Page 125 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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110 Then
on the walls of Paris (for example, ‘Be realistic, demand the
impossible’, ‘Beneath the pavement the beach’) were either inspired,
if not put up, by Debord and his cadre. In this regard, it could be
said that the Situationists’ input set May 1968 apart from predeces-
sors. In conjoining the personal and the political the Situationists
fused revolution and play, and in a gesture whose ambiguity haunts
their legacy to this day, provided an enduring image, a spectacle no
less, of revolution. Indeed, the proliferation across the international
media of images of the May insurrection, ensured the propagation
of Situationist theory: mimeographed copies of hastily translated
Situationists texts circulated in universities, the ‘underground’ press
in Britain and America gave their readers crash courses in ‘situ’
theory and groups such as the New York based Up Against the Wall
Motherfucker [sic], Holland’s Provos and London’s King Mob (on the
fringes of which were to be found Malcolm Maclaren and Jamie Reid
– who a decade later would stoke a situ style moral panic in the
form of The Sex Pistols), recognized the power of Debord’s thought,
and embraced its programme of cultural disruption. But with this
influence and notoriety came recuperation – that is, the neutralization,
and re-commodification by capitalism of those tactics designed to
break its fetishizing spell of signs.

The Society of the Spectacle: early influences and
key terms

Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is his most famous critique of the
media. However, it is worth noting that he arrived at this position
through the refinement of a number of earlier perspectives. An
important tributary to Debord’s thinking and to the structure and
aims of the Situationists were the avant-garde art movements of the
early twentieth century. These movements (in particular Dada and
the Surrealists) subscribed to the belief that the freedom formerly
consigned to the confines of the work of art could be liberated.
Unbound, the aesthetic could intervene directly in social life, as a
force of radical transformation. In keeping with Benjamin’s desire
(voiced at the end of his Essay) for a politicization of aesthetics, the
Situationists offered a fusion of art and politics. They hoped to
produce an art that would break the spell of bourgeois culture and
so emancipate the revolutionary energies that Benjamin and
Kracauer believed to lay beneath mass-mediated culture. The early
avant-gardes adopted the structure of political organizations, com-
plete with manifestos, leaders, pogroms in the name of ideological
purity and the inevitable splintering attendant upon such structures.
Debord both inherited and transformed these ambitions, like these
precursors the Situationists aimed to rupture what they saw as an

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