Ken Knabb

Translator of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, available at the Bureau of Public Secrets website.

Ken Kanbb

Translator of The Society of the Spectacle, available at the Bureau of Public Secrets website.

Guy Debord

Self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International, Guy Debord was certainly responsible for the longevity and high profile of Situationist ideas, although the equation of the SI with Guy Debord would be misleading. Brilliant but autocratic, Debord helped both unify situationist praxis and destroy its expansion into areas not explicitly in line with his own ideas. His text The Society of the Spectacle remains today one of the great theoretical works on modern-day capital, cultural imperialism, and the role of mediation in social relationships.

• Debord,
• spectacle,
• situationists

Media, Activism and Society of the Spectacle 

Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

• activism,
• diy media,
• spectacle,
• media criticism

The Society of the Spectacle @ Bureau of Public Secrets 

Translator's Note to the 2002 translation

There have been several previous English translations of The Society of the Spectacle. I have gone through them all and have retained whatever seemed already to be adequate. In particular, I have adopted quite a few of Donald Nicholson-Smith's renderings, though I have diverged from him in many other cases. His translation (Zone Books, 1994) and the earlier one by Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Black and Red, 1977) are both in print, and both can also be found at the Situationist International Online website.

• Debord,
• situationists

Antisocial Media 

“Antisocial Media” is a remix/cut-up/utopian-plagiarism of Guy Debord’s 1967 “The Society of the Spectacle” that reflects on the role of the network and (anti)social media in political, economic, and everyday life.

• media,
• media theory,
• Debord,
• spectacle,
• media criticism

Art After Activism? 

This debate will address some of the doubts that hard core activists have about the usefulness of art in a political context.

• art,
• activism

The XYZ of Net Activism 

It's time to create the pop stars of activism,
the idoru of communication guerrilla,
it's time to threaten and charm the
masses by the ghosts coming from the
 net, to play the myth against the myth,
to be more nihilist than infoteinment!
                                  - etoy -

• art,
• activism

The Invention of the Savage: Colonial Exhibitions and the Staging of the Arab Spring 

Watching a popular uprising in real time was indeed a dramatic experience. As viewers tuned in (or streamed in) to the violence, courage, and uncertainty of events in North Africa this year, many of them had the impression of witnessing the "actual" events, free from the framing tactics and analytical bias often found on the six o'clock news. A host of new media celebrities became household names as they reported live from Tahrir, and news outlets such as Al-Jazeera saw an unprecedented rise in viewership. Spectators were made to believe that a return to the event "itself" was once again possible after decades of being locked into what Jean Baudrillard called the hyper-real. The revolution in-and-of-itself seemed to unfold before our eyes, creating a fetish for real-time revolt.

• middle east,
• street protest,
• postcolonialism

The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Art and Politics 

The Situationist Movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a new revolutionary contestation. From now on, any fundamental cultural creation, as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.

• art,
• Debord,
• spectacle,
• situationists