McKenzie Wark reconstructs the Situationist International and presents it as an unfinished experiment in how life might escape its conversion into work, commodities and spectacle.

Moving from the bohemian Paris of the 1950s through May 1968 and the movement’s later dispersal, Wark follows figures including Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Raoul Vaneigem, Alice Becker-Ho and Asger Jorn across art, architecture, cinema, political theory and everyday life.

It is especially deep on methods, of dérive, détournement, play, plagiarism, refusal and the manufacture of situations capable of interrupting ordinary capitalist time. The writing is brisk, argumentative and refreshingly unwilling to embalm radical ideas beneath reverence. It also attends to the movement’s exclusions, eccentricities and internal fractures rather than reducing it to Debord and a few endlessly recycled slogans.

This 2024 volume brings together The Beach Beneath the Street and The Spectacle of Disintegration, creating a substantial single-volume history of both the classical Situationist International and its unruly afterlives. A very good entry point for readers interested in cultural politics, revolutionary aesthetics and the problem of how rebellion itself becomes merchandise.

First one-volume edition, Verso, 2024. Paperback. Light surface and shelf wear; clean and firmly bound.