievances in France festered and practical agitation simmered. The year 1967 was the one before revolutionary fervour came to the boil. This was theory that explained the context – be it of politics, cities or global economics. It identified enemy minefields and plotted a radical North-west Passage, ‘a geography of real life’. It dug out city trenches beneath the cobblestones. ‘The SI’, Debord wrote in a 1979 preface to the fourth Italian edition,
was at this time the extremist group that had done the most to bring back revolutionary contestation to modern society; and it was easy to see that this group, having imposed its victory on the terrain of critical theory, and having skillfully followed through on the terrain of practical agitation, was then drawing near the culminating point of its historical action. So it was a question of such a book being present in the troubles that were soon to come and that would pass it on after them to the vast subversive sequel that these troubles could not fail to open up … Those who really want to shake an established society must formulate a theory that fundamentally explains it, or which at least has the air of giving a satisfactory explanation of it.8
May 1968 poster: ‘Down with Spectacular-Commodity Society!’.
The Society of the Spectacle was written on the walls of Paris and other capital cities and provincial towns in 1968: ‘POWER TO THE WORKERS’ COUNCILS’, ‘DOWN WITH SPECTACULAR-COMMODITY SOCIETY’, ‘THE END OF UNIVERSITY’. Its refrains were daubed all over the modern high-rise environment at the University of Paris at Nanterre, a classic scene of urban isolation and separation, a ‘suburban Vietnam’, where a peripheral ‘new town’ university coexisted with working-class slums and Arab and Portuguese shanty towns. The environment was sterile, sexually and socially repressive, and totalitarian. It was a microcosm of France’s culture. This was the spirit of a society without any spirit. The same centralization, hierarchy and bureaucratic obsession persisting in the educational sector persisted in other aspects of the French state. Tough rules governed student dorms and freedom of movement, classes were overcrowded, resources stretched, professors were distant, student alienation rife. The right-wing Gaullist regime attempted to modernize the economy, adapting it to recent Common Market membership, and unemployment was growing, especially for younger workers.
May 1968 poster: ‘Abolish Class Society!’
At the University of Strasbourg, two years before, a handful of Situationists had intervened, Lefebvre’s militant students and Debord’s friends. They’d tried to rile, denounce (including Lefebvre himself) and revolutionize students with an influential pamphlet, drafted by a Tunisian student, Mustapha Khayati, called ‘On the Poverty of Student Life – Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for its Remedy’. They’d infiltrated the National Union of French Students (UNEF), accused students at Strasbourg and elsewhere of pandering to a society dominated by the commodity and the spectacle. Student poverty was a poverty of ideas, a poverty of guts. Students were really ‘submissive children’, labour-power in the making, without class-consciousness. They accepted the business and institutional roles for which the ‘university-factory’ prepared them, never questioning the system of production that alienated all activity, products, people and ideas. Si’s text plainly struck a chord, and translated reprints extended its audience, notably to the USA, Britain and Italy. In Strasbourg, the document caused quite a scandal; a coterie of students refused to be integrated, refused co-optation. Critical awareness gathered steam over the next year, until 22 March 1968, when it blew a gasket in Paris, at Nanterre.
Members of SI, young communists, Trotskyists, anarchists and Maoists invaded the university’s administration building, and began occupying it. The week before, the Committee of the Enragés and the Situationist International had been established. Its members put up posters and scribbled slogans on the walls of Nanterre and the Sorbonne: ‘TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITY’, ‘NEVER WORK’, ‘BOREDOM IS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY’ ‘TRADE UNIONS ARE BROTHELS’, ‘PROFESSORS, YOU MAKE US GROW OLD’, ‘IF YOU RUN INTO A COP, SMASH HIS FACE IN’. In early May, ‘the 22 March Movement’ met with UNEF at the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter. The authorities tried to break up the meeting; instead they only unleashed its latent power. The gendarmerie mobile poured into the Sorbonne’s courtyard and encircled its buildings. Several thousand students fought back, inside and outside, ripping up paving stones on the street. Skirmishes broke out elsewhere, spreading in the Latin Quarter, and flaring up at Châtelet and Les Halles. On 6–7 May a huge student demonstration took over the boulevard Saint Michel and thoroughfares near rue Gay-Lussac; protesters overturned cars, set them ablaze, dispatched Molotov cocktails, manned the barricades and stopped the flow of traffic. Cars no longer clogged up central Paris and the smog lifted. The revolution brought fine weather.9
Demonstration on the bou
levard Saint Germain, 6 May 1968.
On 13 May there was a one-day general strike; ‘student-worker’ solidarity suddenly looked possible, against the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and general worker’s union’s (CGT) odds. Situationists and students détourned the Sorbonne. On one revered fresco they emblazoned a witty cartoon caption: ‘HUMANITY WILL ONLY BE HAPPY THE DAY THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG BY THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST’. Exams had been cancelled at the barricades; sociologists and psychologists became the new cops. Next day, workers at the Sud-Aviation plant in Nantes occupied their factory and locked out the bosses; meanwhile, Renault workers at Cléon, in Seine-Maritime, followed suit. Then the Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne launched a wildcat action, halting newspaper distribution. Workers’ councils linked up with students’ councils, becoming comrades in arms. The working class, at last, declared its unequivocal support for the student movement when rank and filers at Renault-Billancourt took over France’s largest factory.
By 20 May strikes and occupations had become contagious. Nationwide, approximately 10 million workers downed tools and froze assembly lines. France seemed on the precipice of revolution; a festival of people was glimpsed. Alienation was cast off, momentarily; freedom was real; capitalized time abandoned. Without trains, cars, Metro and work, leisure time was reclaimed, time lived. Students and workers had seized the contingent situation, had acted spontaneously, had created new situations, and realized what no trade union or party could do, or wanted to do. And yet, as quickly as things erupted, they were almost as speedily violently and ideologically repressed, by the state and bourgeoisie. The optimistic promise, the beach beneath the paving stones, had dissipated, for now. The music was over. There was apparently no other side to break on through to.
The occupation of Paris was, and still is, seen throughout the world as an event of historical significance. Solidarity between workers had expressed itself; so had direct-action militancy; so had student internationalism, from the LSE to Berkeley, from Columbia to Nantes, from the Sorbonne to Barcelona; dissatisfaction had spread like wildfire. At the same time, The Society of the Spectacle’s demands were ‘plastered in the factories of Milan as in the University of Coïmria. Its principal theses, from California to Calabria, from Scotland to Spain, from Belfast to Leningrad, infiltrate clandestinely or are proclaimed in open struggles.’10 ‘The Situationist International imposed itself in a moment of universal history as the thought of the collapse of a world; a collapse which has now begun before our eyes.’11
In old photos of the student occupations of the Sorbonne, Debord is visible in the thick of the action, lurking with intent. He was no student himself, of course; nor was he particularly youthful: in May 1968 Debord, the freelance revolutionary, was 36, older than a lot of junior professors, and almost twice the age of many student leaders (such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit). He must have seemed like an old man to many kids, somebody’s dad drinking in the student union. Already his appearance had started to deteriorate. Surrounded by a large crowd of student activists, we can see him standing side on, without glasses, wearing a white jacket. His face is much puffier than a decade earlier; a boozer’s physiognomy was rapidly becoming apparent. By comparison with other ‘68ers, who were mere political toddlers, he was a veteran provocateur.
Debord and other Situationist politicos were genius agitators and organizers, and their presence was felt, practically and theoretically. The spirit of The Society of the Spectacle was there, though some had never fully understood it, or even read it. On the other hand, Debord and other Situationists were frequently the most sectarian, invariably falling out with allies – especially falling out with allies, being most ruthless with old friends and former comrades. ‘Guy was a very tenacious person’, Jean-Michel Mension, one of those ousted, remembered in his Situationist memoir The Tribe. ‘He was already very hard – very strict in the way he conceived of existence with this person or that.’ At the same time, there was a playful aspect to the manner in which he and his comrades lived. There ‘were certainly jokers who became part of Guy’s group merely because they were friends of so and so, people who had no business there and who lasted only six months or a year before Guy found them really idiotic and kicked them out.’
Debord also pointed the finger at his former pal Henri Lefebvre, denouncing him as an ‘agent of recuperation’. Lefebvre pointed the finger back, likening Debord’s ‘cult of exclusion’ to that of the Surrealist André Breton. ‘I was never part of this group’, Lefebvre said. ‘I could have been, but I was careful, since I knew Guy’s character and his manner, and the way he had of imitating André Breton, by expelling everyone in order to get at a pure and hard little core. In the end, the members of the Situationist International were only Guy Debord, Raoul Vaniegem and Michèle Bernstein.’12Debord, for his part, accused his former friend of stealing si’s ideas. ‘A certain influence has been attributed to Lefebvre’, he wrote in one pamphlet, ‘for the si’s radical theses that he surreptitiously copied, but he reserved the truth of that critique for the past, even though it was born out of the present more than out of his academic reflections on the past.’13 Debord reckoned Lefebvre’s take on the 1871 Paris Commune was almost entirely lifted from SI’S ‘Theses on the Commune’ (1962). ‘This was a delicate subject’, Lefebvre later recalled in a 1987 interview.
May 1968 still from the film The Society of the Spectacle, showing Debord in a white jacket without glasses.
I was close to the Situationists … And then we had a quarrel that got worse and worse in conditions I don’t understand too well myself… I had this idea about the Commune as a festival, and I threw it into debate, after consulting an unpublished document about the Commune that is at the Feltrinelli Institute in Milan. I worked for weeks at the Institute; I found unpublished documentation. I used it, and that’s completely my right… Listen, I don’t care at all about these accusations of plagiarism. And I never took the time to read what they wrote about the Commune in their journal. I know that I was dragged through the mud.
The rift between Debord and Lefebvre is a complex topic, and its explanation involves some mixture of personality clash, political ideology and arguments over women. Plagiarism around the interpretation of the Commune is but one relatively minor strand. Deep down, Debord viewed Lefebvre as an old Leninist who continued to fraternize with the Party despite his expulsion. Meanwhile, Lefebvre got involved with several young women known to the Situationists, friends of Michèle Bernstein, one of whom, Nicole, became pregnant with Lefebvre’s child. He was old enough to be her father several times over, and Debord et al. weren’t impressed with what they saw as old Lefebvre’s Don Juan pretensions.14 For Lefebvre, Debord’s dogmatism was too austere and ruthless. What’s more, said Lefebvre, it was a dogmatism without a dogma, ‘since the theory of situations, of the creation of situations, disappeared very quickly, leaving behind only the critique of the existing world, which is where it all started, with my Critique of Everyday Life’.15 Perhaps in the end, despite their similar interpretations of urbanism and humanist Marxism, the two men were simply different personas: Debord was a man of the moon, cold and dark, pessimistic and destructive. It was at night when he had the power to create worlds. Lefebvre was a man of the sun, of creation, of light and optimism. In his 1959 autobiography, La Somme et le reste, Lefebvre describes himself ‘surging from the depths, surfacing, a little flattened by heavy pressures. He breathes in the sunshine, opens himself, displays himself, comes alive again.’16
Both men, however, believed that the Commune of 1871 was some sort of historical antecedent of 1968. As Prussian forces at war with France surrounded Paris, for 73 days, between March and May, the city had become a liberated zone of people power. Amid carnivals and pranks, the barricades went up, even across Haussmann’s mighty boulevards. Freely elected workers, artists and small business owners were suddenly at the helm. Their rally cries were territorial and urban; their practice was festive and spontaneous. The Communa
rds, until the National Guard crushed 20,000 of them, launched a revolt in culture and everyday life, demanded freedom and self-determination, and crushed Louis Napoleon’s authority as he’d once crushed their freedom. They occupied the streets, shouted and sang for their ‘right to the city’.
For the first time, it looked as if a working-class revolution wasn’t merely possible, but imminent. The Situationists said that the ‘Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century’ (thesis 2). ‘Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see the insurgents’ feeling that they had become the masters of their own history, not so much on the level of “governmental” politics as on the level of their everyday life.’17 ‘The Commune’, thesis 7 said, ‘represents the only realization of a revolutionary urbanism to date.’ It ‘succumbed less to the force of arms’, the next thesis explained, ‘than to the force of habit’. ‘Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement’, continued thesis 11, importantly, ‘can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been fulfilled. They forget that for those who really lived it, the fulfilment was already there’ (emphasis in original). ‘The audacity and inventiveness of the Commune’, continued thesis 12, ‘must obviously be measured not in relation to our time, but in terms of the prevailing political, intellectual and moral attitudes of its own time, in terms of the interdependence of all the prevailing banalities that it blasted to pieces.’ ‘The social war of which the Commune was one moment’, concluded the penultimate thesis 13, ‘is still being fought today. In the task of “making conscious the unconscious tendencies of the Commune” (Engels), the last word is still to be said.’
Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Page 7