The Spectacle of Disintegration by Mckenzie Wark

Author:Mckenzie Wark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

14 The Devil’s Party

Fortune against envy; fame against oblivion.

Baltasar Gracián

“Shipwreckers have their name writ only on water.”1 Debord takes it to be Shelley’s epitaph, but it is also Debord’s. His last film, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978), perhaps his masterpiece, has an aquatic mood. The eddies and currents of the river as it flows into the sea are so many situations that form and disperse on its surface, to be replaced by others, and still others. In Girum has a slower rhythm, a more somber mood than Society of the Spectacle. The emphasis shifts toward a more fine-grained denunciation of the colonization of everyday life by spectacular images of the commodified world.

Against this, Debord can only posit the remembrance of lost friends and the implacable onrush of a historical time, which will return no matter how much the spectacle denies its existence. Martine Barraqué: “And oddly, while working on the last film (what I am telling you is quite harsh, right?) I had the impression of working with a veteran of war. That he could not write anything else that was new—that everything kept turning round and round in the usual ways because he had already said it all.”

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. The palindrome of the title means something like: We go into the circle by night; we are consumed by fire. If water is a figure for a particular quality of time, fire is another. The momentary conflagration, the clash of forces, the cavalry charge, or the fatal bullet which, Debord once noted, killed an uncommon number of his friends.2 Fire is the other elemental time, and if we all are borne along by a liquid current, there are those few, those happy few, who are the friends of fire; the devil’s party, orbiting the flame, like moths to enlightenment. By the time of In Girum, the party of fire is a diminished band, the everyday situation no longer seems quite so resonant with a wider historical current. In the disintegrating spectacle negation no longer works against it from without. All that remains is the spark of a memory, to be recalled, over and over, until it torches time again.

In Girum détourns scenes from movies as Spectacle does, and sometimes the same films, but to different effect. Shanghai Gesture appears again, but this time Debord chooses not Gene Tierney but Victor Mature playing Doctor Omar, who describes himself as “a doctor of nothing … it sounds important and hurts no one, unlike most doctors.” Doctor Omar even has the temerity to steal a line from the Roman playwright Terence: “I am a thoroughbred mongrel. I am related to all the earth and nothing human is foreign to me.”3

He is the first of a series of characters appearing in In Girum who might be described as being of the devil’s party, agents of deception and division. While Robin Hood and Zorro make appearances as rather more straightforward fantasies of redemption from within the spectacle, Debord is drawn to the more ambivalent and dangerous trickster figure.

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