Mattews - Guy Debord's Politics of Communication (2025)

Kaira M. Cabañas Off Screen Cinema Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant Garde University Of Chicago Press (2015)

Paris Surrealism eulogised its 19th Century poetic ancestors for rebelling against prevailing modes of social subjectivation, championing their often intoxicated – and intoxicating! – breakdown of bourgeois subject constructions: Rimbaud’s famous dérèglement de tous les sens. Attempting to synthesise such acts towards wider revolutionary ends, Surrealism’s avant-garde successors the Situationist International developed the tactic of dérive in order to dismantle urban subjectivities, aiming to recompose them in new, revolutionary forms.Drawing on Foucault and Berardi, we ask to what extent these intoxicating de- and re-compositions of subjectivity replicate and prefigure the recombinant modes of subject formation characteristic of an emergent neoliberal biopolitics. Alternatively, do dérive’s subjective recompositions offer a route beyond these new governmental technologies for the reproduction and valorisation of increasingly precarious and fragmented urban subjectivities?

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2000

The Situationist International (SI) have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists' participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations 'never work/all power to the workers' councils. I examine how the SI's representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around brainwashing, conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which 'makes people live' are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and 'demanding the impossible' is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI's policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of 'situations', involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists' more practically-engaged labour within social movements.

Capital & Class, 2004

This article argues that the Situationist International (S.I.) forms an essential resource that prefigures the values and organisation of certain trends within the creative industries. Reviewing the history and key contributions of the S.I., it will discuss the tensions between its artistic and more overtly political elements. The central concepts of the spectacle, dérive, détournement, psychogeography and unitary urbanism are examined in the second section. The third section addresses the construction of ‘situations’, and earlier attempts at architectural situations. Situations, projects and resistance to the spectacle are the central contributions that can inform creative industries and cultural production. The final section explores possible future directions for the S.I., before examining the Situationists' contribution to creative resistance.

The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism

In Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (2001), Vincent Kaufmann argues that Debord and the Situationist International’s comprehensive critique of late-capitalist society includes what he calls “a politics of communication”1 that not only forms part of what the group originally identified as "unitary urbanism," but that also became increasingly important during what historians call their second phase. For Situationists, the end-game of a politics of communication was a conscious attempt to articulate a different praxis of freedom that would not only open up a new, unnamed mode of socio-cultural existence, but would also provide a kind of ‘Northwest Passage’ toward an unnamed, potential future that was not always-already-there. As Kaufmann points out, and we will explore this point in greater detail, Debord’s politics of communication “coincided to an even greater extent with a poetics of revolution.”

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2011

PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011

This PhD thesis formed the initial basis for my book Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (the paperback version was published by Haymarket in 2018 https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1203-debord-time-and-spectacle ). The book is quite different from the thesis: it is much longer, it uses very little of the original thesis material, and it develops and expands on many of the thesis' claims. It also looks at Debord's source materials in greater detail. The basic argument and structure are, however, similar. The original abstract for the thesis reads as follows:This thesis addresses Guy Debord's theory of spectacle through its primary philosophical and theoretical influences. Through doing so it highlights the importance of his largely overlooked concerns with time and history, and interprets the theory on that basis. The theory of spectacle is shown to be not simply a critique of the mass media, as is often assumed, but rather an account of a relationship with history; or more specifically, an alienated relation to the construction of history. This approach thus offers a means of addressing Debord’s Hegelian Marxism. The thesis connects the latter to Debord’s interests in strategy, chance and play by way of its existential elements, and uses these themes to investigate his own and the Situationist International’s (S.I.) concerns with praxis, political action and organisation. Addressing Debord and the S.I.’s work in this way also highlights the shortcomings of the theory of spectacle. The theory is based upon the separation of an acting subject from his or her own actions, and in viewing capitalist society under this rubric it tends towards replacing Marx's presentation of capital as an antagonistic social relation with an abstract opposition between an alienated consciousness and a homogenised world. Yet whilst the theory itself may be problematic, the conceptions of time, history and subjectivity that inform it may be of greater interest. Drawing attention to Debord's claims that theories should be understood as strategic interventions, and also to the S.I.'s calls for their own supersession, the thesis uses its observations on the nature of Debord's Hegelian Marxism to cast the theory of spectacle as a particular moment within a broader notion of historical agency. It thus contends that Debord's work can be seen to imply a model of collective political will, and offers initial suggestions as to how that interpretation might be developed.

This paper examines the role of nostalgia within situationist theory and politics.After introducing the Situationist International and the need to rethink the politicsof nostalgia, it is shown that nostalgia had both a productive and disruptive placein situationist thought; that it enabled some of their key insights yet alsointroduced incoherence and tensions into their political project. This productiveand disruptive relationship is explored through two of the situationists’ mainconcerns, the idea of the spectacle and the critique of urbanism.

Submitted as MA Thesis at the New School for Social Research, summer 2017

Cabinet, 2020

L'Internationale situationniste naît en 1957 de la rencontre entre plusieurs collectifs d'artistes européens, avant de se transformer au cours des années 1960 en groupe révolutionnaire. Elle est aujourd'hui reconnue comme l'une des dernières incarnations du modèle des « avant-gardes historiques ». Son principal penseur, Guy Debord (1931-1994), a été intronisé après sa disparition comme l'une des figures majeures des arts et de la philosophie politique des années 1950-1960. Première analyse sociologique du mouvement situationniste, cette histoire éclaire les parcours croisés des acteurs qui l'ont animé, décrypte leur relation à l'art et aux institutions artistiques, à la pensée marxiste et aux intellectuels, à la politique et au militantisme. En prenant parti pour une mise au jour lucide des pratiques et idées situationnistes, Éric Brun renouvelle notre connaissance des avant-gardes, de leurs formes de politisation et d'internationalisation, et engage une réflexion sur les apports et limites de ce courant subversif qui n'ambitionnait rien moins que d'établir une nouvelle civilisation. Une contribution majeure pour comprendre le rôle des artistes dans la contestation révolutionnaire et celui des « situs » en Mai-Juin 1968. Éric Brun est docteur en sociologie de l'EHESS et membre associé du CESSP (Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique).

Revisiting Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 2019

This essay provides an introductory overview of Guy Debord and his work with the Situationist International (1957-1972). An important link between Marx, Henri Lefebvre, Debord and the Situationists is their unique understanding of the sociological category of “everyday life.” This link is addressed in relation to Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Finally, derive, psychogeography and detournement are discussed as a part of a revolutionary praxis that works against Marxian commodity fetishism and Weberian instrumental rationality.

Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, 2022

Spectacle and Strategy: On the Development of Debord's Theoretical Work from 'The Society of the Spectacle' to 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' Introduction Debord's two books on 'spectacle' Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle was first published in 1967. It is, by far, his most famous and celebrated work, but it was followed in 1988 by another book that tends to receive comparatively little attention. This is his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: a book in which he outlined the changes that 'spectacular society' had undergone since The Society of the Spectacle's publication, and since the events of May 1968. The nature of these changes, and the way in which it presents them to the reader, makes Comments rather different from its predecessor. The Society of the Spectacle's compact and unforgiving theses present the social revolution that Debord and the Situationist International (S.I.) advocated as a real and immanent possibility, and despite the austerity of its text, the book is touched with a hint of almost messianic euphoria. Comments, in contrast, is written in a more accessible prose style, and although Debord's condemnatory tone is still very much present, the euphoria has gone. The book reflects on the retreat and suppression of the radical potential that May 1968 was held to have evidenced, and in doing so, it sets out an account of a social order that had succeeded in 'eliminating' almost 'every organized revolutionary tendency'. 1 Comments describes a society marked by confusion, manipulation, unverifiable claims, surveillance, and demagoguery, and which had engendered a set of impending crises that it could not hope to control. It closes by predicting that this condition would prompt 'changes in the art of government', 2 on the grounds that those tasked with maintaining this state of affairs would soon gain a clearer understanding of the advantages that it affords for managing a pliable populace. This vision of society was described as pessimistic, defeatist, and paranoid when Comments first appeared. 3 When read again today, however, its account of generalized disorder, discord, environmental damage and technologically facilitated manipulation can seem remarkably prescient. It is, I would suggest, a text that deserves to be revisited and reconsidered.