Customer Reviews

Guy Debord: The Life and Times of a Situationist Revolutionary

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I must say I found Bracken's book to be extremely disappointing,especially after the build-up I had received from him personally, and from others in the 'pro-Situ' scene. As a biography - i.e: a record of the life of an interesting person - it is an abject failure. If information on a person is scant - and yes Debord was secretive about his private life out of paranoia &/or a desire for mythification - then the biographers' job is made very much harder. It is, however, the absolute worst option to do what Bracken has done and constantly assert that Guy 'would probably' have read x book or seen y film, or that he 'must have' thought blah, with absolutely no evidence. For all that he is critical of Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces" (1989), at least Marcus spoke to Michele Bernstein, Trocchi and others who were directly involved. (Bracken is not beyond recycling Marcus' interviews - detournement, perhaps?) With the exception of Debord, Lefebvre & Lebovici, most of the 'major players' in all the events Bracken imaginatively reconstructs are alive. Why did he not attempt to contact them? (Even a tale of non-interviews, such as Ian Hamilton's attempted search for Salinger, would be preferable) Bracken's "I get inside the mind of Guy by reading his texts" method smacks of a) the poorest kind of psycho-biography (although Debord would be a fascinating subject for a Freudian...) and b) the "reputable sources told me" sort of tabloid reportage of the famous but unavailable. In short, I found Bracken's book envious and hagiographical ("Guy Debord is the new messiah") and almost completely uninformative. As to the 'critical' part of the 'critical biography', I think Gabriel Thy's paraphrase sums it all up: "Guy Debord is the new Messiah. Everything he wrote is a masterpiece! Everybody else got it wrong." Whilst I acknowledge that no-one has (or can) get everything about the S.I 'right', I think it is a long way from that to simply stating that 'everybody else got it wrong'. Marcus, Sadie Plant, Peter Wollen, Thomas McDonough, 'not bored', even Stewart Home have all taught me different perspectives on the S.I. I don't take any of them as gospel, yet I admit the strengths and weaknesses of each and negotiate my position between the 'source texts' and the disparate views of the critics (I am a good post-structuralist bricoleur). Whilst I might be an academic 'fence sitter' and not a 'true believer', the one thing about the S.I, in common with the scattered Left (as it exists in 'advanced capitalist societies') that disappoints me the most is this fractiousness and - for a movement that supposedly reifies praxis and abhors ideology - stubborn insistence upon asserting (not proving) that ones' own opinion is correct, that all others are false, and that anyone who believes otherwise is a fool.

The life of Debord is used as a springboard for discussing the ideas that motivated him. This book gives the best introduction to Situationism I have yet seen (I asked one individual, who is much more into the Sits than I, what he thought was the best English language introduction. He agreed with me that this was it). The typical reader will certainly find it far friendlier than The Society of the Spectacle, the main work of Debord himself. Debord's writing is wrapt in Hegelian jargon that was opaque even to a former Marxist I know. The book has some small deficiencies (e.g., the first several chapters have a hurried, first-draft feeling), but really, this might be the best biography I have ever read.

I take strong exception to the Melbourne reader's critique (well-written as it is) of Len Bracken's book. The Situationists were far and away the most seminal and influential of the radical groups fomenting the May `68 revolts in Paris, and Bracken performs an important service with his on- target intellectual biography of their leader Guy Debord, a reclusive and prickly misanthrope whose masterpiece, Society of the Spectacle, quietly influenced numerous more high-profile intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard and Malcolm McLaren. It's true that sources about Debord are scant, but the late master's widow and friends are well-known for their reluctance to go on the record. Bracken's approach is authentic and, I feel, gives a strong image of the Situationist milieu as well as of Debord through the lens of Debord's ideas. Most of the SI's critique of the banality of everyday life is just as on-target today, as are their experience of the city as a "psychogeographical" mental map. I believe Bracken (editor of the zine Extraphile), has written an important book that both fills a long-empty niche in Situationist literature and makes Debord's brilliance available to a popular audience.

In his autobiography, Guy Debord described himself as "an extraordinary example of what this era did not want." As the years since his 1994 suicide flow through us, accelerating, without distinction or meaning, it becomes more and more obvious that Debord and his comrades were precisely what this era needed most of all.

The "movement" Debord founded, this construction of situations, is simply the blunted lance of a broader movement of consciousness, embedded in absences.

The biography "Guy Debord, revolutionary," by Len Bracken, offers the first comprehensive description of the most unitary of unitary critiques, as it evolved in Debord's thought, and in the thought of a very few others.

The vivid historiography of Bracken's research; his partisan, passionate descriptions; and the wealth of insight and data he provides, make this biography absolutely indispensable.

In "Minima Moralia," Theodore Adorno wrote, "in psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations." Much the same could be said of the life of Guy Debord. Now there is a resource to begin to bring perspective to an increasingly important life and body of work.

One reads in this book that Jean-Pierre Voyer is now on the extreme-right. Well, he's not... So I guess Bracken is a cretin. (And no mention is made of Voyer's criticisms of the S.I....)

Christ, there's more to life than reifying praxis and abhorring ideology