| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | 20th-century philosophy |
| Birth Name: | Guy Ernest Debord |
| Birth Date: | 28 December 1931 |
| Birth Place: | Paris, France |
| Death Place: | Bellevue-la-Montagne, Haute-Loire, France |
| Education: | University of Paris (no degree) |
| School Tradition: | Continental philosophy Letterist International Situationist Western Marxism/Ultra-left |
| Main Interests: | Class struggle Commodity fetishism Reification Social alienation Social theory |
| Notable Ideas: | Dérive Détournement Psychogeography Recuperation Spectacle |
| Influences: | Karl Marx Anton Pannekoek Isidore Isou Comte de Lautréamont Georges Bataille Friedrich Engels Friedrich Nietzsche György Lukács Jean-Paul Sartre Frankfurt School Henri LefebvreMarquis de Sade Cornelius Castoriadis G. W. F. Hegel André Breton Dada |
| Influenced: | Jean Baudrillard John Zerzan May 1968 Paul Virilio Post-left anarchy Punk rock Ken Knabb Tiqqun Giorgio Agamben Alexandr Dugin |
| Signature: | Debord's Will.jpg |
Guy-Ernest Debord (; in French gi dəbɔʁ/; 28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International.[1] [2] He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
Debord is best known for his 1967 essay The Society of the Spectacle.
Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931. Debord's father, Martial, was a pharmacist who died when Debord was young. Debord's mother, Paulette Rossi, sent Debord to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy. During World War II, the Rossis left the villa and began to travel from town to town. As a result, Debord attended high school in Cannes, where he began his interest in film and vandalism.[3]
As a young man, Debord actively opposed the French war in Algeria and joined in demonstrations in Paris against it.[4] Debord studied law at the University of Paris, but left early and did not complete his university education. After ending his stint at the University of Paris, he began his career as a writer.[5]
Debord joined the Lettrists when he was 18. The Lettrists were led dictatorially by Isidore Isou until a widely agreed upon schism ended Isou's authority. This schism gave rise to several factions. One of them, the Letterist International, was decidedly led by Debord upon Gil Wolman's unequivocal recommendation.[6] In the 1960s, Debord led the Situationist International group, which influenced the Paris Uprising of 1968, during which he took part in the occupation of the Sorbonne. Some consider his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) to be a catalyst for the uprising.[7]
In 1957, the Letterist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association gathered in Cosio d'Arroscia (Imperia), Italy, to found the Situationist International, with Debord having been the leading representative of the Letterist delegation. Initially made up of a number of well-known artists such as Asger Jorn and Pinot Gallizio, the early days of the SI were heavily focused on the formulation of a critique of art, which would serve as a foundation for the group's future entrance into further political critiques. The SI was known for a number of its interventions in the art world, which included one raid against an international art conference in Belgium during 1958[8] that included a large pamphlet drop and significant media coverage, all of which culminated in the arrest of various situationists and sympathizers associated with the scandal. In addition to this action, the SI endeavored to formulate industrial painting, or, painting prepared en masse with the intent of defaming the original value largely associated with the art of the period. In the course of these actions, Debord was heavily involved in the planning and logistical work associated with preparing these interventions, as well as the work for Internationale Situationniste associated with theoretical defense of the Situationist International's actions.[9]
With Debord's 1967 The Society of the Spectacle and excerpts from the group's journal, Internationale Situationniste, the Situationists began to formulate their theory of the spectacle, which explained the nature of late capitalism's historical decay. In Debord's terms, situationists defined the spectacle as an assemblage of social relations transmitted via the imagery of class power, and as a period of capitalist development wherein "all that was once lived has moved into representation".[10] With this theory, Debord and the SI would go on to play an influential role in the revolts of May 1968 in France, with many of the protesters drawing their slogans from Situationist tracts penned or influenced by Debord.[11] [12]
In 1972, Debord disbanded the Situationist International after its original members, including Asger Jorn and Raoul Vaneigem, quit or were expelled. (Vaneigem wrote a biting criticism of Debord and the International.[13]) Debord then focused on filmmaking with financial backing from the movie mogul and publisher Gérard Lebovici (éditions Champ Libre), until Lebovici's mysterious death. Debord was suspected of Lebovici's murder. He had agreed to have his films released posthumously at the request of the American researcher, Thomas Y. Levin[14] .[15]
After dissolving the Situationist International, Debord spent his time reading, and occasionally writing, in relative isolation in a cottage at Champot with Alice Becker-Ho, his second wife. He continued to correspond on political and other issues, notably with Lebovici and the Italian situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti.[16] He focused on reading material relating to war strategies, e.g. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and he designed a war game with Alice Becker-Ho.[17]
Just before his death, Debord filmed (although did not release) the documentary Son art et son temps (His Art and His Times), an autobiography of sorts that focused primarily on social issues in Paris in the 1990s. It has been suggested that his dark depiction of this period was a suicide note of sorts. Both Debord's depression and alcohol consumption had become problematic, resulting in a form of polyneuritis. Perhaps to end the suffering caused by these conditions, Debord died by suicide on 30 November 1994, shooting himself through the heart. This was not the first time he attempted to end his life.[18]
Debord's suicide is as controversial as it is unclear.[19] Some assert that it was a revolutionary act related to his career. Due to his involvement with the radical Situationist International (SI), as well as his sadness at 'the society as a spectacle' being considered a cliché in later life, many think that Debord felt hopeless about the very society he was trying to shed light on. Debord was said to be "victim of the Spectacle he fought".[20] Among the many commentaries on Debord's demise, one scholar noted: "Guy Debord did not kill himself. He was murdered by the thoughtlessness and selfishness of so-called scholars (primarily trendy lit-criters) who colonized his brilliant ideas and transformed his radical politics into an academic status symbol not worth the pulp it's printed on…"[21]
Guy Debord's best known works are The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In addition to these he wrote a number of autobiographical books including Mémoires, Panégyrique, Cette Mauvaise Réputation..., and Considérations sur l'assassinat de Gérard Lebovici. He was also the author of numerous short pieces, sometimes anonymous, for the journals Potlatch, Les Lèvres Nues, Les Chats Sont Verts, and Internationale Situationniste. The Society of the Spectacle was written in an "interesting prose", unlike most writings in that time or of that nature. For Debord, the Spectacle is viewed as false representations in our real lives. The spectacle is a materialized worldview. The spectacle 'subjects human beings to itself'.[22]
Debord was deeply distressed by the hegemony of governments and media over everyday life through mass production and consumption. He criticized both the capitalism of the West and the dictatorial communism of the Eastern Bloc for the lack of autonomy allowed to individuals by both types of governmental structure. Debord postulated that Alienation had gained a new relevance through the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' – "a social relation between people that is mediated by images" consisting of mass media, advertisement, and popular culture. The spectacle is a self-fulfilling control mechanism for society. Debord's analysis developed the notions of "reification" and "commodity fetishism" pioneered by Karl Marx and Georg Lukács.[23] Semiotics was also a major influence, particularly the work of his contemporary Roland Barthes, who was the first to envisage bourgeois society as a spectacle and to study in detail the political function of fashion within that spectacle.[24] Debord's analysis of "the spectaclist society" probed the historical, economic, and psychological roots of the media and popular culture.
Debord's first book, Mémoires, was bound with a sandpaper cover so that it would damage other books placed next to it.[25]
Debord began an interest in film early in his life when he lived in Cannes in the late 1940s. Debord recounted that, during his youth, he was allowed to do very little other than attend films. He said that he frequently would leave in the middle of a film screening to go home because films often bored him. Debord joined the Lettrists just as Isidore Isou was producing films and the Lettrists attempted to sabotage Charlie Chaplin's trip to Paris through negative criticism.
Overall, Debord challenged the conventions of filmmaking, prompting his audience to interact with the medium instead of being passive receivers of information. As a matter of fact, his film Hurlements exclusively consists of a series of black and white screens and silence with a bit of commentary dispersed throughout.[26] Debord directed his first film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade, in 1952 with the voices of Michèle Bernstein and Gil Wolman. The film has no images; instead, it shows bright white when there is speaking and black when there is not. Long silences separate speaking parts. The film ends with 24 minutes of black silence. People were reported to have become angry and left screenings of this film. The script is composed of quotes appropriated from various sources and made into a montage with a sort of non-linear narrative.
Later, through the financial support of Michèle Bernstein and Asger Jorn, Debord produced a second film, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, which combined scenes with his friends and scenes from mass media culture. This integration of Debord's world with mass media culture became a running motif climaxing with "The Society of the Spectacle". Debord wrote the book The Society of the Spectacle before writing the movie. When asked why he made the book into a movie, Debord said, "I don't understand why this surprised people. The book was already written like a script". Debord's last film, "Son Art et Son Temps", was not produced during his lifetime. It worked as a final statement where Debord recounted his works and a cultural documentary of "his time".
Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003, translated and edited by Ken Knabb) includes the scripts for all six of Debord's films, along with related documents and extensive annotations.
On 29 January 2009, fifteen years after his death, Christine Albanel, Minister of Culture, classified the archive of his works as a "national treasure" in response to a sale request by Yale University.[27] [28] The Ministry declared that "he has been one of the most important contemporary thinkers, with a capital place in history of ideas from the second half of the twentieth century."[29] Similarly, Debord once called The Society of the Spectacle "the most important book of the twentieth century".[30] He continues to be a canonical and controversial figure particularly among European scholars of radical politics and modern art.
In a critical appraisal written after Debord's death, Régis Debray characterized his work as derivative of Ludwig Feuerbach (asking, for example, "Had nothing, then, taken place in history and philosophy between 1841 and 1967?") and essentialist, "rest[ing] on the idea of a generic nature, of man’s pre-existent essence."[31] For Debray, Debord's emancipatory vision is abstract and ahistorical: "It disclaims political mediation as a structuring instantiation of collective existence, along with technical mediation as a structuring instantiation of the hominization process. Nor does our author ever speak the language of technology or politics: such silence is typical of the moralist in all ages and climes. He fulminates from afar without taking a look up close."[32]