Society of the Spectacle

The slogans scrawled across the walls of Paris in May 1968 suggest possibilities most of us have forgotten or that were long ago deemed preposterous. "Never work!" said one slogan. "The more you consume the less you live!" warned another. The words, restless and uncompromising, ask you to wake up, to change your life, to find a better way to live.

At its zenith in the late 1960s, the Situationist International could claim that "our ideas are in everyone's mind," even though the SI itself never had more than a few dozen members. When the whole world was exploding in 1968, the Situationist texts that had appeared throughout the decade read like road maps for revolution, full of slogans and tactics that youthful rebels picked up en route to wildly varying destinations.

Nearly forgotten after their dissolution in 1972, the Situationist legacy was recovered in 1989 with the publication of Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, which purported to trace the subterranean relationships between medieval heresy, nineteenth-century utopianism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, soul music and punk rock.

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