Explore the vast range of titles available.

Debord, Time and Spectacle addresses the philosophical content of Guy Debord and the Situationists' work. It reconstructs the Hegelian and Marxian elements of Debord's theory of 'spectacle', and presents a critical reading that foregrounds his concerns with time and history.

October 26, 1966: At his inaugural lecture as professorial chair at the University of Strasbourg, the French cybernetician Abraham A. Moles was met not with applause but with tomatoes.1 Those responsible for the projectiles were members of the Situationist International (SI), the revolutionary avant-garde organization led by Guy Debord whose influence would color the uprisings of Mai 68. Taken together, these events can be seen as part of a continuum: while the SI later claimed the tomatoes to have been a preliminary action for their dissemination of On the Poverty of Student Life that fall, the subsequent media outcry over this pamphlet is still interpreted as a catalyst for the events of '68.

The ubiquity of the signs of the good(s) life that we devour incessantly has led to the complete \"falsification of social life,\"1 or a disquieting situation in which \"all social interaction is constituted through hyper-rituals which themselves no longer refer to anything other than themselves [...] the commercial and the real are one in the same\" (Debord, La société du spectacle 63, italics in original; Hancock and Gamer 177). According to Debord and Perec, the postmodern subject now dwells in a world of spectacle in which we are constantly bombarded by signs imploring us to obey the summons to consume in consumer republics.2 Given that there is no exit from this onslaught of image-based (hyper-) reality linked to the acquisition of objects laden with purely symbolic value accosting us from all sides in front of our television, smartphone, or tablet screens, Debord and Perec reach the disconcerting conclusion that post-truth metanarratives have proliferated themselves to such an alarming extent that they have effectively replaced commonplace reality. Since real life could not possibly live up to the chimerical standards of the grandiose fantasies that flicker across our screens, this erosion of the real has left behind a bitter trail of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and existential malaise. When it replaces it with the necessity of infinite economic development, it can only replace the satisfaction of the first summarily recognized human needs by an uninterrupted production ofpseudo-needs which come down to the sole pseudo-need for the maintenance of one's reign. The Imposition of Hyperreality and the Proliferation of Post-Truth, Consumerist Metanarratives Although the phenomenon of hyperreality tied to social control over the populace is not a novel problem,

Guy Debord's thought is invariably associated with a certain experience and critique of time. I am attempting to trace the concept of time in his cinematographic legacy and in the creation of his private mythology. In following Janet Harbord's notion of ex-centric cinema which defines a project of potentiality in the realm of experience, I am focusing on this particular kind of cinema that escapes the established forms and the non-lived. My aim is to trace through the method of film archaelogy, the fragments of temporality, and to bring to the surface the concept of time and its manifestation in variable forms in Debord's cinematographic language. Thus, I am exploring the potentiality of the virtual in his cinema.In order to trace the experience of the concept of time in Debord's cinema, I am discussing the discursive formation in two of his films: Critique of Separation (1961) and On The Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Unity of Time (1959). Whilst being composed of a variety of documentary footage, of shots of the urban landscape and of tracking shots of photographs, the films are a record of an invisible history that takes place within the city. The diegesis of the film is being formed by the narrator that argues about a micro-society that created a network of interactions within the urban landscape. I am focusing on the voice-over of Debord and particularly on his rhetoric. I am discussing how his language functions in relation to the images thus constructing a montage-palimpsest.

As was the case for other writers from the Beat Generation, geography is more than simply a setting for Allen Ginsberg’s work, as his poetry also bears the imprint of the influence of the landscapes through which he traveled in his mind and poetic practice. In the 1950s, the same decade which saw the composition of Ginsberg’s Howl, Guy Debord and his followers developed the concept of “psychogeography” and “dérive” to analyze the influence of landscapes on one’s mind. The Debordian concept of psychogeography implies then that an objective world can have unknown and subjective consequences. Inspired by Debord’s theories and through the analysis of key poems, this paper argues that a psychogeographical focus can shed new light on ecocritical studies of Ginsberg’s poetry. It can indeed unveil the complex construction of the poet’s own space-time poetics, from hauntological aspects to his specific composition process.

This article takes a trans-historical approach to the notion of a baroque aesthetic as the expression of a particular set of societal and cultural circumstances. Drawing on the works of French philosophers, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Christine Buci-Glucksman, a baroque episteme is characterized in terms of the suspension of reason or reality through various representational ambiguities, highlighting the tension between being and appearing (etre et paraitre). Concluding with an invocation of Guy Debord's La Societe du spectacle, the above outlined perspective contributes to an understanding of contemporary representational practices in order to elucidate a sublime baroque madness that results from the suspension of certainties. Keywords: Sublime, Baroque, Spectacle, Madness, Reason

This essay argues that the Situationist International (1957–72) and its early concepts of psychogeography (a city's sensorial impact on its residents), dérive (drift), and détournement (rerouting, recontextualization) can enliven our thinking about recent politically charged events—namely, a performance of Katori Hall's Our Lady of Kibeho at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City on December 4, 2014, and a spontaneous Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration on August 14, 2014. Constellating or connecting these sites is the experience of the city under capitalism: Paris for the situationists (1950s and '60s), and a gentrified and redeveloped midtown Manhattan (1980s–2010s) for Hall's Kibeho and the BLM demonstration. For the situationists, postwar capitalism—or the \"spectacle\"—induced habits of passive consumption and alienation. Le Corbusier–style urban planning exacerbated this alienation and destroyed the liveliness of Parisian streets. By contrast, the situationist drift was a creative pedestrian practice responding to the emotional currents of the city—a negation of the passivity on which consumerism depends. The iconic situationist map, \"The Naked City,\" uniquely records the effects of situationist drifts even as it wittily détourns the title of a famous film noir. Turning to New York, the essay discusses the cleanup of Forty-second Street and Times Square through development and gentrification, tools of what Neil Smith calls a \"revanchist\" city, one that puts corporate profits over the needs of its working poor and indigent citizens. Yet, developers were granted zoning exemptions to build higher and wider if they included theatres in their plans. The Signature Center, part of the MiMa apartment tower on Forty-second and Tenth Avenue, is a fortuitous part of this complex development story. This became clear, the essay suggests, when, at the third curtain call for Our Lady of Kibeho, the actors boldly raised their arms in the \"hands up/don't shoot\" gesture, thus linking their artistic effort to the antiracist, anticapitalist politics of the BLM movement—indeed, to the spontaneous BLM march up Broadway to Times Square and back down to Forty-second Street that took place four months earlier. Those marchers, the essay suggests, reactivated the city by behaving like situationist drifters, dodging around police barriers and tourist buses and bringing midtown Manhattan and a tourist-filled Times Square to a standstill. If a situationist-style map were to be made, the Signature Center and Times Square would become linked across time as revolutionary hubs of resistance. In sum, situationist theory and practice speaks across the decades, providing playful tools for imagining and enacting political resistance.

This article focuses on the possible outcomes that may unfold when personal narratives have been intentionally applied on stage to generate a tension between the ideas of reality and fiction in performance. The article uses theoretical references that conceptualize the notion of the ‘Real’ - from the social context of the 1960s to the present - and follows the thoughts of philosophers like Debord, Baudrillard and Rosset with the aim to consider theater and performance as artistic fields that have the potential to interrogate totalizing statements about the truth in today’s world. Resumo: Este artigo dedica atenção aos possíveis desdobramentos do uso de narrativas pessoais em cena, quando tomadas no intuito de provocar tensão entre realidade e ficção no instante do acontecimento cênico. Utilizando como referência formulações que ponderam acerca da concepção do real - do contexto social dos anos 1960 aos dias de hoje -, a partir do pensamento de filósofos como Debord, Baudrillard e Rosset, busca-se refletir sobre o teatro e a performance como campos artísticos capazes de interrogar a afirmação totalizante sobre a verdade no mundo atual. Résumé: Cet article porte une attention aux possibles conséquences de l’utilisation de récits personnels dans la scène, lorsqu’ils sont pris afin de provoquer une tension entre la réalité et la fiction au moment de l’événement scénique. Utilisant comme références les formulations qui examinent la conception du réel - du contexte social de 1960 à nos jours -, bien que la pensée de philosophes tels que Debord, Baudrillard et Rosset, ce texte réfléchit sur le théâtre et la performance comme domaines artistiques capables d’interroger l’affirmation totalisant sur la vérité dans le monde actuel.

O objetivo principal do artigo é desenvolver uma reflexão sobre a atualidade do pensamento de Guy Debord, em especial dos seus conceitos sobre as relações de poder na sociedade do espetáculo. Tendo em vista este objetivo, pretende-se trabalhar como ele entende a relação entre política, comunicação e a vida cotidiana. Será realizada uma análise comparativa do livro A Sociedade do Espetáculo, publicado em 1967, com o texto Comentários Sobre a Sociedade do Espetáculo, publicado em 1988. Além disso, será estabelecido também um confronto entre os conceitos de poder deste autor com os conceitos de Foucault e Baudrillard. O argumento central do trabalho é o de que os conceitos de poder de Debord podem contribuir de maneira significativa para a compreensão de aspectos fundamentais da situação política contemporânea.

(Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, reprinted with the permission of A. Debord and Intertalent.) Fascinated by the potential of aerial photography, especially in mapping how capital was rationalizing urban space in Paris after World War II, Guy Debord and Asgar Jorn offered a deliberately nonrational, resistant optic on the modern city—a psychogeographic view, one that revealed the psychic impact of the city on its pedestrians. Melissa Schultheis, now a graduate student and early modernist in the Department of English at Rutgers University, enjoys dabbling in graphic design and she brilliantly rose to the challenge of connecting the ambiances of the two moments of revolutionary energy that I discuss in my essay: the moment when the actors at a performance of Katori Hall's Our Lady of Kibeho raised their arms in the Black Lives Matter gesture, \"hands up/don't shoot,\" on December 4, 2014, and the moment when a gathering in New York's Union Square (\"Moment of Silence,\" August 14, 2014), commemorating the deaths of unarmed black citizens at the hands of police, erupted in a march up Broadway to Times Square, against traffic and without a permit, which the police were not able or willing (given public scrutiny after the death of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014) to stop with force. In the spirit of situationist irreverence and creativity, Melissa Schultheis has détourned not only Debord/Jorn's The Naked City (see figure 1), but also Debord's own détournement, called \"Life Continues to Be Free and Easy\" (1959), in which he collages pieces of The Naked City, text, postage stamps, and hand-colored figures of soldiers (see the image at https://www.flickr.com/photos/32491186@N05/4069785969).