Author:  [log in to unmask] (Edmond  Chibeau)
Date:    12/14/94 11:55 PM
 
[Editor's note:  This message was submitted to SCREEN-L by the "Author" noted
above, and not by Jeremy Butler ([log in to unmask]).]
 
Guy Debord was 37 during the French uprising of 1968, or the Chicago
Democratic Convention, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution or lots of other
moments in a year when a popular motto was,
 "Don't trust anyone over thirty!"
 
So why suicide at 62, was he ill?
Was he trying to push the greatness that comes at the end of life?
 
"When art, become independent, depicts its world in dazzling colors, a
moment    of life has grown old and it cannot be rejuvenated with dazzling
colors.  It    can only be evoked as a memory.  The greatness of art begins
to appear only     at the dusk of life."
        Debord, Paragraph 188.
 
Was his work mere spectacle?  I think not, but I am disturbed when a
revolutionary fighter abandons the cultural barricades.  Unable to bear the
situation that he found himself in, he believes the disbelief.  Did he think
he was no longer needed?  That is not a decision we can make for ourselves.
Part of making the revolution is waiting for the revolution;  for the next
turn of the wheel, that brings what he (one) stands for ( or against) into
sharp relief. What if we need him now?  A sense of dispair in his writing was
tempered by a sense of resistance to the situation as it stands at the
moment.  There can be Situationalists but there can be no Situationalism.
 
"The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the principle of
internal cultural development in historical societies, can be carried on
only through the permanent victory of innovation.   Yet cultural innovation
is carried by nothing other than the total historical movement which, by
becoming conscious of its totality, tends to supersede its own cultural
presuppositions and moves toward the supression of all separation."
        Debord, Guy.  "Society and Spectacle,"
        (Detroit,Michigan: Black & Red) Paragraph 181
 
 
"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present.  History advances
in disguise; it appears onstage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and
we tend to lose the meaning of the play.  Each time the curtain rises,
continuity has to be re-established.  The blame, of course is not history's,
but lies in our vision, encumbered with memory and images learned in the
past.  We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is
a revolution."
        Debray, Regis. Revolution In The Revolution.
        New York, Grove Press, 1967) p19
 
"Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his study, so that
time may not abolish the works of men..."
 
 
He found his situation untenable.  It disturbs me greatly and I feel the loss.
    Edmond Chibeau
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