GUY DEBORD PUBLISHED The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 while shepherding the original Situationist International in Paris, a collective shimmy that tumbled into the protests of May 1968. This era has become a frozen plot point in the Wiki of the left while its theoretical leader remains, somehow, under-consulted. British art historian T. J. Clark, though, read Debord and found a way to drag his esoteric divination into practice (or at least the practice of art history). Every sentence of Society is an estuary that floats you back to a shelf above the world; like other books steeped in clarity, it needs to be read and reread. Two Debord thoughts flow through Clark’s. One, that “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” and two, that in the current moment, “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Clark, an equally close reader of Marx, took the Situationist approach and made it his own, looking to the painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Clark’s latest collection of essays, Those Passions, continues a project that stretches (at least) back to 1999’s Farewell to an Idea, slowly x-raying the paint to find the fingerprint of capital. Debord was firmly focused on his own century, but Clark found a way of looking back to see the paintings that set the stage for photography. (Cheat sheet: Clark is painting; Debord is photos and movies.) Raised in a “solid lower-middle-class family” from Bristol, Clark went up in 1961 to Cambridge, “a caricature of class privilege” he called it (as well as “grisly”). In 1973, he received a doctorate in art history from the Courtauld Institute in London. He has written and taught in the field of art history without surcease in the fifty-odd years since. He was one of the few British Situationists included in the Situationist International, a brief membership that ended in 1967 when all of the British members (three) were expelled from the larger collective (at most, forty people). The expulsion had no effect on Clark’s ideas.
Spectacle does not dissolve easy—Debord wrote an entire (short) book about it and Clark planted this concept and watched it bloom into a career. Spectacle is a process and a location and a mode and an outcome just as are, say, despair or gossip. In 2021, Clark said that what the Situationists offered (and still do) is a “determination to try to face up to the actual nature of this new consumer society.” For a budding art historian, it was notable that the Situationists believed that “Art was over” and that the “activities” of art needed to be remade “in a way which would give them a political force and pertinence.” For Clark, this simply meant seeing with more force, and with a deeper investment. In “Sex and Politics According to Delacroix,” Clark sees a world in the vortical bodies in Delacroix’s 1855 painting The Lion Hunt. At least “three feet” of the canvas was lost to fire in 1870, but what remains is a “bloodbath” of a “packed, airless, claustrophobic” quality. Clark’s reading of this painting is at least partly spiritual—“there is always a thin line, that is, between showing violence and aestheticizing it,” he writes in the opening, claiming that Delacroix’s work in The Lion Hunt extends what he began in Death of Ophelia, which “makes the loneliness of death present.”
Clark is able to go from what sounds like a personal event to, seamlessly, a trace of the social. Tracking the movements of rumps and forearms and scimitars and “billowing pantaloons,” Clark describes a “flickering and doubling of identities,” parsing various reds and greens to find the “deep appeal of violence in life and art.” It turns out, Clark tells us, that the “horse’s impossible head or the scalped red turban are not there, of course, in the world we normally assent to and take for reality.” We have worked our way back to the valve of spectacle when Clark writes that “identities are real and unavoidable in the world (think of the heraldic lion, rigid with his own outline), but always haunted and contradicted by opposites.” Before painting became photography, it contained more information than covered by mere psychology. Clark, in fact, is one of the best cartographers for studying the growing overlap of capital and the image over time.
Clark began studying these overlaps in the early ’60s. He and his lifetime friend Donald Nicholson-Smith were involved in King Mob, a brief-lived British response to the Paris Situationist International that published a zine called King Mob Echo and translations of key French texts, like Raoul Vaneigem’s dizzy and vibrant 1963 pamphlet The Totality for Kids. This eighteen-page text contains a line that synthesizes Henri Lefebvre and Debord in a way that struck me hard when I was in my twenties: “Everyday life has always been emptied to substantiate apparent life, but appearances, in their mythical cohesion, were powerful enough to ensure that no one ever became conscious of everyday life.” Clark stares at, and through, Delacroix, in order to help us become conscious of how appearances were beginning to detach from daily life.
Clark became to painting what Fredric Jameson was to the novel, a docent through the compressed guts of figuration and how it was dragged into class war. What he really, really loves is painting. As he puts it in “Bosch’s Anthropology,” when discussing the painter’s storytelling in Visions of the Hereafter, Ascent to Heaven (one of four panels in a larger work): “Telling in Bosch equals painting. Painting in the strong and earthbound sense of the word. Painting meaning applying colour in solution and seeing what reality results.” His close readings recall the voice we hear in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Permanent Red, a casually authoritative narrator who can simultaneously write the seeing and feel the critique. Clark slows down, relishing the assignment, getting in close with his camera (the guards were feeling generous), so he could take a zoomed-in photo of two figures: an angel and a righteous man. “You could write a book about the angel’s profile,” Clark writes, “and the effect on our understanding of that touch of red to its lower lip.” Clark mentions the “vulnerability” suggested by “the line of paler pink that Bosch put on the man’s raised forearm”—he is someone for whom paintings seem to open without difficulty.
“This is painting—again I labour the obvious—that discovers what it ‘wants to say’ about its subject matter, and what it wants its viewers to see, as it confronts what paint has made possible,” he writes. “What happens in paint. What the means of representation call into being.” This is perhaps the purest expression of Clark’s political root, this deep empathy for the world of people in these paintings. Not in the sense that the imaginary is real but that these images bring with them all the force of ideas and aspects that represent the stakes and struggles of real people (even channeled through proxy angels). “You move between the profile of the angel and the blessed man’s profil perdu. What results is a thinking of the human, yes, that takes us ‘out of this world.’ It is about ecstasy. About transcendence. About simplicity, perhaps—the divinity of fools.” To my naked eye, these two figures are fairly primitive blobs, but after Clark’s exegesis, they make me want to cry. Paint lives for Clark and is transubstantiated, is the body of actual people. It is not an unwise leap to say that for Clark, painting, like money, is a real abstraction.
In “Picasso and the English,” a bracing example of disdain that only a family member can generate, Clark discusses how English visual art was not able to successfully respond to Picasso’s challenge: his greatness, his omnivorous aliveness that placed all painters in a sort of tiered subjugation. The problem? “The culture of art in England, to repeat, is genteel,” Clark writes. So how do we find an expression of class to go to war with? “The English novel in the twentieth century . . . has the power to offend; it has the courage of its class convictions. There is no visual art in the same period of which this can be said.” And then Clark delivers an entire undergraduate course in art history in two sentences:
Painting, from the 1860s on, was the central modernist art—I follow Mallarmé and Nietzsche in this—precisely because it hovered constantly, constitutively, on the edge of complete assimilation to an upper-class ethos of aesthetic novelty, refined cuisine, “daring” entertainment. The closeness was a threat, and most artists succumbed to it; but for a few it clarified matters in ways no other art form could match: it forced painters to define what could possibly set painting apart from its parent culture, and induced them to build an elaborate protective carapace within which the cult of art—the idea of order and intensity, the dream of inviolable aesthetic distance—might be pursued in safety.
The political here is an act of comradeship, and Clark performs his part by rescuing the painter from being undeservedly hoovered up into the mother ship of blue-chip commodification. These painters are slipping Clark samizdat notes, begging to be seen within a stratum of production that hasn’t escaped the “upper-class ethos” in centuries. When Clark approaches Picasso’s Guitar, Compote Dish and Grapes, he is peeling away the financial and cultural signification to recapture the human. “The thing crackles with static,” Clark writes. “Picasso’s colouring and cross-hatching are infinitely more nervous and ad hoc than they look from 10 feet away.” He then asks “how much deliberate glibness of pattern” a painter is allowed, when most of us did not know a pattern could be glib. What Clark upends is the prison of the museum, whose institutional heaviness is always in the process of fully eliding the humans who meekly trail through its hall, and those who chaotically, magically, ecstatically, managed to find the paint, and listen to it.
Clark listens to Matisse with such care that I wish “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” about the artist’s La Femme au Chapeau, were three times as long. He is doing at least two things at once—pulling the story out of the canvas and simultaneously grappling with an abstraction, one imposed in 1905 when it was first shown. A matrix of greens and purples and oranges, the painting shows us Matisse’s wife, Amélie Parayre, wearing a gigantic hat loaded with what could be plastic fruit, and a belted dress. (When asked what color the dress was originally, Matisse replied, “Black, obviously.” There is no black in the painting.) Clark tells us that people “pretended” that the painting was scandalous. Soon after the painting was shown, a significant painter-critic named Maurice Denis wrote a brief but serious engagement with the artwork in a “Symbolist journal” called L’Ermitage that suggests he was one of the scandalized. Denis accuses Matisse of “artificiality,” a process using “abstraction and generalization” to find some kind of pure form. “You are only happy when all the elements of your work are intelligible to you,” Denis writes, sounding jilted, going on to suggest that Matisse has forsaken all elements of the “accidental” and instinctive (what Denis proposes as the inverse of “intelligible”).
Clark brings us in quickly by wondering how Denis could have missed that “intuition, accident and spontaneity are still palpably struggling with Mind?” Me, an amateur lover of Matisse? I see something painted quickly and in thrall to some kind of visual rapture. His wife seems both mournful and caught up in some kind of electrical storm that is changing the known into the unknown. Clark makes the same leaps Denis made, both of them using the tools of criticism: synthesis, intuition, speculative hope. Clark thinks that “the mouth runs away with the picture.” This sounds no more correct to me than the idea that the painting is looking to find purity through abstraction. Clark thinks the mouth “had to be intensely, naively correct,” and maybe the small orange and pink lozenges are that. (Clark is also convinced that Parayre’s “spectacular décolletage” is somewhere in this picture, which confuses me as it would be behind the fan he also describes. He senses things!)
Clark admits that he and Denis are not that far apart in trying to read Matisse’s painting as a part of modernism’s “paradox.” The modernists saw that “human qualities,” once “embedded in the texture of experience,” are becoming extinct. Sounding very much like Adorno, Clark proposes that qualities like intensity and depth have become “miniaturized and compressed,” doomed to be little more than commercialized kitsch. If modernism didn’t succeed in rescuing these qualities—insofar as the moma posters of Matisse have been in dorm rooms for longer than Matisse was alive—Clark’s entire body of criticism has done its best to keep the scandal of aliveness in painting’s court.
IN 2012, CLARK WROTE A SPEECH titled “The Experience of Defeat” for a lecture series called The State of Things. Later that year, it was published in New Left Review with its current title, “For a Left with No Future,” which was then published again in the collection Heaven on Earth. (The version here has been revised, as have all of the essays, “some greatly,” per Clark himself.) The argument, largely unchanged from its first two versions, begins here: “Left intellectuals, like most intellectuals, are not good at politics; especially if we mean by the latter, as I shall be arguing we should, the everyday detail, drudgery and charm of performance.” Clark tells us, because he is funny and British, that he passes “no judgment” on the effectiveness of capitalism’s “military humanism.” Lol. He wants to offer here a “perspective” in which the failures of the left and of capitalism “might make sense.”
Clark quickly defines “left” here as “a root and branch opposition to capitalism.” Count us both in. “The deeper a political movement’s spadework, the more complete its focus on the here and now,” Clark writes. But what is Clark’s here and now? He told Whitehead he admired the Situationist focus on “late twentieth century consumer capitalism, with its immense new apparatus of persuasion, its emerging media, its cults of youth, its refractory subcultures,” but these subcultures are not Clark’s bailiwick. Clark has written primarily on painting from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his twentieth-century window closes right when his career begins, in the ’70s. It’s genuinely hard to sort out Clark’s relation to this “now.” He writes in “No Future” that he does not want to see a politics “premised, yet again, on some terracotta multitude waiting to march out of the emperor’s tomb.” We understand his target here to be unexamined, ready-made visions of the proletariat, as constituted in various versions of the Marxist left.
And he is definitely putting an arm’s length between himself and former comrades when he mentions “reality (as opposed to the fantasy world of Marxist conferences).” (As an aside, what—if anything—does it mean when Marxists are the punch line for both T. J. Clark and Trump?) Clark is, partly, just razzing his siblings here, as he makes it clear throughout Those Passions that his Marxist grounding has not weakened. Is he maybe regretting that he hasn’t done more with his own Marxisms? Or is he taking shots at the sabermetricians of value form or the podcast philosophers who will mansplain the stages of surplus value creation before they pull you from a burning car? Signs point to yes.
The source of his “pessimism” about the left seems to come partly from what he identifies as its tendency to go on “exulting in the glamour of the great refusal, and consigning to outer darkness the rest of an unregenerate world. That way literariness lies.” But that way is precisely the way to Clark’s house! Clark follows this brief mention of a movement with several pages of, that’s right, unadulterated literariness, engaging theatrical scholar A. C. Bradley’s theory of tragedy, or rather the tragedy of the left as seen through Bradley. Clark refers to many, many people by last name only. The whimsical exclusivity and name-dropping of the Cambridge student die slowly, even with those who hated the place.
It is in the final movement of “For a Left” that we come to some awkward business. Clark has subbed in “maga” for the 2012 version’s “Tea Party,” so we know our man had his ear out when he revised it. In discussing the prospects of “reformism and revolution,” Clark writes that “a movement of opposition of the kind I have been advocating—a reformism with the workings of capitalism in its sights—the moment it began to register even limited successes, would call down the full crude fury of the state on its head.” Most of this section is the same in the NLR original and it’s fantastic. Clark goes on: “The boundaries between political organizing and armed resistance would break down—not of the left’s choosing, but as a simple matter of self-defence. Imagine, for example, if a movement really began to put the question of permanent war economy back on the table—in however limited a way, with however symbolic a set of victories. Be assured that the brutality of the ‘kettle’ would be generalized. The public order helicopters would be on their way back from Bahrain.”
Not only did that happen, it continues to happen. One assumes that, were one out here revising one’s pieces, the next section would be about the militarized responses to direct action in support of Palestine, most especially the brutal treatment of the student encampments. The situation he wondered about happened exactly as he said it would, except he can’t be bothered to give the Palestine movement any credit. Someone transformed by a legendary twentieth-century student movement should be the first to recognize its descendants in this century, possibly even before the rest of us. Control+F for “Palestine” in this book and you’ll find that it is not one of those passions.
Who owns the spectacle of violence now? Clark writes, as if he hasn’t already answered this question, “What are the circumstances in which the predictable to-and-fro of state repression and left response could begin, however tentatively, to de-legitimize the state’s preponderance of armed force? Not, for sure, when the state can show itself collecting severed body parts from the wreckage of tube trains and rock concerts. Extremism, to adapt Randolph Bourne’s great dictum, is at present the health of the state.” Clark is suggesting here that the state’s love of violence will be justified by what it broadcasts as the results of “terrorism,” with “rock concert” here a metonym for the Bataclan attack. (This line was better in the 2012 piece: “Extremism, to repeat, is the state’s ticket to ride.”)
The second part of this idea comes in “Modernity and Terror,” a heavily revised chapter from 2002 written by Retort, a collective Clark engaged with Joseph Matthews, Iain Boal, and Matthew Watts. They write here that “control of the spectacle by the state” is “truly hard to maintain,” which is true. The following parenthetical update points at the right thing in exactly the wrong way: “The Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis in Gaza are learning the same lesson. War doesn’t play well on Instagram.” War, is it? Someone of Clark’s caliber and political commitment knows that substituting “war” for “genocide” is not a minor error and Gaza is not Ukraine.
This new, revised line is a solid update of standard Debord: “Empire is to be extended, and opponents defeated, in conditions of spectacle: that is the new reality in a nutshell.” (In 2005, this sentence was “Primitive accumulation is to be carried out in conditions of spectacle: that is the new reality in a nutshell.” I’ll let the Marx bros fight out the details.) His addition of the word “empire” is the right one, but he ends up choking at the edge of his own assignment. Yes, the state’s control of spectacle slipped during the genocide. The barbarity captured by smartphone that converted so many people to the cause of Palestine, and is (as confirmed in film clips of Mitt Romney) what caused the US to stifle TikTok, a live-stream that, for the first six months of Israel’s assault, made Abu Ghraib look like a failed audition tape. We repeat Clark’s query: “What are the circumstances in which the predictable to-and-fro of state repression and left response could begin, however tentatively, to de-legitimize the state’s preponderance of armed force?” And we answer the same way, again: Palestine.
For a lesser writer, or one who had not taught me how to think about spectacle and empire or one who had not thought to complain about this allegedly no future left not once but three times, I might drop this interrogation. But Palestine answers every question that Clark poses. Clark complains about leftist writers in the introduction by asking, “Who thinks they connect to our current cruelties with anything of the urgency of a Frantz Fanon, a Rosa Luxemburg or a Georges Sorel?” How have we ended up in a situation where I am telling you about Bassel al-Araj and Walid Daqqa and Ghassan Kanafani but Clark isn’t? Clark has written about potential pathways for internationalism, and I would propose looking to an Arab formation—you can start by reading Mary Turfah and Max Ajl and Mohammed El-Kurd. Situationism was a firmly European intervention that may have outlived its utility. Or maybe Clark imagined that empire would be dismantled by imperialists.
Sasha Frere-Jones is the author of the memoir Earlier (Semiotext(e), 2023).