157effectively help to prop up the system. The revolutionary artist, who aims to prevent
the system from regaining control of play and creativity, can only be consistent if he
abandons all complicity and stops producing works of art. This is why the situation-
ists can state that “we are artists only insofar as we are no longer artists: we come
to realize art.”^21
Debord developed this theory in La société du spectacle. This book contains a
detailed critique of society based on the ideas of Hegel, Marx, Lukács, and the So-
cialisme ou Barbarie group. Debord proposes the thesis that capitalist society is es-
sentially different from what it was in the nineteenth century. Instead of the
dominance of the commodity, one now has the dominance of the spectacle. Debord
begins his book with the statement that “in societies where modern conditions of
production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of specta-
cles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”^22 The
image has become autonomous and the entire social system is dominated by the
monopoly of representation. The real world, life that is directly lived, has become
nothing more than images; as a result these images have acquired the power of re-
ality, and they are now the active motors of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is the
nightmare of imprisoned modern society. It is maintained because individuals are se-
duced into preferring the amnesia of sleep to the intensity of a genuinely experi-
enced reality.
Debord relates the mechanism of the spectacle to separation and expropria-
tion. The retreat into representation is in his view one of the sources of the universal
alienation that is typical of the capitalist system. The spectacle is both cause and re-
sult of the loss of unity in the world. This diagnosis takes up a number of criticisms
that had earlier been developed by Henri Lefebvre. In an influential book of 1947,
Lefebvre argued that everyday life suffers from very powerful forms of alienation.
Life is no longer experienced in its entirety, but disintegrates into disconnected and
unrelated moments. Individuals are alienated from their own desires. Their work,
their social identity, their leisure, and their public lives, even the way they relate to
their families—none of this has anything to do with their essential being, but is pro-
duced by the control and conditioning of a social system that has other ends in view.^23
Debord’s Society of the Spectacleis primarily concerned with analyzing the so-
cietalmechanisms that maintain alienation and dispossession. The counterpart of
this book is Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. Starting out from sim-
ilar theoretical premises, Vaneigem’s work discusses the possibility of revolutionary
changes in the everyday lifeof individuals. He states the aims of the revolution as fol-
lows: “In its chaotic underground development, the new society tends to find prac-
tical expression as a transparency in human relationships which promotes the
participation of everyone in the self-realization of everyone else. Creativity, love and
play are to life what the needs for nourishment and shelter are to survival.”^24
The situationist ideas in these two books were fertile soil for the revolutionary
movement that culminated in the student uprising of 1968, in which the situationists156