SPECTACULAR AND CLANDESTINE LIFE: GUY DEBORD IN THE CHRYSALID
Luka Rudez
§On the Clandestine
The Use of Bodies is the culmination of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, the final volume of the Homo Sacer Project. Some readers might find it surprising that this work starts off with a prologue concerning none other than Guy Debord. The prologue constitutes of a kind of bio-graphy; a sketch of Guy’s life, including his own thoughts on his life and the life of his friends. Agamben points to the very autobiographical nature of Guy’s cinematography, intertwining the great political endeavours of the Situationists, in critical thought and vigorous activism in public life, and, surprisingly, the private life of the members of the group, documenting “[…] [In Panégyrique:] the houses he inhabited, 28 via delle Caldaie in Florence, the country house at Champot, the square des Missions étrangères at Paris (actually 109 rue du Bac, his final Parisian address, in the drawing room of which a photograph from 1984 shows him seated on the English leather sofa that he seemed to like,” (Agamben 2016, xv) and images of the faces of his friends, Asger Jorn, Maurice Wyckaert, Ivan Chtecheglov and his partner Alice. And yet this unavoidable split between the public and the private is exactly part of the alienation inherent to the spectacle society: the distinction between the two is spectacular in its own right, and the ’private’ is itself an appearance of a politically qualified form of life, a negatively state-governed sphere, only apparently ‘autonomous’. This point is invoked by Michel Foucault innumerably many times: ‘autonomy’ is produced, ‘given’ as such, the state being the supplier and the structure inside which this ‘freedom’ is qualified.
Still, there is something hidden in the private, something that grounds the public-private opposition, which Agamben argues bears an immense importance for Guy, his thought and life, but which at the same time seems to be completely ‘intransmissible’…
“Cette clandestinité de la vie privée sur laquelle on ne possède jamais que des documents dérisoires. [That clandestinity of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.]" (Agamben 2016, xv)
By documenting his life and that of his friends, whatever was the thing to be documented is somehow lost in the transmission of it; this intransmissibility can in part be understood as conditioned by the prevalent mode of appearance laid out by Guy in §15 of his all-important The Society of the Spectacle:
“The idea of a downgrading of being into having at an earlier stage of society, and now the shift from having into appearing. What is had, has to appear, for it truly to be had. And earlier: what is, has to be had, before it truly is – this can even be conceived in a Hegelian way; being needs to be thought in order to truly be.” (Debord 2017, 17)
Looking at this passage, we get a sense of why Agamben takes a liking to Guy: politics and philosophy are interlaced – the governmental distinction between the public and the private rests on an ontological division of being into two modes. Why must a being appear in order to be; why must a being be had in order to be? The history of Being might be just as political as philosophical; this current epoch is characterized by the dominion of ‘appearance’ – the age of the spectacle. The nature of the clandestine is such that it is lost in its revelation, and yet the society of the spectacle[1] forces it to reveal itself through the mode of ‘private life’, where there is nothing of the clandestine left but its very absence. But this absence is something that goes completely unnoticed! Bringing to light this exact absence is the main obsession in Guy’s life, paving the way for that ‘true life’ or ‘historical life’[2] he constantly evokes, in contrast to the pseudo-life of the spectacle society. This life has a very peculiar character, which is clandestine in nature, impossible to put into words in terms of a definition or description. As with things of a similar incommunicable nature, we know literature and poetry to be able to let such things reveal themselves in their clandestinity; letting them come to be in new ways through the verses of song or the prose of writing. Searching for the ‘clandestinity of private life which we possess nothing of but pitiful documents’ we encounter in literature one such figure, whose life consists exactly in the writing of documents (which do not even deserve to be described as pitiful), exemplary of that clandestine life Guy could never fully comprehend:
“But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel…” (Melville 1853, 1044)
Henry Melville’s short masterpiece, which has piqued the interest of many philosophers, most prominently Gilles Deleuze, as well as Agamben himself, Bartleby, the Scrivener concerns a ‘man of the law’, managing a law-copying firm on Wallstreet, and his encounter with the glitch in the societal matrix that is Bartleby, who in turn leads the manager to question the whole purpose of existence and the meaning of anything. To each and every demand from his boss Bartleby simply responds ‘I would prefer not to’, which the manager interprets as a refusal, at first taking it as an insult coming from a disgrace of an indignant employee towards his benevolent employer, which surely must be punished with a lay-off, if not simply with violence, but then realizing there not being any justification for such punitive actions, since there seems to be no snarky and conspicuous motive behind Bartleby’s words. The manager even asks him directly on one account why he refuses: “You will not?”, to which Bartleby finally ‘makes himself clear’: “I prefer not.” (Melville 1853, 1050-1052) The ontological implications of the word prefer is extensively analysed by Deleuze 1997 (Bartleby; or the Formula) in terms of the magical formula ‘I would prefer not to’, which is neither a negation nor affirmation, and neither a preference or a non-preference, but instead a kind of suspension of language through which the structure of the question or demand is nullified: ‘What does he mean by…?’ has no answer here, because “[…] the formula stymies all speech acts, and at the same time, it makes Bartleby a pure outsider to whom no social position can be attributed.” (Deleuze 1997, 73)
The mystery of Bartleby stems from the fact that every interpretation and structure imposed upon him glides off of him. The manager even supposes something inhuman about him in the lack of signs pointing towards a motive of his apparent refusal.
“Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.” (Melville 1853, 1049)
The more the manager thinks about Bartleby, the less he understands. Does Bartleby even eat? (He has only been seen eating gingernuts.) Does he have a place to live? When arriving at the office in the morning Bartleby is always already there, leading to the discovery of the office being Bartleby’s very own home:
“Rolled away under his desk, I found a blanket; under the empty grate, a blacking box and brush; on a chair, a tin basin, with soap and a ragged towel; in a newspaper a few crumbs of ginger-nuts and a morsel of cheese.” (Melville 1853, 1054)
It is completely baffling to the manager how someone can live like this, and the only logical explanation must be that Bartleby is lonely and has lost his way in life. Indeed, Bartleby must be one of the saddest cases of man, living in complete solitude in the wretched conditions of an office, not even suited for being a home, and all this on Wallstreet of all places! This grand vehicle of economic growth, the centre of the production of the wealth of society – and on a Sunday, as well as any given night, when work is put on hold, Bartleby inhabits this “deserted Petra”.
How dare he not prefer to do anything? It is as if Bartleby’s existence is an insult towards the whole of society, all the wealth and enjoyment it has to offer. This existence is entirely clandestine. In terms of the spectacle, one might ask: how dare he not show himself, continuously failing to appear, to be spectacular, failing to be integrated into the spectacle? Sadly, this is what happens in the end, when Bartleby remains in the office after it has been sold, being arrested on account of housing himself there illegally, in turn becoming sensationalized in the newspapers as the odd man dwelling on Wallstreet, who no one knows anything about – a spectacle.
Despite the metaphysical feats ascribed to Bartleby by Deleuze (and Agamben 1999: Bartleby, or On Contingency), his story expresses a certain melancholy about his solitary existence. Asking Bartleby, ‘do you want to live?’, the answer ‘I prefer not to’ is rather disturbing, even if the opposite question of death gets the same treatment. Thinking of the way Guy cherishes his friendships and brief seemingly insignificant moments of life, there seems to be something missing for Bartleby. Following Guy’s thought, there is something important revealed in Bartleby’s clandestine existence: his blanket, his morsel of cheese and his tiny basin, are all things fundamentally shared, something communal, that everyone takes part in (sleeping, eating, bathing); uncommunicable, and yet for Guy the truth of life, which comes to fruition as a historical life – a life yet to come, tragically repressed in that state of society known all too well, under the name of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’.
§2 On the Spectacular
The Society of the Spectacle is one of those works which is ahead of its time, written like a manifesto where each paragraph is numbered; it reads as a series of proclamations of which §34 seems to be the most striking:
“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” (Debord 2017, 24)
Just this one paragraph should make us resist an all too simplistic interpretation of the work that reduces what is at stake to the consequences of the emergence of mass-media, commercialization, and television. The image is not confined to a screen, and the phenomenon of the spectacle cannot be represented by a mass of people glued to such a screen. The spectacle builds directly on the idea of capital and all the ways in which society is saturated by it, resonating with all the Marxist critiques of alienation, exploitation, and the eclipsing of use-value by exchange-value. The immediate safeguard to reducing image to a screen shows that the radicality of the becoming-image of capital is far from understood.
Once again, Agamben appears as crucial to understanding the crux of the idea of the spectacle. In his Profanations (2005), we find a chapter titled “Special Being” (Agamben 2020, ch. 7) concerned with that being which in belonging to no one belongs to everyone. The paradigm for such a being is built upon the character of the species (as ‘appearance’), and the many derived terms (including ‘spectacle’),[3] as something that is essentially seen as something. The species is like an image, which consists in referring to something else (the image of something), and thereby not being in itself, but being in another, or ‘being in a subject’, different from the image itself:
“The image is a being whose essence is to be a species, a visibility or an appearance. A being is special if its essence coincides with its being given to be seen, with its aspect.” (Agamben 2020, 57)
Agamben adds to this that the mirror is the place in which we discover that which we identify most with: our image, something other than ourselves. The smile we see in the mirror is not strictly our smile but, in being other, is connected to any smile whatsoever, a ‘kind of’ being, or a ‘whatever being’.
“A being – a face, a gesture, an event – is special when, without resembling any other, it resembles all the others. Special being is delightful, because it offers itself eminently to common use, but it cannot be an object of personal property.” (Agamben 2020, 59)
The mention of ‘a face, a gesture, an event’ brings to mind the form of life of the bourgeoisie where everything is about the right glare of a facial expression, the exactitude of a honorary gesture and the perfect sociable construction of the event or occasion. This is precisely the setting of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and it is in the character of Lily Bart that the spectacular and the image reveal themselves. Ms. Bart lives a life in the partly decaying bourgeois fin de siècle society, where her appearance is her very essence, and she knows it. As a woman, the masculine life of working to gain wealth and power is not a possibility for her; instead, it is by marrying and through favours gained by the right exchanges of looks, the perfectly timed glance and, of course, the ability to make oneself a spectacle of beauty. Throughout the novel, Lily Bart uses the power of the spectacular perfectly, and yet always doubts herself when the moment of commitment presents itself, rejecting the very logic of bourgeois society that she has been playing along with (refusing the men of her circle’s much-needed economic favours and offers leading to marriage), just to fall back on that same structure shortly after every downfall. She ends up in the working class, a life she simply cannot bear, like a delicate garden flower thrown back into the natural forest. Here she seems to finally have come to a full understanding of her situation in Wharton’s summation of her life lived:
“She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty. […] She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. […] All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance.” (Wharton 1993, 286)
The spectacular life of Lily Bart contains an absence of the clandestine, those roots connected to the seemingly insignificant patch of dirt they are ingrained in. Finding in the mirror only oneself and the capital interest one’s appearance can generate the clandestine is put out of reach. Still, the enamouring smile which Lily can put on at times, the gesture with which she can make others feel joy contains something true in its spectacular nature. The spectacle separates the individual from her gestures, opening up for alienation on the one hand, but also ‘special being’ on the other. In Lily Bart we see this possibility for the special, proper to all in being proper to none, and at the same time the danger of the spectacular in an age when ‘the common’ remains an unrealized potential exploited to maintain the dominion of alienating separation.
§3 On the Crystal and the Chrysalid
“Immediately after having evoked his lost youth, Guy adds that nothing expresses its dissipation better than that ‘ancient phrase that turns completely back on itself, being constructed letter by letter like an inescapable labyrinth, thus perfectly uniting the form and content of loss:
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.
‘We turn in the night, consumed by fire’.” (Agamben 2016, xvii)
Following the autobiographical intention of Guy’s oeuvre, Agamben relates this palindrome, often called the devil’s verse, to the motif of the moth striving towards the flame which consumes it. This image bears a striking similarity to the idea of the spectacle society. Everyone contemplates the spectacle and remains in contemplation separated from themselves and each other, and yet some pursue the spectacle itself in an effort to transcend it, to revolt against it and make the repressed true (historical) life emerge out of the pseudo-life maintained by it. Such a revolution does not go directly by way of the universal, but must take the particulars with it, that exact clandestinity of each and every one’s life – an approach Marx might appear sceptical of: “it is thus that nocturnal moths, when the sun of the universal has set, seek the light of the lamp of the particular.” (The German Ideology, quoted in Agamben 2014, xvii-xviii) As great as the sun is, that which it illuminates has an importance intimate with itself, which remains true even through the night. Nocturnal moths gather under the lamp of the particular and share a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, exchanging words of no universal, nor particular, importance, a cigarette or a few dozen, a laugh or two, perhaps a smile. Guy would see in the light of this lamp, the light of the spectacle itself, and he would then “pursue this light, to stubbornly peer into the flame of singular and private existence.” (Agamben 2016, xviii)
Any studious reader of the great Kapital knows that the profundity of Marx lies not only in his critique of capitalism, but in the way in which he expresses this critique, surprisingly evoking concepts from both biology and minerology.[4] Marx likes to use the term ‘metamorphosis’ when speaking of the exchangeability of commodities, and in order to explain the general equivalent which money functions as in capitalist modes of exchange, he invokes the idea of the Geldkristall, the ‘money-crystal’:
“Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a money-crystal [Geldkristall]. Nothing is immune to this alchemy; the bones of saints cannot withstand it, let alone certain other, more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum [sacred things beyond human commerce].” (Marx 1977, 229)
Peering into this crystal, one can see every single commodity reflected. Since every commodity has its value in money, this crystal is like a Philosopher’s Stone, having the ability to transform each thing into gold and, more profoundly, each amount of gold into any commodity, making money the commodity par excellence. Following Guy’s thought, this is exactly the truth (or lie) of the spectacle; the becoming-image of capital is this crystal which is everything and at the same time nothing. In §49 of SS we read:
“[…] in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do. The spectacle is money for contemplation only, for here the totality of use has already been bartered for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just servant of pseudo-use – it is already, in itself, the pseudo-use of life.” (Debord 2017, 33)
All use is directed towards money, the use of which is merely ‘contemplative’ (a pseudo-use), constituting a life separated from itself in a representation that is alienated from that which is represented; the money-crystal making the commodities and the social relations reflected in it insignificant apart from their reflection in money. Still, the nature of the money-crystal remains a mystery[5], since the crystal does not explain the exact relations between commodities, but merely shows the totality of the commodity world, in spectacular fashion, hiding the fact that it is showing, concealing the nature of its appearance, as Martin Heidegger would put it.
Marx is on to exactly this aspect of concealment in the above quoted passage: “Since money does not disclose what has been transformed into it […].” The undisclosed is found in another way Marx conceives of capital. When he tries to define the concept of circulation, and how each circuit (or relation) between commodities are connected, through money, in a general all-encompassing circulation of commodities, he does not mention the crystal at first, but rather the image of the chrysalid:
“But then it goes the way of all flesh [den Weg alles Fleisches wandert], enters the chrysalis state as gold [Goldchrysalide], and thereby simultaneously completes the first metamorphosis of a third commodity [money]. Hence the circuit made by one commodity in the course of its metamorphoses is inextricably entwined with the circuits of other commodities. The process as a whole presents itself as the circulation of commodities.” (Marx 1977, 207)
All flesh, that is to say, every thing whatsoever, every commodity, in order to transform, to undergo metamorphosis, must go through the gold-chrysalid state; a state that is fundamentally clandestine! The secret of money: how can any thing become anything else? This is an ontological question at its core, the answer to which is hidden inside the chrysalid, and as such a truth unable to show itself to us as anything else but clandestine. Following Heidegger’s idea of truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit): The spectacular conceals its unconcealment, showing everything but the fact that it shows, while the clandestine unconceals (reveals) its concealment, hiding everything but the fact that it hides, only showing its hiddenness.[6]
Lily Bart is much like a butterfly; showing her colours and patterns to the world from one flower to another, embodying the beauty of the spectacular, but in being separated from herself also not being able to find herself at home in her spectral being. The butterfly is then in a way different, since it does not see itself being seen; it is not haunted by its own image and the capital it consists of. Ms. Bart, having become fully a spectre, her reality being reduced to being seen, being specious, reclining in her dimly lit working-class home, ceasing to be spectacular, becomes a dark-coloured moth fluttering near the flame and succumbing to the light, not being able to remain in existence, having lost contact with that warm intimacy of the clandestine.
While the spectacular can be said to culminate in a decadence in the form of the moth bound to the flame, meeting its death at the supposed peek of its existence, the clandestine has its absolute form in the chrysalid. The metamorphosis happening inside this incumbent cannot be brought to light – the chrysalid cannot be turned inside out since any interference would destroy the life on the inside. We must understand this metamorphosis not solely in terms of the living being at the end of the process, but also through the process itself, considering the chrysalid as a hidden life on its own which bears no lesser importance than the spectacular butterfly which is to emerge from it. Still, this life is entirely clandestine, the chrysalid being the symbol of clandestinity as such, showing its hiddenness. The melancholy of Bartleby is, then, that of the chrysalid which remains enclosed and never develops into that form which can be spectacular, emerge as a species (something visible to others). The becoming-spectacle of Bartleby is in any case possible since the chrysalid itself is visible and able to be made into a species also. Thereby, the special of Agamben is ever-present in society; Bartleby’s blanket (and his life) cannot be enclosed in pure clandestinity – the hidden always has a sort of mild glow. Showing its very concealment, it is enveloped in the special. And the butterfly is then the opposite, since it hides something in all its spectacular colours and patterns; it hides the fact that it is showing, that all its aspects flow out from a certain life irreducible to its appearances, and yet lets these appearances be shared by all.
§4 The Life of Guy: The Life of All
With Giorgio’s renewed vision upon Guy’s life, we could say that the character of the spectacle – being all-encompassing and shared by all – is analogous to that special being, which in being nobody’s, becomes proper to all. The clandestine is then where the special is found; in ‘cette clandestinité de la vie privée’, and it is the special emerging uncorrupted into society which constitutes that ‘historical life’ in which the blanket, the morsel of cheese and the basin become historical, intertwined in the lives of all; individuals becoming most proper in finding the whole of life in a moment of life: a situation.[7] A momentary flutter of a butterfly passing by, enveloping the whole of life in one instance, as if in a chrysalid form, fundamentally “playful in character”.
Endnotes
[1] As well as certain strands of philosophy, following Hegel’s dictum, mentioned by Guy, ‘being needs to be thought in order to be’, who makes being follow the laws of reason, or of rationality, such as analytical philosophy of mind, which hesitates to give credence to the being of ‘the mental’ as long as it cannot be thought in an analogous way to the physical, which appears consistent and logical: ‘As long as a being cannot appear consistent with the system of thought, why not simply reject its existence entirely?’
[2] §163 of SS (notice the emphasis on historical life being playful): “The revolutionary project of a classless society, of a generalized historical life, is also the project of a withering away of the social measurement of time in favour of an individual and collective irreversible time which is playful in character […] – the complete realization […] of that communism which ‘abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals’.”
[3] Speculum (mirror), spectrum (image, ghost), perspicuous (transparent, clearly seen), speciosus (beautiful, giving itself to be seen), specimen (example, sign), and spectaculum (spectacle).
[4] Very similar to Goethe who can develop a profoundly original theory in any subject of interest to him, from botany and biology to minerology, the nature of colours to the nature of language, from a masterpiece in the style of the novel to another masterpiece in the style of an epic. Goethe being a German romantic can keep on elaborating, while the modest modernity of Marx only allows him to merely evoke certain concepts while keeping on topic in terms of philosophy and political-economic thought.
[5] Even in Marx, when the foundation of value is found to be labour(-power), the value of labour itself is by capitalist logic also labour; a tautology that is fundamentally an aporia, since the means of thinking it through seem to be absent in the age of capitalism.
[6] This comes surprisingly close to the way in which Guy talks of truth and falsehood in the spectacle society: both §9 of SS: “[…] the truth is a moment of falsehood.” (p. 14) and §219: “[the spectacle] erases the dividing line between the true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances.” (p. 153).
[7] Means without End: “[A situation is] a moment in life, concretely and deliberately constructed through the collective organization of a unified milieu and through a play of events.” (Agamben 2000, 77)
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000 [1996]. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti & Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2020 [2005]. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2016 [2014]. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translated & edited by Daniel Heller-Rozen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Debord, Guy. 2017 [1967]. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Daniel Nicholson-Smith. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997 [1993]. Essays: Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Marx, Karl. 1977 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Policy, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York City, NY: Vintage Books.
Melville, Henry. 1853. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.
Wharton, Edith. 1993 [1905]. The House of Mirth. London: Penguin.
