Bücher von Edward John Matthews

Drawing on published works as well as personal correspondence, this book sheds new light on Guy Debord¿s work on the spectacle, arguing that he offers a politics of communication that relies on the ironic language of contradiction, of critical theory, and of the incommunicable to undermine the hierarchical language of the spectacle.

Arts and Politics of the Situationist International contextualizes the SI within a comprehensive aesthetic and theoretical framework that integrates its concepts and practical activities with previous critical thinkers, political activists, artists, and poets. The SI belongs to a history of radical gestures and cultural practices concerned with re-imagining everyday life and overcoming alienation. This book regards the SI as a critical interdisciplinary endeavor in the history of consciousness, particularly as a moment in an ongoing western-European trajectory of aesthetic negation dating back to the early nineteenth century. The chapters search for origins of the SI in French Symbolist poetry, Dada and Surrealism, Hegelian-Marxism, and Lefebvrian social theory in an effort to provide a clearly-defined ';something' out of which the SI developed as an increasingly radical collective of artists, writers, and theorists.