authenticity into spectacles to be witnessed; it could remove their radical import, and even
reproduce them as commodities and pre-patterned lifestyles. Equally, however, the
situationists insisted, as had Dada and the surrealists, on the possibility of our advocating and
even establishing an alternative, authentic society. They argued, for instance, that people
always could find a point from which to oppose the spectacle since capitalism itself actually
required people to have some awareness of the authentic reality that it distorted. Raoul
Vaneigem even suggested that the spectacle was rapidly approaching a crisis from which a
new, better society of radical subjectivity and true pleasure would at last emerge.
The situationists defended the possibility of an authentic society in large part by tying
alienation and recuperation to the process of commodification. In their view, if we just destroy
the commodity form, we will allow the individual to have an unmediated relation to objects,
and so we will thereby create an unalienated society characterised by total integration: they
allowed that the resistance of the world still would generate divisions and challenges, but they
added that people would confront these divisions and challenges directly, as opposed to
through the alienated form of the commodity. Finally, the situationists argued, as had Dada
and the surrealists, that the danger of recuperation meant that revolutionaries had to rely on
spontaneous interventions of a situtational nature to disrupt the spectacle. They hoped to
attain glimpses of a truer reality by means of playful performances that bring fantasy into
ordinary life, by means of transgressions that fragment bourgeois norms, and also by means of
eruptions of the extraordinary in the everyday. In their view, the people who made such
interventions thereby will begin to take direct control of their lives and so experience moments
of authenticity, while those who witnessed such interventions might experience a shock that
could loosen the hold of the spectacle upon them and so lead them to similar moments of
authenticity.
221
Convention