Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Read online

  Debord seldom disclosed much about his past. His family, on his mother’s side, may have been wealthier than he claimed. But we can assume that his childhood was not entirely happy; his past may have been a bit like young Stephen Dedalus’s, entering the world to seek misfortune. His father died of tuberculosis when he was four. Guy, who’d been diagnosed asthmatic, his mother Paulette and grandmother Lydie ‘Manou’ moved south just before war broke out, to Nice, outside the Occupied Zone. There, Paulette tried her best to keep the family together. The two women adored Guy, and he was no doubt spoilt and doted upon. Soon, though, Paulette had a fling with an Italian driving instructor, and gave birth to Guy’s half-sister, Michèle Dominique, in 1942. That same year, the extended family moved west to Pau, an elegant resort in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and settled in the centre of town. Guy enrolled at Pau’s lycée (now the Lycée Louis-Barthou), where he became a rather solitary, precocious child, insecure and arrogant, reading a lot of adventure stories and poetry.

  By a quirky coincidence, one of his poet idols, Isidore Ducasse, aka the Comte de Lautréamont, had attended the very same school back in 1863. Several years later, Lautréamont had published Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) and Poésies (1870), two mad hallucinatory visions, proto-Surrealist classics, at once beautiful and grotesque. Less than a year after Poésies, Lautréamont was dead, at the age of 24. Debord loved Lautréamont’s in-your-face subversion; one dissatisfied youth recognized another. ‘The poetic whimperings of this century’, Poésies begin, ‘are nothing but sophistry.’ Debord never stopped loving Lautréamont and always paid homage to the true inventor of détournement, a favoured pastime the Situationists would later utilize.20 Part II of Poésies had ‘inverted’ a host of famous verses and maxims by Pascal, Hugo, Kant et al. The more rational the reversals, said Debord in an essay of 1959, ‘Methods of Détournement’, the less effective the détournement. Lautréamont wrote only at night, seated at a piano, drinking absinthe. The taciturn poet hammered out words at the same time as he hammered out notes, much to his neighbour’s chagrin. His meagre oeuvre defied any classification.

  Maldoror was neither novel nor prose-poem: it followed no linear path, often switched tenses, went from singular to plural, and wilfully ignored punctuation. It was a flight of fancy, a dream, a hallucination, a mental derangement, an epic odyssey of Maldoror, the ‘prince of darkness’, who cursed God and hailed the ‘old ocean’. Maldoror, Lautréamont said, is a bandit who ‘is, perhaps, seven leagues from this land’ or ‘perhaps he is some steps from you’.21Maldoror was seen as blasphemous; prospective publishers feared litigation. For a while it was banned. Now, it has been accepted into the French canon, infamous for lines that became touchstones of the Surrealist movement: ‘the fortuitous meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.22 Elsewhere came scattered, deliberately opaque similes: ‘beautiful like the law of arrested development in the chest of adults whose propensity for growth isn’t in rapport with the quantity of molecules that their organism assimilates’; ‘beautiful like the congenital malformation of a man’s sexual organs’. And one that Debord loved to recite, ‘beautiful like the trembling of the hands in alcoholism’.23

  Debord aged 19, from his film In Gimm Imus Node Et Consumimur Igni.

  Poésies was the sober counterpart to the ravings of Maldoror, its moral antidote, its negation and subversion – its détournement. Lautréamont himself may have been a schizophrenic, and side-by-side the works evoke a Jekyll and Hyde persona. Poésies is famed for the maxim that became sacred to Debord and the Situationists, who’d soon enough rip off and lampoon many ‘great’ works and ideas: ‘Plagiarism is necessary’, Lautréamont insisted, ‘progress implies it. It tightly squeezes an author’s phrase, serves his expression, erases a false idea, replaces it with a just notion.’24

  Debord’s initiation to the writings of another enduring influence, Arthur Cravan, came a little before his encounter with an almost real-life Isidore Ducasse; an eccentric Romanian bohemian, Isidore Isou, poet and guru of the Lettrist movement, whom Debord met at the Cannes Film Festival of 1951. After the Liberation of France, the Debord family left Pau for the chic Côte d’Azur town of Cannes where Guy attended the Lycée Carnot. He showed little interest in anything there. Though he once won a prize in a radio general knowledge quiz, Guy didn’t excel. He read things that didn’t appear on the curriculum and instead of his homework wrote long, meticulously crafted letters, full of effusive poetry and revolutionary idealism, to a school pal Hervé Falcou, two years his junior: ‘We have been enfants terribles’, said one outpouring, a chip off Rimbaud’s block. ‘If we become adults we will be dangerous men.’ ‘An individual ought to be passionate or he is nothing’, affirmed another. ‘The Marquis de Sade has young girl’s eyes. Beautiful eyes for blowing up bridges… ’.25

  Young Guy yearned for something else, for another world, and caught a glimpse of it at the town’s fourth film festival soon after he’d finished his baccalauréat. It was Isou and the crazy rebellious world he created that really lit Debord’s fire. The Lettrists, who’d journeyed down from Paris, sported turtleneck sweaters and jeans and dug jazz. They were hip and Debord hadn’t seen their like before. Isou himself usually donned a silk cravat and was a curious mix of bourgeois elegance and rumpled decadence. He was a sleazy reincarnation of Lautréamont and Rimbaud. He and his disciples were at Cannes to promote an offbeat film, Treatise on Slime and Eternity, and to stir up trouble. They intended to upstage the conventional film world; Debord towed along, engaging in rowdy alcoholic binges. Isou’s film caused an uproar: nothing happened; a blank screen often prevailed, interspersed with bizarre, guttural noises masquerading as poetry; and it lasted for more than four hours…

  After Cannes, Isou helped Debord find a small furnished room in Paris at the Hôtel de la Faculté on the rue Racine. Debord told his mother he planned to enroll at the Sorbonne to pursue a law degree, for which she’d send him a modest monthly sum. He enrolled yet did little conventional studying. With his membership of the university, he could borrow books from the Sorbonne library and get a discount on meals at nearby restaurants and canteens. So he read a lot, smoked, drank, flirted with women, and posed as a struggling Left Bank student. Dada and Surrealist texts became his staple, and Debord’s appetite for adventure and carousing got whetted by a certain poet, boxer and wild man deserter of seventeen nations, Arthur Cravan.

  If Lautréamont’s output was slim, Arthur Cravan’s was even slimmer. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in 1887 in the genteel Swiss town of Lausanne, Cravan carried a British passport yet preferred to speak French. A human chameleon, he never identified with any place in particular, and often masqueraded behind forged papers, claiming all the while to be Oscar Wilde’s nephew. (As the son of the notorious scribe’s brother-in-law, this was one piece of bombast that was actually true.) At a height of 6 ft 7 in (2 m) and weighing 265 lb (120 kg), Cravan was built like the Eiffel Tower and held the European heavyweight title for a brief period.

  In 1916, he fought the ex-world champion, Jack Johnson, in Barcelona, in a rigged fight, a spectacular ploy to earn the penniless Cravan sufficient for steerage to New York, where the boxer-poet-cum-conscientious objector could avoid military service. Cravan tumbled in the sixth round, amid a delirious and suspecting crowd, who simultaneously chanted and booed when he didn’t get up. A riot ensued; Cravan slipped out of a side exit and soon set sail on the Montserrat across a storm-tossed ocean, alongside a motley crew of deserters, adventurers and dissidents, as well as a certain Leon Trotsky.

  Cravan was happiest wandering: ‘I have twenty countries in my memory and trail in my soul the colours of one hundred cities.’26He could only feel himself, he said, ‘in voyage; when I stay a long time in the same place, stupidity overwhelms me.’ Cravan was a shameless exhibitionist and self-promoter, and had a habit of dancing on tables and pulling down his trousers. He managed to start up a pesky little journal, Maintenant, which advertised soirées of
poetry readings and boxing instruction. Only six issues appeared; Cravan was editor-in-chief and sole contributor, often penning diatribes under pseudonyms such as W. Cooper and Robert Miradique. ‘Every great artist’, Cravan proclaimed – and Debord concurred – ‘has the sense of provocation’. ‘The letter of insult is a sort of literary genre that held a grand place in our century,’ Debord wrote in Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici, ‘and not without good reason … On this point, I have learnt a lot from the Surrealists and, above all, from Arthur Cravan.’27 ‘Cravan’s actions during those few years’, the Surrealist king-pin André Breton claimed, ‘developed in an atmosphere of absolute irreverence, of provocation and scandal that herald “Dada”.’ Breton knew that Cravan had ‘accomplished, without compromise, Rimbaud’s desire: “Il faut être absolument moderne”.’28

  New York dazzled Cravan: ‘New York! New York! I should like to inhabit you!’ There, he scribbled a few stanzas in a minor literary review called The Soil; but in a land where ‘science married itself to industry’ in ‘an audacious modernity’, poetry was hardly an earner. Broke, he drank in dive bars in the Bronx and slept rough in Central Park, until he met and later married the English poet and artist Mina Loy. (She wrote a touching memoir about him called Colossus.) In 1918 they moved to Mexico City, where Cravan became a professor of boxing at the School of Physical Culture. He and Loy planned to go to Buenos Aires, but only had enough money for her passage. Cravan decided to navigate himself with a friend in a small fishing boat; he and Loy would rendezvous later in Valparaíso. She waved her 31-year-old husband off one morning late in 1918, from a small pier, and watched the craft breeze out into the open sea. It dipped on the horizon and nobody ever saw Cravan again. Loy bore his daughter, Fabienne, in April 1919.

  Debord, unlike Cravan, never visited New York. He was invited there once, in 1959, by his friend Alex Trocchi, who lived for a while on a barge moored on the Hudson at 33rd Street. (Trocchi, a Scot and a junkie, who would have loose affiliations with the Situationists in Paris during the 1950s, had just completed Cain’s Book, his furtive portrayal of heroin addiction and existential angst, destined to become a bestseller.) Yet Debord turned the invitation down; an American voyage wasn’t possible, he said, pointing out the steady work he had to do in Europe.29 In fact, Debord never ventured beyond Europe and never flew in a plane. His adventures always seemed closer to home and were less exotic: imaginative leaps of the mind and spirit, intellectual and political as much as geographical, taking to the pen and bottle as much as to the high seas.

  In Panégyrique, he admitted: ‘I haven’t had the need to travel very far.’ ‘Most of the time I lived in Paris, exactly in the triangle defined by the intersections of the rue Saint-Jacques and the rue Royer-Colland, rue Saint Martin and rue Greneta, and the rue du Bac and rue de Commailles.’30 It was a smallish area, accessible on foot, spanning both sides of the Seine, between Les Halles and the Pantheon, in the 3rd and 5th arrondissements. He had, he said, spent his days and nights in this zone, and never would have left if the life he’d led there hadn’t been completely destroyed. ‘Soon’, Debord lamented years later, citing Arthur Cravan as testimony, ‘we will only see artists in the street, and it will take no end of effort to find a single man.’31

  Throughout the 1950s, this patch became Debord’s ‘zone of perdition’, ‘where his youth went as if to achieve its education’.32There, without conventional education or grooming, he became an autodidact in every sense, whose life in books was equally books in life. ‘I too grew up in the streets’, Debord said, citing Aristophanes’ Knights approvingly. In the streets, bars and libraries, he taught himself what to read and how to act, and how to combine each. His formative milieu, he said, was the ‘milieu of demolition experts’33 and ‘dangerous classes’, of malcontents and the poor. They engaged in perilous pursuits; devotees had to know how to live off the land – the urban land. They were lost prophets of an age of innocence and naïveté and mad, raving ideals. It was an epoch dramatized by what Debord had daubed in chalk in 1953 on a wall along the rue de Seine: Ne travaillez jamais (‘never work’).

  It was also an epoch that came to the page in the wonderfully zany text Mémoires. ‘The rare works of my youth’, Debord wrote in a retrospective preface, ‘had been special. It is necessary to admit that a taste for generalized negation united them. It was in great harmony with real life that we led then.’34 Consisting of structures portantes (‘supporting structures’) – contorted cartoons and captions that Debord and the Danish artist Asger Jorn purloined in 1958 – Mémoires is a classic piece of détournement, ‘composed of elements entirely prefabricated’, a garish collage of photographs, drawings, sketches and citations sacred and profane, original and ripped off. Some images are straight out of Jackson Pollock, spontaneous outpourings of red, blue and black ink seeping over the page, overlaid with assorted snippets: ‘It is the act of a subject profoundly inebriated by alcohol’; ‘all the world’s twenty-year-olds had genius’; ‘we ate well there and met lots of people: writers, artists, more or less poor, and all full of illusions.’

  This motely coterie was the most marginal of marginal dissidents; little of their political activity extended beyond a Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels triangle. Their programme was epigrammatic not systematic, bequeathing only scraps and preliminary ideas, vague hypotheses and blurry vignettes. No completed or coherent body of work endures. And yet somehow, after the Situationists, Marxism, urban politics, radical art and design, the status quo, nothing would ever be quite the same again. The saga of the Situationists is full of acronyms and bad faith, whirlwind romances and intense camaraderie, back-stabbing and ideological expulsions. As is so often the case in Left history, everyone seems harder on themselves and their fellow travellers than they do on their ruling-class antagonists. Debord was culpable here, more than most. He was brilliant yet ruthless, seductive yet manipulative, both theoretical mastermind and chief executioner.

  Debord, Michèle Bernstein and Asger Jorn.

  Situationist prehistory involved several small, subversive avant-garde movements. First came the Lettrist International, Isou’s underground minimalist set-up, founded in 1946; but as the 1950s unfolded, it crystallized around Debord, Michèle Bernstein (his first wife) and Gil Wolman. Next was COBRA, the Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam Surrealist and experimental design conglomerate, dominated by the Dutch utopian architect, ex-Provo and anarchist Constant Nieuwenhuys – later abbreviated to the snappier Constant. Soon the Imaginist Bauhaus entered the fray, Asger Jorn’s brainchild, with its Abstract Expressionist bent, and London’s Psychogeographical Association, with the painter Ralph Rumney, the sole Brit on the scene.

  All these groups were highly politicized and revolutionary in their intent to renew art – or, better, to ‘abolish’ art, much as Karl Marx sought to abolish philosophy – and to renew the action of art on life (and life on art), transforming both in the process. They were bored with art as they knew it, bored with politicians, bored with the city, and bored in the city. The city had become banal, as had art and politics. Banalization was a mental and material disease afflicting life in general. Everything needed changing: life, time and space, cities. Everyone was hypnotized by production and conveniences, by sewage systems, lifts, bathrooms and washing machines. Presented with the choice between love and a garbage disposal unit, Debord quipped, young people opted for garbage disposal units. Baron Haussmann’s Paris, the Paris of grands boulevards and speedy traffic arteries, ‘is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Today’s urbanism’s main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles.’35

  The Lettrist International (LI) pushed for new forms of collective expression, including self-expression, and especially irreverent expression; the group embodied the spirit and gusto that would animate and dramatize the Situationists. To begin with, LI members found sustenance from Surrealism and Breton; by the 1950s they
thought Surrealism washed up, effete, and lurched instead towards the earlier, more iconoclastic Dada. (Dada’s lampooning, its technique of turning images, art and life around, of formulating new meanings from old worn-out meanings and transforming them into shocking, original collages, would become a cherished Situationist practice.)

  The LI, meanwhile, pioneered their own shoestring journal, Potlatch, named after the great feasts of northwestern Native American tribes. In them, chiefs actually gave food, drink and wealth away; all surpluses were wilfully destroyed. Potlatches forbade bargaining, affirmed gifts, defied ‘exchange’ and were absolute negations of private property and capitalist values. Debord loved the idea, developing it from the sociologist Marcel Mauss’s text of 1925, The Gift. Debord drafted numerous polemical pieces for Potlatch in the already icy-cool clinical speak he’d make legendary in the decades to follow. ‘Our ambitions are clearly megalomaniacal’, he wrote in issue 29, ‘but perhaps not measurable by the dominant criteria of success. I believe that my friends would satisfy themselves working anonymously in the capacity of a paid worker in the Ministry of Leisure of a government who in the end will be preoccupied by changing life.’36

  It was as a Lettrist that Debord also launched his first experimental film, Howlings in Favour of Sade (Hurlements en faveur de Sade, 1952). It set a Debordian movie precedent, after Isou: there would be hardly anything going on, with intermittent periods of silence and darkened frames. Images would suddenly intersperse with monotonous voice-overs, frequently Debord’s own. ‘There’s no film. Cinema is dead’, said one in Howlings. ‘There can’t be any more film. If you want, let’s have a debate.’37 Cinema – or anti-cinema – was Debord’s first love; he often identified himself as a particular kind of filmmaker. His denunciations of bourgeois cinema also extended to rants against the avant-garde, especially the ‘respected’ avant-garde like Jean-Luc Godard. In Godard, Debord said, ‘the repetition of the same clumsy stupidities is confounded by postulate’. Godard’s critique, he added, ‘never surpasses the basic humour of a cabaret’.38