Andy Merrifield

Though well-known for his founding of the avant-garde Situationist International movement and his prominent political and cultural activism, Guy Debord was nonetheless a surprisingly elusive and enigmatic figure, spending his last years in an isolated farmhouse in Champot, France. Andy Merrifield's Guy Debord pushes back the farmhouse shutters and opens a window onto Debord's life, theory, and art.

Merrifield explores the dynamics of Debord's ideas and works, including the groundbreaking show more Howls for Sade and his 1967 classic, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord understood life as art, Merrifield argues, and through that lens he chronicles Debord's stint as a revolutionary leader in the 1950s and 1960s, his time in Spain and Italy during the 1970s and the reclusive years leading up to his death in 1994.

Dada and Surrealism's legacy and punk rock's god, Guy Debord spun theories on democracy, people, and political power that still resonate today, making Merrifield's concise yet comprehensive study an invaluable resource on one of the foremost intellectual revolutionaries of the twentieth century. show less

It strikes me that personally, my bolshiness about "great man" criticism/theory as it's been practiced in the Western academy springs from two main sources: Grade 8 Philosophy with Mr. Bowker jumping up out of his chair to point an accusing finger and yell "Appeal to authority!" and shame you in front of your smart-class friends and later steal your hat or chocolate bar (yes, my teacher really did steal our shit on a regular basis, but we loved him for it), AND, more amorphously, my early show more Marxism, which made me suspicious of the whole idea of a canonical philosophical tradition that lionized a grindy bastard like Kant (e.g.) and put an asterisk next to my beloved Trotsky (e.g., but I really did daydream about worldwide revolution) as "socialist thinkers" or what have you. It provided me with a tradition that the mainstream itself was defining as external, which problematizes the whole notion of canonicity early on (and, let's face it, it was the early '90s. Fuck corporate philosophy!)

More than that, there's something about treating Marxism in particular as a roverboat ride of maitres penseurs that can turn icky. Because, you know, if this faith is about anything, fundamentally, surely it's about not tugging the forelock. And as I come back to Marxism in my old age (I think that's what I'm doing?), I find myself thinking that if it's anything, it's faith. I mean, not that Marx and people working in his tradition haven't done incredible scholarship - but what's changed the world is the ideas of Marxism, of revolution, of social justice, of the General Strike, etc., etc. It's about living with human dignity in a world full of forces trying to take it away, and in that sense the power of thinkers like the ones Merrifield presents to inspire and be your friend is a lot more like the power of the Virgin Mary or St. Christopher to cure your cancer or keep your luggage safe than it is what happens when people wrap themselves in a critical approach (or, like, look at everything through the lens of The Economist.

Without trying to give the Althusserian (or let's say it, Stalinist) strain in Marxism more facetime than it deserves, Merrifield presents an alternative lineage of firekeepers consisting of Marxism's wild, beautiful and damned. On the ostensible "Marxism and the City" level, Metromarxism is a little textbooky and doesn't present much beyond a (principled, entertainingly written) review of familiar Marxist ideas on urbanism (Marx and commodity fetishism, Engels and housing, Benjamin and the arcade of delights, Lefebvre and festival, Debord and freaky maps, etc.). But what it does that I really appreciate is tells a bunch of stories about some cool smart guys who walked something like the path you, the reader, are walking or trying to figure out how to walk or flirting with at least. Engels as Marxist Batman! Karl all sickly in his chair, and then 100 years later dancing on the cover of that dude's book! "I am a Marxist so later on we can all be anarchists"! Marshall Berman, of whom I'd never heard, and a "Marxism that helps old ladies across the street." And all along, I know I risk turning this into Benjaminism or something but hell: the City. Womb of the future, site of the alchemy, heart of all the things that will make the future worth living. I'm gonna volunteer for the NDP in the next election, I think. show less

There's something nice and something missing about this book. Being a book about amateurism, I do like of it the free "wandering" of the author through different topics and fields - in particular literature. What I'm missing is a more cohesive structure and, especially, a final chapter - the one devoted to an explicit political discourse - more focused on real, proactive actions and not so dangerously close to the drift of populism. I'm sure I'm writing this because I'm looking at the show more current (2018) Italian political situation, but I can't help but still having more faith in professional politics rather than in bottom-up "movements" which - at least in Italy - are giving voice and power to people lacking any kind of amateur attitude (in the sense of this book). I keep on loving the idea of being an amateur (I definitely am), so I *have to* like this book but I do really find difficult to think about this approach out of the arts-culture realm and extended to politics. Which is my fault and a pity, but this book doesn't help from this point of view. show less

At the moment I'm very interested in cities and theoretical and empirical studies of the city as a phenomena. In a bookstore in Amsterdam I found this book on a shelf and picked it up. This is the first book of Merrifield I've read and I thought it had both strengths and weaknesses.
Merrifield has read a lot of critical urban theorists and his introductions and explanations to Castell, Harvey and Debord is a good read. In a few pages he seem to be able to explain their theories, concerning show more the urban question, in an easy and accessible way. He also has in some places quite a poetic language which I appreciate.
Where I feel the book is lacking is where Merrifield is trying to stand on his own legs. There he becomes very idealistic and in some ways quite conspiratorial. For example is the shift from the managerial to the neo-liberal planning and politics since the 1970s described as the work of a small group of ideological driven politicians and lobbyists. This is also shown in his insistence on the need for individuals to take a personal stand against the neo-liberal planning and to create alternative news sources. For Merrifield change seem to depend on a few dedicated activists. I would be more interested to read about changes in class composition and material conditions and how this affects the way everyday people struggle in their daily life.
As a book on it's own it is ok to good, but after reading it I'm really looking forward to reading his books about Lefebvre and Debord. show less