Subscribe by RSS
Guy Debord’s first book, Mémoires, was bound with a sandpaper cover so that it would destroy other books placed next to it. Memoires was written, or rather assembled, by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn in 1957. Debord himself often referred to Mémoires as an anti-book. […]
The text is entirely composed of fragments taken from other texts: photographs, advertisements, comic strips, poetry, novels, philosophy, pornography, architectural diagrams, newspapers, military histories, wood block engravings, travel books, etc. Each page presents a collage of such materials connected or effaced by Jorn’s structures portantes, lines or amorphous painted shapes that mediate the relationships between the fragments.
The combination of Jorn’s lines and Debord’s collages creates a kind of hybrid between the strategies of détournement and dérive, thus approaching culture as a dérive over the face of the spectacle itself.
<24> At its most literal level, Memoires is a history of Debord’s years in the Letterist International, the precursor of the Situationist International. In a rare exegesis of the book in On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time (1989), Greil Marcus explains that
Memoires is divided into three parts. There is “June 1952″ when Hurlements en Faveur de Sade, Debord’s first film, was premiered, and he and Wolman first conceived the “Letterist International” as a secret tendency within Isidore Isou’s Letterist movement, the postwar Parisian neo-dada band Debord and Wolman were then part of; “December 1952,” when the LI, having announced itself in late October with leaflets denouncing a Charlie Chaplin press conference at the Ritz, formally established itself, laying down its statutes (taking goals for granted and, like the authors of the Constitution of the United States, concentrating on prohibitions and penalties); and “September 1953,” when the group first began to come apart (“the dirt is gone!” announces a loud page in Memoires, the phrase, taken from an ad for a detergent, signifying that the LI had purified itself of microbes and viruses, of frauds and careerists) (128).
However, what is most interesting in the text is not its ostensible content, a literal, intelligible history, or its status as a founding text, but the way in which this organizational principal is undercut, even thwarted, by the fragments that are brought together presumably to tell that very story. Ostensibly a history, it becomes a work that questions the immediate possibility of that project by presenting that history from the perspective of an unrealized Situationist future. In Lipstick Traces Marcus explains that
as a memoir, Debord’s book was also a prophesy. To follow its story one needed information Debord withheld — even the words “L’Internationale Lettriste,” which never appeared. But one also needed the ability to imagine a reinvented world…a new, “situationist” civilization, shared by millions, finally covering the globe (164).
Without the realization of that world, Memoires remains for us something that “would be experienced not as things at all, but as possibilities” (166).
<25> To understand Memoires, and to argue for its absolute relevance to our own moment, I want to begin by invoking Debord’s concept of the spectacle. As anyone who has read The Society of the Spectacle will remember, Debord states that “the spectacle is NOT a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). Debord isn’t so much taking on the prevalence of the image itself as he is the particular form of mediation images constitute. For Debord, the spectacle is akin to Adorno’s concept of the culture industry or Jameson’s culturalized horizon. The images (TV, film, advertisements, etc.) are one-way identic communications that provide no possibility for a dialectical engagement or response. Each individual subject is silenced, forced to absorb the instrumental meanings of this totalizing system. As Debord puts this, “by means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise” (19).
<26> If Debord had not so clearly formulated these concepts during the creation of Memoires, they nonetheless animate the book, which is composed of fragments of the spectacle itself. As early as the Letterist International, Debord was negatively gesturing at the spectacle in the concept of détournement. The critique that animates this concept is one of cooption. To produce new works of art within the traditional categories means playing by the rules, being subsumed under those spectacular discourses. On the other hand, to conduct terrorist raids on the particulars of those discourses and liberate the particulars of those works holds the potential of creating revolutionary sense and desire. The images that perfected separation and political impotence could now assume nonidentic meanings, meanings that allowed one to both construct a critique and imagine a reinvented world.
<27> To take Debord’s project in terms of Adorno, Memoires is the creation of an autonomous artwork. The use of détournement shifts the emphasis to the nonidentic possibilities of the given collage elements. As a history it must, as Adorno would approve, fail, since the collaged particulars are always outstripping their function, never content to carry on a single, intelligible meaning. And yet, in Adorno’s sense, it is also a unique example of enigmatic political commitment within the horizon of postmodernism, for Memoires is a profoundly political work, though not in any readily instrumentalizable register. Though I don’t have the space to execute a cover to cover reading of Memoires, I would like to look closely at both its first and final pages. These pages are far more spar than many of the collages in the book, but they both highlight the tense relationships of form that animate the entire work.
<28> The first line of Memoires (reading right to left, top to bottom, a convention the book doesn’t impose) is a fragment of two sentences: “A memory of you? Yes, I want.” Though the reader knows, from the title page, that this sentence has been ripped out of its original context, there is no indication of its original source. Thus it is not identical with any subject. Instead, this fragment invokes the concepts of memory and desire without specific objects. One of Jorn’s lines carries the eyes from this fragment to another, in the middle of the page, which reads “it is a subject profoundly soaked in alcohol.” Jorn’s line spreads out into a blob just above this fragment, creating a block that puts the emphasis on this second fragment. Whatever the subject or object of this memory or desire, it is to be taken in terms intoxication, both literally and metaphorically.
The second line of Memoires, “of lights, of shadows, of figures,” underscores the indeterminacy of the elements of the text. Literally, it invokes a play of the identic and nonidentic. It suggests that each fragment could be read in terms of its original context or colloquial meaning, but that these will shift into shadow or light, constitute different figures depending on how they are read. Though the fragments may constitute recognizable figures at points, they will do so only transiently. Again, another line ofJorn’s descends from this fragment, crossing others, and trailing off at the page’s final deceleration: “Listen well, I will, all the same, represent these events and explain the considerations.” This line gestures at the totality of the work as the literal history that Marcus reduces it to, but the emphasis is not with this line. At best, it is an ironic gesture at the failed totality of the work, a marker of the traditional desire for wholeness and understanding that the book undercuts. It isn’t that history is not present, but it has become a figure that slips in and out in the play of light and shadow. In short Memoires does not present a totalizing climax, a point where the reader could make sense in the mode this fragment suggests. Rather, Jorn’s line takes this desire and holds it in tension with other fragments and their gestures towards the nonidentic.
