Since then the name of "situationist" has been used by a cast of idiots ranging from Malcolm McLaren to Tony Wilson the thing itself has been less prominent. The situationist analysis was vindicated and defeated in the space of a month the resulting cult status was not what the SI wanted, and the group dissolved in 1971. In May '68, so consistently portrayed as a kind of unusually boisterous Rag Week, something like the situationists' complete negation of the reigning society began to be put into practice. Ultimately "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a socio-economic formation, its use of time".ĭebord's ideas and those of his group, the Situationist International, were widely echoed (and borrowed). "The struggle of powers constituted for the same socio-economic system is disseminated as the official contradiction but is in fact part of the real unity - on a world scale as well as within every nation". Politics, of course, is just part of the show. The spectacle defines not only the lived experience but also the material structure of society: it is "a social relation among people, mediated by images", on the basis of "capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image". "The sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity", the spectacle has affinities with ideas like "consumerism" and "media culture" however, Debord's analysis goes both wider and deeper than that of an Ignatieff or a Seabrook. In that book Debord wrote that "the concrete life of everyone has become degraded into a speculative universe": the essential reality of modern society is the spectacle. Guy Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle appeared in 1967. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso, £8.95) Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
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