The Spectacle of Disintegration. Situationist Passages out of the Twentieth Century
Following his acclaimed history of the SI, The Beach Beneath the Street,McKenzie Wark continues the story after the failures of May 1968. Wark locates their contemporary relevance, as digital culture opens up new possibilities of experience and new terrains of struggle.
The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through Guy Debord's late films and his surprising work as a game designer, the political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Viénet's earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sanguinetti's pranking of the Italian ruling class, and Alice Becker-Ho's account of the anonymous language of the Romany.
Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse, to the integrated, to what he calls the “disintegrating spectacle.” At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to action in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century and plots an exit to the twenty-first.