The Guy Debord that is best known is the one who is the author of The Society of the Spectacle, but in many ways it is not quite a representative text. Lately there has also been a revival of Debord the film maker, but here I want to think about Debord is a slightly different light. So I will discuss not so much his writing or his films, and still less his biography, but a game. Beside being a writer, a film maker, an editor, and a first rate professional of no profession, he was also, of all things, a game designer.
According to Debord’s second wife Alice Becker-Ho, he patented his Game of War in 1965. In 1977 he entered a partnership with his then publisher Gérard Lebovici in a company to make board games. The company published Game of War, and commissioned a craftsman to make four or five sets in copper and silver. In 1987 Debord and Becker-Ho published a book about the game. On this account, the game was a part of Debord’s life for more than 30 years, and had its beginnings in the midst of the second, ‘political’ phase of the Situationist International. It is, I would argue, an expression in a new form of something both the ‘artistic’ and ‘political’ phases of the Situationist International had in common despite their different fields of operation, namely, a concept and a practice of strategy.
Debord’s Game of War is a strategy game, and to see this as a major rather than minor part of his legacy is to insist that above all else Debord was a strategist. Jacqueline De Jong: “He was a great strategist.” Giorgio Agamben: “once, when I was tempted (as I still am) to consider Guy Debord a philosopher, he told me: ‘I’m not a philosopher, I’m a strategist.’ Debord saw his time as an incessant war, which engaged his entire life in a strategy.” The strategist is not the proprietor of a field of knowledge, but rather assesses the value of the forces aligned on any available territory. The strategist occupies, evacuates or contests any territory to hand in pursuit of advantage.
The avant gardes have a longstanding connection to games, and perhaps to strategy. The Surrealists invented many games. Duchamp famously gave up art for chess. He even co-authored a book about it. As François Le Lionnais observed of it: “What Halberstadt and Duchamp perfected was the theory of the relationship between squares which have no apparent connection, Les Cases Conjugées, which was a sort of theory of the structure of the board. That is to say, because the pawns are in a certain relationship one can perceive invisible connections between empty squares on the board which are apparently unrelated.” Like the Surrealists, Debord invented his own game, but like Duchamp, it took the form of a sustained effort to create via the game a conception of how events unfold in space.
Among the Game of War’s particular qualities is that it is not a territorial game. It does not conceive of space as property, to be conquered and held. It is modeled on classic war games which go back at least to the time of Clausewitz. It includes more or less plausible parameters of movement and engagement for infantry and cavalry. Yet it is not really a game of war at all. If it is, it models something more like a full spectrum war where the opposing sides are composed of forces not restricted by their extension only in space.
Beside the usual fighting pieces of cavalry, infantry, artillery and the arsenal, Game of War also includes units for communication. While military units move at given speeds per turn across the board, the lines of communication, so long as they are not broken, are instantaneous and direct. This ‘war’ can be fought as much on the plane of communication as that of extensible space. What distinguishes the two planes is their relation to time. Debord and Becker-Ho’s concept of contemporary strategy is one that takes place in a doubled terrain, one of spatial extension and sequential time, a space of architecture and geography. The other of the simultaneous time of communication – the spatio-temporal matrix which in Society of the Spectacle (1967) Debord would come to conceive as world history.
Hence while it looks like its 18th century ancestors, Game of War is really a diagram of the strategic possibilities of spectacular time. Debord: “The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. ‘Once there was history, but not any more,’ because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history.” In Game of War, history is made mobile again, in an irreversible time where strategy can reverse the course of events.
Game of War incorporates the problems of conflict in general within a manageable framework. Debord’s ambition seems to be no less than to create a game with possibilities for play that are as great as chess but which conceives of play in a different manner. That one’s communication must remain intact is equivalent to the rule in chess that the king must not remain in check. Debord includes in his presentation of the game a line from the 1527 poem ‘Scacchia Ludus’ by Marcus Hieronymus (who was, incidentally, the Bishop of Alba). The opening lines of the poem are: “We play an effigy of war, and battles made like / real ones, armies formed from boxwood, and play realms, / As twin kings, white and black, opposed against each other, / Struggle for praise with bi-colored weapons.” That strategic genius, in any field, is the only thing worth commemorating is a characteristically Debordian note. Effigy is a word that might appeal to Debord in its modern sense, given how careful he was to preserve his bad reputation. But here it might mean something else: that the game is a form, a mold – an allegory, perhaps – for a certain kind of strategic experience.
But Game of War does not enclose space within strategy as chess does. Space is only ever partially included within range of movement of the pieces. Some space remains ‘smooth’ and open. The game is also subject to sudden reversals of fortune rare in chess. “In fact, I wanted to imitate poker – not the chance factor in poker, but the combat that is characteristic of it.” Each side makes its initial deployments in ignorance of those of the enemy, introducing at least an element of the unknown characteristic of poker.
The game requires attention to the tactical level of defending each of one’s units, since once one starts losing one can quickly lose many pieces. However, units cannot move or engage unless they remain in communication with their arsenal, making lines of communication particularly vital. Players are usually more concerned with breaking the adversary’s lines of communication than with offensive action directed against either the adversary’s arsenal, or fighting units. Outside of the quantitative struggle between blocks of fighting units is a qualitative one, in which a force suddenly loses all its power when the enemy cuts off its communications, “thus the outcome of a tactical engagement over just one square may have major strategic consequences.”
Each player has to keep three quite different aspects of the game in mind: fighting units, arsenals, lines of communication. “This war game – like war itself and like all forms of strategic thought and action – tends to demand the simultaneous consideration of contradictory requirements.” While attempting to maintain freedom of action, each side is also obliged to make difficult choices between qualitatively different kinds of operations, the means for the realization of which are always in short supply. One may have the means but not the time, or the time but not the means for their realization. “Each army must strive to keep the initiative, compensating for shortfalls in troop strength by the speed with which it can concentrate its forces at a decisive point where it must be the stronger: strategic maneuvers succeed only when victory yields an immediate return, so to speak, in terms of tactical confrontation.”
Antonio Gramsci famously juxtaposed the concepts of the war of position and the war of maneuver. For Gramsci the war of maneuver is associated with syndicalist approaches to political conflict, with Rosa Luxembourg and the events of the October revolution. He associates the war of position with ‘mature’ Leninism, and the lessons of the defeats suffered across Europe by the revolutionary movement that the October revolution was supposed to spark. Gramsci: “In the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks….” For Debord this line of thinking can only justify the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Parties, their obsession with creating one after another institutional bunker, from the trade unions to the official Communist art perpetuated in their later careers by former Dadaists and Surrealists such as Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon. Game of War is a refutation of this whole conception of strategy.
In the war of position, tactics are dictated from above by strategic concerns with taking and holding one bunker after another across the landscape of state and civil society. The Game of War refutes this territorial conception of space and this hierarchical relation between strategy and tactics. Space is always partially unmarked; tactics can sometimes call a strategy into being. Some space need not be occupied or contested at all; every tactic involves a risk to one’s positions. “It makes sense to move against the enemy’s communications, but one’s own will be stretched in the process.” As in a game of poker, advantage comes quick and is lost even quicker.
Moreover, Debord moves the conception of conflict away from the privileging of space that persists in Gramsci’s war of position. Key to Game of War is the question of judging the moment to move from the tactical advantage to the strategic. Tactics and strategy do not have a hierarchical and spatial relation, but a mobile and temporal one. Plans have to be changed or abandoned in the light of events. “The interaction between tactics and strategy is a continuing source of surprises and reverses – and this often right up to the last moment.”
Game of War is a rigorous and schematic presentation of conflict, if missing certain qualities. The spatial field is asymmetrical, but unchanging. The moment of surprise comes only once, when each side reveals to the other the initial disposition of its forces. In documenting one game for their book, Debord and Becker-Ho present each move on a diagram which presents a static figure the changing disposition of forces, but this gives no real sense of the ebb and tension in time even of the playing of a game. Still, the ambition of Game of War is clear: “Before they went to the printers, the figures looked like a truly dazzling puzzle awaiting solution, just like the times in which we live.”
[Originally published in McKenzie Wark, 50 Year of Recuperation: The Situationist International, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008, also forthcoming in Cabinet magazine]