Category Archives: paris

Found in a Trunk: The Lost Avant-Garde Movement that came Decades before Dada

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Filed under Art, Dadaism, Marcel Duchamp, paris, Yellowism

BY CECILE PAUL OCTOBER 8, 2021

If modern art has taught us anything, it is that anything can be considered art. Picasso’s and Braque’s curious peeling newspaper collages of the 1910s spring to mind as the opening act for the ‘Modern Art’ movement. It was at this point in time, in the early 20th century where ‘real’ art – the academic 19th century kind, with all its airs and graces and establishment-imposed ‘rules’ – and this new lighter, less formal and somewhat random approach, parted ways. Modern Art as we perceive it was arguably launched by the quirky and wonderfully chaotic Dada movement that took root in central Europe around 1910 and flowered in New York in the early 1920s, causing a somewhat profound ruffling of the feathers of the status quo. And whilst we now see Dada as revolutionary, it was uncanny to discover that Dada had a look-a-like predecessor – not a direct ancestor, mind you, more like a forgotten uncle. ‘Les Incohérents’ was a short-lived French art movement that originated from Montmartre in Paris in the 1880s. Unconcerned with the intellectual, political or spiritual facets of the arts (which Dada would address a mere 20 years later), they did, however, attempt to question through satire and ridicule, what exactly ‘art’ was, who it was intended for and why on earth it had to be so darn square.

Paris in the 1880s was the capital of a flourishing world empire, serious and secure. Perhaps it could afford some cultural introspection and self-analysis, if only for its own entertainment? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the Incoherents movement had a point: why restrict the arts, visual, music or dance world to the same old tedious and traditional offerings? Why not open it up to fun, new rules and new media?

Photo card – FECAMP – Cavalcade de Fécamp -Cabanon des Incohérents

As a small group of self-publicists, Les Incohérents were fed up with the stale and rather dull version of the-then established Arts world and wanted to entice the public with an alternative and more joyful view on art and life.

Playful, ingenious, ridiculous and entertaining, the Incoherent’s message was delivered through social amusement of the public, not unlike today’s social media content. This was to be an art for all, not just for a chosen few intellectuals. There’s indeed nothing new under the sun: from the graffitied walls of Pompeii to the current explosion of self-indulgent imagery on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it’s human nature to tease and tinker with mainstream messages and offer an alternative opinion.

Mona Lisa fumant la pipe by Sapeck (AKA Eugène Bataille)

The Mona Lisa of the movement is quite literally, the Mona Lisa herself, enjoying her long clay pipe. Mona Lisa fumant la pipe created by the artist Sapeck (AKA Eugène Bataille) in 1883, is perhaps Les Incohérents’ most iconic identity piece. The crude application of the pipe and its smoke rings, shatters the reverence of the historic image, and let’s face it, Sapeck’s subject is clearly far more relaxed than Leonardo’s. No longer part of an exclusive private collection or purely the intellectual property of the elite, street art was now there for all to enjoy. Technological developments in printing and photography allowed ease of artistic appropriation of established iconic images and masterpieces. Contributors of the Incoherents movement continued to manipulate and distort all aspects of the Arts, from dance to opera, from poster art to photography in an attempt to provoke and rewrite the rules as to what ‘art’ was and who it was for.

The founder and leader of the movement was Jules Lévy, a Parisian writer, publisher and founder of a wine-loving literary club out of Montmartre during the Belle Epoque called Les Hydropathes, which had fizzled out in 1880. Working in newspapers of the day and familiar with volume printing and understanding the public’s appetite for news, in an anti-establishment move, Levy had decided to throw a public ‘exhibition of drawings by people who could not draw’. Billed as a charity event, the contributors could present works in a public forum. This was the first ‘Incohérent’ art exhibition, held on July 13th 1882 on the Champs Elysées. Appropriately, in true Incohérents style, the Champs Elysées show was extravagantly lit by candlelight due to a gas outage. A profusion of works were shown; drawings of all types, paintings littered with alternative and radical subject matter, miscellaneous sculpture and objects in all mediums and forms. These consisted of nonsensical, irrational and bizarre imagery, all engineered to question, provoke, engage and get a laugh from the public.

The success of the Champs Elysées event prompted Lévy to run a second show from his own tiny attic apartment in October 1882 which attracted some 2,000 people including Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Richard Wagner. Imagine the art world’s most famous artists and critics crowded together to see over 150 works in a chambre de bonne (Paris’ matchbox apartments reserved for domestic workers). A stark contrast to the pomp and elitism of the prestigious art ‘Salon’ and its official circuits, it was nothing short of a parody. One academic called the radical counter-salon “an attack on art”.

The sober scene of a typical Paris art salon at the Champs Elysées in 1881

The public was actively invited to engage with this new art through the mocking and mannering of old icons. To say they were intrigued and amused is an understatement. They were gagging for more. Masked balls and cabarets were advertised across the city as the vehicle for delivering their message, attracting the public to a variety of venues and experiences where a jumble of different media, random objects, miscellaneous artefacts, scratchings, pastings and other weird and wonderful objects would be exhibited. A sort of arts ‘rave’ of the day.

Les Incohérents, whether it was a ball or a happening or an exhibition, became a ‘must do and see’ event in the Parisian cultural calendar.  October 1883 saw the first official exhibition of Incoherent art at the Galerie Vivienne in the heart of Paris. This show and all their future events would be run for charity, with the guidelines ‘All works are allowed, the serious works and obscene excepted’. The show was an Aladdin’s Cave of absurdities, parodies and pictorial puns and was furnished with a formal catalogue of the works, giving us some idea today of just how bizarre the content was. A whopping 20,000-plus enthusiasts visited the exhibition that October.

The next year, the Incohérents were again at Galerie Vivienne with yet more artful amusements. This time the catalogue, now effectively their manifesto, was lavishly illustrated with engravings of the peculiar works. The invitation card showed a ghostly broom-wielding dancer chasing blackbirds, perhaps an allegory for ‘out with the old and in with the new!’ The newspapers relished the event and as for the public, nothing could gratify their insatiable appetite for ‘incohérent art’.

La femme sans visage de Marc Sonal, Cruelle énigme, Catalogue des arts incohérents, 1884

Les Incohérents gave the Parisian public and celebrities of the day a chaotic and absurd serving of the visual arts, a barrage of eclectic offerings and experiences. Whilst never shocking nor challenging, the events were joyfully anticipated and was very much ‘a thing’ to attend and be seen attending in the Paris of the 1880s. But by the end of the decade, the success of the movement was catching up with Lévy. Accused of commercially exploiting both his artistic contributors and his public, the press began to describe him as a new form of the establishment, ‘the official unofficial Incoherent’. To add insult to injury, other enterprises in Paris started to cash-in on the branding, badging new cafes and titling magazines with the movement’s name and likeness

In order to distance himself from his accusers, Lévy organised a masked funeral ball at the Folies-Bergère nightspot to mark the end of the movement. In 1891, Levy tried to relaunch the movement with a new magazine, ‘Folies-Bergère’, but this also struggled to capture public attention. One last exhibition in 1893 was described this time by a critical press as ‘all that is outdated, outmoded. Inconsistency joined decadence, decay and other jokes with or without handles in the bag of old-fashioned chiffes’. Lévy plodded on until 1896, still trying to be the good Svengali and showman but his movement had flowered and wilted, and its audience had moved on for titillating entertainment elsewhere. Les Incohérents would be momentarily ressurected stateside in 1919 when Marcel Duchamp appropriated the Mona Lisa image, but this time, in place of Sabeck’s pipe, she now sported a moustache.

So little of the movement’s works is thought to have survived, that when the Musée d’Orsay devoted a retrospective to the Incoherent Arts in 1992, it was only able to exhibit archival documents and press clippings. Thousands of works produced by hundreds of artists during the movement’s zenith had all disappeared. Even by the 1930s, surrealists like André Breton, who often spoke about the Incoherents, had never seen their works.

With few traces of its existence, the movement was practically a lost legend; but more than a century later, unexpectedly in early 2021, seventeen important works attributed to the Incoherent Arts exhibitions were discovered in an old trunk. Unearthed amongst the storage of a private home near Paris, the large trunk full of a “jumble of documents, drawings, objects wrapped in rags,” included one work which has since been identified as the first monochrome in the history of art.

Discovered in the trunk
Discovered in the trunk: “La tortue et les deux canards, d’après Lafontaine (Molière)”/ Exposition des Arts Incohérents, 1884
Discovered in the trunk: signed GIEFFE (Jules Foloppe)

Another important find amongst the trunk’s contents was a piece of green cab curtain suspended from a wooden cylinder created by Alphonse Allais, given a title that roughly translates to “Pimps still in the prime of life and their stomachs in the grass drink absinthe“. To the untrained eye, it might look like just an old swatch of antique fabric, but the piece actually predates the Dada movement’s “readymade” philosophy, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe works of art he made from manufactured objects, such as his famous Bottle Rack (1915), the iconic porcelain urinal he titled Fountain (1917) and Bicycle Wheel (1913).

Discovered in the trunk: 1897 Green cab curtain by Alphonse Allais, “Des souteneurs, encore dans la force de l’âge et le ventre dans l’herbe, boivent de l’absinthe” © Galerie Johann Naldi

Unaware of the mysterious trunk’s value or significance, the homeowners were unable to identify its original owner – perhaps a co-organiser of Les Incohérents, one of the movement’s artists, or an early collector? Dealer and art expert, Johann Naldi, is still searching for answers while planning to present his findings to the public at the end of 2021, when the collection is also expected to go up for sale as a single lot. The Musée d’Orsay is rumoured to be a likely buyer.

And yet for such a historic find, bringing this collection to the world’s stage could be far more problematic that some would probably hope having just uncovered a missing link in the history of modern art. The problem being; the collection’s centrepiece, a canvas entirely painted in black, now identified as art history’s first monochrome, entitled “Combat de Nègres dans la Nuit“, which translates to “Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night”.

Combat de Nègres pendant la nuit (as seen from the back) © Galerie Johann Naldi

The provocative “joke” painting by the poet Paul Bilhaud, exhibited at the very first ‘Incohérent’ art exhibition in 1882 on the Champs Elysées, was thought to be lost forever. And now here it is, having resurfaced nearly 140 years later, facing a very different 21st century audience in the wake of a global racial reckoning.

Perhaps tellingly, the international press has been uncharacteristically slow to pick up a story about the rediscovery of an entire art movement hidden inside a trunk. Mainstream newspaper Le Monde however, has followed the story among other French art world publications, describing Paul Bilhaud’s historic monochrome as the collection’s most significant attraction. Meanwhile, the French Ministry of Culture has declared the collective discovery a “national treasure”. Disappointingly, we found that the French media coverage thus far has notably and consistently avoided any acknowledgement of the inevitable outcry that would likely ensue were a racist artwork disguised as humour to find its way into a public museum today and be celebrated as a national treasure.

The rediscovered works were briefly exhibited at a small gallery in Paris in Feburary 2021 © Le Figaro

As a conceptual piece, it is decades ahead of its time, which is where experts no doubt find the majority of the work’s merit. But is it worth elevating as the movement’s pièce de résistance or better used to reopen the conversation about what we consider art? It’s possible these issues are being raised behind the scenes before the collection is presented on a larger international stage.

In many ways, the Incoherents did create flickers of the avant-garde before the avant-garde. The movement momentarily released the public perception of the arts from the confines of its establishment, but it was Dada that actually managed to break the mould of previous centuries’ art traditions. Where the Dadaist created art for the mind, Les Incohérents was perhaps more of an amuse-bouche; a teaser of things to come. Now it’s our turn again to decide what to celebrate as art for public consumption.

Review – The Parisian Swing Band at The Musician, 5th January, 2019 – Music in Leicester Magazine | Jessie Mann

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Filed under Audio & Video, Gypsy Jazz, jazz, Music, paris
Parisian Swing
Kenny Wilson

Reviewed by Jessie Mann

If you had asked me where I was on Saturday 5th January, I would have been inclined to say at a club in the heart of Paris. Listening to the band, Parisian Swing, I was honestly transported to another time and place, taking in the rich sound of the 1930’s Parisian Gypsy Jazz era.

Being the first band to perform at The Musician in Leicester this year, they certainly kicked off 2019 with a SWING!
The four greatly talented band members performed to an enthusiastic audience that sat at little tables by candlelight and soaked in the atmosphere the musicians created.


Arthur Tyers (Photo: Kevin Gaughan)

With Arthur Tyers and Will Smith on Guitar, Kenny Wilson on the Accordion/vocals, and Mike Whittle on the Double Bass/vocals, this set up was all you needed to listen to some of Django Reinhardt’s most famous songs.

Nuages, a Django classic, set a slow, rich and velvety mood for the couples in the crowd and then the juxtaposition of Mack the Knife, described as ‘a mean song about a mean person’ brought laughter and bounce even over its darker lyrics. Beautifully played with speed and accuracy, each note was phenomenal from the guitars. Smith and Tyers were able to play incredibly fast but each note reached the audience perfectly.


The Parisian Swing Band (Photo: Kevin Gaughan)

Mike Whittle on the bass enchanted us all with his charisma and passionate dancing with his instrument throughout the evening. During the song It had to be you, each instrument had time to truly be appreciated as the focus was passed from the guitars to the bass, to the accordion. You were able to single out the gifts of each of the band members and appreciate how much talent and hard work goes into what they do.

My favourite song of the night had to be Autumn Leaves, originally by Edith Piaf, which Parisian Swing played with beautiful romantic justice. The audience was transported to a café in Paris with Kenny Wilson’s French vocals and accordion tying the scene together with Parisian passion.


Mike whittle, Arthur Tyers, Kenny Wilson(Photo: Kevin Gaughan)

The band played 18 songs from 8:30 onwards with a break halfway in which Music in Leicester was able to interview Mike and Kenny who were buzzing from their first half.
With a quick ‘one-two-three’ the band were off in full swing with upbeat lifts that you couldn’t help tapping and nodding your head too.

The band also played Sweet Sue, Honeysuckle Rose, Minor Swing, Just a Gigolo, Douce Ambiance, Lady be Good and After You’ve Gone. The mix was a real treat for the crowd to experience a taste of the best of Parisian Gyspy Jazz.

After two ‘last’ songs from the band (as the audience asked for more) the evening concluded at 11 and I’m sure many people will be having jazzy-dreams for a long time to come!

I wish the best for Parisian Swing and hope to hear them again!

Bonne chance mes amis!

Watch this video, by Kevin Gaughan, of The Parisian Swing band perform at this gig.

Watch this video of Jessie Mann interviewing Kenny Wilson and Mike Whittle from The Parisian Swing band.W

Source: Review – The Parisian Swing band at The Musician, 5th January, 2019 – Music in Leicester magazine

The junky genius of Alexander Trocchi | Tony O’Neill | The Guardian

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Filed under Art, Beatniks, Counterculture, Literature, London, New York, paris

The plotless beauty of his writing, and its fearless look at the emptiness of his own life, put ‘the Scottish Beat’ on a par with Kafka and Camus.

My scow is tied up in Flushing, NY, alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinderblocks of the main building of the works has turned them pink. The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.

Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix.

So begins Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi‘s incredible novel of existential dread. Young Adam, its predecessor, is better known, but the latter is the “Scottish Beat’s” classic.

Asked to name the best existential literature, most of us would probably say Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Franz Kafka. But Cain’s Book actually takes the reader one step further into the philosophical world of existential angst than any of them. It positively drowns us in a word of unremitting absurdity and meaninglessness.

A roman à clef, Cain’s Book details the life of one Joe Nechhi, a Glaswegian heroin addict living and working on a scow in New York’s Hudson harbor. It is a book almost entirely devoid of plot: Nechhi occasionally details trips into the city to score heroin, recollects his childhood in Glasgow, or talks of his attempts to write a book. What is incredible about the book is its unrelenting bleakness, and the sheer poetic quality of Trocchi’s writing.

Heroin for Trocchi, as Remainder author Tom McCarthy noted in a lecture on Cain’s Book recently, “is a moveable void: taking that void around the city with him, in him, he ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it’s also the way his whole perception system works at its most basic level (the two are the same).”

In real life, Trocchi seemed very glad to cut himself off from his peers, saying that his only concerns as a writer were “sodomy and lesbianism”, that those were the only interesting subjects in the previous 20 years of Scottish writing and that “I have written it all.”

Sadly, Cain’s Book was his last. As the 60s gave way to the 70s, Trocchi’s addiction to heroin took its toll and his talent lay pretty much squandered. The stories of his wild and tragic life are infamous and extensively documented in many of the leading “swinging 60s” biographies (Marianne Faithfull’s account of doing drugs with Trocchi is one of the best). Despite his addictions, and his sad death at the age of 59, Trocchi left us some of the bleakest, most beautiful writing to come out of the 60s.

In Cain’s Book the writing is all – the words ebb and flow like the inky blackness of the Hudson River. Trocchi’s descriptive powers are mesmerising: one barely even notices the lack of narrative drive until after the book has been put down.

His other books includes some interesting pseudonymous pornography for the Olympia Press. (Titles like Helen and Desire, Sappho of Lesbos and White Thighs deliver their smut with a Sadean political edge.) Young Adam, of course, was turned into a successful film starring Ewan McGregor, and helped to raise the author’s public perception a little. But it’s Cain’s book that best fulfils Trocchi’s hopes for “the invisible insurrection of a thousand minds”.

Alexander Trocchi

Guy Debord predicted our distracted society | John Harris

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Filed under Art, Counterculture, Dadaism, paris, Politics and Philosophy

Blurring appearance and reality … Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving in The Matrix. Photograph: Rex Features

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

With echoes of the most rapier-like prose written by Marx and Engels (eg “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), so begins Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, the treatise on the modern human condition he published in 1967. It quickly came to be seen as the set text of the Parisian événements of the following year, and has long since bled into the culture via no end of people, from the Sex Pistols to the Canadian troublemakers who call themselves Adbusters.

Its title alone is now used as shorthand for the image-saturated, comprehensively mediated way of life that defines all supposedly advanced cultures: relative to what Debord meant by it, the term usually ends up sounding banal, but the frequency with which it’s used still speaks volumes about the power of his insights. Put another way, there are not many copyright-free monographs associated with arcane leftist sects that predicted where western societies would end up at 40 years’ distance, but this one did exactly that.

The Society of the Spectacle maps out some aspects of the 21st century directly: not least, so-called celebrity culture and its portrayal of lives whose freedom and dazzle suggest almost the opposite of life as most of us actually live it. Try this: “As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.” The book’s take on the driving-out of meaning from politics is also pretty much beyond question, as are its warnings about “purely spectacular rebellion” and the fact that at some unspecified point in the recent(ish) past, “dissatisfaction itself became a commodity” (so throw away that Che Guevara T-shirt, and quick).

But there are also very modern phenomena that fit its view of the world: when Debord writes about how “behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other”, I now think of social media, and the white noise of most online life. All told, the book is full of sentences that describe something simple, but profound: the way that just about everything that we consume – and, if we’re not careful, most of what we do – embodies a mixture of distraction and reinforcement that serves to reproduce the mode of society and economy that has taken the idea of the spectacle to an almost surreal extreme. Not that Debord ever used the word, but his ideas were essentially pointing to the basis of what we now know as neoliberalism.

Some brief history. Debord was the de facto leader of the Situationist International, a tiny and ever-changing intellectual cell who drew on all kinds of influences, but whose essential worldview combined two elements: an understanding of alienation traceable to the young Marx, and an emphasis on what left politics has never much liked: the kind of desire-driven irrationality celebrated by both the dadaists and surrealists. The ideas in The Society of the Spectacle drew on obvious antecedents – Hegel, Marx, Engels, the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs – and also pointed to what was soon to come: not least, postmodernism, and the “hyperreality” diagnosed by Jean Baudrillard.

To sum up the book’s substance in a couple of sentences is a nonsense, but here goes: essentially, Debord argues that having recast the idea of “being into having”, what he calls “the present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy” has led to “a generalised sliding from having into appearing, from which all actual ‘having’ must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.”

Like most of The Society of the Spectacle, you have to read such words slowly, but they hit the spot: he is talking about alienation, the commodification of almost every aspect of life and the profound social sea-change whereby any notion of the authentic becomes almost impossible. Whether their writers knew anything about Debord is probably doubtful, but as unlikely it may sound, one way of opening your mind to the idea of the spectacle is maybe to re-watch two hugely successful movies about exactly the blurring of appearance and reality that he described: The Matrix and The Truman Show.

It’s also an idea to read The Revolution of Everyday Life by Debord’s one-time accomplice Raoul Vaneigem, which works as a companion piece to The Society of the Spectacle. Vaneigem writes more in a more human register than Debord, and is a more straightforward propagandist:

“Inauthenticity is a right of man … Take a 35-year-old man. Each morning he takes his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats his steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love, and falls asleep. Who reduces a man’s life to this pathetic sequence of cliches? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A socialist-realist author? Not at all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes.”

The words point up something very important: that the spectacle is much more than something at which we passively gaze, and it increasingly defines our perception of life itself, and the way we relate to others. As the book puts it: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

How we confront the spectacle is a subject for another piece: in essence, the Situationists’ contention was that its colonisation of life was not quite complete, and resistance has to begin with finding islands of the authentic, and building on them (though as what some people call late capitalism has developed, such opportunities have inevitably shrunk, a fact captured in the bleak tone of Debord’s 1989 text Comments on the Society of Spectacle, published five years before he killed himself). In truth, the spectacular dominion Debord described is too all-encompassing to suggest any obvious means of overturning it: it’s very easy to succumb to the idea that the spectacle just is, and to suggest any way out of it is absurd (which, in a very reductive sense, was Baudrillard’s basic contention).

What is incontestable, though, is how well the book, and Debord’s ideas, describe the way we live now. The images that stare from magazine racks prove his point. The almost comic contrast between modern economic circumstances and what miraculously arrives to disguise them – the Queen’s Jubilee, the Olympics – confirms almost everything the book contains. My battered copy features a much-reproduced photograph from post-war America: an entranced cinema audience, all wearing 3D glasses. But when I read it now, I always picture the archetypal modern crowd: squeezed up against each other, but all looking intently at the blinking screens they hold in their hands, while their thumbs punch out an imitation of life that surely proves Debord’s point ten thousand times over.

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle | Will Self 

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Filed under Counterculture, paris, Politics and Philosophy, Theatre

Guy Debord

“What other text from the 60s so accurately describes the shit we’re in?’ – Will Self on Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. Photograph: Situationist International

Will Self takes a walk through the banlieues of Paris and is astonished by the prescience of Debord’s 1967 masterpiece, which so accurately describes ‘the shit we’re in’

A small green tent was pitched on the small daisy-spotted patch of greenish grass. It looked tidily enough done; suitable perhaps for a summer rock festival. But this was just outside the Saint-Gratien RER station, north of the rundown riverine port of Gennevilliers, on the outer whorl of the Parisian fingerprint; and the tent – which had the limp-wristed bough of an evergreen touching its flysheet in benediction – was quite clearly being lived in.

The mental picture the non-Parisian has of the city’s banlieues is framed by the fictive: gangster movies such as La Haine, or TV cop shows such as Spiral that do battle with similar Danish, Swedish, British and, of course, American vehicles, in a race to see which can sandblast its respective society with the greatest quantity of grit. But within this framing, content and dimensionality are provided by recent history, and in particular by the widespread rioting of 2005 that thrust these under-imagined locales on to TV screens worldwide. Not since the événements of 1968 had Parisian street fighting commanded such attention, but whereas the soixante-huitardscould be characterised as the vanguard of a stillborn revolution, the young second-, third- and probably fourth-generation immigrants who chucked molotov cocktails at the flics and the CRS during the émeutes neither donned, nor were measured up for, any such ideological camouflage.

Instead, the violent eruption of the Parisian banlieues was anatomised by reference to a body politic sickening with pathological metaphors. Implicitly, explicitly … ineluctably, the rioters were the Muslim Other, which, having been almost accidentally ingurgitated as part of the colonialist couscous, was now playing havoc with Gallic digestion. The French state had found itself – willingly or not – as a fellow-traveller on the neocons’ coach trip to the rapturous intersection of medieval chiliasm and Fukuyama’s neoliberal end-point.

Walking from the RER station towards the Seine, I passed not through what the fictive might lead you to expect, but rather low and hummocky hills, the swoop of a B-class road, outcroppings of commerce, small apartment blocks, car parks, duff public sculpture, off-cuts of quasi-open space – over it all an ambiguous miasma of street furniture and signage: this was France, certainly, but a France at once decoupled from any sense of pays, and divorced from the least suggestion of the urbane. In a comparable district of London – picture, if you are able to, Ruislip or Hounslow, Abbey Wood or Enfield – there would be myriad subliminally registered cues, all of which would combine to force on the spectator the unavoidability of her metropolitan condition. In London, the interwar spread of municipal socialism through the arteries of the tube system was accompanied by the soft-modernism of the suburban stations and Harry Beck’s matching diagram, which completes their connectivity. In London, the map really is the territory, because the territory really is the map. Not here.

The vexed relationship between the map and the territory suffuses The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord’s 1967 masterpiece, which argues that not only authentic social relations, but even the bricks and mortar that frame them, and the tarmac that connects one to another, have all been replaced with their representation; a 1:1 scale model. Moreover, for Debord, as a sequel to the paralysis of “historical development”, the contrast between town and country has become submerged in a sclerotic suburbia. He is at pains to point out that this annulling is no cod-utopian “supersession” but rather an “erosion … visible in the eclectic mélange of … decayed elements”.

From the beige depths of a heavily shuttered house beside a hillock from which I could spy the Eiffel Tower, a deep, dark voice spoke: “Qu’est-ce que vous cherchez?” I suppose, had I been the ghost of Jane Jacobs I would have experienced this as reassurance: the eyes, even if unseen themselves, remained on the street. But, instead, I muttered pacifications: “Nothing … just having a look … about”, then walked on down and around the hill through a scree of crushed fag packets, centrifugally impelled aluminium trim and the petrified tears shed by long dead cars. Dragon’s teeth were sewn across the scabrous roadway – I queased between them and found myself within 100 metres of the riverbank. The A15 soared overhead: two pilotisplanted this side of the river, the next pair on the far bank, its two carriageways separated by curved air. Up there was the city, conceived of however you so pleased. Down here, however, was this un-place, an inter-zone, under-imagined and thus free to be itself. Sprays of cherry blossom mimicked by tangles of wire and a shaggy pelt of weedy grass. Two small brown kids sat beside an oblong concrete depression filled with dank water, one had her hair tied in pigtails. They were playing with tin cans, cups and a bucket. Beyond them, right on the river’s edge was their Paris: a bidonville of shacks built from bits of scavenged packing cases, plastic tarpaulin, car tyres and all sorts of other stuff.

Many of its most sympathetic readers experience The Society of the Spectacleas a concerted howl of disgust. I cannot agree – for me it is the Spectacle that, far from being the creation of some malevolent or false god, emerges instead as the hero of the piece, inasmuch as any hero can be conceived of as the unconscious product of insensate historical processes. The Spectacle, Debord writes, “is the heart of the unrealism of the real society”. We are all jammed up against the plate glass of the Spectacle, our faces crushed as we “lèche-vitrine” in search of the same old commodified poison.

The entirely manmade nature of the world from which the individual subject experiences alienation is not, for Debord, a factual programme to be passively viewed on the TV screens of the global village, but a belief that is actively entered into. It is the genius of Debord to have characterised the totalising capability of late capitalism so early in its post-industrial manifestation. The Society of the Spectacle reads – if you will savour a cliche – as fresh as paint. Debord’s analysis of time itself as a series of epochs is dizzying: such “pseudo-festivals” as sporting events (the Olympics springs immediately to mind), act to convince the denizens of the Spectacle that they are still living in a cyclical and eternal go-round, while only the anointed few, the celebrities, are imbued with the attributes of money and power that signify the ability to make choices – to progress into a better future. “Being a star,” Debord writes, “means specialising in the seemingly lived.” Sound familiar, “Sir” Peter Bazalgette?

But it is most of all in its analysis of the ideology of the Spectacle that Debord’s text repays close reading. It is the Spectacle’s genius to have “turned need against life” and thus effected “the separation and estrangement between man and man”. Hence the Spectacle’s embrace of economics as the only form of instrumental – indeed “scientific” – knowledge worth possessing; hence ritual obeisance made before the gods who will confer growth, and hence the fact that more or less any contemporary western politician – from Hollande, to Merkel, to Cameron, to Obama, and back again – who had eyes to see, could find their own Caliban image raging back at them from the pages of The Society of the Spectacle.

At Argenteuil centre-ville, I found echoic pedestrian underpasses, faux-19th century streetlamps of twirled iron and postmodern apartment blocks built of scaled-up children’s construction toys. I walked on across the oxbow of Gennevilliers, still feeling that I was nowhere at all in particular – standing beside a grocery store or an office block, then crossing between parked cars. The bridge across the re-encountered Seine that led to Clichy was lined with cheerful window boxes, planted with a gaily patriotic tricolour of blooms pinker, pinker and pinkest. Where there are window boxes there must, of course, be a window – this one framed the mirrored cuboids of La Défenseto the west, structures that might have been designed expressly to conform to the Debordian paradigm.

And then, some way past the Porte de Clichy, I was quite suddenly – if at an indefinable point – in Paris, a city to this day that defines itself by the micro-associations of its smaller parts: the awning of an alimentation, a drain cover, the angle of a pissing dog’s leg, the furl of paper around a stick of bread, the white apron around a smoking waiter – quite as much as the high extravaganza of its grand boulevards and gold-leafed public buildings. Rereading The Society of the Spectacle, I was struck yet again not only by Debord’s astonishing prescience – for what other text from the late 1960s so accurately describes the shit we’re still in? – but also wondered how it was that his dérives across the Paris of the time could have so attuned him to the way in which the urban environment of the near future would become quite so decoupled from any element of the felt or experienced life. After all, Pariswas by no means the most Spectacular city of the late 1950s and early 60s; indeed, it’s still not on an equal footing to London. Unplanned London, which has just arrived at its square miles of parametrically designed junk space, its CCTV-overseen gated business cantonments and Chinese party cadre-owned luxury encampments, its logo skyscrapers and purpose-built “iconic” tourist destinations.

It occurs to me that Haussmann’s attempt to impose civic order and authority on the medieval jumble of mid-19th century Paris had not only paved the way for the Spectacle, but it had also afforded its – and his – enemies with the material to rip up for their barricades. There seems a nice congruence between the go-rounds of the Grands Boulevards and centrifugal/centripetal current of French theorising, whereby notions given form in the cafes of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the classrooms of the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure swirl out in widening circles from the metropolis, only to then gurgle back in again, before eventually disappearing up the arses of their originators.

Seen like this, The Society of the Spectacle is at once the bastard progeny of the French Enlightenment – out of Diderot, by means of the Napoleonic Code – and a salutary reminder of how the pursuit of some millenarian ideological purity only ever results – if successful – in the rumbling of tumbrels; or, if a failure, in its wholesale co-option by its stated enemies. That we no longer hear quite so much about “the spectacle” as shorthand for any of the following: the ludic element of consumer society, the post-ideological character of western “democracy”, the web-cum-matrix woven by the internet, the glocal character of late capitalism, may be because Debord’s concept has now been so thoroughly appropriated – one might fairly say détourned – that there’s nothing left of it but its coldly numerical bones.

Had Debord not shot himself in 1994 in his rural fastness of Bellevue-la-Montagne, he probably would have turned his gun on the likes of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren (and no doubt me as well); pop music impresarios whose much-trumpeted situationist influence – such as it was – consisted only in a series of pranks, that, while they may have given succour to the culturally anomic nonetheless only resulted in the profitable sale of records, posters and other memorabilia. I doubt, somehow, that either Wilson – chiefly known for managing Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, and setting up Factory Records – or McLaren, rather more famous for his role as the Sex Pistols’ svengali, can have subjected The Society of the Spectacle to a sustained critical reading. Had they done so, they would’ve realised that their antics were anathema to Debord; that the playful elements of situationist practice – the bowdlerising of cartoons, the daubing on walls of whacky slogans, the exaltation of drunkenness – were only ever to be sanctioned if constitutive of a genuine insurrection, such as the few short weeks of 68, and as precursors of that revolution of everyday life (to adapt the title of the competing situationist theoretical work, written by Debord’s greatest rival, Raoul Vaneigem), which was to follow the final and complete dissolution of the Spectacle.

The relative success of the Situationist International during les évènementsalso sowed the seeds for the détournement of The Society of the Spectacleitself. I say relative success because it can be doubted – and will always be disputed – the extent to which Debord and his loose confraternity of freelance bully-boys and wannabe revolutionists actually succeeded in either manning the barricades themselves, or screwing the courage of the mob to CRS’s sticking post. But the important thing was that the situationists were perceived as having been in the thick of things – as instigators and ideological choreographers of the distinctively ludic elements of this particular civil disorder. The sneering, de haut en bas reception of The Society of the Spectacle on its publication the year before in French, was followed the year after by its rhapsodic one when it appeared in translation. By then, of course, the game was effectively up – something Debord, a man obsessed by war games and strategising, undoubtedly grasped. The Society of the Spectacle so far as being an animator of events, had in a matter of months become simply another text to be subjected to scores, hundreds, thousands of exhaustive academic analyses. The best that could be said for the thing – from its author’s point of view – was that the royalties paid his wine bills, and helped to supplement a lifetime of unabashed – and indeed, self-righteous – sponging.

Of course, The Society of the Spectacle still animates serious protest to this day – or, rather, since to admit to having been one of the Invisible Committee that authored the highly Debordian The Coming Insurrection (2007) is to court arrest on those grounds alone, the very style of the earlier work remains inflammatory. As to its content, The Coming Insurrection has nothing much to add – how can it, when, as I say, never before has Debord’s work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine – as he would wish – and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants.