Page 124 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 109
their fractious alliances of creative and unpredictable individuals. For
Debord, theory was inseparable from an avowed commitment to
action, theory was born of praxis, and its primary function to
effectuate further praxis – to hasten full-blown revolution. The main
vehicle of these ambitions and operations was the Situationist Inter-
national – an unstable collection of theorists, artists and activists, over
which Debord (in stark contrast to his egalitarian politics) presided
imperiously. Although the history, operations and legacy of the
Situationists or ‘situs’ (as Debord and his followers were popularly
known) is outside the scope of this chapter, certain elements are
worth outlining in order to better contextualize Debord’s notion of
the spectacle and help establish more clearly its continuity, and
departure, from earlier media critique.
The Situationists argued that the consumer society effectively
subordinated all aspects of human endeavour to capitalism. It follows
from this that any political struggle to change this would need to
extend beyond challenging the economic relations of production
(hitherto the central arena of left-wing politics). Consequently, they
developed an armoury of tactics adapted to the conditions of
modern mass-media society, in particular they identified culture as a
vital ‘theatre of operations’. In other words, given the fact that
culture had become an industry (to use Adorno’s term), then the
task at hand was to develop corresponding forms of ‘industrial
action’, the cultural equivalents of ‘wildcat strikes’ or ‘work to rule’.
As Debord’s 1958 Theses on Cultural Revolution put it, the: ‘Situation-
ists can be seen as a union of workers in an advanced sector of
culture … as an attempt at an organisation of professional revolu-
tionaries in culture’ (Debord, cited in McDonough 2004: 62). Thus,
like the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Debord recognized the
centrality of culture (and by extension the technologies by which it
was produced and disseminated) to any proper understanding of
contemporary mass society. Unlike the Frankfurt School, however,
Debord was committed to what might be termed aesthetic terrorism –
a direct intervention in cultural production.
Situationist activity coincided with a fundamental transformation
of the culture of the developed nations. The arc of the Situationists’s
rise and fall encompassed the optimistic consumer boom of the
1950s and then the turbulent cultural and political upheaveals of the
1960s, while their demise corresponded with the disillusionments of
the 1970s. The zenith of this trajectory was the ‘event’ of May 1968,
in which France teetered on the brink of full-scale revolution. It is
difficult to establish, given competing accounts and self-publicity, the
true extent of the Situationist role in events as they unfolded. What
is incontrovertible is their contribution to the style or ‘spin’ of those
heady weeks. The irreverent and playful slogans, which blossomed

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