master-concept for a new era of the unthought. He wrote that transgression will “seem as
decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an
earlier time for dialectical thought.”
Lyotard argued that the sublime and the just arise from
perpetual transgressions that negate established norms. He wrote that justice “consists in
working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new
rules and therefore new games.”
Although Baudrillard and other postmodernists remained “faithful” to the sites and
strategies of situationism, they came to think that its time was “past” for reasons which echo
Derrida’s critique of Foucault. The postmodern radicals complained that the situationists had
never explained satisfactorily how we could possibly have any authentic experiences given the
all-pervasive nature of the spectacle. They suspected that because representation always
obscures reality, we cannot ever get behind the representations in order to identify “the real”
or an authentic experience. Again, they suspected that if alienation is ubiquitous under the
spectacle, then we cannot adopt a revolutionary standpoint that avoids entrapment in the
spectacle or current relations of power. These suspicions appear to have inspired Lyotard’s
break with Socialisme ou Barbarie as early as 1964. Yet, despite this early appearance of such
suspicions, they clearly gained piquancy from the impact of Derrida and, at least as
importantly, from the events of May 1968. The idea that revolutionary groups protected their
position from the disruptive voices of the rebels reinforced the suggestion that all theories of
revolutionary praxis were merely more exercises of power rather than expressions of
authenticity – theory seemed inevitably to quieten difference. Likewise, the idea that the rebels
challenged hierarchies in sexual relations and football teams as well as industrial relations and
politics reinforced the suggestion that the spectacle lacked a hidden, monolithic source –
power seemed to function differently on the surface of various practices.
It was in the wake of May 1968, as well as Derrida’s early work, that Foucault voiced
the postmodern critique of situationism. He argued that situationism did not actually “liberate
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