ON GUY DEBORD [1 ed.]

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MARCELO GUIMARÃES LIMA

ON GUY DEBORD

CADERNOS DO CEPAOS Occasional Papers November, 2023

1 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X Conselho Editorial / Editorial Board Amelia Alvarez Andrea Loparic Elvira Souza Lima Irene Barberis Marilena Chauí Pablo del Rio

(Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje, Madrid) (Universidade de São Paulo) In Memoriam (CEPAOS, São Paulo / Porto, Portugal) (RMIT University, Melbourne/ Metasenta Art Center) (Universidade de São Paulo) (Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje, Madrid)

Editor: Marcelo Guimarães Lima (CEPAOS, São Paulo)

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.cepaos.org

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ON GUY DEBORD Marcelo Guimarães Lima The expression "Society of the Spectacle" was conceived by Guy Debord and presented in his book published in 1967. The book and concept were the result of a militant experience that was at the same time, that is, inextricably political and artistic-cultural within the Situationist International, a movement dedicated to synthesizing and overcoming the role of the artistic avantgarde in the mid-twentieth century. As a brilliant theoretical-critical creation, the concept emerged as a diagnosis of the present and the revelation of its substantive tendencies, both superficial and profound, from a dialectical perspective following closely the ongoing historical process. In its public and mundane existence, the term underwent a process of banalization, a process in many ways already foreseen by the theory itself. Guy Debord's rejection of the many appeals to participate in the post-1968 media spectacle, in the subsequent consolidation of Neoliberal Society in the late 20th century, a society of systematized narcissism, of desublimated "self-love", fueled the construction of the myth of the Situationist artist-theoretician 3 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

as type of subversive "hero", as a "poet" of the negative in the period of ebb of the energies of rebellion and revolt displayed in the May 1968 movement in France. Thus, his vigorous denunciation of the moral and substantial misery of the times could also, by the process of general falsification proper to life turned spectacle, play the role of an "aromatic-spiritualized" complement (according to Marx's critique of religion as the "spirituality" of a world without spirit) of reality, that is, be annexed to the specific domain of ideology in the specific sense of the term as an anesthetic that helps to support the unbearable dimension of life in the society of universal commodification. At the same time, the theses of The Society of the Spectacle, dismembered and academically redesigned or deliberately falsified in diverse and conflicting perspectives, provided to some, or even several authors, a fertile source of critical or "critical", uncritical, "aesthetic", formal, recreated, dematerialized, etc., lucubrations for the general market of ideas in contemporary society. A global effort of recovery and neutralization, an "unconscious" effort in the best cases, marked from the beginning the reception of the theses and the figure of the subversive militant, avant-garde artist, thinker, "master" of literary form, among the many characterizations proper or inappropriate of the author 4 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

and ¨narrative persona¨ that indicated the impact of the ideas and of the individual Guy Debord in his environment and in his time. Exhaustively repeated, the expression “society of the spectacle” allowed epigones, misguided critics, journalists and many other semi-literate people to empty the concept of its proper dimension and theoretical effectiveness. And yet, the “le dispositif Debord” persisted and still persists as an original and in many aspects productive perspective also for our time,as the 60s and 70s of the last century can be properly characterized as the “prehistory” of our current period. The period of activity and impact of the French theorist and activist were also the decades that saw the early developments of the ideology and practice of Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction and response to advances in the global class struggle in the post-world war period of the 20th century expressed by students and youth struggles, the movements, conflicts and achievements of the working classes of the advanced industrial societies, anti-colonial struggles, popular struggles against the threats of atomic war, racial conflict in the central post-war power, conflicts and changes that marked ruptures in the established forms of domination and control in the period called Late Capitalism. 5 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

In 1988, Debord published his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, an updated, a retrospective and prospective analysis of his theses and the object of his theses, an analysis of the processes of intensification and updating of the spectacle in the world, and on the contemporary world as the soil for the development of the spectacle, of the spectacle as a “worldform” that reproduces and intensifies itself in the false transparency of the realm of the universalized commodity, of the form and mercantile processes made form and substance of human activity, of life formalized and subsumed in the autonomous circuit of the commodity, the “consummated” commodification of life as a means and end of domination. The “society of the spectacle”, that is: “the autocratic reign of market economy rising to the stage of irresponsible sovereignty and the set of new techniques of domination that accompany such reign” (Debord, G. – Comments on the society of the spectacle) , as the author explains, developed and deepened in the post-May 1968 period following technological developments driven by and having repercussions in the spheres of commodity production and its specific forms of appropriation of general wealth, transforming forms of life and demanding new forms of social control as a response to the capitalist crisis and a response to the globalized popular struggles of resistance and contestations of the time.

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The society of the spectacle developed further and, in this truly totalitarian process, that is, methodical, without respite and, by design, without alternatives, it reached a paradoxical dimension of “transparency”: by establishing itself as a universal medium, the spectacle withdraws itself from knowledge of its historical construction, that is, its contingent nature, the result of human actions and decisions within existing structures and processes of power, of its conflicts, the result of impositions, that is, of explicit or implicit violence, therefore the result of determined choices and initiatives, and thus subject to critical analysis, opposition and active resistance. In his Comments, Debord describes the society that emerged in the period after the May 1968 rebellion, in many aspects a fruitless revolt with regard to the essential tendencies of the continuing development of the spectacle. This society presented the following basic characteristics: continuous technological renewal, fusion between the economy and the state, widespread secrecy and its concomitant: universal surveillance, general falsehood that does not allow criticism, a perpetual present. Historical consciousness is relegated to a “clandestine condition¨ (Debord), historical imagination is degraded and the historical horizon disappears. A present without historical dimensions is a time without alternatives, of “automated” 7 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

reproduction of its conditions and processes, in which technological renewal itself in its tireless dynamism ends up contributing to the reproduction and deepening of established structures of domination. Important in this process is the role of the monopolies of communication. The role of the media is to make palatable, to rationalize and to present as result of individual choices decisions already taken by the dominant bodies in the lives of contemporary societies. To promote not only post-facto acceptance of what is imposed, but the “desire for”, that is, the modern citizen must internalize other people’s decisions as their own, take what is already established as the result of an “intimate” choice, “opt” for what is already given and decided, in short, according to Debord: to “follow orders”, orders disguised as free, reasonable and necessary information coming from a political and social system whose public face hides private decision-making spheres that are by nature confidential, secretive, outside of the sphere of public scrutiny. Debord's observations help us analyze the issue of public power, that is, of the State, in the neoliberal era. Contemporary neoliberal ideology (and practice) promotes the selective “demonization” of specific spheres of the state structure, eliminating everything that concerns the “collective interest” (however contradictory this may be in capitalist society), effectively concentrating decision-making bodies (eliminating 8 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

historically constituted democracy), initiatives that, in what may appear as a a kind of conceptual “paradox”, require coordination and de facto centralization of power, and demand developing to the limit, that is, excessively, in fact without limits, forms of control, of symbolic violence and material violence necessary to enforce related policies of intensified exclusion and exploitation. Neoliberal praxis, unfaithful to its own “liberalizing” theory, reinforces the repressive functions of the state structure given that the universality of the commodity form structuring all social relations in capitalism is at the same time, in contradictory ways, a factor of abstract unification and real disaggregation in society and, consequently, within the state structure itself. The “secret” (Polychinelo’s secret?) of Neoliberalism is the de facto fusion of State and Economy and its “negation” in the ideology of the “free market” as a market of autonomous and self-sufficient processes. This can be considered one of the keys to the real and imaginary dilemmas of our time, the context of the generalized crisis of politics and the forms and practices related to it, the crisis of historical imagination, the crisis of political identities and, in the concentrationary universe of the World-As-Commodity, the “recreation” or reduction of politics to a technical sphere of domination. Life mediated by the system of spectacular information transforms social processes into so many mirrors of the 9 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

spectacle, reproducing its logic. This also includes, according to Debord, the spectacular critique of the spectacle in which the logic of competition that presides over market economy is also expressed in the universal market of ideas with its delimited “innovations”, that is, ideological adaptations necessary to preserve the substantial continuity of the same material and mental processes. Under the appearance of diversity and disputes, the regulatory and despotic unity of spectacular power is imposed. And yet, the unity of the society of the spectacle is itself a contradictory unity, that is, structured on a fundamental split: the essential division which separates the actor from his action, where the producer cannot recognize him/ herself in his/ her activity, nor in what is produced, where the subject's activity occurs not as his/her own, but as that of some “other”. In the inverted world of the spectacle, the call for participation is at the same time an imposition of passivity. The spectacle is life splitted, life contemplated as a kind of gallery of insubstantial, fleeting images, like reflections, delayed gestures multiplied in a hall of mirrors. The fundamental split is also inscribed and manifests itself in power processes, in the amalgamation between public and private bodies and in the consequent competition between different groups and factions within and behind state institutions. A capitalism of competing mafias corresponds to a 10 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

state as the general administrator of crime. The state itself, as a reflected unit of a shattered world, breaks down into power groups and immediately reproduces at its core the divisions and disputes of interests of sectors, groups, criminal associations, illicit bodies, monopolies, oligopolies, etc. In this context, the abstract and managed “negation” of “politics in general” that prevails today, the “moralizing” criticism of socalled public power is itself inscribed in the circuit of the spectacle, an “aromatic” complement to the structures and processes of autonomous power in the face of the masses of its occasional voters. The world of the spectacle is, in fact, a split, torn world, whose only possible unity is given, according to Debord, by the spectacle itself. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord analyzed the period between the 1960s and 1980s and the transformations of the spectacular-mercantile system in Europe, which presents a kind of fusion between the initial models of the diffuse spectacle (USA) and the concentrated spectacle (the Stalinist Soviet Union), the first distributed in society, the second requiring centralized coordination, on the one hand a society that takes charge of lying to itself in its various instances, on the other hand a society that receives the lies provided by its central instances.

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European “originality”, in the exemplary cases of France and Italy according to Debord, the creation of the integrated spectacle, has to do with the intensified commodification of social life, popular and working class resistance to the process, and the political context of the post-68 with the reactionary offensive against workers' organizations, small radical left parties, revolutionary groups, against the autonomous initiatives of the working class and the various initiatives to contest the capitalist order. In this context, all weapons were used in the offensive to safeguard and intensify established power, coordinating legal and illegal, official and unofficial initiatives, close collaboration (and cooptation) between the repressive apparatus of states and their official and clandestine services with the extreme right, clandestine criminal groups and organized crime. The judicial and even physical elimination of opponents, police infiltration of militant circles and various provocative initiatives involving radical armed militancy or their simulacra: “media-mediated terrorism” appeared as an alibi for the unconditional defense of the State. In this kingdom of shadows the “ghosts of the revolution” (such as, for example, among the most notorious, the Moro case and the Red Brigades in Italy) were conjured to serve the process of destruction of the autonomous political initiatives of the popular classes and marginalized groups , the dismantling of 12 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

the radicalized labor movement and, subsequently, the offensive against the historical organizations of the working class (the mass parties already subjected to liberal democracy), a kind of historical “prelude” that preceded the final collapse of the so-called communist regimes of the Union Soviet and associated states, and their partners in Western Europe, among them the Communist Parties of relevance in the political life of France and Italy in the post-war period. The cooptation of Communist Parties by the power structures of European Liberal Democracy revealed itself, with the consolidation of the society of the spectacle, as one of the main paths for their extinction. The society of surveillance and control brought to paroxysm, as the formally totalitarian experiences of the 20th century attest, ends in structural impasse, universal distrust, the consequent conflict of direction and uncertainties of legitimacy, and the resulting paralysis of initiatives, equally demonstrating the impossibility of sectorial solutions to problems where the general disposition of society, and the resulting solidarity of its multiple instances, becomes the essential issue. The society of spectacle, as Guy Debord observes, is a profound transformation that forces leaders and followers, managers and those who are managed, to an almost infinite plasticity to the extent that forms of consciousness and action in force 13 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

yesterday lose their effectiveness and reason for being today. In this process, excess comes to characterize the power of the spectacle (everything that can be materially done will be done to consolidate domination) concomitantly with the mystification of the legitimacy and effectiveness of traditional forms of thought and action (for example: Democracy, National Sovereignty, etc.). Revolutionary action itself is compromised to the extent that its conditions of possibility, its roots in society, are affected by ongoing transformations. And yet, the revolutionary perspective is confirmed in that it points out the solidarity of the various instances and processes of the spectacle and the need, the urgency of global contestation. The division that the spectacle promotes within subjects ends up being externalized in society, dialectically, spectacular domination ends up generating its own negative. Debord's great merit was to have maintained coherence and lucidity in his analyses, preserving the revolutionary, militant inspiration, that is, unveiling and exploring possible ways to overcome the world of the Commodity-Subject, combined with the rigorous examination and description of the period of reflux of the energies of resistance and the mounting of Neoliberalism, providing and objective description and evaluation, without illusions but equally without concessions. 14 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

In this sense, beyond the appearances and beyond the narcissism of the present, of the present considered as causa sui, beyond the conceptual poverty of a time that presents itself as self-identical, that is, tautological and unidimensional, his works give us elements to reflect, to think about the dynamics of the constitution of our time and identify the symptoms of its future demise by way of conscious collective actions. In our period of multiple crises, political, economic, sanitary, ecological, of wars and massacres transmitted in real time, the future presents itself in the figure of an “immense open-air prison” as a kind of universal “concentration camp”, in the image of a Global Palestine. The Neoliberal world governance faces today a profound crisis that affects both its material infrastructure and its ideological hegemony. The depth of the crisis we are experiencing is proportional to the real challenges to the structures of class power in a period of profound structural changes, to the intrinsic and extrinsic difficulties that the global ruling class are trying to face with the resources so often used of manipulation, war, coup plotting, the threat of state terror in which the violence ordinarily exercised against the marginalized and subordinated classes extends to society as a whole and the forms of colonial domination become the modus operandi for social control in the global political centers. In this process, the structure of domination strips itself of its "civilized" garb and exposes 15 CADERNOS DO CEPAOS ISSN 2447-889X papéis avulsos / occasional papers November, 2023 Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas Armando de Oliveira Souza, S.Paulo www.cepaos.org

violence at the foundation of class domination in the center as in the global periphery. Debord´s writings and militant actions, immersed in its proper context, offered an early and forceful critical perspective that was able to, in different ways, anticipate the dynamics of contemporary history and the impasses of the spectacle as the constituted superstructure of domination in the centers of global power and extended to the periphery. We can say that he was able to read the future in the now.

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On Guy Debord by Marcelo Guimarães Lima © 2023, Marcelo Guimarães Lima is an edited translation of Sobre Guy Debord published by A Terra é Redonda July, 30, 2021 https://aterraeredonda.com.br/sobre-guy-debord/

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Marcelo Guimarães Lima, PhD, MFA, is a visual artist, art historian, researcher and writer. He is the author of Heterochronia and Vanishing Viewpoints (Metasenta, Melbourne, 2012) and of essays, papers and articles on the History of Art, Philosophy, Art Criticism, Psychology of Art and related subjects. He taught History of Art and Studio Art in the USA (University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Goddard College) and the UAE (American University of Dubai) and, as guest lecturer/ visiting scholar, in Spain (Universidad de Salamanca, Universidad Internacional de Andalucia). He is presently Independent Study and Dissertation Director at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Art - IDSVA, Portland, Maine, USA. https://mguimaraeslimatextos.blogspot.com contact: [email protected]

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