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

I heard it said recently by a respected new media critic that Tim Druckrey's collection of texts from Ars Electronica constitutes an adequate, possibly definitive, history of new media criticism [1]. Historiography is in the air, along with the specter of canon-formation. How to do the one without the other is a conundrum.

The revenge of art institutions on their bitterest critics is posthumous beatitude. At least in the case of Walter Benjamin, the lack of any English-language translations until 1969 is a decent excuse, though not for the vast industry that has sprung up around him. Both Deleuze and Debord were scarcely cold before the machinery cranked up, reassured, as T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith complain in their vitriolic collection-closer, that Debord at least would not unleash his notoriously virulent pamphleteering against misconstruals and de-detournements of his thinking (as Debord puts it, "The ruling ideology . . . even succeeds in making use of subversive individuals: when dead, by doctoring their work," p. 31).

The Situationist International (SI) left a rather threadbare artistic legacy, unless you have a taste for Asger Jorn, and a legacy in any case now entirely art-historical—a movement to indicate the transitions between Fluxus and conceptualism, perhaps, or to signpost the route not taken. On the other hand, the SI did drop off on the way a series of manifestos, tirades and slogans which, sometimes seen as the unacknowledged script for May of 1968, have continued to reverberate in anarchist and other new politics circles, as well as acting as the bad conscience of academic Marxism. By now many of the analyses are outdated, the Hegelianism suspect, and the faith in workers' councils no longer convincing. The same could be said of Marx, not just of his defense of women against the labor market, but even of his highest achievement, the analysis of the commodity form. Politically, the SI's greatest achievement was to renovate that Marxist analysis, replacing it with the idea of spectacle. Philosophically, that represented an understanding that the commodity form has a history. Hagiographic squabbling over the interpretation of the SI's texts is less interesting than working onwards from the period of Bretton Woods and the Cold War to our own time, the years of the WTO and Kyoto.

But history is a great tool (and as Santayana said, those who do not understand it are condemned to repeat it). This collection, which aims to sit beside Ken Knabb's SI anthology, brings 22 rare texts back into circulation, together with 11 essays (seven of them reprinted from the MIT Press journal October), placing them in their time and beginning, as the editor has it in a phrase cited from Jean-Marie Apostolides, "the phase of interpretation" (xvii).

Jonathan Crary's valuable chapter on the periodization of the spectacle cites Debord's statement that, in 1967, the spectacle was barely 40 years old. Taking 1927 as his date, he cites the perfection of television, the integration of communications and entertainment in synchronized sound film and the rise of fascism. Oddly, there's no mention of 1929, the Wall Street Crash and the global downturn that resulted in the Keynesian doctrine of a consumption-driven economy. Even Baudrillard, whose sense of history is misty, is clear on the centrality of the Depression to the history of simulation. As G.W. Bush rams the U.S. into immense public spending on arms, the old Keynesianism warms up again: get them working and they will spend their way out of recession. More significantly, they will buy symbols: logos, brands, entertainments that are increasingly self-advertising machines imbricated in dense networks of recycling attention from advert to sweatshirt that advertises the shop that advertises . . . Debord, at his best, was onto this game.

Sadly, the current lionization of the Situationists in the art world is less alert to the risk of branding. Historian of ideas Kristin...