On Writing with Photography

Chapter 8: Situating Images: Photography, Writing, and Cinema in the Work of Guy Debord

The question of the image occupied a central place in the writing , political activity, and cinematic work of the founder of the Situationist International, Guy Debord.1 In Debord’s most influential work, for example, his thesis-like dissection of “the society of the spectacle”in the book and film bearing this name, he virtually translated Marx’s “capital” into“image,” as the linchpin of a whole set of social relations, structures of feeling, and historical developments. Thus, toward the beginning of Guy Debord’s  book La Société du spectacle (The society of the spectacle)— a passage also read in voice-over in his  film version—the following proposition is set forth: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord, Oeuvres, ). Yet precisely because the image plays such a crucial conceptual role for Debord, what an“image”actually is and how it relates to the network of borrowings and inventions, alliances and breaks, practical interventions and theoretical concepts that made up Debord’s lifework cannot be taken for granted. From a superficial examination of this work, it might easily be concluded that Debord was simply contradictory or inconsistent, again and again denouncing the spectacle of contemporary capitalism yet just as constantly drawn to the employment, for his theoretical and autobiographical productions alike, of the imagistic ensemble put so deliriously at his disposal by that same spectacle.2 And mirroring Debord’s own difficult search for a cutting edge between critique and complicity with his material,  8 Situating Images Photography, Writing, and Cinema in the Work of Guy Debord TYRUS MILLER  TYRUS MILLER readers of his work may grope to find the dialectical pivot or criterion of differentiation between the fallen imagery of the spectacle and those chosen images that may have been, through deliberate diversion or fortuitous escape, redeemed from its glaring shadow. Was it even possible for Debord to use images to expose the spectacularity of the spectacle, while taking critical and—in light of the heavily autobiographical content of his work—existential distance from the spectacle ’s effective operations? This theoretical problem regarding his oeuvre was also, reflexively, a key practical and compositional problem within it. As in theoretical writings such as The Society of the Spectacle, this problem of the status of the image pervades his most manifestly autobiographical works, including his early short film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the passage of a few persons through a rather brief unity of time, ), his late film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We turn around in the night and are consumed by fire, ), and his valedictory books Panégyrique (Panegyric)  and  (, ). To refer only to the last, we confront the fact that Debord’s final major work before his suicide—the second volume of his Panegyric—is composed almost exclusively of photographs and related graphics, chronologically arranged,mostly captioned,and interspersed with quotations from literary texts,works of strategy,and other memoirists.It would be too hasty, in my view, to argue that this searing iconoclast and skeptic about the truthvalue of the images of the age entrusted, in a second innocence of last days, the memory of his life to images that might signify and communicate its meaning. Nonetheless, with Panegyric’s gallery of blurry, vague black-andwhite photographs before us, seducing us into a desire to see more—or better , to have already seen more, back when we were elsewhere and all this was still invisible to us, that we might now take these images as an invitation to remember something whole that took place long ago—we are compelled to conclude that Debord found at least a meaningful pathos in the interrupted gesture toward unity that these images make toward his readers.  The best commentators on Debord’s life and work, including Vincent Kaufmann, Greil Marcus, and Thomas Levin, have taken as their starting Situating Images  point his brief, fraught involvement with the Lettrist movement’s avantgarde provocations in poetry, experimental cinema, and performative scandal . Centered upon the charismatic personality and thinking of its leading figure, the Romanian émigré Jean-Isidore Isou, the Lettrists constituted a training ground in the politics of scandal and sectarian struggle that would mark the breakaway groups that Debord would soon lead,the Lettrist International and the Situationist International.Isou...