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An Aesthetic of the "Grand Style": Guy DebordAuthor(s): Mario Perniola and Olga VasileSource: SubStance, Vol. 28, No. 3, Issue 90: Special Issue: Guy Debord (1999), pp. 89-101Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685435Accessed: 07/06/2010 00:08

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An Aesthetic of the "GrandStyle":Guy DebordMario Perniola

A Distancing from the WorldIt is difficult today to determine what might correspond to that modelof aesthetic excellence that Nietzsche defined with the expression "thegrand

style." Certainly, in the various arts, works keep being produced thatcorrespondto the features of containedpower,classicalrigorand unboundedcertainty; unfortunately they come to the attention of experts and the publicwith greater difficulty and more slowly than in the past, both because ofliterary, artistic and cultural overproduction, and widespread cynicism,superficiality,and insensibility."Thegrand style,"in fact, implies immediateconcern,respect,memory-in aword, veneration. Theseaspects do notblendwell with the general tone of contemporary daily experience, but preciselybecause of their rarity they may render "the grand style" the objectof morediligent research and more zeal than ever.It is much more difficult, however, not just to find, but even to imagine"the grand style" as the quality of an action, a behavior or even an entireexistence: in other words, as Nietzsche says, to consider it no longer simplyart,but "reality,ruth,life."Besides,Nietzsche himself taught diffidenceaboutactions and behaviors that attribute to themselves all sorts of positivequalities, and he showed how, in most cases, they are secretly animated byopposite drives. In this specific instance, the philistinism of the richand idlemob that glorifies Wagner's opera exemplifies exactly the opposite of "thegrand style"; indeed cultural snobbism -as the word itself suggests: "sinenobilitate"-constitutes a manifestation of vulgarity and coarseness, ofboasting ostentation that is at the antipodes of "grand style's" simplicityand purity.As for a whole life, globally considered, it seems that only a fewshort existences may aspire to all that, almost as if longevity requireda longexercise of practical shrewdness, if not complicity with infinite shames. Torecognize this is already a great achievement!For this reason, it is for me a source of great happiness to have met theman who in the second half of the twentieth century has been theSubstance# 90, 1999 89


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personification of "thegrand style,"Guy Debord, "doctorof nothing," as hedefines himself (Panegyric13),but master of the ambitious, friend of rebelsand the poor, secretly admired by the mighty, stirring great emotions, butcold and detached from himself and from the world. This is in fact the firstcondition of style: detachment, distance, suspension from disorganizedaffections,from immediate emotions, fromunrestrainedpassions;hence thereis a relationship between style and classicism that Nietzsche repeatedlyunderlined. Style,however, should notbe considered a synonym forfrigidity,insensibility, or worse, pedantic and stereotyped academicism. In order tomaster passions, they have to be there! Besides, style and passion have incommon theirimperious and constrainingcharacter;both requireobedienceand discipline.In Debord's case, detachment manifests itself first of all as completelyextraneous to the worlds of academia, publishing, journalism, politics andmedia. Debordnourishes a deep disgust forthewhole culturalestablishment.He hates worldliness and snobbish frivolity that flirts with revolutionaryextremism - the so-called "radicalchic."Finally,his disdain is not softenedby inherited wealth: he affirms thathe was "bor virtually ruined"(Panegyric12).In an age in which ambitious people arereadyto do everything to obtainpolitical power and money, Debord's strategy exploits one factor: theadmirationhe inspires in those who see that political power and money aresecondary to excellence and its recognition. This strategy aims at a kind ofsuperioritysimilarto thatof some of the ancientphilosophers, like Diogenes,for whom coherence between principles and behavior was essential.However, this superiorityis not so much embedded in an ethicalbackgroundas an esthetic one: the tradition to which Debord belongs is one of poeticand artistic revolt. That tradition, which encountered an extraordinarydevelopment in the twentieth century avant-garde,dates back to the MiddleAges: the great fifteenth-centuryFrenchpoet FranCoisVillon was the modelfor an encounter between cultureand alternative (in his case, even criminal)conduct, handed down through the centuries. Debord explicitly recognizesthat heritage, but takes it further with a qualitative leap, since he refuses theexercise of poetry and art,maintaining that they must be overcome-that isto say, in Hegelian terms, they have to be suppressed and realized inrevolutionarytheory and practice(Society, 191 and ff.)According to Debord,the overcoming of art must not be postponed to a distant future, as someutopian thinkers propose, but is an urgent need of the time in which welive: it is not so much a question of foreshadowing a society to come than ofobeying the very powerful command coming from the historical and social

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An Aesthetic of the "GrandStyle" 91

hicet nunc. In this way, Debord also dissociates himself from those literary,poetic and artistic milieus which, despite being foreign to every form ofinstitutionalization, persevere in practicingactivities that can at any time berecuperated by the cultural establishment. It is not by chance that I got intouch with Debord after a conflict that in 1966 opposed me to the Surrealistmovement.

One has to add to all this his distance from all political-revolutionaryorganizations and trends prevailing in his age: Debord felt he was carryingon theheritageof the "councilcommunism" of the 1920s,developed in Franceby theoreticaljournals such as Socialisme uBarbarie. his choice led him to atotal refusal of any Leninist, Trotskyist,Maoist or Third-Worldposition: inhis view, the so-called socialistregimesare forms of statecapitalism, governedby a party bureaucracy that assumes the right to speak in the name of theproletariatwhom it actually owns (Society,? 102).At the same time, Debordalso distances himself from anarchism,which abandons the human being toindividual whim; he does not doubt that the highest level of revolutionarytheory has been reachedby Marx,and not by Bakunin. Ifby "political"onemeans the distinction between "friends" and "enemies," together with theeffort to increase the number of the former, there is in Debord a radical"unpoliticization"leading to isolation. Thatis, moreover,one of the reasonswhy we broke off our relationship in spring 1969.Approval and effectiveness obtained through sympathy, agreementanda good predisposition towards others was certainlynot included in Debord'sstyle. In this, he followed Nietzsche's opinion, according to which thegreatness of the soul is not compatible with amiable virtues: "The grandstyle excludes the pleasant" (Nachgelassene,1972, 18, 1). In an era whenamiability and ease are the most appreciated qualities, Debord faces hiscontemporariesin abitterand roughmanner,almost as if today only a similarattitude could arouse interest and excite passion. He writes: "[...] I neverwent looking for anyone, anywhere. My entourage has been composed onlyof those who came on their own accord,and knew how to make themselvesaccepted" (Panegyric,17). In fact, this did not prevent, at least in the secondhalf of the 1960s, a sociability that recognized itself in a theoretical projectand in a life-style formed around Debord. Its axis was constituted by the"Situationist International," a movement that Debord founded in 1957together with other members of the art avant-garde, and which produced,over twelve years, twelve numbersof ajournal,L'Internationaleituationniste,that was brilliant in contentand elegantly produced. TheSI- as it was called,with a fortunate acronym-was a closed group that made a clear-cutSubstance# 90, 1999



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distinction between members and sympathizers: it was ruled by a sort ofcollective responsibility,accordingto which individual theoreticalstatementsand behaviors automatically involved everyone else. This feature, similarto one of the aspects of religious sects, has in the case of the SI an aestheticmeaning, referringto the importanceof the constrainingandbinding elementof style; as Nietzsche writes, it implies the erasure of individual specificity,a deep sense of discipline and a repugnance for a disorganized and chaoticnature (GayScience ? 290). However, these requirements, which perfectlycorresponded to Debord's way of being, did not match the temper of othermembers of the SI,who were either much more expansive and extroverted,or deprived of genius and creative spirit. But above all, they did not matchthe dominant featuresof the protest movement, on one side of which ragedsubjective vitalism and the most impulsive spontaneity and, on the other,gloomy and anti-aesthetic Stalinist political subjugation. All this explainswhy only a very few people actually received the SI'smessage: at the end of'68 only three people received the journal in Rome, and only 20 in Italy!Something of the high aesthetic qualities of the whole enterprise wastransmitted to common readers who had the impression of belonging to aworld revolutionary elite; indeed, they formed an international networkwithin which it was possible to move not so much with a conspiratorialattitude as with an aristocratic one.

In a form of historical blindness, however, the aesthetic feature of theSituationist endeavor was not recognized by either those who formulated itfrom within or by external observers. In a letter dated December 26, 1966,Guy Debord, in answer to some of my questions, summarized the SIprojectsin four points:

1.Theovercomingfarttowardsa freeconstruction f life.This is meant tobe the end of modemart, nwhichDadaismwantedtosuppressartwithoutrealizingit, and Surrealismwanted to realize artwithoutsuppressing t.(These wo needs areinseparable, amhereresuming erms hattheyoungMarxused forthephilosophyof his time).2. Thecriticism fthespectacle,hatis to say,of modem societyas concretelie, realization of an overturned world, ideological consumerism,concentratedand expandingalienation(finally:criticismof the modernstageof the worldlykingdomof the commodity).3. Marx'srevolutionaryheory to be corrected and completed in thedirectionof its own radicalism(firstof all, against all the heritage of"Marxism") [...].

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4. the modelof therevolutionaryowerof Workers' ouncils, s targetandmodel thatshouldalreadydominate herevolutionary rganization imingat this [...].The firsttwo points are,in some ways, our main theoreticalcontribution.The thirdcomesfromrevolutionary heoryof thebeginningof the historicalperiodto which we belong.The fourthcomes fromtherevolutionarypractice f proletariansof this century. It is a questionofunifying hem.

Whatstrikesme in this letter is the factthatthe two most specificfeaturesof the SI areaesthetic,and that the idea of uniting tendencies and perspectivesinscribed in different traditions is even more aesthetic. This correspondsexactly to a Nietzschean definition of "thegrand style":"few principles andthese hold very tightly together;no esprit,no rhetoric"(Nachgelassene, 974,3, 23).The Situationists' effort to maintain a certain distance from the worldclashed inevitably with modern society's tendency to "recuperate" theirrevolt-that is to say, to neutralize it by assigning it a role and a functionwithin society itself. Debord says in one of his films,

It is known that this society signs a sort of pact with its most avowedenemies,when it allots thema placein its spectacle.YetI am, indeed, atthis time,theonly persontohavehadsomerenown, clandestineandbad,and whom they have not managed to get to appear on this stage ofrenunciation ...].I would find it justas shabbyto become anauthority nthe contestationof a societyas to be one in this societyitself. (Ingirum,65-6)It is not by chance that one of the most debated problems within theSituationist milieu concerned precisely its relationship with the cultural

spectacle. Inhis letter of November 18,1967, notifying me of the publicationof his book TheSocietyof theSpectacle,Debord writes:Wecertainly llagree:"cinema"sinitselfapassivespectacularelationship[...].Theproblem s moregeneral:we believe that even the book(ajournaletc.) is also participatingn this separatemode of unilateralspectacularexpression [...]. However, we believe that it is necessary to dominatecriticallythese moments(theory,expression,agitationetc.) on differentlevels. It is evident forall of us thatwe cannotreduceourselves to a sortof pureimmediacy.

On this last point Debord was too optimistic: spontaneity, vitalism, themyth of action were destined to be raging,especially in Italy, n the followingyears for at least a decade.These orientations, which refuse all mediation, nourish an infinitediffidence toward form, and aspire to an ideal of absolute transparencvSubstance 90, 1999



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represented the most serious problem of my youth. They were also presentwithin the SI, especially in the circle of its sympathizers, but certainly theycannot be attributed to Debord, for whom every manifested alternative towriting "depends itself on a more or less complex consciousness andtheoretical formulation" (Letterof March 2, 1968). This seems to contrastnot only with the passions aroused by Debord, but also with the stronglyemotional dimension of his writings and films, which seem often suspendedbetween nostalgia and impassivity, between pain and hardness.The fact remains that next to the Apollonean Debord, whose essentialfeature is his distance from the world, there is a Dionysian Debord, aboutwhom he made no mystery, and on whom he lingers in his memoirs whenhe celebrates various alcoholic drinks. Thefollowing seems revealing aboutthe quality of such an experience: "First,like everyone, I appreciated theeffect of slight drunkenness, then, very soon, I grew to like what lies beyondviolent drunkenness when one has passed that stage: a magnificent andterrible peace, the true taste of the passage of time" (Panegyric 35). Or oftime's suspension?What do these empirical, vital and even physiological aspects have todo with style? Doesn't style consist in leaving aside the subjective, theaccidental,what it is too personaland too alive?Is not the Nietzschean notionof "the grand style" close to "classic" style? Certainly those features ofhardening, simplification,reinforcementand turning nasty that forNietzscheconstitute the essential features of classical style arepresent in Debord. But"thegrand style" is certainly something differentfrom classicism, and froman aesthetic ideal of harmony and composure. As Heidegger observes, "thegrand style" contains an element of excess, which the Greeks of the tragicage called deinon,deinotaton-the frightful.Thereforethe Nietzschean notionof "grand style"cannotbe fully understood if it is separatedfromNietzsche'sreflection on the importance of the physiological component in art as anindispensable premise of style. In other words, style is separate from "theparalysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic, as [it is] from sheerrapturous tumult " (Nietzsche 128). With Nietzsche, an extreme aesthetichas been born. It goes beyond Kant and Hegel's moderate aesthetic, and init feelings are followed to an extreme physiological state of the body.However, this does not mean succumbing to naturalism or to mere empiricalfactuality. In fact, "the grand style," according to Heidegger, is precisely acreative counter-movement in respect to the physiological. It presupposesits existence, but goes beyond it: "only what assimilates its sharpest anti-thesis, and not merely what holds that antithesis down and suppresses, is

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truly great;such transformationdoes not cause the antithesis to disappear,however, but to come to its essential unfolding"(Nietzsche135).An Aesthetic of Struggle

One does not treat Debordfairly by considering him a pure theoretician:it is easy to put him into perspective by examining his writings exclusivelyfrom the point of view of their speculative originality. Indeed, more thantheory,what counts for him is struggle; in his view, "theoriesaremade onlyto die in the war of time: they are stronger or weaker units that must beengaged at the right moment in the combat [...];theories have to be replacedbecause their decisive victories even more than theirpartialdefeats producetheir wear-and-tear" (Ingirum,25-6). It is possible to better understand hisway of being by including him in a long tradition that dates back to theancient philosopher Heraclitus, who believes that beauty is not harmony,but conflict. This strategic and energetic conception of beauty, in whichaesthetics is not linked to the experience of conciliation (as in Pythagorasand in neoplatonism), but to thatof war,resorts to the metaphors of lightningand fire.Beauty is considered as a weapon-in fact,as the strongest weapon.Hence the aesthetic dimension contains nothing decorative, or accessory oroverstructural.It is tightly linked to the effectual, to reality,to a sphere thatwe usually regardas pertinentto politics. TheHeracliteanconception, whichoperated underground in the Roman world through Stoicism, meets withthe esthetic ideal supported by rhetoricand oratory,according to which thepractical efficacy of the art of speech has an essential value. The sphere ofbeauty is therefore a battleground in which one wins or loses: it is the placeof decision and result. According to Debord,

Individualswho do not actwish to believe that you canpick,freely, theexcellenceof thosewho will figure n a combat,alongwith theplaceandtime when you canstrikeanunstoppableand definitivehit. But no: withwhat is athand,and according o the few effectivelyassailablepositions,you make a grabfor one or the other as soon as a favorablemoment isapparent;otherwiseyou disappearwithout having achieved anything.(Ingirum 61)This strategic conception of beauty was fully developed in theseventeenth century.The definition of beauty as sharpness, the comparisonbetween the man of letters and the warrior, the mixture of aesthetic and

political models make the Baroquea constant point of referencefor Debord:in particular the figure of BaltasarGracian deserves attention and respect.Substance 90, 1999



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In his TheCourtier'sManualOracle,he was able to depict better than anyoneelse all the aspects of "the grand style" by rescuing it from any form ofabstract classicism and immersing it in historical events and contingencies.However, even more thanGracian, t is the enemy of Richelieuand Mazarin-CardinalRetz-who occupies Debord'simagination.Inhis letter of December24, 1968, Debord wrote to me:I love the quotationof Retz's Memoiresnot onlybecause it touchesuponthe themes of the "imaginationn power"and of "takeyour desires forreality," ut also because there s a certainamusing relationshipbetweentheFrondeof 1648andMay[1968]:heonlytwo greatmovements n Pariswhichexplodedas immediateanswer to somearrests:nd both with somebarricades.

The subversive tradition in which Debord places himself is thereforemore one of ancient-baroque tyrannicide than the modern one of politicaland social revolution: 1968 seems to him similar to the Fronde, not to theFrenchRevolution, much less the RussianRevolution. By comparing Debordto the Cardinal who animated the Fronde, there is in him a practice of truththat belongs to Retz the writer,but definitely not to Retz the man of action.It is easy, of course, to preserve one's integrity in solitude, or in a veryrestrictedgroup of friends;it is a totally differentmatter to have to deal withall sorts of men and to fight in a civil war in which everybody knows thatlife itself is at stake! The "grandstyle" of Retz's Memoires onsists above allin the distance he keeps from himself, in the unrestrained sincerity withwhich he exposes the most hidden motivations of his actions, even when itdamages his reputation, but certainly it does not consist in the events thathe tells! It is a post festum "grandstyle," so to speak, not in the flagrancy ofaction; in plotting intrigues, betrayals and conspiracies, Retz is no differentfrom his enemies, and if his schemes have not succeeded, failure was certainlyunintentional and unwelcome! Debord's case is very different; in it theaesthetic of struggle, at least starting from the end of the 1960s, is shaped asan aesthetic of defeat, almost as if any success would contain an element ofunavoidable vulgarity. War s for him not only the realm of danger,but alsoof delusion (Panegyric,VI).I have always had a vague sense of the "obscuremelancholy" that accompanied his life, as he acknowledged in In girium,and I saw the tragic and inevitable consequences of attributingto failure anaura of dismal splendor.What Debord has in common with Retz the writer is the questioning ofwhat could have been and has not been. InhisMmoires,Retz often mentionsevents that were on the point of happening and did not happen for totallySubstance 90, 1999

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accidental reasons. In his view, heroic judgment consists precisely indistinguishing the extraordinaryfrom the impossible, in order to aim at thefirst and to avoid the second. In Debord as well there is a similar attitude:inhis letter of June10,1968 he writes to me: "Wehave almostmade a revolution.[...] The strike now has been defeated (mainly by the C.G.T.),but Frenchsociety as a whole is in a crisis for a long period." Now, I wonder whetherthe "society of the spectacle"itself, erasing the distinction between true andfalse, between imagination and reality,has not also changed the notion ofvictory and defeat, freeing them from reference to the accomplished eventand inaugurating a "society of simulacra." This is, however, a theoreticalstep that Debord never took; he remained fundamentally linked, like Retz,to a realistic vision of conflict. Maybe political thinkers of the sixteenthcentury (such as Machiavelli, Guicciardiniand Loyola) had already movedbeyond this vision.Debord's questioning the reasons for events, however, never becomesregret,much less repentance. He writes,

I have never quite understood the reproaches I have often incurred,wherebyI lost this fine troopin a senselessassault,or with some sortofNeroniancomplacency. ...] I certainly[...] assume responsibilityfor allthat happened" Ingirum,60).The stoic attitude of acceptance of present and past prevails: this is

definitely a very important aspect of the "grand style." Life is a labyrinthfrom which there is no way out: from this, in fact, derives the title of his filmIngirumimusnocteet consumimurigni.This sentence, which means, literally,"We urn around atnight and we are devoured by fire,"presents the curiousfeaturethatone can readit fromthe last letter to the firstwithout the slightestchange-an extraordinary palindrome. Hence it expresses very well theexperience, typical of the ancient Stoics, of synkatathesis,he assent of thewise to heimarmene,Providence, which they understood as the inviolableseries of causes, "the rational law on the basis of which things thathappenedhave happened, those that happen happen and those that will happen willhappen"(Pohlenz).Connectedto this experienceis the stoic idea of the eternalreturn,that is to say, of the repetition of recurrentcosmic periods, in whichthe same events thathave alreadyoccurredhappen again.As is well-known,Nietzsche adopts the stoic conception of the eternal return and interprets itnot as a metahistorical law but as "a will of eternalreturn,"as amorfati:onlyin thisway canthe past stop being the cause of frustrationand powerlessness.The future will not be able to give us anything better than what the past hasSubstance 90, 1999



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already given us. The path of utopia is blocked for Nietzsche, as well as forDebord; it is extraneous to "thegrand style." Debord says: "As for myself, Ihave never regrettedanything I have done, and I admit that I am completelyunable to imagine what else I could have done, by being what I am."(Panegyric47).The Direct Hold on History

In Debord's way of being there is a last aspect that is probably moreimportant than all the previous ones: the relationship with history. Indeed,his distance from the world and the aesthetic of conflict undoubtedlyconstitute style, but they do not make it really great. They can in fact lead toan ascetic model in which fanatical features are present: the figure of thewarrior monk manifests a strong aesthetic dimension, for his courage andhis (atfirstsight) contradictory eatures,but it is difficultto attributegrandeurto him. Something else is required; n Debord, this extraelement comes fromhis relationship with the historical process, of which he claims to be notonly the interpreter,but also an essential part. The SI believes in being thecritical consciousness of the return of social revolution. Starting from theearly 1960s, this expresses itself in unconscious and nascent forms in allindustrial societies as the revolt of youth, racialuprisings, and struggles inthe Third World. The social revolution is not conceived as an ideal to berealized, but, in Marx and Engels's words, as "the real movement thatabolishes the existing state of affairs."During the period I was in contactwith Debord, the boundless ambition to constitute the most advanced pointof human progress (already present in Hegel and Marx) found some truesupport. For instance, the SI played a decisive role in the first Europeanstudent revolt, in Strasbourg in Autunm 1966. While I was there, I hadexperienced the enthusiasm of feeling oneself in the avant-garde of aworldwide movement.

But the highest point of the Situationist experience is represented byMay 1968 in France. In fact this movement, exploiting the occasion of astudent revolt, went a long way beyond the university environment,expanding to the industrial proletariatand to the whole of Frenchsociety.Inhis letterof May 10, 1968(2:00p.m.), in which Debord describes in detail therelationship between the SI and the student movement, and the events ofMay 3, May 6, and of that same morning, advising me to take someprecautions with respect to the police, he affirms that "a decisive step hasbeen made in the revolt and in the consciousness." And he adds,

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Themoment of the SI'sovercominghasnotyet come:and this is why oneneeds to overcometheprevious tageof our action(ifwe were unable to doso, we would be "objectively"dissolved because the spreadingof thestrugglerequires hat a groupsuch as the SIattaina correctand slightlymoreextendedpractice).

In his letter of June 10, 1968, he writes:We had the opportunity o be at the heart of the entireevent duringthemostinterestingperiod.Wecontinueat themoment,but the future s veryuncertain.Wecount on theshock that n manycountriesopenstheway toa internationaleturnof thenewrevolutionaryritique.Herealready heoryhad takento the road.Everyold organizationhasbitterlyfought againstthe movement[...] The core people--including a certain number ofworkers-have been most of the timeremarkable.Ourgroupwas formedby 4 Situationists+ 2 Enrages+ approximately 5partisanswho joinedinthe battle (halfof them were totallyunknownbefore) [...] Afterhavinghad the "OccupationCommitteeof the Sorbonne"duringthe first days(one of them was decisive), we have formed the "Council for theMaintenance f occupation"whichhashadmanycontacts n Parisandinthe provinces.

The Council, formed by Situationists, Enrages and sympathizers for atotalof approximately40people, had functioned as an uninterruptedGeneralAssembly, deliberating day and night. Ithad three separate commissions incharge of compiling and printing documents, relations with occupiedfactories,and the supplies necessaryforthe activity.Itpublished the "Reporton the Occupation of the Sorbonne" (May 19), which exposed the eventsthathad caused the failureof thatexperience;the declaration "For he Powerof Workers' Councils" (May 22), which evaluated the possibility ofreactivating certain sectors of the economy under workers' control; the"Appeal to All Workers"(May 30), which maintained that the movement inits refluxprocess "was missing only the consciousness of what it had alreadydone, in order to really possess this revolution." With the State restorationin June, the Council dissolved, because it refused to have a permanentexistence.

While taking refuge in Brussels for fear of persecution (where I meetthem inJuly1968),the Situationistswrote the volume Enrages ndSituationistsin the Occupation Movement (signed Rene Vienet) and the article "TheBeginning of an Era" (issue 12 of L'Internationaleituationniste), n whichthey perfected their judgement on May '68. In their opinion, the movementof May '68 was essentially proletarian and not a student one; it expresseditself on the occasion of a student revolt,but its development went farbeyondSubstance 90, 1999



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the academic context: "The May movement was not some political theorylooking for workers to carry it out; it was the acting proletariat seeking itstheoretical consciousness" (Knabb, 229).

The fact that a small group of marginal intellectuals, poor and jobless,guided by a man who held the entire world "ingran dispitto,"had been atthe heart of one the greatest spontaneous strikes in history, gave Debordextraordinary credibility and invested him with an almost prophetic role.Even in the moments of maximum enthusiasm during May,Debord kept anextraordinary lucidity of historical judgment.

On May 15 he saw three possible developments in a decreasing orderof probability:the spontaneous extinction of the movement, repression,andsocial revolution. On May 22 he deemed that the most probable solution tothe crisis was the demobilization of workers, negotiated between Gaullismand the C.G.T.on the basis of economic advantages. In the conversations wehad in July 1968 in Brussels, I was impressed by the fact that he considereda Russian invasion the most probablesolution to the Czechoslovakian crisis,something that actually happened the following month, causing hugeastonishment and scandal, above all in the milieu of the Left.

I interpreted his silence on the historical events of the 1970s and 1980sas a negative judgment with respect to an age he would indeed define as"repugnant" (Panegyric,IV). But his "grand style" manifested itself onceagain with a masterly move: like TheSocietyoftheSpectacle,published a yearbefore '68, his Commentarieso theSocietyof theSpectacle,which marked hisreturn to greatpolitical theory,anticipatedby some time the fall of the BerlinWalland the end of the Soviet Union. This is how he renewed, for the yearsfollowing 1989, his role as "occultmaster" of subversion.

Two more brief considerations in the last pages of Panegyric seemprophetic to me. The first concerns the general hatred in which we are allimmersed, because of the authoritarian redefinition of pleasures, bothconcerningtheirpriority,and theirsubstance. Thesecond is even moresubtle.ThereforeI have to quote it in full:It should be known that servitude henceforth truly wants to be loved foritself, and no longer because it would bring some extrinsic advantage.Previously, it could pass for protection; but it no longer protects anything.

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An Aestheticof the "Grand tyle" 101

Servitudedoes not trytojustify tselfnow by claimingto haveconserved,anywhere at all, a charm that would be anything other than the solepleasureof knowing it. (Panegyric7-8)

This seems to me the epigraph under which the present age stands.UniversityofRomeIItranslatedby OlgaVasile

WORKS CITED

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Substance 90, 1999


perniola - an aesthetic of the

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