On the Passage of a Single Person Through a Brief Unity of Time:It's the birthday of the founding father of the Situationist Internationale, champion of dérive and détournement, staunch and unapologetic enemy of the Spectacle, director of the provocative Hurlements en Faveur de Sade, impetus behind the Paris Revolt of May, '68, accidental progenitor of punk rock, and lover of all things alcoholic.
Guy Ernest Debord would have turned 76 on this day, had he not removed himself from an increasingly artificial and artless world some 13 years ago with a single squeeze of the trigger, simultaneously perfecting and concluding his lifelong efforts to disappear.
Guy Debord, whose early work Mémoires had sandpaper covers, so that its removal and replacement on the bookshelf would gradually erase the titles of other works surrounding it.
"The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely."
—The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
An obituary for Debord can be found here.
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