A review by spacestationtrustfund
The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark

3.0

What forcloses the possibility of praxis is what Lefebvre, citing Debord, calls the spectacle. The spectacle makes totality visible, but only in fragments, and visible only within the space of the private. It does not make the private social as well. The spectacle is a one-way street, the public privatised. “It is the generalisation of private life. At one and the same time the mass media have unified and broadcast the everyday; they have disintegrated it by integrating it with ‘world’ current events in a way which is both too real and utterly superficial.”

Lefebvre calls the spectacle the great pleonasm, the Thing of Things. Thought in terms of its totalising tendency, “it would be a closed circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.” What is real is what is known: what is known is what is real. The illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise. It is a world of incessant redundancy. Everything is always the same, only better. It makes the same special offer to everyone, all the time: “the faked orgasms of art and life.”