Issue 6: Winter 2010
Guy Debord's 'HOWLINGS IN FAVOUR OF SADE'
Christopher Clarke
Guy Debord
"Memorandum for a history of cinema: 1902 - Journey to the Moon. 1920 - The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 1924 - Entr'acte. 1926 - Battleship Potemkin. 1928 - Un Chien Andalou. 1931 - City Lights. Birth of Guy-Ernest Debord. 1951 - Treatise of Venom and Eternity. 1952 - The Anti-Concept. - Howlings in Favour of Sade." (1)
"1952 - expulsion of Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaitre, Gabriel Pomerand from Lettrist International (a precursor to the Situationist International). 1957 - Gil J Wolman and Jacques Fillon expelled from Lettrists - Founding of the Situationist International. 1958 - expulsion of Ralph Rumney, Walter Korun. 1959 - Hans Platschek expelled. 1960 - expulsion of A. Alberts, Har Oudejans, Armando, Heinrich Höfl, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Giors Melanotte, Glauco Wuerich, Constant, Erwin Eisch, Abdelhafid Khatib. 1961 - Maurice Wyckaert, Asger Jorn, André Frankin. 1962 - split with 'Spurists' (German SI) and 'Nashists' (Scandinavian SI), Jacqueline de Jong. 1963 - Attila Kotányi, Peter Laugesen. 1964 - Alexander Trocchi. 1965 - Uwe Lausen. 1966 - Jan Strijbosch, Rudi Renson, Anton Hartstein. 1967 - Théo Frey, Ėdih Frey, Jean Garnault, Herbert Holl, Michèle Bernstein, Charles Radcliffe, Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Ndjangani Lungela. 1968 - occupation of the Sorbonne and constitution of Council for Maintaining the Occupations, later dissolved. 1969 - Guy Debord steps down as editor of Internationale Situationniste - Mustapha Khayati, Bengt Ericson, Alain Chévalier. 1970 - Claudio Pavan, Eduardo Rothe, Françoise de Beaulieu, Patrick Cheval, Paolo Salvadori, Raoul Vaneigem, Jon Horelick, Tony Verlaan, Christian Sébastiani. 1971 - René Viénet, René Riesel. 1972 - Dissolution of the Situationist International." (2)
In these two lists, a parallel process occurs. The former: a progression, laced with irony, towards a sort of ‘culmination' of cinematic innovation. The latter: a series of purges and disputes, before a final, faded disappearance. What happened in the space between these two paragraphs (although not necessarily in 1952)?
Guy Debord's contribution to the former history is that self-declared high point, Howlings in Favour of Sade (Hurlements en faveur de Sade), a radical film sequence of black and white screens of varying lengths, accompanied by seemingly random statements and snatches of dialogue. A prediction and pronouncement is made then, in the film itself, of its cinematic importance, and, of course, of his own significance as an artist (there is no mention of the births of Eisenstein or Buñuel or Clair). Howlings..., then, aspires to termination, to the ‘end of cinema', even as it takes its place in the litany, and, one must assume, the avant-garde canon. This end-point is reflected in the film's lack of visual imagery, an alternating series of ‘blank' screens, that not only negate all expectations of the moving image but which render the distinction between cinema and everyday life illegible. How does one distinguish between the lengthy, 24 minute stretch of silent, black leader which closes out the film and the point where the reel runs out, and the audience returns to reality? Fortunately for Debord, during the premiere of his work, the reaction of the restless, outraged audience didn't even need to wait that long. The screening was cut short, ending in scandal and confusion. One could also say that this was entirely the response expected, judging by the statement that followed the ‘memorandum for a history of cinema.'
"Just as the projection was about to begin, Guy-Ernest Debord was supposed to step onto the stage and make a few introductory remarks. Had he done so, he would simply have said: ‘There is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move onto a discussion.'" (3)
The ‘dead' film lives on to speak of its death. In the knowing humour of the declaration, couched in the soundtrack of the film itself, Debord even acknowledges the unlikelihood of the claim. This is what was ‘supposed' to happen, ‘had he done so'. In moving onto a discussion, then, it is imperative to start with the implicit admission that all will end in failure, an awareness that would infect and initiate the slow bloodletting of the Situationist International (SI). Debord's puritanical streak applies here as well, and is manifested from the very beginning in the insistence that one can only refer to Situationists, never to Situationism. The emphasis is therefore on the active, and the actors, over ideology. This ‘practical experiment' (the term is Michèle Bernstein's, evicted 1967) , while pointedly not a historical 'movement', is nevertheless distinguished from current strands of post-Situationist thought and is indicative of Debord's ambiguous relationship with the SI and its accompanying theoretical and artistic output. In this light, the strategies of obfuscation and confusion exercised by Debord would serve to insulate the experiment from its later adherents. Concurrent with the SI's drawn-out and deliberate self-destruction, its removals and fractures, are these fail-safes: incoherence, contradiction, arbitrariness, ridicule, effacement.
There has always been something problematic about Debord's 1984 decision to withdraw all of his films from circulation as a specific gesture of protest. When Debord's benefactor and associate Gérard Lebovici was murdered, an unsolved crime that was in all likelihood due to the latter's connections with various gangsters, the resulting media speculation hovered around his friendship and business relationship with the shadowy Situationist (Lebovici both published a reprint of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and produced the film of the same name). In response to the media's suggestions of guilt-by-association and/or the lack of a proper police investigation into the crime, which Debord felt was either a cover-up or intentional disregard motivated by Lebovici's similarly close association with the infamous bank robber Jacques Mesrine (himself killed by the police in 1979), Debord refused to allow any further screenings of his films. Yet the withdrawal seems to bear little relation to a concrete, political protest, and would imply that Debord had other ideas in mind. His response to Thomas Y. Levin's request for access to the films in the late 1980s, on the grounds that his interest as an American researcher would not contradict a particularly French political matter, elicited the response that "his insistence on France had been a function of his particular annoyance with the response of the French press: 'Naturally', he wrote in his letter of May 29, 1987, 'I should have said: never again anywhere.'" (4)
But why not anywhere? To extend the ban worldwide suggests that Debord had little actual interest in slighting the national media, and may have used the opportunity as an excuse to turn the Situationist proclivity for disavowal upon himself, or, at least, one aspect of his production. Certainly, Debord seemed to consciously contradict his earlier declaration of the films' cinematic importance (or to emphasise his original underlying irony) with his cutting dismissal: "The cinema has not been my passion, and not even the anti-cinema. ‘What we saw him leave behind, without pain, was not the object of his love,' as Bossuet would say." (5) The 'end of cinema' proposed in Howlings... is symbolically carried out, devoid of revolutionary or iconoclastic intent, but done in an act of weary disdain. Indeed, one could also ask; "why bother then?" However, Debord's casual tone may also be read as one of disingenuousness, as a way of fulfilling the SI's programme of aesthetic distillation while insulating the gesture from the spectacle's processes of absorption and reification (under the sign of an image-saturated capitalist society). In other words, it is a deliberate playing down of significance, even as that significance is made the ‘point' of the censorious gesture. The paradox of this position - on the one hand, a political statement, and, on the other, a de-politicising of the statement - exemplifies a strategy of co-opting the spectacular society's absorptive properties. While the subversive act can be subsumed and commodified via late capitalism's pluralistic appropriation of dissident elements, the ambiguity of Debord's gesture is more slippery. It contravenes itself in order to maintain a position of de-stabilisation and ideological uncertainty (as does the figure of Debord himself, whose later activities of conducting crude letter-writing campaigns, patenting his own board game and associating with media businessmen like Lebovici demystify and degrade his idealised reputation as a puritanical revolutionary). Throughout the history of the SI, one finds similar strategies of negation, evasion, and opposition; against art and anti-art (Levin points to one example, where, at the fifth SI conference in Göteborg, Sweden in August 1961, the members "approved a suggestion by Attila Kotányi [expelled 1963] to call the products of... aesthetic activity on the part of the SI 'anti-Situationist' given that truly Situationist conditions has yet to be realised." [6]), against political power (another anecdote: "At the École des Beaux Arts Debord had been corrected by someone who thought that the CRS [Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the riot police] should not be fought but won over to the course of revolution. After all, argued the interloper, would it not be necessary to have a police force to put down the counter-revolution? Debord stood still, took off his glasses and, before anyone could say a word, had smashed the interlocutor in the face with all his force." [7]), against Situationism and the Situationists. The tactic of conscious failure, of contradiction, is ultimately an attempt to undercut history and an indictment against capitalist society, which cannot bear failures of any kind. Failure was to be Debord's legacy, not merely in the moment, but in all later reflections and reminiscences. As Vincent Kaufman has noted:
"Guy Debord repeatedly placed his life under the sign of the lost children (enfants perdus): those that are habitually sacrificed by armies in desperate battles - and Debord was very keen on desperate battles - but also those who refuse to inherit a world in which nothing is to their liking, those who do not accept any responsibility in it... In any case, the expression 'lost children' sums up what counted for him. It locates him in relation to a society that he considered to be evil and had decided to confront, whatever the cost, i.e., sometimes at the price of defeat. Therefore talking about the 'political failure' of Situationism has very little meaning." (8)
It is the gesture which fades into irrelevance and is rendered un-useful (but not useless) that persists as an empty potential, a pathway to a future that never occurs. Debord's failure, enacted through a conscious withdrawal coupled with lackadaisical disregard (a disregard doubly emphasised through the lack of earnestness), ensures the ongoing possibility of the SI, through a permanent state of non-completion and an always-unfinished promise of a different society. It intends to fail, and, in doing so, confirms its relevance as a lingering absence. Such projects retain their viability as notions of what could have been, as potentialities, or, in the Derridean sense, as spectres. (9) The spectres of Debord, then, are eternally revitalised by his own ambiguity and non-specificity. While, according to Derrida, the inevitability of thinkers like Marx and Engels is confirmed through the acknowledgement of their "own possible 'aging' and their irreducible urgency" (10) as well as the continued need for permanent revolution, Debord takes a slightly alternative tack, and situates the future-value of the Situationists in inscrutability and incomprehension. The SI persists only because it has yet to be completely détourned; the process of absorption is perpetually deferred by its inconsistencies and contradictions, by a refusal to finally and definitively state its programme. One is unable to settle with any precision:
"Let us consider first of all, the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance, the difference without opposition that has to mark it, 'a disparate' and quasi-juxtaposition without dialectic (the very plural of what will we later call Marx's [or Debord's] spirits). An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. 'One must' means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it." (11)
For Debord, the Situationists (and, here particularly, one must emphasise the ‘ist' over the ‘ism') are firmly located in a discredited, disengaged moment; written off as a failure twice over, by its opponents at the time and its leaders and followers after the fact. In sifting and sorting out the salvageable, one is left with a number of versions, often in direct opposition to each other. The lack of agreement or compromise, and the sense of propriety that tends to surround individual contemporary readings of Debord, comes out of this incompatibility, as various factions overlap, influence, turn against and deny each other. Of course, this is also the history of the SI itself, with its numerous schisms and resulting splinter groups perpetuating their own particular Situationist vision (12). In this sense, the twin litanies at the beginning of this essay, the filmic trajectory towards the ‘end of cinema' and the historical chronology of the International's disintegration and dispersion, each map out the spaces surrounding the ‘secret' of Debord and the Situationists. The two are inextricable, as it was the deliberate strategy of negation, whether at a single stroke or slowly, in stages, that served (and continues to serve) to wipe out the traces of the Situationist moment, obscuring what is essential from what can be forgotten. It is from the fragmentary, subjective versions that any such legacy is delineated, as an absence or central emptiness around which circulates a sphere of divergent paths and unfinished readings. This Debordian disavowal of determined meaning, which pre-empts the spectacle's own processes of assimilation, is built in from the beginning, and manifested in contradiction and hypocrisy, irony and dissimulation.
Take, for example, the expulsions of Isou, Lemaitre, Wolman et al. from the Lettrist International, precursor to the SI. Debord's text ‘Why Lettrism?', despite its claims of commitment to set ‘ideas', despite its title, favours the provisional and the exploratory over the explanatory. He writes: "Nothing agitates us less than the elaboration of a doctrine: we are sufficiently far from explaining ourselves..." (13) The programme is only gradually revealed, worked out and waited for through a succession of half-steps, repudiations, compromises and cleavages. For Debord, the realisation of Lettrism could only mean its rejection (and displacement by the SI, which takes over and moves again towards a state of eventual dissolution), whether through a self-willed act of sabotage or an eventual submission to capitalism's absorptive logic. Debord, naturally, chooses the former, but only as a strategy against the latter.
A similar device occurs in Howlings..., in the film itself, and not just Debord's eventual prohibition. As in Derrida's notion of the spectral, so-called ‘truth' or ‘meaning', if it does exist, is perpetually rendered suspect through incongruous and inconsistent impulses. One can find, throughout the filmic commentary, a number of retrospectively prophetic statements, forecasting Debord's suicide, the SI's disintegration, and the artist's consciousness of such eventualities. (14) In locating the seemingly loaded suggestion, one must consistently filter out the accidental and the arbitrary, the meaningless non-sequiturs whose meaning lies precisely in their obfuscating function. These ‘other' phrases colour the entire script, to suggest an overriding randomness that renders any sensible reading as speculative or subjective. For each statement of intent - "The perfection of suicide lies in its ambiguity," for example, or "I made this film while there was still time to talk about it" - a fragment of doggerel - "Paris was real fun because of the transportation strike," or "Would you like an orange?" - disrupts the former's impact. Every suggestion of meaning is subsequently undercut, every truth is tarnished.
And yet it is this ambiguity, this restlessness, which characterises Debord and the Situationist International. All fixed points are corrupt, capable of being turned around to represent the other, and, in this light, Debord speaks the truth; that "their revolts become conformisms" (15) In advance of this inevitability, Debord seeks not to sustain his legacy but to simultaneously balance a number of distinct, conflicting legacies. One must, pace Derrida, ‘filter, sift, criticize', not in hope of discovering an underlying constancy, but for the sake of perpetuating the empty space which sits, impenetrable, at the centre of peripheral discourse.
Chris Clarke is a critic and curator of education and collections at Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork. He has written extensively on contemporary art and film for publications including Art Monthly, Circa, Irish Arts Review and Photography and Culture.