ABSTRACT
Today, after almost half a century of neo-conservative counter-revolution, there is a felt need for a new conceptual weapon of critique more suitable to twenty-first-century conditions of life. The weakening force of the spectacle and the slow process of recuperation and inversion outlined in the previous chapters make such a need especially acute. Not that the impulse behind Debord’s theory is any weaker now than it was then. On the contrary, the very same desire to understand life in its actual conditions also drives the tentative search for a new conceptual framework today. It was this parti pris on the side of the subject, incidentally, that allowed Debord to say about his films, and without conceit, that they were all about ‘a most important topic: myself.’ Indeed, what starting point other than the subject’s lived experience is possible for a theory of the present? How else does one go about re-thinking the situationist program with an eye to what has changed – politically, culturally, economically, and technologically – over the last fifty years?
