Guy Debord,an Untimely Aristocrat

The Chicken Is Poisoned

In recounting his friendship with Guy Debord, ex member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Daniel Blanchard describes an evening on the impasse de Clairvaux in Paris. Debord and Michèle Bernstein had invited Blanchard over for dinner and ended up serving a takeaway dish of chicken and fries, likely purchased on the Boulevard de Sébastopol from a shoddy hole in the wall. Despite the apology from his hosts, Blanchard assessed the situation easily enough:

I should have understood that my hour of disgrace had arrived. [. . .] Had I been less of a fool I would probably have read the signals more fully, and understood that the mixture of chicken-fries-plus-apology was a sort of self-contradictory compromise between the will to exclude me [. . .] and a desire to be indulgent. (Blanchard, 1999: 231)

Blanchard reflects on how, for Debord, a certain formal code of conduct, in friendship or in its dissolution, finds its way into a sensual palate, a spectrum of quality by which to employ reverence or insult. Whether it is chicken and fries or poulet chasseur, what one serves to dinner guests says more than what is literally the case.

How true this anecdote might be is secondary to its convenience for illustrating the disposition of Debord as, in the words of fellow member of the Situationist International (SI hereafter) Raoul Vaneigem, ‘a sensualist in the grand tradition’ (Vaneigem, 2012: 72). Yet what is this grand tradition, and can it help situate our own contemporary predicament, which seems to dissolve our relationship to the past with an ever-recurring displacement of one novelty by the next?

Tracing a lineage of what can be described, rather buoyantly, as Debord’s aristocratic sensibility, we discover not simply an aesthetic approach to strategically navigating social relations, or guidelines for outmanoeuvring an adversary, but also a contempt for honest labour, a repugnance for monetary transaction in cultural affairs, and a patrician disdain for conventional political gestures. Together these themes remain part of a legacy of an aristocratic past, one that, as will be examined here, informed Debord’s acrimony towards his own mid-20th-century moment. The following discussion will thereby reconstruct a genealogy into Debord’s thinking from late antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, and finally with an extended examination of the baroque, a concept that helps advance Debord’s diagnostic concept of the society of the spectacle.

This essay poses the question of what characterizes Debord’s specific style of critique, and our answer unfolds a portrait of a critical theory that explicitly recognized the strategic importance of thinking outside of its own time. Despite utilizing material from his entire oeuvre, including unpublished material from his archival notes, we will not proceed systematically or give exclusive focus to only one of Debord’s works as exemplary. Rather, what emerges is an intensity of spirit that penetrated every detail of his work, and our engagement with Debord’s embrace of aristocratic cultural fragments aptly draws its inspiration from that constellation of thinking so central to Walter Benjamin, in which a seemingly unrelated and anachronistic assortment of various details together gives meaning to a whole. It is in this way that our method is immanent to our content. Rather than piece together a linear system of Debord’s intellectual influences, we follow his own eclectic approach to history by similarly recognizing the strategic usage of pulling together fragments for a comprehensive whole without reducing the individual moments to a subordinate status. ¹ It is a portrait of Debord engaged in his own present as much as the past. Finally, our endeavour has the merit of focusing on an aspect of Debord’s thought and writing that has been almost universally ignored in both the Anglophone literature – which tends to heavily lean into the SI’s artistic background – and that pattern in French scholarship that reduces Debord to a mere classicist. Instead, our espousal of Debord’s engagement with the past helps to provide a corrective to any partial approach concerned with Debord and the politics of the SI, one in which the past is, in a sense, weaponized against contemporary capitalist society. ²

Through an excavation of the pre-capitalist origins of Debord’s thought, what will emerge as central is the critical importance of the faculty of discernment, an aptitude arguably whittled down by a capitalist society whose omnipresence of commodity indulgences panders to sameness as difference and difference as a potential new market. The overall aim is as such to emphasize the gravity of something so seemingly inconsequential as the acumen of judgement, how its cultivation stands in glaring contrast to the socialization requisite for participating in industrial culture, and how we might salvage its critical potential from an unlikely source, a seemingly irrelevant and distant past whose ruling elite can hardly be said to offer guidance for the abolition of class society. Yet as we will conclude, the manner in which Debord’s critical thinking incorporated elements of an aristocratic past satisfies such queries, and such an overall comportment fruitfully stands as a bulwark against the barbarism of contemporary culture.

A Noble Style of Antiquity

By all accounts, Debord was an autodidact, well-read not just in Marxism or political theory, but also in ancient warfare, poetry, history and classic literature. His education was entirely of his own navigation. Although initially enrolled at the Sorbonne for law, Debord never had any intention of attending classes. It was simply a ruse to gain access to the student canteens and bars, and to appease the concerns of his mother (Hussey, 2001: 43). As he writes in his autobiography, ‘I could not even think of studying for one of the learned professions that lead to holding down a job, for all of them seemed completely alien to my tastes or contrary to my opinions’ (Debord, 2004b: 12). Yet Debord’s archival notes in the Département des Manuscrits at the Bibliothèque nationale de France are awash with annotations on the varied writings of, for example, Thucydides, Dante, Gracián, Pascal, Tocqueville, Montaigne, Molière, Diderot, Chamfort, Stendhal, Goethe, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Saint Just, Chateaubriand and Melville. Debord indeed held ‘a distinct preference for the dead, especially those without posterity’ (Frayssé, 2017: 72), occasionally adopting in his writing the tone of bygone eras, such as the 18th century. As he wrote in a 1971 letter to Gianfranco Sanguinetti, ‘[i]t was then that the bourgeoisie employed the best and most dignified language. None of it remains today’ (Debord, 2004a: 448).

Yet it is from a period further back that we can detect a certain style of Debord’s writing, particularly in late antiquity and in the tenor and incisiveness of its historians. Both Sallust and Tacitus write from a Roman context of decadent decline, historians of the fin de siècle whose grim portraits of imperial duplicity mark a disintegrating era. It is a tone wholly captured, for example, by Debord and Sanguinetti’s ‘Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time’, a document that gives a verdict on the necessity of the SI’s self-dissolution and twilight. Furthermore, the historical works of late antiquity are marked by an attraction to archaisms, often appropriating the formulations of their predecessors, such as, in the case of Sallust, Cato’s Origines or even the opening line of Tacitus’ The Annals, which alludes to the beginning of Sallust’s own Catiline’s War (Sallust, 2007: xxvii, xxix). This quality may also be said to characterize the technique of détournement as practised by Debord, whose The Society of the Spectacle (1967) pulls together an eclectic composition of sociology, urbanism, historiography, psychoanalysis, political theory, philosophy and literature to form 221 theses of varying length. Amid his panoramically chosen sources, however, Debord finds only elective affinity, commandeering voices to serve his own purpose as a puppeteer might manipulate the wooden legs of an otherwise lifeless figure.

However, closer to Debord we find in Sallust and Tacitus the skill of a great condensation of thought. It is this ability for an almost surgical concision alongside a talent for brevity, harsh forms of speech and trenchant epigrams – which together can illuminate an entire epoch – that anticipates the scrutiny and contorted style of Debord’s prose. Knowingly or not, Debord inherits that classical approach to language which, against mere instrumentality, goes out of its way to forge a phraseology both archaic and poetic. As Debord himself admits in a 1974 letter to Sanguinetti, he was partial to a certain dignity of style and commends his recipient’s initial correspondence, whose contents contained a ‘nobility of tone and gracious stylistic ornaments [that] touch me more than I can say’ (Debord, 2005: 136)

It was with a certain nobility of spirit that Debord wielded an almost insatiable contempt for the organization of the world. Even amongst scoundrels he was in a class of his own, perhaps veering towards the antipathy for public opinion shared by the likes of Whistler, Kraus and Schönberg. Indeed, there is something aristocratic about Debord’s affront to the social conditions that surrounded him, employing cold detachment towards the object of his critique, and indifference where an opponent was hardly deserving of any recognition at all. ³ To those who knew him, Debord held a certain sovereignty about himself, cautiously distant until the moment was right. At the same time, the sternness and composure with which Debord reproached an undeserving society corresponded with a jubilance for life, a constant pursuit within the everyday of vital meaning within individual and social existence, accompanied with a lifelong indulgence for alcohol. ⁴ As he writes in his autobiography: ‘It is true that I have tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the lamentable laws of this era’ (Debord, 2004b: 13). With equal parts libertine-flâneur and military strategist, Debord was, in the words of Michèle Mochot, ‘courageous in his dislikes because he was indifferent to most people and things. He would say things like “gaiety is vulgar”’ (Hussey, 2001: 109).

Such a disposition – combined with a renowned aversion to wage labour and the alienated world of work, a crux of the SI’s critique of modern capitalist society more generally ⁵ – elicits somewhat of a pseudo patrician orientation to the world, dignified in its contempt for the lowly and alienated conditions of modern life. As Vaneigem has written:

It must be said for the nobles that they never forgot either their dignity or the lack thereof that characterized their bondservants: the aristocratic contempt for work reflected the master’s contempt for the subject classes; work was the expiation to which serfs were condemned for all eternity by the divine decree which, for impenetrable reasons, had willed their inferiority. (Vaneigem, 2012: 38)

Yet as these comments make clear, if we find within Debord a certain nobility of style – one that is not in fact materially determined by those confined to a life of drudgery – we must be more specific. We are not here dealing with an actual historical aristocrat of the manorial system parading blood lineage; Debord, for instance, ‘never talked about his family’ (Hussey, 2001: 13). ⁶ Instead, to explore the peculiarity of Debord’s aristocratic sensibility more closely, it is the Italian Renaissance and its idea of nobility that advances our portrait.

A Fragile Historical Feast

While it could be said that during the Middle Ages the honour associated with the nobility was first and foremost the mark of a particular class, in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance we find a dramatically different significance attached to this sentiment of distinction. As Jacob Burckhardt describes in his unmatched 1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, we find instead an

enigmatic mixture of conscience and egotism which often survives in the modern man after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new strength. (Burckhardt, 1990: 273)

As his archival notes can attest, Debord read and took copious notes on Burckhardt’s work, drawing attention to this theme of individuality. The Renaissance provides an exemplar of aristocratic behaviour without any absolute allegiance to birth. Of course while title still persisted in bestowing social status, intellectual prowess and reputation were also capable of undermining the position of family name. What became increasingly important for the recognition of honour was ‘the power which each possessed he held in practice as in theory’ (1990: 77). It was a nobility of personal merit, albeit with an almost parodic passion for titles, however meaningless. Such an ethics of stature undoubtedly had its basis in the Renaissance’s aesthetic model for life, a social distinction reflected by cultural and educational refinement for which the style of conduct itself was propagated as an art. The Renaissance is a remarkable example, yet not without qualification, of an era which lived ‘for the great purposes of culture’ (1990: 8), and it is here that we find its great affinity for Debord’s thinking.

Within The Society of the Spectacle, Debord engages with the Italian Renaissance, a period that inaugurated a profound break with the immutable cosmology of the Middle Ages. Here Debord largely follows the analysis of Burckhardt for which the period stands as an emergent spirit conscious of its own historical possibility in pursuit of beauty and nobility of form while yet remaining in reverential awe of antiquity (Debord, 1994: §139, §189). This accoutrement of an idealized past served to develop individual splendour and humanist magnificence overflowing with historical consciousness. Art, politics, philosophy – all stood as conduits for mankind’s capacity to flourish amidst a hitherto non-existent atmosphere of social equality and respect for individuality, most notably within the 15th century. Society itself was a matter of art, the exact opposite of empty and formulaic etiquette which proliferated during the Middle Ages. Prescribed modes of entrance were subject to varied forms of social decency, intellectual freedom, wit, graceful dilettantism and polished dignity. For all this, Debord discovered in the Renaissance a ‘new form of possession of historical life’, a ‘fragile historical feast’ (Debord, 1994: §139) that would concede to the illustrious and elevated historical consciousness emblematic in the arts of the baroque in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Debord’s explicit affinity for Italy emerges during the early 1970s, and both Venice and Florence held considerable charm for him. The former was in a sense the embodiment of Debord himself. ⁷ As for Florence, its spirit – at once attentively critical, trenchantly political and unrelentingly poetic – can undoubtedly be seen in the demeanour of Debord. ‘An easygoing contempt for everything and everybody was probably the prevailing tone of society’ (Burckhardt, 1990: 114). Yet Florentine criticism and disdain was not merely a scholastic exercise, any more than critical theory was for Debord. It often unfurled intense and violent political struggle, as can be seen in the life of 16th-century sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, a figure of Florentine controversy not altogether dissimilar to the aristocratic sensibilities of Debord. Yet Cellini, like Debord, was not simply an artist but a man of action, fully indulgent with an acquired taste for crime (Debord, 2004b: 15, 17). Cellini was infamous for his violent temper, jumping, at a moment’s notice, ‘from words to weapons when he feels his honour, courage, or artistic abilities have been called into question’ (Cellini, 2002: xi). For both, their dignified stature was chiselled out of a complete disrespect for surrounding authority. Their respective autobiographies share a number of similarities, not least of which are their tones. Cellini recounts a life of ‘having grown familiar with misfortune’ (Cellini, 2002: 205), and that, as he begins the work, ‘I have achieved many noble exploits, and still I live’ (2002: 3). Debord’s Panegyric starts with much of the same resonance:

All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles. Such circumstances would doubtless suffice to prevent the most transparent of my acts or thoughts from ever being universally approved. (Debord, 2004b: 3)

The congruence between Debord and Cellini is in a shared character for boldness in aesthetic sensibility, individual fortitude and insolence towards external command. Yet a more substantive interrelation between Debord and the Renaissance can be found in authors of the period that Debord held in high regard, most notably the work of Baldesar Castiglione and Baltasar Gracián. In both their works Debord discovered social and political guidance, models of social conduct, classical ideals of fellowship and strategic manoeuvring.

We begin with Castiglione, whose 16th-century The Courtier is emblematic of the High Renaissance of Italian city-states, affirming medieval ideas of chivalry, classical virtues and humanistic aspirations, a compendium of aristocratic behaviour at a time when medieval values were in fact dissolving. Like the late antiquity tradition of appropriating formulations for alternative purposes, Castiglione is also part of that prehistory of détournement, scattering The Courtier with variations on passages from Plato, Plutarch, Cicero and Livy. The ideal courtier, derived from Castiglione’s experience at the Court of Urbino, must bring together military and literary prowess, deployed in equal measure and under a general disposition of prudence – one not, however, without the incentive for sensual indulgences. The book resonates with a notion of individuality supremely at odds with its surroundings, and that only a strategic outflanking of intellectual aptitude, subtlety of etiquette, a refined and discerning palate and a reliance on one’s own stock can yield a life of meaning. It is a portrait of Debord himself, even if he was only to read Castiglione closely in the late 1980s (Debord, 2010: 298).

Yet contemporary impressions of reading both The Courtier and, for instance, Debord’s Panegyric prompt a similar impatience over their musings. ‘It is hard, indeed, to think of any work more opposed to the spirit of the modern age. At an obvious level, its preoccupation with social distinction and outward forms of polite behavior creates an intense atmosphere of artificiality and insincerity’ (Castiglione, 1967: 15). ⁸ While these comments might refer to Castiglione, it is not altogether uncommon to find similar reactions around the myth of Debord’s persona: distasteful to the modern reader is the portrait of a selfish individualism combined with a snobbery that conceals its opportunism with a veil of refinement. Such responses, however superficial, speak to the way in which Debord utilized an aristocratic deployment of discrimination thoroughly echoed by Castiglione, one which upholds the art of strategy. Indeed Debord revered the skill of seizing upon the situation and its advantage, a point which will be explored more thoroughly below.

But let us first proceed to Gracián, whose vision of the world is bleaker than that of his predecessor Castiglione. Gracián’s 17th-century The Art of Worldly Wisdom is, with a markedly aristocratic sensibility, a collection of maxims on achieving distinction, on teaching temper and a guide for knowing how and when to judge and act. As Maurer writes in his introduction, the collection ‘revolves around a duality dear to the seventeenth century and to our own: it sees life as warfare involving both being and seeming, both appearance and reality’ (Gracián, 1992: v). Here one must adapt to the circumstances of the situation, a strategic ethics of camouflage which held to the importance of human resource and industry, self-mastery and other forms of prudence. With similarities to the work of Debord in abundance, Gracián repudiated spectacular illusions and his brevity of style was unmatched since the time of late antiquity. Neither does Gracián hold the hands of his readers, often withholding meaning until the time is right and concealing his true intentions. Like Debord, it can hardly be said that Gracián courts and flatters his readers, remaining adamantly opposed to crowd-pleasing and taking refuge in the strategy of dissimulation in order to avoid the vulnerability of being identified under full illumination (1992: §13)

On the whole, Gracián advanced the notion that one’s life should be lived as high art, and so here ethical and aesthetic strategies coalesce. The correlations with Debord are overwhelming, most notably with, on the one hand, a notion of nobility as ‘fertile intelligence, deep powers of judgment, and a pleasant, relevant taste’ (1992: §298), but also, on the other, instruction on how to navigate the guile of an adversary through manipulation, an idea that becomes explicit with Debord’s appreciation for the baroque and in particular with the figure of the Cardinal de Retz.

Bedside Reading

The comportment of Jean François Paul de Gondi, the Cardinal de Retz, was always guided by irreverent manoeuvrings. Here was a man, coadjutor of the Archbishop of Paris during the mid-17th century, whose life seemed to be guided by the axiom that everything is in its appearance. Retz conspired and orated his way as leader of the Fronde, a series of civil wars in France during the minority of Louis XIV. The events of his Memoirs depict a jeu de guerre in which deception abounds on all sides. The tactical movements of such a war – submerged in the pessimism of an increasingly disillusioned court nobility – consisted not in the clout of artillery but in the cunning art of persuasion and insinuation, seduction and flattery, whisper and influence, quiescence and deceit.

No stranger to conspiracy, Retz embodied a theatrics integral to a balance of forces. As he declared, ‘nothing touches and moves the common people, and even companies who hold a near resemblance to them, so much as a variety of spectacles’ (Gondi de Retz, 1774: 186). Indeed, for Retz, a personnage was at its most influential when the number of promises exceeded the number of pistols and flirtatious wit rather than bravery brought one closer to victory. The mind of Retz excelled in its baroque character as an intensely ephemeral engagement with the world. His opportunism wielded an intense and grandiose bravura within the burlesque combat of the period. His was an era consummating

the subjectivization of the artistic world-view, the transformation of the ‘tactile’ into the ‘visual’, of substance into mere appearance, conceiving the world as impression and experience, regarding the subjective aspect as primary and emphasizing the transitory character inherent in every optical impression. (Hauser, 1999: 160–1)

Indeed, the courtly Catholic baroque of Retz’s moment proliferated an awareness for the divergence between appearance and reality. An impetuous and monumental sensualism, coupled with the decorative and ultimately pictorial tendency that traversed the repoussoir politics of the time, gave credence to an increasingly optical view of reality. The baroque dissolution of the linear into an infinite perpetual movement, resisting capture as it were, is embedded within the feinte of Retz’s opacity.

It is Retz’s attention to strategy in a world construed as a stage and therewith in the centrality of appearances in times of political and social duplicity that would, nearly three centuries later, leave a lasting impact on Debord. The exercise of strategy within an expressly baroque environment, in which any uniform or forthright approach meant, in all likelihood, defeat – a fraudulence internalized for good reason by Molière’s Tartuffe and illustrated by Hegel’s noble consciousness – was a tactical insight that remained with Debord throughout his life. Retz was, in the words of Vaneigem, ‘Debord’s bedside reading’ (Vaneigem, 2015: 154). Both were embedded in ages of treacherous ambiguities and shared a ‘growing distaste for the all too clear and the all too obvious’ (Hauser, 1999: 163). They would each adhere to the virtue of calculated foresight and tactical adaptability, imploring attention towards le moment décisif. ⁹

Not an arbitrary association, the words of Retz themselves appear in Debord’s writings throughout his life. First within a terse article of Potlatch No. 26, an anonymous Debord pens ‘The Good Example’, a short comment which upholds a characterization of Retz found in a biography by Pierre-Georges Lorris: ‘From defeat to defeat, the Mémoires proceed, until the final disaster. . . . His Mémoires do not manifest the despondency of the conquered, but the amusement of a gambler. . . . Retz achieved the only goal he set himself.’ ¹⁰ The vernacular and imagery of a player engaged in a game of considerable stakes is a pattern not lost on Debord, himself often portraying social conflict as a game of wits in which subtle innuendo and sleight of hand has more strategic merit than outright declarations. On 29 October 1990, Debord would even compose ‘Notes on Poker’, whose seven theses emphasize a number of strategic orientations not altogether distinct from the tactics of Retz. First and foremost, ‘bluffing is [at] the center of the game’ and, channelling the manoeuvrings of Retz, Debord reminds the reader that ‘[o]ne must know how to employ the kairos of one’s forces at the right moment’. Again alluding to the manner in which the crafty cardinal conducted himself by selectively wielding his personnage, Debord continues:

The player who has understood the purely theoretical existence of the bluff will win by using their hand and their adversaries’ perceived reactions as their guide. It is no concern of mine if the other player wants to bluff. As the flight of fancy takes him, he, on the contrary, will often believe that the one bluffing is me. (Debord, 2006b: 1790) ¹¹

However, the relationship between Retz and Debord is not without differences. Unlike Retz, Debord cared little for his own reputation and was vocally never hindered by such an impediment. The image of Retz he so carefully creates of himself cannot be said to characterize the personnage of Debord which, as systematically documented in his 1993 essay ‘This Bad Reputation’, was well outside his control. As he contends against the judgements of journalist Jean-François Bizot: ‘I do not write like Cardinal de Retz. I have inevitably anticipated what I will put into my “works” before writing them, since they are intended to be disagreeable portraits of current society, and they have been recognized as lifelike.’ With a concluding quotation from Retz himself, Debord adds that ‘[b]ehind the rather delirious reproaches that I write like the classical authors, there’s most often been envy because I have read the classics and have sometimes ventured to reason like them’ (Debord, 2006a: 1823, 1825). In this way, Debord is actually an inverted mirror image of Retz, hardly ‘an accomplished poseur’ and thoroughly unconcerned ‘to conquer the opinion of posterity’ (Watts, 1980: 62, 103).

The Fog of War

As an author who once professed to ‘never give explanations’ (Debord, 2006c: 70), Debord’s attention to war theory, strategy and chance warrants specific focus. Indeed an overwhelming amount of his archival notes is devoted to war strategy and a scrupulous attention to the history of both modern and ancient warfare. Standing above the rest, however, is the inspiration drawn from the writings of Prussian military general Carl von Clausewitz. His most notable work, On War (1816–30), derives from his experiences in the Napoleonic Wars with the Royal Army at the turn of the 18th century and expounds a theory of war that had revolutionized the prevailing positive doctrines grounded at the time within the methods of the natural sciences. The period witnessed a search for immutable and fundamental ‘principles’ of war strategy akin to the certainty of a Newtonian or Galilean science. Clausewitz, however, stands as a categorical rejection of these approaches to war theory, specifically with attempts to construct grand ‘principles of war’ with mathematical invariability. ¹² For Clausewitz, there is an uncertainty that adds to the difficulty of properly gauging, measuring and predicting anything within conflict.

Positive doctrines fail to grasp that everything in war is variable, that the actions and effects of moral and intellectual agents in war are fundamental factors for which opponents reside within a mutually constitutive relation. Such is the case that, for Clausewitz, ‘[o]n no account should theory raise it to the level of a law’ (Clausewitz, 1984: 91). Immutable conviction has a minimal role to play within strategy and runs the risk of degenerating into obstinacy (1984: 108, 178–9). While presumptions and anticipations abound when moving against the enemy, a point extracted from both Clausewitz and Gracián that Debord retained within his archival notes (Debord, 2018), the myriad of volatile circumstances in war prevent any stringent a priori principles from guaranteeing victory. Clausewitz wants to strategically think the simultaneously contradictory factors of war and, for Debord, ‘[t]o think dialectically and to think strategically is the same thing’ (Debord, 2018: 430). Debord observes the way in which Clausewitz made use of a certain, albeit general, understanding of dialectical thinking to uncover, on the one hand, the antinomic nature of opposing positive doctrines on war and, on the other, the experiential, historical and variable nature of war.

In light of the foregoing, Debord’s writing has, unsurprisingly, always proceeded with the caution and meticulous precision of a war strategist. ¹³ For example, in introducing his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord forewarns his reader that:

I obviously cannot speak with complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody. Our unfortunate times thus compel me, once again, to write in a new way. Some elements will be intentionally omitted; and the plan will have to remain rather unclear. Readers will encounter certain decoys, like the very hallmark of the era. (Debord, 1998: 1–2) ¹⁴

Debord finds himself manoeuvring inside a ‘social reign of appearances’ where no ‘central question’ can any longer be posed ‘openly and honestly’ (Debord, 1970: §101). And yet it remains the case that Debord is not without the strength to write the predicament in which he finds himself, one that is thoroughly binding.

A Nightmarish Baroque

Our survey will now culminate with a more conceptual approach to the influence of the baroque on Debord’s thinking, specifically by emphasizing the significance of wholeness within baroque composition. While of course there is a complex and intricate history of interpreting the baroque (Wellek, 1946), certain keynotes can nevertheless be brought to the surface for our present purposes. In its emphatic proliferation of florid façades and arabesque ornamentation, baroque opulence, as if liberated from a disciplined regimentation, bursts into an almost hyperbolic spectacle of surfaces. Here a central topos of the baroque is in its allusion to an interior of great depth solely through an excessively adorned surface show, an almost derangement of appearances through an infinite play of differences within a panorama of transitory splendour. Heinrich Wölfflin’s seminal Principles of Art History (1915) depicts the baroque as an accommodation of contradictions that preserves tension amongst its disparate elements. With overarching oppositions that nevertheless integrate differences, the baroque brings together the unlike without cancelling out distinction – a unity bereft of homogeneity. A complementarity of opposites in and through an omnivoyant world of restlessly shifting appearances thus comes to define the baroque. We find a harmonious unity in which particular elements lose all independent privileges (Wölfflin, 2010: 50). The baroque expounds a coherent whole of exuberant façade yet without relinquishing the impression of perpetual continuance and the incomplete.

With this description we discover two competing conceptions of the baroque in the work of Debord. The first has received cursory mention in the literature, with commentators most frequently evaluating Debord’s appreciation for the baroque in terms of the fluidity and irreversibility of temporality, its feeling for the ephemeral and for the general mingling of aesthetics with history. ¹⁵ It is with this dimension of the baroque that the music of Debord’s films can be properly evaluated. Baroque music is frequently employed in his films, most notably with the alluring yet mournful sonata of Michel Corrette, Les Délices de la Solitude, Op. 20 No. 6, which accompanies parts of the film version of The Society of the Spectacle. In a 1973 letter to Sanguinetti, Debord writes that ‘[t]he Corrette is marvellous. It is the only music in the film. It isn’t “the song of the spectacle,” but the song of its negation accompanying the interruptions of real life and revolution: notably the sequence devoted to the occupied Sorbonne’ (Debord, 2005: 89). ¹⁶

There is also a way in which the very method of détournement encompasses a baroque spirit, an appropriation of pre-existing materials to foment a critical affront to a wholly new context. As Debord writes, ‘[t]his style, which embodies its own critique [. . .] is manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts’ (Debord, 1994: §206). Yet if the baroque nature of détournement is to be brought to the fore, particular examples offer best illustration, specifically with the critique of urban planning found within the SI’s prehistory. In ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, written in 1953 by Ivan Chtcheglov as an internal document for the Lettrist International, a ‘baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge’ (Chtcheglov, 2006: 6) is given elucidation through a new vision of space within the urban environment. In the Lettrist International’s ‘Proposals for Rationally Improving the City of Paris’, we find, in the most concrete of terms, how a baroque composition might completely reimagine the relation between part and whole within urban experience:

The subways should be opened at night after the trains have stopped running. The corridors and platforms should be poorly lit, with dim lights flickering on and off intermittently.

The rooftops of Paris should be opened to pedestrian traffic by modifying re-escape ladders and by constructing bridges where necessary. Public gardens should remain open at night, unlit. (In a few cases, a steady dim illumination might be justified on psychogeographical grounds.)

Street lamps should all be equipped with switches so that people can adjust the lighting as they wish.

With regard to churches, four different solutions were proposed, all of which were considered defensible until appropriate experimentation can be undertaken, which should quickly demonstrate which is the best.

G.-E. Debord argued for the total destruction of religious buildings of all denominations, leaving no trace and using the sites for other purposes.

Gil J. Wolman proposed that churches be left standing but stripped of all religious content. They should be treated as ordinary buildings, and children should be allowed to play in them.

Michèle Bernstein suggested that churches be partially demolished, so that the remaining ruins give no hint of their original function (the Tour Jacques on Boulevard de Sébastopol being an unintentional example). The ideal solution would be to raze churches to the ground and then build ruins in their place. The first method was proposed purely for reasons of economy.

Lastly, Jacques Pillon favored the idea of transforming churches into houses of horror (maintaining their current ambience while accentuating their terrifying effects). (Lettrist International, 2006: 12–13)

We see here how it is that members of the SI envisaged what Debord referred to as a ‘new architecture’ that was to ‘begin with an experimental baroque stage, the architectural complex – which we conceive as the construction of a dynamic environment related to styles of behavior – [and] will probably détourn existing architectural forms’ (Debord and Wolman, 2006: 19–20, emphasis added)

From the grandiose copies Rubens made of Titian, with their imposing appearances and great theatrical gestures, to the sweeping melodies of the fugue, the baroque dissolves linear form into the ever transitory and immeasurably infinite. Indeed, for Debord the baroque signified the art of the passage of time against any eternal fixity, ‘the art of a world that had lost its center with the demise of the last mythic order recognized by the Middle Ages [. . .] An art of change was obliged to embody the principle of the ephemeral that it recognized in the world’ (Debord, 1994: §189). The influences of the baroque on Debord range from the aforementioned aphorisms of Spanish Jesuit Gracián, to the Castilian poetry of Jorge Manrique, from Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) to the German literary criticism of Richard Alewyn’s L’univers du Baroque (1959). Most prominently, however, is Catalan essayist Eugenio d’Ors’ Lo Barroco (1935), which bequeathed to Debord various conceptual and artistic insights. It is the work specifically of Huizinga and d’Ors that allows now a second conception of the baroque in Debord’s work to come to the fore, one almost never examined in the literature.

With Huizinga and d’Ors, Debord inherits a conception of the baroque that is less a specific period within art history than a cyclical recurrence traversing a myriad of cultural contexts. For Huizinga, the 17th-century baroque had developed into a categorial scope exceeding its period. Not simply a definite style of architecture and sculpture, the baroque, beginning with various German and Austrian scholarship at the end of the 19th century, came to entail a vast complex of ideas. As a result, painting, poetry, literature, fashion and even politics came to be characterized as measuring up to a concept of the baroque. On the whole, the category invoked ideas of conscious exaggeration and the baroque becomes the ‘general tendency to overdo things’ (Huizinga, 2016: 182).

D’Ors instilled within Debord a conception of the baroque as a culturally constant eon, not reducible to a particular period in art history but of a general cultural disposition towards the relaxing of discipline in which ‘spontaneity takes on a kind of divinity’ (D’Ors, 2010: 82). In his archival notes on Lo Barroco, Debord even highlights the baroque as a Weltanschauung. ¹⁷ For d’Ors, there is a fundamental dynamism that characterizes all baroque works, a tendency towards the canonization of movement, ‘as opposed to the parallel tendency toward stasis, rest, reversibility that characterizes rationality and everything classical’ (D’Ors, 2010: 83). Here d’Ors propounds the baroque as an abasement of reason, as the usurpation of foreground in a holistic accentuation of particulars, whether in the tectonic of a building façade, a painting, a musical composition or even within political institutions. By rejoicing in oppositions, the baroque emerges as a unity of contraries or Schleierantithese whose reconciliation absorbs differences as much as it produces them out of its surface show. It resolves any tension between reality and appearance (Alewyn, 1959: 86–7).

With this transhistorical concept of the baroque, everywhere multinuclear patterns are affirmed and coalesce in a continuous whole that collapses any absolute distinction between appearance and essence. However, as we continue to follow thesis 189, itself the longest thesis of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord pivots this logic of the baroque to characterize the spectacle itself, that diagnostic critical concept for a society dominated by appearances. It ought not to be forgotten here that the organization of appearances, rather than appearances themselves, is the object of Debord’s critique. This is the point whereby we find not only a second rendition of the baroque outside of the aforementioned elements of the ephemeral and temporal, but one which offers an abridged portrayal of what we might term the spectacular logic of the society of the spectacle (Russell, 2021). Indeed, the second half of thesis 189 characterizes the spectacle as a rationalization of the baroque, importing into it a higher level of rational unity that coheres together heterogeneous particulars. In a word, the baroque becomes for Debord, in parodic form, an abridgment of spectacular logic:

The baroque ensemble, a unity itself long lost to the world of artistic creation, recurs in a certain sense in today’s consumption of the entirety of the art of the past. The historical knowledge and recognition of all past art, along with its retrospective promotion to the rank of world art, serve to relativize it within the context of a global disorder which in turn constitutes a baroque edifice at a higher level, an edifice into which even the production of a baroque art, and all its possible revivals, is bound to be melded. The very fact that such ‘recollections’ of the history of art should have become possible amounts to the end of the world of art. Only in this era of museums, when no artistic communication remains possible, can each and every earlier moment of art be accepted – and accepted as equal in value – for none, in view of the disappearance of the prerequisites of communication in general, suffers any longer from the disappearance of its own particular ability to communicate. (Debord, 1994: §189)

While Debord’s specific usage here refers to museums – in which the succession of different styles and forms renders the entirety of art history equivalent to the patron as the commensurate debris of all periods and past civilizations – we find plenipotentiary in the example the entirety of spectacular logic. Under the spectacle, enumerative images and masses of detail are rendered into a diabolical harmony, a cheap eclecticism whose fresco surfaces offer unrelenting variation in and through agreement. The historical consciousness expressed by Thucydides, for example, can therewith be contrasted with that of Eusebius of Caesarea from the ubiquitous perspective of spectacular logic, through a universal continuum in which all of the past is rendered interchangeable: the relation between historical moments denies while affirming difference insofar as it contains the identity of identity and non-identity. It is here that we find the crux of spectacular logic as essentially baroque.

In this atmosphere, the objects of the museum set alongside one another and coerced into surrendering their meaning to the meaning of the mediation imposed between them provides adequate expression to a predominant mode of social mediation for which diversity of choice is celebrated as an end in itself. Pivotal to this spectacular logic remains the objectivity of the money-form and the reign of general equivalence. It is not simply coincidental that this forcible conciliation of like with like shares an unspoken affinity with the exchange relationship concretized in the money-form. Unremitting concrete detail, including historical knowledge, is manufactured in an elaborate edifice of spectacular logic, grounded within an invariable and universal schematic establishing the conditions of possibility for the total commensurability of the richness of reality. Different elements from different epochs or cultures are radiantly brought together within its métissage schema. Relations of difference and alterity are no longer distant or diachronically incommunicable but speak in the same compatible language of a surface show.

This pseudo-baroque is thus an anachronistic form of assimilation that refracts all aesthetic elements within a spectacle, undermining both their temporal and geographical distance within a syncretism linked to the pastiche and heterogeneity of the modern marketplace. ¹⁸ This spectacular logic of commensurability results in an ars combinatoria that attempts to embrace and assimilate otherwise irreconcilable, heterogeneous detail. In it, ‘Michelangelo’s frescoes will acquire the fresh, bright colours of a cartoon strip’ (Debord, 1998: 51). It is a logic not altogether dissimilar to the baroque of the period of absolutism. If the classical baroque period can be read as a development of social captivation and appeasement – a moment in the development of panem et circenses governance – then the modern baroque under spectacular organization, through the cornucopia variation of its snap-together culture, furnishes unlimited gratification and identification sans any partisan mesmerism or orchestrated malfeasance.

A synecdoche for the spectacle’s talent for the baroque is provided as an image within the 1963 eighth issue of Internationale situationniste. Above the heading ‘The Beauty of Sociology’, there appears a composite photo-fit depicting an ‘ideal woman’ whose individual features, while deriving from ten different female celebrities, are held together in uninterrupted aggregation (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Internationale situationniste, No. 8, Beauty of Sociology, 1963.

Originally published as an exercise in koinophilia by France-Soir on 11 August 1962, the SI here offer the image as an exemplary instance of spectacular synthesis, ‘an eloquent example of what can lead to the totalitarian dictatorship of the fragment, opposed here to the dialectical plasticity of the face’ (Internationale Situationniste, 1997: 329). The overall effect is unnerving, modelled through the modern techniques of sociological statistics and surveillance and assembled together as a pastiche, emphasizing the inhuman tendency of the spectacle to composite together disparate fragments of social life into a falsified whole. Its sinister eclecticism also brings to the fore a qualitative distinction between the rationalized baroque of spectacular logic and the elemental unity-in-difference of the money-form. As a breviary for spectacular logic, Figure 1 can therewith be contrasted with Figure 2. As a 1912 advertisement for Kellogg’s cereal, Figure 2 expounds the propensity of reconciliation implicit within exchange relations. It is a capsule for the dominance of capitalist society to proliferate commensurability, however false, yet still without the spectacular ambition for a consonant wholeness rivalling Zeuxis, which we find in Figure 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The Providence, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, 9 March 1912.

Another instance of the baroque character of the spectacle is elucidated in Debord’s relatively obscure 1985 essay ‘Abat-faim’ [‘Starter’], which appeared in the fifth issue of Encyclopédie des Nuisances. The essay focuses on the development of global food processing under the market conditions of greater efficiency and ‘the drive to simply forget about everything we can no longer taste. Thus, with beer now so adulterated that it will keep under any conditions, it is little wonder that plans are now afoot to make it travel better’ (Debord, 1985: 97). It is within this context that Debord offers a picture of what becomes of food and its ersatz under the baroque organization of spectacular society: ‘industrialists who destroy the architecture of meat, mixing more-or-less finely chopped cuts and reassembling them as “reconstituted” meat [. . .] leave us with little doubt that this restructuring will very quickly extend its field of operations far beyond the world of cattle’ (1985: 99–100) And indeed it has. The spectacle thereby acquires ‘a talent for baroque associations’ (Hegel, 1991: 2), a derogatory phrase incidentally used by Hegel as a foundation of deception.

Debord’s concept of the spectacle is a question of the organization of appearances within society. Through an investigation of Debord’s pre-capitalist influence, we are able now to affirm the thesis that it is the baroque in particular that informs his concept of spectacular domination. We accord with the reality of a baroque ensemble furnished by materials of advertising and mass industrial culture, with themes and dramatic tropes of popular film and television, fragments torn and assembled from a vast range of cultural traditions, ‘all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary mind’ (Lasch, 1979: 91), yet not without the wherewithal to celebrate its unrelenting variety. It is as such that we can derive new meaning from the words of Georg Lukács: ‘The details may be dazzlingly colourful in their diversity, but the whole will never be more than an unrelieved grey on grey. After all, a puddle can never be more than dirty water, even though it may contain rainbow tints’ (Lukács, 1980: 43).

On Restoring Dignity to Conflict

Guy Debord took as a compliment the accusation of being somewhat of a living anachronism. As he writes in Panegyric, ‘[w]hen “to be absolutely modern” has become a special law decreed by some tyrant, what the honest slave fears more than anything is that he might be suspected of being behind the times’ (Debord, 2004b: 66). Pride in the way one refuses to allow the increasing velocity of the times to helplessly drag everyone towards further disaster is an esteemed trait for Debord, even if it risks the charge of conservatism. In contrast, communications technology, publicity and the circulation of information everywhere prioritize a ceaselessly standardized here and now as the barometer of cultural advance. Resort to counsel from other centuries is here not simply some scholastic exercise for those unconcerned about the present. Instead, certain features examined above – most notably an ethics of aesthetic sensibility, strategic prowess and rejection of conformity alongside a critically diagnostic concept of the baroque for evaluating a seemingly heterogeneous objectivity that leaves little room to breathe – may be found in bygone epochs for the purposes of a greater understanding of our own frightening calamities.

When evaluating Debord, it becomes clear that his writings and person cannot be wholly separated. In fact, it has been part of the presentation here that Debord’s aristocratic sensibility positions his writings as inseparable from who he was as an individual. Having lived as he criticized, his style of critique refuses to be embroiled in the difficulty of being unable to come to terms with the grounds of its own criticism. Debord’s détournement of an aristocratic past, and the eclecticism with which his sources might be said to have been strung together, is itself part of that style of critique that allows cultural fragments to say something more than they literally do, something critical both of the present and the past, and perhaps even to the notion of ‘irreversible time’ more generally (Debord, 1994: §§131–133, §§136–147). This reverence towards the past as a potential weapon against the present, hardly nostalgic or escapist, helps elucidate Debord’s aristocratic contempt in the face of the incessant demands one’s age places upon oneself.

Debord’s aristocratically critical spirit with its contemptuous indifference and impertinence meant that he was ‘never prepared to reconcile himself to the existing order of things in any way’ (Löwy, 1998: 32), not even when it came to his health. Debord’s physician Michel Bounan diagnosed him with gout in the early 1990s. As ‘the disease of kings’ reflecting a life of epicurean fulfilment, it was, as Debord unapologetically remarks in a March 1991 letter, an ‘illness which has earned my preference’ (Debord, 2008: 268), a gallant point without regret for those who tended to live robust lives with strong lecherous and voluptuary favour. True until the very end, a posthumously published note by Debord refers to the alcoholic polyneuritis diagnosed in his later years as ‘the very opposite of an illness that one might contract through sheer carelessness. Instead, it requires a lifetime of stubborn application’ (2008: 472)

This investigation was not meant to have been a blind veneration of aristocratic Weltanschauung, but an elucidation on how Debord attempted to rescue from human history those instances and precedencies that have upheld faculties of discernment as a virtuous human endeavour, a project systematically eroded by the levelling powers of the commodity economy. Nor is it to be concluded that such patterns of appraisal remain exclusively aristocratic tendencies any more than the bourgeoisie hold a monopoly on crass philistinism, or that it is only the working classes who consist of a great unwashed. Yet whatever can be said against the aristocracy of the ancien régime and their naturalized social position – or even their hidebound ritual and sycophantic routine governed by stifling, petty rules of court etiquette and rigid hierarchies – we can nevertheless bear witness to their repugnance over abstract equivalence and perhaps therein find some quiet moment of reverence.

Yet with the ubiquitous power of money, qualitative distinction, and along with it the rich tapestry of life, has been torn asunder by the cold calculating gaze of the exchange abstraction, against that ‘aristocratic tendency towards the raising of humanity’s quality’ (Jorn, 2002: 197). Here but accelerating in the 19th century, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of abstract equality, ideas which were fatal to an aristocratic sensibility, are burrowed deep within society. Yet prior to this development, while we of course can identify the domination of one class by another, there is something to be said about the way in which ceremonial pomp and magnificence held greater importance than money, or that the enjoyment of riches had yet to be hollowed out by the mechanism of inexorable accumulation. Indeed, for elements of the aristocratic class, the satisfaction garnered from wealth is not yet for its own sake but for luxury and avarice.

It is with Huizinga particularly that we discover such a dimension to Debord’s aristocratic sensibilities, one inseparable from the ‘play instinct’ of ceremony and other forms of aristocratic conduct. For Huizinga, all human culture arises in the form of play through which society expresses for itself an interpretation of the world. Conduct of chivalry, braggadocio, costume, etiquette and ritual in the 14th and 15th centuries of France and the Netherlands, for example, had an unmistakable quality of play about them. ‘This is not the ordinary world of toil and care, the calculation of advantage or the acquisition of useful goods’ (Huizinga, 2016: 60). Within such a world, there was a tendency to give style to almost everything, with a certain dignity of ritual to be found in the most mundane activities, themselves saturated by a plethora of formalities yet now raised to the height of a sublime dream.

Exclusively allotted to the leisure of an aristocratic class, we nevertheless find here an effort to decorate life with ‘an epic or idyllic colour’ (Huizinga, 1924: 30) in order to showcase its exemplariness. Poetical admonitions on the idea of true nobility were given ceremonial consecration that overflowed with aesthetic value. Even meals were dignified ceremonies on par with liturgical observance, a far cry from any chicken and fries readily available. These flamboyant elements of the aristocratic legacy, always strengthened by their exaggeration, denoted a rich adornment of life, scrupulously observed and, to our eyes, almost childlike in its ludicrousness, yet nevertheless conducted against a vicious and barbaric social existence, veiling a cruel reality under an apparently harmonious life construed as an artwork itself. Yet despite its vacuity, within this admixture of devotion and debauchery, a reconciliation of the moral extremes of austere cunning and unbridled splendour, we entreat critical theory to discover valuable resources.

It is here that an aristocratic sense of detachment and scorn – no less than tact and extravagance defining features of Debord’s engagement with the world – might be of service. We might therein rediscover a path towards utopia precisely by forsaking the world, a staple ethics of the 15th century. Such an appraisal of Debord proposes a renewal of revolutionary struggle by restoring dignity to conflict, by upholding the merit and scrutiny of a steady hand, unrelenting integrity and fellowship against a society which takes pride in liquidating distinction and universalizing mediocrity, while perhaps even elevating the tone of cultural life by conjuring that immemorial conception of war as a noble game. It is to Debord’s credit that, unlike so many others, he at least knew how to give people the treatment they deserved.