filmmaker Martine Barraqué, with video documentarian Brigitte Cornand, and in the independent work of three former members of the Situationist International: T. J. Clark, Raoul Vaneigem and René Viénet. It is a disparate body of work through which we can read the last quarter of the twentieth century. They still dare us to outwit them, outmatch them. They dare us to stake something. There is more honor in failing that challenge than in refusing it.
This book is not a biography of Guy Debord. It is not a history of the Situationists. It is not literary criticism or art appreciation. Out of what is living and what is dead in the Situationist legacy it concerns itself mostly with what is living. If the Situationist slogan LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME is to be understood at all, it can only be in writing which treats its own archive as something other than dead time. The project is to connect Situationist theory and practice with everyday life today, rather than with contemporary art or theory. Hence the presence of certain anecdotes, cut from their journalistic context and taken on a journey, a detour, relieved of their fragmentary context and connected to a theoretical itinerary which treats them as moments of a lost totality. As the Situationists said: “One need only begin to decode the news such as it appears at any moment in the mainstream media in order to obtain an everyday x-ray of Situationist reality.”24
Debord, like Retz and so many others, failed to transform the world of his own time, but this failure is the basis of a certain kind of knowledge. Right thinking in this tradition depends on the confrontation of thought with the world. History’s winners are confirmed in their illusions; the defeated know otherwise. Debord: “But theories are made only to die in the war of time.”25 At least the Situationists found strategies for confronting their own time, to challenge it, negate it, and push it, however slightly, toward its end, toward leaving the twentieth century.
As impossible as that task was, leaving the twenty-first century may not be so easy. It is hard to know how to even imagine it. Perhaps a place to start, then, is by returning to some situations where it seemed possible to leave previous centuries. One of the virtues of writing in a Situationist vein is that it opened up the question of an activist reading of past revolutions. In our opening two chapters, we look back over the seventies writings of Clark and Vaneigem, but through their eyes look back again over the whole series of French revolutions and restorations. Then, we turn our attention to the rather critical accounts Sanguinetti and Viénet offered, from firsthand experience, of the Italian Autonomists and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, moments which, strangely, are back again, in a rather spectacular fashion, as touchstones for twenty-first-century political thought. After that, we pursue the tactics of Debord and Becker-Ho for keeping alive the spirit of contesting the totality as the era of the disintegrating spectacle was dawning.
To follow the times is to lead them.
Baltasar Gracián
Suppose a team of archaeologists from an alien civilization came upon the ruins of the disintegrating spectacle, but all they had with which to understand it, besides some blasted fragments, was one or two books by T. J. Clark. What sort of sense would they make of it? Of course, we are already ourselves those very aliens. Much of what we now think of as what was once modern comes down to us in bits and pieces, as inscrutable as ancient Egyptian funeral art. But Clark’s books might be singularly useful for this unearthed modern, since certain of his books quite consciously read the art of the nineteenth century as intimations for the twentieth century. As Clark reflects in The Sight of Death: “The advantage of the historical allegories in my previous books was that, if I was lucky, a point occurred at which the politics of the present was discovered in the histories—the distant histories—generated out of the object in hand.”1 These allegories might have further resonance in our own times.
One way to grasp the genesis of the disintegrating spectacle might be to rewind it, back before it sped up, before it flung apart. What Situationist writing might have going for it in this task is that, as Clark puts it: “It was the ‘art’ dimension, to put it crudely—the continual pressure put on the question of representational forms in politics and everyday life, and the refusal to foreclose on the issue of representation versus agency—that made their politics the deadly weapon it was for a while.”2 Clark can help us to formulate the problem of thinking aesthetics and politics together, within the vicissitudes of historical time.
Clark was, however briefly, a member of the Situationist International, and while his books are by no means a mere pendant to that fact, they respond to it; and respond, more particularly, to the stresses of a certain kind of political time through which Clark has lived. His writing was for him “a place to shelter from the storm. Doing art history—being an academic—was a compromise. It was as much as I had the nerve to do.”3 (An aside: And who am I, and who are you, dear reader, to ask of anyone anything more? Only those who throw stones can begrudge us our glass houses.)
Clark recalls standing on the edge of a demonstration in the late sixties, on the steps of the National Gallery in London, “discussing the (sad) necessity of iconoclasm in a revolutionary situation with my friend John Barrell, and agreeing that if ever we found ourselves part of a mob storming through the portico we ought to have a clear idea of which picture had to go the way of all flesh; and obviously it had to be the picture we would most miss.”4 Which picture would Clark choose? We shall find out later. Suffice now to say that it did not come to that, and perhaps just as well.
It is sometimes lost on readers familiar only with the opening overture of Debord’s infamous book that the spectacle is not just some vast and totalizing shell that secretes itself out of the commodity form and envelopes all around it. While it may be the dominant form of social life, it is not the only one. Clark: “The spectacle is never an image mounted securely and firmly in place; it is always an account of the world competing with others, and meeting the resistance of different, sometimes tenacious forms of social practice.”5 Clark enlarges and refines the sense of the struggle over social form, and the role within the struggle played by the making of images. For while society may have become in part disciplinary, it has never ceased to be spectacular in its totality.6
If there is a limit to Clark—evident particularly in the later texts—it is in the way the auras of certain images start to become stand-ins for a contest of forces, struggling not just over what images can mean but also over what they can do. Clark: “If I cannot have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan.”7 A Satan which art alone is not up to the task of confronting.
There are times when aesthetics and politics appear as discrete and free-standing categories. At other moments they can’t help but fall over each other, which in the French context at least might be telegraphed by the following dates, and from the events that spill forth from them and evaporate into history: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1945, 1968; from the first successful French revolution, via the Paris Commune and the Liberation, to the last failed one. While Clark will have quite a bit to say about epochs of restoration, where art and politics interact only tangentially, of particular interest is the kind of time where they fuse. “Such an age needs explaining, perhaps even defending.”8
Modernity is all about beginnings, and it might as well be said to begin with The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). David shows Marat dead in his bath, clutching the letter written to him by his murderer. It’s an image of a secular martyr, but not exactly a secular image. It was first shown at a ritual occasion, contrived by David. Quite a struggle went on over the meaning and ownership of the cult of Marat. While Marat was close to the Jacobin faction, the Enragés—the most radical expression of the most radical class, the sans-culottes—claimed him as one of their own. The image of Marat hovered for a moment, caught between the role of martyr to the state on the one hand, and friend to the sans-culottes and their demand for a thoroughly social revolution on the other.
“Surely never before had the powers-that-be in a state been obliged to improvise a sign language whose very effectiveness depended on its seeming to the People a language they had made up, and that therefore represented their interests.”9 The