ABSTRACT
The situationists had always been aware that the term ‘spectacle’ could easily be robbed of its critical force, recuperated as a descriptive concept and appropriated to serve the ends of spectacular society itself. ‘Without a doubt’, Debord had declared in The Society of the Spectacle, ‘the critical concept of the spectacle is susceptible of being turned into just another empty formula of sociologico-political rhetoric designed to explain and denounce everything in the abstract-so serving to buttress the spectacular system itself.’1 This has indeed been the fate of the situationist critique of the spectacle which, twenty years after its initial development, now appears in a spectacular form of its own: a
context which precludes all critical appraisal and is content to describe and celebrate the ahistorical world of image, sign, and appearance.
