Society of The Spectacle 1

In 1983 or 84, I walked into Revolution Books in Central Square, Cambridge, Mass and found a copy of Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", which looked like the only creatively composed radical philosophy in the shop. I was a film student and noticed the chapbook cover, an office building on front and the classic b+w photo of the movie audience staring at the screen with 3-D glasses on back (this was Black & Red's 1970 edition). There are many cut-and-paste graphics interspersed with the text, which is broken into 221 short statements about the alienation of humanity in the age of industrial production. Debord took Marx to its logical next step and propelled political thinkers and artists alike to challenge the success of capitalism in new ways. His work spoke from a France of the 50's and 60's, a time when French colonial power was obviously ending, their own disasters in Algeria and then Indochina which preceded the American occupation of Viet Nam. The Situationist International, the organisation founded by Debord and others, played a significant role in the events of May 1968 in Paris, where students took over many universities. Debord's re-writing of Marx gave new life to leftist political thought in Europe, inspired numerous writers and eventually spread to the rest of the world, partly carried by cultural institutions like art galleries and museums, which buoyed the creativite impulses in the theoretical work of the SI. These were artists who gave up art in order to imagine a better world. Greil Markus has famously attributed punk rock's roots to the SI, which, while helpful in some elementary ways linking street music rebellion in England to happenings in France, it's a bit of a smokescreen I think. The radical dispersion of the right to power anticipated by Guy Debord's work in writing and in film is improperly served by offering direct lines of cultural inheritence, whether to Johnny Rotten (via Malcolm McLaren) or Mayo Thompson. The Red Crayola was conceptually much more interesting than the Sex Pistols, their affiliation with the group Art and Language creating a question mark over much of Britain's cultural life through the 70's and 80's, carrying on the self-publishing aesthetic of radical work that endures today.

In 2007, we ask again the relevance of these moments, figures, events. Books and articles abound, each contributing aspects of outreach and education and at the same time mummifying and institutionalising a current of human thought which struggles yet against institutionalisation and commodification. As the cost of living in modern society goes through the ceiling, who can afford to live a radical life? The power of the grand old institutions, banks, corporations and even universities is preserved through the increasing difficulty of existence for those who would be critical of the grand old system. Or so it seems. The cultural life of The Left has survived in spite of great attempts to write history with a sword.

The internet, while subset of the grand old institute, allows us to write our own history once again. Xeroxed pages from archive boxes can be scanned and transcribed and uploaded. Although the Society of Spectacle "collapses here" (to quote the tape Beatles), that is: the internet consumes and absorbs all media, the story of social history, or Class War, remains undecided and unfinished. The Free Market capitalists may claim the day since the fall of the Soviet Union, but so much remains to be lived and witnessed. We are not doomed to repeat it.