       OBITUARY: GUY DEBORD

       FREEDOM INTERNATIONAL SECTION 84B, WHITECHAPEL HIGH ST.
       LONDON E1

       THE AUTHOR OF SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE HAS KILLED HIMSELF

       Last Curtain Call for Guy Debord

       We don't know how he died and still less why. We only know
       that Guy Debord, around evening time on Wednesday 30th
       November, took his life; the life that in the last few years
       he himself - perhaps the last of the Situationists still
       partly faithful to his own image of the resolute enemy of
       the society of the spectacle - helped to make more
       mysterious, more evanescent more elsewhere. Paradoxically
       one could say that in reality death has brought him back to
       life, in the sense that it has re-established the human
       reality (death being our common destiny) of a character
       whose notoriety and uncompromising stance of refusal would
       make of existence a long theatrical piece, in which he would
       improvise up until the end. But who was Guy Debord? There
       are several answers, but at the same time such answers would
       preclude the understanding of his identity as indefinable.
       Writer? Film director? Situationalist? 'Doctor in
       nothing...' as he liked to define himself in one of his
       latest books? Of course all those things, but simply because
       they are 'things' - which comes down to things he did - they
       certainly do not reveal the whole man. It isn't for nothing
       that the numerous French dailies which reported the news of
       his suicide, not only didn't say how or why he died, neither
       did they say anything about him, limiting themselves to an
       inventory of the things he did, the things he said, how he
       did them, how he said them but forgetting to say who, Guy
       Debord, was. In reality it was the self-imposed mystery
       which created the impenetrable and adventurist aura, barely
       available to the media and prone to violent argument; Guy
       Debord liked to hide his true self behind a blanket of
       gossip, speculation and even spite in his dealings with
       others, and to never let it see daylight. For the rest, for
       someone who wrote a book: The Society of the Spectacle,
       where the world is seen as a spectacle - which is to say a
       false image which the economic system produces of itself in
       order to dominate society - visibility was to be totally
       denied. Thus the rare photos which he consciously planned so
       that they should be published in his lifetime - were the
       most hazy in the world and to a fair degree made him look
       younger than his real age. Certainly, invisibility was
       imperative!

       It was not by chance that his first public work was a film
       Hurlement en faveur de Sade (1952), in which there is no
       picture and the spectator - truly stupefied by this purely
       surrealist provocation - watched an alternated sequence of
       white and then black screens, whilst listening to a mixture
       of atonal dialogues involving numerous people leading up to
       a silent, black screen for 24 minutes. This was the first
       gauntlet against the spectacle thrown down by Guy Debord who
       fought this battle throughout his life; a death sentence for
       the cinema, at the time considered as the essence of the
       artistic product of bourgeois society and for that reason
       the extreme synthesis of its values in full decomposition,
       since it expressed not the construction of a situation which
       aimed to shed light on everyday life but rather a system of
       falsification of reality in order to suppress it and
       supplant it by means of a series of images aimed at cutting
       the individual off from his daily existence and making of
       him an illusory participant in the spectacle of consumer
       society in his role as good/product of the spectacle.

       The setting up in 1957 of the Situationist International was
       partly the logical consequence of these artistic
       presuppositions. Coming out of the European cultural milieu
       as the convergence of several artistic experiences (COBRA,
       the Lettrist International, the Movement for Bauhaus Cinema,
       the London Psychogeographical Society) the SI from day one
       aimed to represent - above all via Debord who was the editor
       of its statement of principles - a critique of art brought
       into being by the necessity of superseding it by creating
       liberated situations in which life can effectively
       experience its own possibilities and not become enclosed in
       the repetitive role models that the society of the spectacle
       constructs in order to dominate and exploit. But already in
       those early years the different heads of the SI quarrelled
       amongst themselves and Debord - who alone amongst them
       represented the most coherent position with his objective of
       achieving a total critique of art and a whole culture
       skewered towards the production of values separated from
       everyday life (and for that reason incapable of achieving
       its own radical transformation) - came out better from
       confrontations with those who presupposed the replacement of
       art as simply a repeat  of the architectural and urban
       argument which aimed to make works of art no longer on
       canvas but in the physical space of a city.

       But the first years of the 60s saw a U turn in the politics
       of the SI, and coincided with Debord's political phase,
       which saw an achievement of sorts in making of the
       organisation - now nearly purged of any artistic content -
       the rallying point between the experience of the European
       cultural avant guard and the experience of politico-
       revolutionary groupings, in France represented by some
       journals (Arguments and Socialisme et Barbarie) of a
       revisionary Marxist leaning. These were the years when
       Debord participated in the seminars of Lefebvre at Nanterre
       and during which he developed his critique of daily life
       which had already been expounded by this philosopher and
       sociologist from Nanterre in the late 50s. The critique of
       everyday life - the baby sister of theories of
       alienation/separation produced by the spectacular society,
       became the theoretical underpinnings of the SI and the theme
       of his most famous book, already mentioned, in which the
       theoretical and organisational experience  of the workers
       council ... represented the political and revolutionary
       dnouement of the situationist theory. The Strasbourg scandal
       and Paris 68 showed not so much that Debord and the SI were
       gaining influence (as has always been claimed by the
       historical hagiographer of the movement), but rather the
       fortuitous meeting - and in many ways prospicious - between
       the combative and revolutionary practice of the movement of
       68 and the necessity to find an outlet for situationist
       theory. If there had been no May 68 in France, would the SI
       have become what it seemed to be after the event (that is
       the high point of modern revolution)? And would the work of
       Debord have come to seem clairvoyant and prophetic, as was
       claimed by numerous commentators who proclaim his books on
       the social spectacle to be the only texts able to give a
       sense - sorry: a vision - to what happened in the East as
       well as the West? All these considerations lead back to the
       unanswered question of who Guy Debord was; a man who, at the
       age of 62, decided to put an end to his life and to
       foreclose his real life story asking forgiveness for his own
       mistakes. But the truth of his story will still have to be
       reconstructed by reference to his work which he has left to
       posterity with the intention of becoming the first invisible
       personality of the society of the spectacle. Will we ever
       know the truth?

       GIANFRANCO MARELLI FAI Milan Trans from Le Monde Libertaire
       21 Dec. 94


