In all of its 15 years, no more than 72 people could claim the honour of having been in the S.I. was a geographically diverse but selective mix of artists and intellectual revolutionaries that cavorted mostly about Europe. is, at best, to apply a loofah to one’s ideological makeup and, at worst, to feel shoved into a game of ideological jousting waged by nihilists. Thus, to pass through his works or those of the S.I. Concessions and deference were not his forte. He dared his contemporaries to imagine a different life for themselves, one that was not defined by their participation in consumer society or fealty to prosperous, self-serving politicians. The spectacle was Debord’s conceptual gift to the public, a tool to get people thinking about ideology. The “spectacle” was his name for the network of socio-cultural-economic forces with a vested interest in keeping people ensnared in a set of permissible routines: go to work, go home, watch TV, cheer on your favorite political team and, between those obligations, buy something.
He wanted a life without “dead time,” so he positioned himself as the enemy of the daily grind, a scourge to consensus. Primarily, Debord longed to see the social order pass. The fact that so many of us might agree with that statement while remaining relatively apathetic has everything to do with Debord’s project, as well as with that of one of his intellectual successors, Jonathan Crary, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, about whom more later. We live in an age of dizzying economic inequality, manmade ecological disasters, and political deadlock. Surely this is worth considering, since life under global capitalism is, for most of the population, precarious at best-a point that no longer even seems worth qualifying. His example, however quixotic, calls into question how far any of us are willing to go to better our circumstances. A born polemicist, he thought wage-earning was a euphemism for wage slavery and that human beings deserved better than representative government we deserve direct democracy. Debord was a refusenik who never held a day job he was drawn to politics but contemptuous of established political parties.
This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Guy Debord (1931-1994), the filmmaker, revolutionary, writer, and consummate drinker who is most often identified as the secretary and guiding figure of the Situationist International (S.I.), as well as the author of the books The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988).
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