Preface
(T)he spectacle has become more all-pervading than ever-to the point that it is almost universally taken for granted. Most people today have scarcely any awareness of pre-spectacle history, let alone of anti-spectacle possibilities. As Debord noted in his follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), “spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation moulded to its laws.”
- Ken Knabb, from preface of Society of the Spectacle, 2014 edition
Nigh on sixty years after Guy Debord’s seminal work, the Spectacle has become infinitely more pervasive than at the time of his writing. This is a disturbing, reality-shattering observation. While the Spectacle was a dominant presence of the sixties, the individual still retained pockets of respite, spaces and times to switch off. The 1967 individual didn’t have the smartphone, the internet, and TV channels broadcasting 24/7. Even advertisements were not omnipresent, as they are now. We can only imagine, then, Debord’s horror at our current enclosure. All we can do is take The Society of the Spectacle and elevate it to the level of atmosphere, as opposed to a social sector infringing on all areas of human existence. The Spectacle has since become much more than an infringement.
This issue of The Existential Reader has been put together with acute awareness of that fact. There is an awareness, also, that even a work that seeks to expose the spectacle, such as this one, can only exist as part of it. As Debord noted back in ’67, we are “obliged…to use the spectacle’s own language” in that we must “operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle”[1]. For this publication, there must be some form of participation in the marketplace of attention. There is branding to consider, an eye-catching cover design to aid visibility, and eventual distribution. Remember, there is no outside to the totality of capital. To critique capital as if from an outside position would be an indicator of dishonesty or misunderstanding of the thing itself. Indeed, we must be careful how we frame our critique, as by allowing criticism, capital legitimises itself in the “freedom” it allows to speak out about it.
We must also be wary of recuperation, the spectacle’s immune-system-like mechanism that neutralises radical thought and ideas, rendering them mere consumable outputs by way of recall - bringing them back into the system itself as the edgy, the political, the controversial, and so on.
To recognise all of this is no concession. Acting from within the spectacle is not defeat because defeat has already, long ago, occurred. Outside of face-to-face communication, which is simply impossible to achieve on a large scale without spectacle participation through which to grab attention, the language of the spectacle is our greatest asset. Looking again, as we will throughout, to Debord for guidance, the term we are looking for here is detournement (rerouting or hijacking) – an act of subverting the spectacle by recontextualising it in a contradictory way. Turning the spectacle against itself, essentially. Or as described by OxfordReference.com – “An artistic practice conceived by the Situationists for transforming artworks by creatively disfiguring them.”[2]
This is something to think about. To me, it has truly revolutionary potential. Though not an original strategy, it is one that could have quite the resurgence if implemented on a wide scale. And let’s be honest, what even is original nowadays anyway? Which is part of the point, I suppose.
By turning artists into celebrity, and building an entire culture around it, we have reached artistic stagnation, or artistic recycling, specifically in the areas of pop music and cinema. Our politics, too, feels as if it is stuck in a late 20th-century loop, with recurring crises, enemies, and, for lack of a better term, plotlines.
Even an act such as psychogeography, or flaneurship, that entails nothing more than wandering around an urban landscape and observing urban life has become commodified in the age of social media.
All-in-all, life in the spectacle is an experience of (cultural) non-time. Culture has become a feeding frenzy, a constant battle for attention and monetary recompense at the expense of detail and innovation, resulting in the doling out of the tried and the tested, the derivative, and banal.
From “retromania”[3], to reboots and comebacks, the spectacles greatest source of nourishment is the cultural past, specifically the latter 20th century period. For my part, I trace this back to 1952 and the 1st UK pop charts, culminating in the dwindling of innovative and exciting cultural outputs in the late 1990s. But considering that much of the 1950s does now feel dated (as it should, being seven decades ago), it is possibly more accurate to place the late 1960s as the beginning of a period that 21st century generations have so far had obsessively on repeat. If you want a specific moment, you could point to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, or maybe The Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut. Or perhaps it was more nuanced than that. Perhaps it was with the invention of the teenager as a consumer base, an eager market that coincided with the rolling out of television as part of the home’s furniture. Perhaps it was television itself, just television, beaming images into those homes, creating the world’s first cultural megastars in figures like Elvis Pressley and Marlon Brando. Who can really say for sure? All we can point to is the distant past, a past that doesn’t feel so distant in the present’s attachment, or anchoring, to it.
And with these questions, we shall begin.
Craig Snelgrove,
23rd April 2026
