Co-editor of the collection, Alastair Hemmens underlines that while often misconstrued as a theory of mass media and advertising, Debord’s theory of the spectacle was intended as a deeper critique of consumer society, extending from the shining surfaces of commodities to the hidden realms of subjectivity. The spectacle is perhaps the most influential Situationist concept, though its definition remains contested. The sociologist Michael Löwy characterises the SI as revolutionary romantics whose nostalgia for a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, myth-infused world retains an ‘explosive force’.

The editors claim that Situationist ideas resist attempts to domesticate them, citing as evidence the reappearance of SI slogans on Parisian streets in recent protests. More staid and scholarly than Lipstick Traces, The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook tours the SI’s history and key concepts. In 1958, Guy Debord proclaimed that Surrealism could only be considered a success ‘in the context of a world that has yet to be fundamentally transformed’ and was therefore a failure on its own terms. The excoriating ‘No Future’ of The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ found a maudlin echo in erstwhile Situationist TJ Clark’s 2012 essay ‘For a Left with No Future’, which surveyed the catastrophes of the twentieth century and sombrely advocated for a ‘politics in a tragic key’, very different from the boisterous exuberance associated with the Situationist International.

The Situationists had a term for the co-optation of once incendiary ideas by capitalist culture: recuperation. By the time I read the book in the mid-2000s, John Lydon had recently stormed off I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and would soon be appearing in adverts for Country Life butter. Marcus heard in punk an unwitting echo of social critiques posed by earlier artistic movements: Surrealism, Dada, Lettrism, and Situationism.

My introduction to Situationism came through music journalist Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), an anarchic collage of materials that tore excitedly through the past, ripping up notions of what history writing is or is for in the process.

Lipstick traces by greil marcus