Debord, Guy

Guy Debord (1931–1994) was a founding member of the Situationist International and author of the influential La société du spectacle (1967) (The Society of the Spectacle, 1977). Largely self-taught in avant-garde artistic circles, Debord forged a critique of consumer society grounded in the young Marx and influenced by Henri Lefebvre and, through Lucien Goldman, by the young Georg Lukács. Although he denied the accusation (and the praise), La société du spectacle was often described as the inspirational philosophy behind the Parisian student revolts of May 1968. At the heart of his theory is the thesis that whereas in Marx's day, relations between people appeared to them in the fantastic guise of relations between objects, by the mid 1960s, the role of objects had been overcome by the activity of representation. Later in his life, Debord advanced toward an even more radical critique with the theory of the “integrated spectacle,” combining the techniques of totalitarianism and free-market capitalism in a single global system of administration and deception.

Debord came to prominence as an articulate internal critic of the Lettriste International, a politically radical avant-garde movement of the 1950s. The Situationist International was formed as a breakaway group, persisting through splits and expulsions from 1956 to 1972. As editor of the group's journal, Internationale Situationniste, and author of a series of pamphlets, manifestos, and essays, Debord attempted to define an artistic practice that could not be assimilated to bourgeois institutional art, as had been the fate, he believed, of Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism. The answer lay in total but ephemeral “situations” in which the deadening hand of capitalism, the state, and bourgeois culture might be temporarily lifted and a glimpse of a utopian future vouchsafed. Debord's reasoning here was deeply Hegelian, determining the artist's role as one of negating the existing society. At the same time, reading the contemporary avant-garde of Beckett and Robbe-Grillé as already a negativity in the service of the bourgeoisie, Debord proposed a positive programme of situations, a negation of the negation, as the only truly revolutionary vanguard position.

In the mid-1960s, Debord set out the 221 theses of La société du spectacle. Social relations were, he argued, mediated by images, and what had been lived directly had become signs. The dominant mode of production, that is, the ordering of society, was undertaken as an ordering of [Page 187]signs, and the production of signs was its goal. The society of the spectacle appears to date from the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the move toward a consumption-led economy. Since the 1930s, the spectacle had taken two major forms, that of the European dictatorships, especially Nazism and Stalinism, and that of North Amercian consumer capitalism. Both shared the substitution of signs of life for life itself: advertising and entertainment for desire, architecture and urbanism for community, thrills and shocks for excitement and revolt. Though in his later writings, Debord would boast of his unique outsider status as lifting him above the crowd to see these truths, in La société du spectacle, the inference is that an unalienated life can be contrasted with the alienation of wage-slavery and, worse still, slavery to the idols of consumerism. Like fellow Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, Debord contrasts real and false desires, retaining for his nihilistic, avant-garde, and criminal coterie the possibility of a reality from which mass mediation has debarred the bulk of the population.

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