[28.7.05][Andrew Stevens] FIRST OF THE GANG TO DIE Recuperation, the assimilation of the working class into capitalist society and Adbusters, it's all in Michael Calderbank's review article for the latest Historical Materialism (Volume 13, Number 1, 2005), 'How Does One Become Guy Debord'?', which can be downloaded from here as a PDF:
"By contrast, the erection of a whole academic sub-industry around the SI threatens to see them immortalised and turned into something of a fetish: the obsession with the last of the real revolutionaries, the authentic expression of radical Sixties' counterculture at its purest. The tenor of such a retrospective fascination with the situationists might be taken as a painful measure of the isolation of cultural studies from the political as such. Sentimental nostalgia for an age in which revolutionary social and cultural aspirations still seemed possible functions, in this context, to compensate for an admission of impotence in the present. Often implicit in this approach is the assumption that the situationists must have known, deep down, that their demands were too utopian to stand any chance of being realised. In this light, their project looks like a glorious last stand, prior to the inevitable triumph of consumer capitalism and onset of postmodern cynicism." [permalink]
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