Anachronistic Distinctions.

Behind the scenes, Green ninja + hair dye commercial actress, 2014.

An article by Asger Jorn brilliantly attacked a society which accorded 'leisure' its highest social value and thereby, with the nodding complicity of managers, experts and sociologists, 'tried to sneak their way to a fully automated society' in which the individual, exhausted by work and dazed by pleasure, had lost any sense of himself as a unique subject.

(...)

This was because modern civilisation, argued all the Situationist writers, was based on a con-trick. Instead of living a life according to the principles of subjective desire, each individual was persuaded or conditioned (there was only a slight negligible difference between these two terms) into accepting the mediocre comforts of modern society. This was the process by which life was turned into an empty vessel, a 'spectacle', and it was the coercive power of this 'spectacle' which had to be opposed and fought in the most urgent terms. Glamour shots of bikini-clad sex kittens, images of commodified desire who were preening themselves or pouting à la Bardot, were placed alongside Situationist writings which were in equal measure imperious, sarcastic, aristocratic and contemptuous.

(...)

Back in Paris, Debord loudly claimed that he was not in the slightest bit interested in the activities of high-life international trash. Others detected an asperity in his tone which belied a certain jealousy of Rumney's easy access to high-life finance. More particularly, even at this stage, Debord was clearly interested in the possibility of having his life and work funded by a patron. This apparent dependence could be philosophically justified because, as Debord read it, it was a Renaissance model of artistic activity which placed art, politics and philosophy on a more intimate and human footing and therefore entirely separate from the twentieth-century model that dealt art as commodity. Secondly, it was a well-known commonplace that, as Machiavelli pointed out, contrary to appearance, such a relationship gave ultimate power to the artist, not the patron. The work of the Florentine artists of the early Italian Renaissance, who worked directly under the patronage of the Medicis but whose art was universal and spoke eternal truths, was clear proof of this fact. Debord was already reading at this stage not only Machiavelli's The Prince but also The Discourses, as well as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier which, along with the Bible and The Prince, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had famously kept by his bed. These books would accordingly become guiding works for Debord in later years.

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Most notably in late May Debord had given a lecture to a research group convened by Henri Lefebvre under the auspices of the prestigious Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique. The title of the lecture, 'Perspectives on conscious modifications in daily life', was pompous and academic enough to please Lefebvre's research students. The content was however an undiluted call to arms in the name of a revolutionary transformation. 'Everything depends,' Debord argued, 'on the extent to which you dare to ask this question: how do you live? How are you satisfied? Not satisfied? This must be asked without for a minute letting yourself be intimidated by the various adverts which are aimed at persuading you that you are happy because of the existence of God, Colgate toothpaste or the CNRS'. 

(...)

The book was published in an elegant, plain white jacket, with a small photograph of Debord and the rubric: 'Guy Debord, born in Paris in 1931, is the director of the revue L'Internationale situationniste. He has also made several films which are out of circulation.'

The text itself was divided into 221 theses, rigorously numbered and orderedn each one developing or building upon the previous argument or assertion so that, in the true Hegelian fashion which Debord admired, the theory as a whole contained the sum of its parts. If the first influence was thinkers such as Karl Korsch, Gyorgy Lukacs and Anton Pannekoek, who were considered to be the inheritors of the 'young' or 'true' Marx, the revolutionary theorist of alienation whom Henri Lefebvre had set in contrast to the official Marxism of the French Communist Party. To this extent, it seemed, The Society of the Spectacle could be read as part of the general debate on the French left outside the French Communist Party, a debate which included Edgar Morin, Henri Lefebvre, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, about the primacy of everyday life in revolutionary theory and practice.

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Debord does not simply attack the obvious visual manifestations of modern society - advertising, television and the mass print media. He analyses in a rather more nuanced fashion the way in which the fragmented aspects of modern life are brought together in the images which the spectacular society makes to represent itself. This process is most clearly seen, he says, in the development of the modern cult of celebrity which serves to represent all the qualities - happiness, tragedy, freedom - which are missing in the anonymous lives of spectators.

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In recent years, the term 'society of the spectacle' has itself become a cliché, entering the post-modern lexicon to describe any contemporary process, from the playful pursuit of designer consumerism, economic and cultural globalisation, the internet, celebrity worship or the way in which Western democratic political parties occupy interchangeable positions having abandoned the anachronistic distinctions of Left and Right. Having entered the language of contemporary life, the term 'society of the spectacle' is also somehow understood to imply a complicity with its illusory nature.

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The Situationist International did not approve of bombs, but it did not approve of hysteria either, especially when emotions swung away from the promise of revolution. On the morning of the 18 December a pamphlet entitled 'Il Reichstag bruccia?' ('Is the Reichstag burning?') could be found scattered around the Piazza Fontana and factories throughout Milan. It was signed by 'Friends of the Internationale' and published in the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who were condemned to death in Massachussetts in 1921 for alleged armed robberies and whose innocence became a cause célèbre throughout the world. The text had in fact been composed by the Situationist International and it accused the Italian state of having a hand in the Rome and Milan bombs. Terrorism was denounced as most commonly a 'primitive and infantile demonstration of revolutionary violence' and the fruit of 'failed revolution'. These particular massacres, it was argued, were, however, a new, more spectacular form of violence, sanctioned by the state in order to frighten and coerce the populace. This form of terrorism was the brutal exposed reality of the society of the spectacle.

When the Situationists wrote this text, which caused an outcry on the Left as well as the Right, few even on the extreme Left dared to think that this was possible let alone already happening. It would be several years before the role and the activities of the Italian intelligence services known as 'Gladio' and their hand in the bombings would be fully known and revealed in the international press. It was the Situationists who had been the first to unveil the new tactics mounted by the spectacular society in its self-defence, the deliberate provocation and even murder of citizens which would ward off threats from the insurrectionist Left with the so-called 'strategy of tension'. 

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The Real Split was not however a mere settling of scores. It also advanced and moved on many of the arguments of The Society of the Spectacle and, in particular, presented a withering analysis of modern conditions of production and consumption in which 'the executive is the epitome of the consumer-spectator'. This is because, unlike the genuine proletariat in the factories, the managerial or executive classes do not fully acknowledge their status as cogs in the machine of production, emphasizing their distance from the proletariat by consuming higher value consumer goods. This is, argued Debord, 'man as a thoroughly dependent creature who feels duty bound to lay claim to freedom itself, idealized in the semi-affluent nature of his activity as a consumer'. It was this man, 'the former student', Debord warned, who was also shaping the physical conditions of the modern world: 'The work and leisure requirements of the executive are what now dictate the transformations currently laying hold of our urban fabric, from office blocks down to the tasteless fare dished up in restaurants where his strident tones leave other diners in no doubt about how much training his voice has received from exposure to airport Tannoys.' The executive, the man who though he owned the world, was, said Debord, no more or less than 'le plouc', an old French slang word still in use, which denoted a gormless rural oaf, completely at odds with his environment. The same term, he went on, should be applied to women in modern society whose idea of liberation was to harbour the same needs and ambitions as the 'executive oaf'. The result of this process, in which 'executives always pretend to have wanted what they have got, and the distress occasioned by their secret dissatisfaction' was described by Debord as a new form of alienation, a 'gilded destitution'.

Andrew Hussey, The Game of War, Jonathan Cape, 2001 (various excerpts).