Had Debord not shot himself in 1994 in his rural fastness of
Bellevue-la-Montagne, he probably would have turned his gun on the likes
of Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren
(and no doubt me as well); pop music impresarios whose much-trumpeted
situationist influence – such as it was – consisted only in a series of
pranks, that, while they may have given succour to the culturally anomic
nonetheless only resulted in the profitable sale of records, posters
and other memorabilia. I doubt, somehow, that either Wilson – chiefly
known for managing Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, and setting up Factory Records – or McLaren, rather more famous for his role as the Sex Pistols’ svengali, can have subjected The Society of the Spectacle
to a sustained critical reading. Had they done so, they would’ve
realised that their antics were anathema to Debord; that the playful
elements of situationist practice – the bowdlerising of cartoons, the
daubing on walls of whacky slogans, the exaltation of drunkenness – were
only ever to be sanctioned if constitutive of a genuine insurrection,
such as the few short weeks of 68, and as precursors of that revolution
of everyday life (to adapt the title of the competing situationist
theoretical work, written by Debord’s greatest rival, Raoul Vaneigem),
which was to follow the final and complete dissolution of the Spectacle.