The Most Radical Gesture - The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Hardcover, New)

"The Most Radical Gesture" is the first major study of the Situationist International, a revolutionary movement with great ambition and influence whose reflections on art, everyday life, pleasure, spontaneity, the city, and the spectacle have ensured it a vital, but largely hidden, role in the development of 20th-century culture and politics. Revealing the extent to which situationist ideas and tactics have influenced subsequent political theory and cultural agitation, this book discusses a variety of specific movements and moments of contestation, including Dada, surrealism, the events of May 1968, the Italian Autonomists, the Angry Brigade, and punk. It places the situationists in a line of impassioned anti-authoritarian dissent which also informs the work of writers like Lyotard and Deleuze and underwrites contemporary debates on postmodernism. It suggests that Baudrillard's reflections on hyperreality are impoverished reworkings of the situationists' critical analysis of capitalist society as a spectacle, and challenges postmodern denials of meaning, reality, and history by showing that postmodernism itself depends on a tradition which completely undermines the purpos;This book