Guy Debord, and: Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (review)

"The construction of situations begins on the other side of the modern collapse of the idea of the theater," wrote Guy Debord in "Report on the Construction of Situations," the 1957 founding document of the Situationist International (SI) (2002:47). Six years later, the eighth issue of the journal International Situationiste featured an editorial entitled "The Avant-Garde of Presence," proclaiming that the artistic experimentation of the day was not an adequate response: "To the degree that participation becomes more impossible, the second-class engineers of modernist art demand everyone's participation as their due [...]. They urge us insolently to 'take part' in a spectacle, in an art that so little concerns us" (144, original emphasis). Still, it would be a mistake to understand Debord's theories simply as a recent addition to the long history of antitheatrical prejudice. Curiously, even his revolutionary conception of spectacle as "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" ([1967] 1995:12) does not completely exclude theatre. In his 1967 Society of the Spectacle Debord praises baroque theatre as "an art of change [...] obliged to embody the principle of the ephemeral that it recognized in the world" (134). Debord not only recognized the tectonic shift from a society centered on commodity to one centered on image, but also developed a keen sense for its neuralgic points, such as its intolerance for the passage of time. There is a great deal yet to be learned about the political and artistic potential of the ephemeral from Debord, who as early as 1955 complained about the "exaggerated corpse of Antonin Artaud" (1955).¹ For this last statement alone, if for nothing else, Debord deserves more attention from historians and theoreticians of performance.

Anselm Jappe and Tom McDonough both take an ambitious approach to Debord. Rather than trying to set straight the record about Debord, or to analyze him as a media theorist and '60s radical, they engage in the important challenge of recontextualizing his work, revealing in the process its astonishing range.

Since 1997, a new biography of Debord has been published in English almost every other year.² This is not as surprising as it may seem given that Debord's versatility as a political thinker, inventor of new art forms, filmmaker, editor, and avantgarde leader is unrivaled in the period after WWII. His passions and addictions, his catalyzing role in May 1968 in France, his bold gesture of dissolving SI at the peak of its popularity, and his elective obscurity afterward make him an intriguing subject. His return to the center of public attention when he withdrew his films from distribution in response to French media speculation about the unsolved murder of his friend and publisher Gerard Lebovici in 1984 alone makes a fascinating story. Add his suicide and the posthumous television broadcast of his films and it's easy to see how Debord's life was raw material waiting to be mythologized, narrativized, biographized, and, of course, commodified.

Jappe does not want to take part in selling or saving Debord. His book is a biography of a rare kind: when mentioned at all, the incidents from his subject's life are used only to provide historical context for his ideas. While never forgetting Debord's reversal of the relation between (avantgarde) art and (leftist) politics—instead of art being used as means of revolutionary politics, revolutionary politics becomes artistic means—Jappe scrupulously traces the origins of Debord's political thought, convincingly demonstrating that, apart from Marx and Hegel, Georg Lukács's History of the Class Consciousness is the major, though insufficiently acknowledged, source of Debord's analysis of spectacular economy. Though Lukács was published in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution...