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Guy Debord, Philosopher and author, along with helping to form the Situationist International wrote the seminal trope The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. How relevant is it 58 years later?
Has Paris really moved on much from the riots of the sixties, the gritty social fragmentation portrayed in the film La Haine or the more recent political scandals?
Debord posited that social interaction and the physical representation of society i.e the architecture and intertwining appendages of infrastructure were and had been eroded to soulless representations ro parodies of their former glories. Caused by a miasma of colonial inheritance and abstention from responsible planning.
Debord spotted the post-industrial roots and effects of unfettered capitalism early. He warned us all about it in his book and yet we watched, glued to our TV screens as his prophesies played out in front of us. Not only did we watch but we positively encouraged the carnage, embracing Populism and neo-liberal ideologies that entrenched the divisions and celebrated short sighted right wing demagogues.
Will Self’s claim that the likes of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McClaren adopted the situationist ideology of Debord as a prank for the profitable sale of records, posters and other memorabilia could possibly be applied to McClaren but definitely not Wilson. For Wilson profit (Or lack of it) was a side effect of ‘contracts written in blood’. Wilson himself died in debt, so it is rather disingenuous for Self to anoint such a claim.
The Factory ethos perfectly aligned with situationism and I’m sure Wilson would still be arguing it’s relevance were he alive today.
A new version of The Society of the Spectacle with a forward by Will Self was published in 2013
